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November 14

which discworld book describes the structure and operation of a clacks tower

I don't know about described, but this says they were introduced in The Fifth Elephant. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:58, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Also, this isn't my question. It just looks that way. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:58, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Going Postal seems to be where Pratchett got into the nuts and bolts. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:01, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I just read Going Postal, and I can confirm that that's where Pratchett covers the inner workings of the clacks towers: the technology, the Grand Trunk company culture, and how some people manage to intercept messages and feed their own messages into the clacks system. A good chunk of the plot revolves around that. Monstrous Regiment touches more briefly on the subject in a subplot involving another group of people who intercept communications between the towers. AtticusX (talk) 08:47, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

ancient widescreen

I recently watched some old TV shows ( Dead or Alive, 1959; Rocky and Bullwinkle, 1963) on a new screen, and am puzzled that 1/4 of the screen's width is not empty, as it ought to be when displaying a picture created for a 4:3 screen. Nor is anything obviously cut off at top or bottom. What wizardry is this? —Tamfang (talk) 08:49, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The remaining method to fit 4:3 content onto a widescreen display is to stretch it. This results in fat, short people (when standing up). Do they seem fat and short ? (Probably easier to tell with actual people, as the cartoon characters might have been drawn excessively thin to begin with, such as Natasha Fatale, or short and fat, such as Boris Badenov.) StuRat (talk) 08:52, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'd thought that crap only flew on the Internet, but it seems not even The Simpsons are safe. InedibleHulk (talk) 10:10, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No, nothing is distorted. —Tamfang (talk) 08:30, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

How are you watching them? (e.g. DVD, Blu-ray, broadcast, other?) Anamorphic_widescreen seems to only discuss viewing widescreen media on narrower screens, but I think it goes the other way too. Many newer TVs have settings you can mess with, and they can stretch/zoom/crop the signal in many different ways. Also consider that the lack of obvious cutoff may conceivably be the result of Shoot_and_protect. Contrary to Stu's assertion, there are many techniques these days that are not simple linear transforms that distort the way people look. Here's an example of one way that GoPro cameras do dynamic stretching [1], here's one for a TV [2], perhaps you can look up what your own model is capable of. For broadcast, Active_Format_Description has some info too.

So without knowing more details, it could be any combination of how the material was remastered for distribution, your playback device, your TV, or all the above interacting. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:04, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Another relevant article is Anamorphic_stretch_transform, sadly lacking sample images. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:11, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Solely stretching the edges would make it look rather distorted, especially as people and other objects passed into and out of the edges. Changing aspect ratios could be rather nauseating. This would be a better approach to a single frame image, where you could specify what to stretch and what not to stretch. StuRat (talk) 18:49, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly tilt and scan, where they move the margins over time to avoid cropping important parts of the frame. -- BenRG (talk) 20:49, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

But I watched DVDs from both series on the old 4:3 TV, and they looked normal there too. —Tamfang (talk) 08:25, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You might want to watch on both TVs at the same time (if you haven't). Could clear things up. InedibleHulk (talk) 09:11, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, well. I got a new TV because the old DVD player went flaky and the new one can't connect to an old TV, so that's not an option even if the old gear had not gone to the junkyard. —Tamfang (talk) 07:57, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The Magnificent Seven Ride: Questionable scene

In the 1972 western film The Magnificent Seven Ride, Chris' wife Arrila is killed by bandits. When he and Noah find her dead, Chris asks Noah "Did they use her?". What does he mean by that? And why does he say "Raped, killed and left for the buzzards"? Rape is when you force someone to have sex with you against their will and sex is associated with love, not with hate. Bandits are bad people. Non-bandits are good people. If bandits hate non-bandits, why would they want to have sex with them? That is morally violet. Violence dwells on pain or injury, not on sex. And it's associated with hate, not with love. Chris should have asked Noah "Did they torture her?" and said "Beaten, killed and left for the buzzards". And the film is rated PG. Sexual violence is associated with rated 15 and 18 films.5.81.235.234 (talk) 23:53, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"Use" as in "abuse", most likely. The moral violence committed against a non-bandit woman would be precisely the point - to harm someone they inherently don't like. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:49, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Rape is when you force someone to have sex with you against their will - er, the victim is hardly "having sex with" the rapist. They're just effectively a piece of meat that the rapist is using forcibly to obtain sexual gratification from, and impose their own power over. Not unlike a lump of liver (see Portnoy's Complaint) or a plastic sex doll; the only difference being that the liver/sex doll happens to be a live human being. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 08:38, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Rape has long been a weapon of war and torture,and the penis has long been used as a weapon and instrument of power over both men and women. We have an article on Wartime sexual violence and if you want to learn more about sexual politics and consent, try this site. --TammyMoet (talk) 14:35, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Somewhat similar is the concept of prison rape. Despite what that article implies, it's not just an American thing. It's a dominance thing. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:13, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Here's an overview of how sex and violence often blend together in American movies, just as PG-13 and R ratings do. Note that PG-13 didn't exist in 1972, which would explain the PG. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:23, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Please note that with movie ratings, the Motion Picture Association of America's system of rating of movies is not based on objective criteria. The Motion Picture Association of America film rating system is based on sitting a group of people in a room to watch the movie, and then having them rate the movie they watch. That's it. While some general guidelines often emerge at various times, the rating a movie gets depends entirely on the whim of the committee who watches it at the time. So, there is really very little reason to suppose that the same movie would receive the same rating at different times based on any objective criteria. The reason it is rated PG is because that's what the ratings committee thought it should be rated the day they watched it. --Jayron 32 13:24, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Also note that watching the "Unrated!" version of a movie doesn't mean you'll get any sex, violence or "suggestive themes" that were "too hot for theaters". It just means you're watching the DVD version. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:21, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]