The quest for resolution independence

I sent this in an e-mail to a friend who was complaining about the lack of high DPI (dots per inch) consumer-grade LCD desktop displays. (Some models do exist, but are intended for the medical community and are pricey.)

A comparison of DPI for previous/current Apple computers and display products

Laptops:
13.3" (1280 x 800) = 113.49 DPI
15.4" (1440 x 900) = 110.27 DPI
17" (1920 x 1200) = 133.19 DPI

Cinema displays and old iMacs:
23" (1920 x 1200) = 98.44 DPI
24" (1920 x 1200) = 94.34 DPI
30" (2560 x 1600) = 100.63 DPI

New iMacs: (note that these are now 16x9, suitable for watching "widescreen" video without black bars instead of the 16x10, which is much more common for widescreen computer displays)

21.5" (1920 x 1080) = 102.46 DPI
27" (2560 x 1440) = 108.79 DPI

And while Apple has touted a push for resolution independence (along with 64-bit) for a while now, some things still appear to be broken (at least in the first Snow Leopard release. I haven't installed Snow Leopard yet, so I can't say if it's been fixed since then.):

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/21
(scroll down to the Resolution Independence section)

On a further note, I do have minor gripes about the 16x10 computer displays, since my current HP display scales up widescreen input (via component) to the full size, so video games are stretched vertically ever so much (+11.1%). I believe this is simply because component is analog, and is being decoded by an onboard chip that then gets sent into the analog to digital converter (probably the same one that would decode a VGA signal). Not sure if this is still an issue on the newer LCD displays from HP and Dell that take consumer digital inputs like HDMI. (not that I have a PS3 or 360 to test anyway) I imagine it's still an issue with component video in. On the other hand having 16x10 IS useful for watching 16x9 video, because the black bars allow for UI popup that does not obscure the video at all.

stats on tv

I just saw a Toyota ad on tv that claimed that 80% of Toyota vehicles sold in the last 20 years are on the road today. What this statement would like you to believe is that if you buy a Toyota now, chances are good that it will be drivable for 20 years.

What the statement actually tells you is that of the cars sold over the period 1989-2009, 80% of those cars are on the road today. However, the distribution of "hard" failures is unknown, at least just from these statistics. It could be the case that all Toyota vehicles fail at exactly the 16-year mark: if Toyota sells the same number of cars each year, then the cars that would be running today were sold between 1993 and 2009, or 16 years worth (80%) of cars.

Alternatively, it is highly likely that the number of Toyota cars being sold today is much higher than it was in 1989, so of those 80% that are running today, most might have been sold in the last 10 years or so, which might put the average lifespan closer to the early teens.

powerpoint parsing fail

Yesterday, I was puzzled by this curious bullet-point at our weekly ecology seminar:
- recruitment unlikely due to Allee effects

Because I was parsing "unlikely" as an adverb modifying the verb "due" - of course, this didn't make any sense because Allee effects are not typically mentioned except as a mechanism to inhibit recruitment. Even more confusing was the previous sentence that no significant recruitment had been observed since the 1960s - so in some ways the statement that there *was* recruitment could have been new evidence to overturn earlier findings.

Eventually, I figured out that the intended parsing was for "unlikely" to be an adjective modifying the noun "recruitment" - recruitment is unlikely to occur because of low population densities (Allee effects).

Which begs the question of using complete sentences vs. phrases in powerpoint bullets: in this case, I think a complete sentence would have been fairly unambiguous, and would only have needed to be a bit longer - but in other cases, a complete sentence would take up a lot more space and be confusing as a block of text for the audience to read.