With any luck, the marking tsunami will have receded by the end of the week, and so I should be able to get back to blogging a bit more frequently soon.

In the meantime, I’ll fill some space by ripping off something from the “Feedback” page of the latest New Scientist:

The TV industry has […] yet another new mantra: “Not just more pixels, but better pixels”.  The marketeers’ problem is that few people can actually see the extra details in their newest, flashiest sets unless they sit very close or the screen is very, very bright.

A colleague found a demonstration unpleasant, especially when the image flashed, and wondered about the possible risk of this triggering photo-epilepsy or migraines.  One company said, yes, this was being looked into- but no, they could not identify the university doing the work.

Then in the tea break at a tech conference a senior engineer from a UK TV station confided the reason: “We are very aware of the risks and would love to do some real research.  But nobody dares to do it because it would involve tests that deliberately push subjects into epileptic fits, and might very possibly kill them.”

In other words: here’s an intuitively plausible risk associated with product p; we could test whether p is safe; but doing that test itself would be unsafe.  Were this a pharmaceutical trial, one would expect that things would stop there – or, at the very least, that things would move very slowly and carefully indeed.  (Maybe if the drug is highly beneficial, and can be used in highly controlled circumstances, it might be worth it.)

But with TVs… well, it looks like journalists have been invited to the product launch already.  My guess is that if the TV is found to be risky, it’d be quietly withdrawn ex post facto – which seems rather late in the day.

It is a bit strange that trials on a product aren’t being done not so much because of what they might reveal, as because even doing the test might be iffy.  Stranger yet that this is unlikely to make much of a dent in the marketing strategy.  Or, given the requirements of consumer capitalism, not all that strange after all: take your pick.

Sometimes, Big Pharma can seem like a model of probity.