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.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I’ll fill some space by ripping off something from the “Feedback” page of the latest\u00a0New Scientist<\/em>:<\/p>\n The TV industry has […] yet another new mantra: “Not just more pixels, but better pixels”. \u00a0The marketeers’ problem is that\u00a0few people can actually see the extra details in their newest, flashiest sets unless they sit very close or the screen is very, very bright.<\/p>\n A colleague found a demonstration unpleasant, especially when the image flashed, and wondered about the possible risk of this triggering photo-epilepsy or migraines. \u00a0One company said, yes, this was being looked into- but no, they could not identify the university doing the work.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0But nobody dares to do it because it would involve tests that deliberately push subjects into epileptic fits, and might very possibly kill them.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words: here’s an intuitively plausible risk associated with product p<\/em>; we could test whether\u00a0p<\/em> is safe; but doing that test itself would be unsafe. \u00a0Were 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. \u00a0(Maybe if the drug is highly beneficial, and can be used in highly controlled circumstances, it might be worth it.)<\/p>\n