Hacker Cinema
Tosca
2001 · Film · 120 min
Directed by Benoît Jacquot
Benoit Jacquot's acclaimed 2002 film of Puccini's opera stars Angela Gheorghiu in the title role, with Roberto Alagna, Ruggero Raimondi and the Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, under Antonio Pappano.
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Shorter version: TV is light entertainment, even when it pretends to be something more.
Why? Claim: There is in effect a rule not to be violated: Whenever content passes through a video camera, the work must be under the control of a producer, director, writer, set designer, camera operator, and, if not 'live', editor all with the techniques and values of entertainment TV and Hollywood. Proof: Look at the video clips done for high school math and science. Done. I know of only one exception, the 30 minutes or so on plane geometry done by A. Gleason with some help from T. Apostol.
In one step more detail, the main technique of TV is from formula fiction. The interview in question? Sure: Notice that the interviewer kept returning to the issue of what she sensed was the 'drama' and 'evil' of the situation of hundreds of young entrepreneurs who enter accelerators but end up with businesses worth $0.00.
Why the drama? A central pillar of formula fiction is drama from the threat of evil. E.g., just now in my computer's DVD burner is a CD of the Puccini opera 'Tosca' with the two lovers, sung by di Stefano and Callas, and then too soon facing the evil Scarpia. Sure: I can like light entertainment when it has singing of Puccini by di Stefano and Callas! What is on TV shows on finance is closer to 'Tosca' than to Black-Scholes, the Sharpe capital asset pricing model (CAPM), how portfolio rebalancing in an index fund works, tests for Brownian motion, or how James Simons made so much money.
Am I the only one saying that TV is so bad? No: Recall the N. Minow statement that TV is a "vast wasteland". And recall the explanation from M. McLuhan "the medium is the message", that is, the narrow bandwidth of the then few TV channels ensured that the best ROI on that bandwidth was essentially one size fits all light entertainment.
Of course, Graham and Hornik kept talking about the challenge of seeing the future. Well, with the above, let's now do some of that: One size fits all doesn't fit. It never did fit very well. It doesn't fit in shoes, shirts, restaurants, home furnishings, cars, or personal interests. Instead, with more variety, can get on average better fits. So, there is value in more variety.
Can we have that variety? Well, with the Internet McLuhan's limited bandwidth of the TV "medium" essentially no longer applies. Instead we are free to have highly specialized content for particular personal interests. So, we can have specialized blogs, fora (not that I can think of any just now), long tail Web sites, etc. And maybe eventually I will be able to get some good lectures in quantum mechanics, that emphasizes both the physics and the mathematics, the actual, 100% genuine, died in the wool mathematics, hopefully from a guy who actually knows what a Hilbert space is. It would also be good for him to know what a random variable is, if that's not too much to ask.