CBS tapped into something special when it gave the world the CSI television series. The original incarnation, set in Las Vegas, introduced viewers into the shock and gore that is criminolgy via “realistic” camera tricks. I’ll admit, having a bullet’s-eye view of a gunshot path was pretty cool at first. There’s something to be said about the sick fascination with seeing a bullet slowly pierce skin, travel through flesh and lodge itself in bone, all the while acompanied by squishing and crunching sounds. I guess studio executives thought it was all cool enough to spin off series for Miami and New York City locales.
Dena’s a fan of the Las Vegas series; possibly because, in her words, “William Petersen is pretty hot for an older guy”. I watched the show with her for the first couple of seasons, but there came a turning point when CSI’s cheese factor, specifically regarding the use of computer technology, was too powerful for me to ignore and lose interest in the show.
It all began with an episode where our ridiculously good-looking team of criminologists deftly identify the episode’s suspect from a reflection in the victim’s sunglasses. At first, the reflected image was blurry, but with a few clicks of the mouse, software was able to extrapolate a crystal clear image of a very bad man from a blob of pixels. The algorithms used in the software to perform this feat would probably make your head explode, should you even begin to try to understand them. These algorithms’ inventors could teach Donald Knuth himself how to write a serious computer science book. I don’t know what software or computer has that kind of intelligence and processing power, but sign me up! Anything’s better than the shitty interpolation on my camera phone’s digital zoom implementation, so this hardware and software that the Las Vegas crime lab is privy to would be welcome.
Following this episode, there have been numerous other examples of defying what technology is currently available. Usually, this involves matching smudgy fingerprints in an instant. Why the CSI series will remain true to accepted scientific facts from the worlds of biology, chemistry and physics all the while living a magical world of computer technology is beyond me. What really takes the proverbial cake is this clip from the New York City series:
She’s going to what?!? What will the “GUI interface” be used for? Developers have used VB for a long time as a tool to quickly prototype user interfaces for Windows applictions, and some people even [gasp] build entire applications with it. But the GUI is simply what the user will use to interact with the software’s intended functionality. They appear to want to track the location of somebody who is posting all crazy-like on a blog. I’m not sure how her app will accomplish this. I suppose it could search the web server’s logs for requests for the blogging software’s posting pages and check the refering IP address, but I don’t think you need to create an application just to do that – that’s what CTRL+F or F3 or some other “find” functionality found in most text editing/word processing/spreadsheet applications are for. Unless she wants to build a visual sort of Ping or Traceroute utility, but that seems like a waste of time. Where’s the functional specs for her application!?! 🙂
3 Responses to "the wonderous and magical world of csi"
I’ve remained a pretty solid fan of CSI and CSI:NY over the years (Miami was just too much for me).
CSI:NY regularly features technological impossibilities, it is practically their distinguishing feature. Even with a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief, this particular episode of NY had me shouting at the TV. It started with me snarking to my wife about the “Is it human?” “It’s primate DNA.” exchange not actually answer the question and got worse from there.
It’s even an invalid from an internal cohesiveness standpoint – they’ve traced IPs several times on the show. Apparently all the ISPs available to NYC residents keep detailed records of the current leasee or something. Why do they need another application?
I almost think that the people behind the series intentionally tweak its geekier fans (and critics).
ok, I agree that the series has taken a turn for the worst. They lost touch with the cool camera angles following a bullet into the flesh, blah blah blah. The series itself has become extremely boring. Storylines have lost touch with the viewers as ratings clearly indicate and two actors have walked away from the L.V. series probably because they are bored. But leave it to you to make it a geek thing! No one except computer geeks would even have understood what the hell that girl just said (wtf is a gooey – (sarcasm)) And btw, you failed to mention the cool sounds computers make when filing through millions of finger prints 🙂
ROFL. A Gui with VB to do what?!? Track IPs?
Thats good, comedy gold right there. Or she could of done something like that with a single line command in Bash.
Its funny how you mentioned the sharpening algorithm for blurry images. The exact same discussion came up in my visual computing course. It just doesn’t exist. You’d need a multi-lens camera which would make simulatenous high and low resolution images, to pull something like that off.