Just a reminder that the comm has moved to !historymemes@piefed.social
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
276 points (97.6% liked)
History Memes
3504 readers
415 users here now
THIS COMM HAS MOVED
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I remember some posts from when lemm.ee shut down of moderators recommending locking the old versions of communities so people didn't keep posting to them, it's a bit of a nuclear option but it's an option you have. More critical when the instance is actually going down though.
Yeah, prefer not to use that option yet.
The way we sell screens by diagonal does seem like marketing got away with one.
I'm reading we started with the method because with circular, and later nearly circular screens, this was the most consistent measurements.
Plus, measuring diagonally gives us a clue to both width and height.
I can't help but imagine a world in which displays were circles instead of rectangles or squares.
I don't like it. 😬
Cathode Ray Tubes lend themselves to circles (or, indeed, hemispheres). Televisions standardized on 4:3 aspect ratio as kind of a circle with four sides kind of dented in.
Then there was all the hell of different aspect ratios in the late 2000s or so that...kinda hasn't stopped?
I'd rather have a triangular interocitor.
You collective head of knuckle.
Has it not? I feel like 16:9 has basically won, with a consolation prize for 16:10
Televisions have mostly crystalized on 16:9. Computer monitors are all the fuck over the place; 16:10 is common on laptops but surprisingly difficult to find in standalone monitors, gaming monitors start at 16:9 and only go wider, I believe mine is a 21:9? And then there's smart phones, which A. are often ultrawide, and B. are usually held in portrait mode.
Then there's media itself. Television recorded before ~2006 is often 4:3, with the exception of some shows like Babylon 5 which saw HDTV coming and filmed in widescreen that was cropped for 4:3. Modern television is made for 16:9. Movies? Most of them are made wider than 16:9, with some directors going even wider/vertically narrower to be more "cinematic" because their pay scales with how far up their own asses they are. Same thing happens on Youtube. Linus "Sebastian" Tech Tips was often in the habit of bitching about camera notches/holes in phone screens being in the way of content...while simultaneously mastering his own videos at an ultrawide aspect ratio, so that they're letterboxed on standard televisions and most computer monitors, and they extend to the edge of a phone screen where all the rounded corners and camera holes are. It's like he's bad at decisions or something.
3:2 my beloved. best monitor ratio.
Linus "Sebastian" Tech Tips was often in the habit of bitching about camera notches/holes in phone screens being in the way of content...while simultaneously mastering his own videos at an ultrawide aspect ratio, so that they're letterboxed on standard televisions and most computer monitors, and they extend to the edge of a phone screen where all the rounded corners and camera holes are. It's like he's bad at decisions or something.
🤣
I totally disagree with your stance on wider screen movies and TV shows though. Generally speaking, if it’s an aesthetic choice.
I’ve started to suspect that the minor deviation from 16:9 is a bandwidth saver that streaming services have imposed, though. Because the total pixels go down. And as far as I’m aware, there are no anamorphic video files served on YouTube, Netflix or other services. That seems to have stopped being practiced after we moved on from DVDs.
They were called "roundies". Usually the top and bottom were purposefully obscured by the casing. Just look up TVs from the 50s to see what I'm talking about.
Further complicating this is that the screen is curved.
So... they'd have to take a tailors tape, from one diagonal to another, also pressing it into the screen, being careful not to damage it.
Either that or take a width heght and depth measurent and do a bit of trig.
Yeah, measuring the arc of the curved width using the width and sagitta is a little tricky, too, but totally doable with trig.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagitta_%28geometry%29?wprov=sfla1
The wiki main image suggests to me, a mere math casual, that you might even need one more piece of information than just s and l?
It's reasonable. What they got away with was labeling wide screens as a good thing.
Human vision is wider than it is tall. It makes sense for screens to reflect this fact. 180° horizontally and 100° verticaly.
So, way closer to 4/3 like old standard screens than to 16/9 like the screens nobody even calls "wide" anymore?
Can you show the math behind?
180x100, 18x10, 1.8:1
1.8 * 9 = 16.2
16.2x9
Or, 16/9 = 1.777...
180/100 = 1.8
Now that the numbers on the original post changed, no, it's not closer anymore.
Now imagine a display 24" wide and one pixel high.
Widescreen format has a width/height ratio of 1.78, human vision has a width/height ratio of 1.8.
Why would you want a screen that isn't somewhat close to the same ratio as your vision? Your one pixel tall screen is quite far off from the ratio of human vision.
"wide screens" != "widescreen". I'm merely demonstrating that distinction with an extreme example.
Wide screens are great when you treat them as 2 screens combined as one. It just doesn't make sense for a single window for most usecases
As long as you get a much larger diagonal than the screens they are replacing...
Well, it's also in inches, so nobody has a mental image of what the number means anyways.
I love that Amazon's approval process for reviews doesn't filter out ANY of this stupidity.
I read a livid one-star review once from a customer who angrily returned a wireless router because the box had wires in it.
What if words? Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more.
Thanks.
Corrected if into of in the title.
If you give Pythagoras the width and the aspect ratio, he’ll be just fine.
how is this a history meme
Oof yea I did the thing where I upvotes without checking the community. Shame on me.
Pythagorus was a guy in the past
oh mb I thought he was a scientist
Mathematicians are scientists that don't wear lab coats?
No, he was a sentient triangle.
no, no, they have a point
why is a resolution primarily measured in vertical pixels, but a screen size is measured in diagonal? shouldn't it be vertical, so that it's easily comparable across resolutions and sizes?
Are resolutions predominantly measured in vertical pixels? I thought it was horizontal? Like, 1080p is 1080 wide? I don't know anything about resolutions though so I'm likely wrong!
1080p is 1920x1080 (WxH)
1440p is 2560x1440
Oh my god. Duh 😂 I literally did the 1920x1080 thing but somehow still thought 1080 was the width 😂 Thank you!
Then you get to 4K and whoops, we broke the naming convention
Why is my Samsung 49-in curved monitor only 14 in high? It should be 49x49 duh.