Wake up those sleeping dogs!

Have you read the most recent post on Cosmic Variance about the issue of varying aspect ratios in various video sources? John pulls a sample frame from some CNN video with a picture of a woman and a child. He's amazed that people claim not see a distortion when the original aspect ratio is changed. All very good...of course the high def people I know get very defensive if you bring up that this issue exists.

Anyway, in his text, he casually makes mention of

And if you don’t prefer the one where the nice-looking mom’s face is not grossly distorted, then I am even more baffled!

...is this not similar in intent (if not to the same degree) as Tommaso's crush on Lisa Randall? Sure this woman is not a physicist, but does that matter? The comment appears on a physics blog and isn't that the important part? And the comment is similarly "irrelevant" to the context.

Don't get me wrong...I don't fault John in the least. I'm just not clear I really get the reasoning behind thinking there's much harm to these types of comments.