Althouse: Searching for "average."

September 10, 2014

Searching for "average."

The software... the blurriness... which — no matter what you think of Claude Monet — is not what "artistic" means.

11 comments:

Nonapod said...: Are you implyingg that machines can't create art? That's highly robophobic.; 9/10/14, 12:11 PM
Quaestor said...: Researchers at UC Berkeley have created software that averages image searches into one artistic result.

The Smithsonian is noted for serial stupidity like this.; 9/10/14, 12:26 PM
Paco Wové said...: Smithsonian was one of the last holdouts, but it too has succumbed to the relentless ADHD dumbing-down of modern American media. We let our subscription lapse a year or two ago.

I should have known it was a bad sign when we visited the National Museum of Natural History some years back and they had replaced exhibit and research space with <shudder> an IMAX theater.; 9/10/14, 12:48 PM
Michael K said...: What has this to do with Monet ?; 9/10/14, 1:02 PM
rhhardin said...: Outing is somewhere between Monet and Seurat.

And general blurriness of the 4x Sony zoom gives you impressionism

Tracks

Meadow; 9/10/14, 1:09 PM
Peter said...: If you could average all the images of a person throughout that person's life, from newborn through open-casket, would that somehow produce an image that was representative of what that person looked like?; 9/10/14, 1:15 PM
CWJ said...: Paco Wove,

I'm surprised you lasted this long. I let my subscription go at least a decade ago, and for the very same reason.

I loved the magazine because there was always at least one article every issue that I wanted to read in full. Then I began to notice that the articles were becoming shorter, the scholarship was being replaced with popular cant, and the writing beginning to suffer. The once reliable monthly history, art, and science articles were being replaced by the monthly racial, social issue, and global warming articles. All in all it was suffering a creeping USA Today editorial makeover.

And this was over a decade ago. Paco Wove, what's happened since then?; 9/10/14, 1:19 PM
Joe said...: Yet another solution searching for a problem.; 9/10/14, 1:26 PM
Sam L. said...: I too became less and less happy with the mag--but it has done and likely will do some good, if not great, articles from time to time. (Dec '06--The Steamship Arabia. I went to the museum built for it, and was greatly impressed.) I have given up my subscription, though I retain my Air & Space subscription.; 9/10/14, 2:41 PM
rhhardin said...: And general blurriness of the 4x Sony zoom gives you impressionism

Technically, in case the Smithsonian wants to mention it, digital cameras have very regular pixel arrangements, and you get a moire pattern when you take pictures of regular arrangements, like chain link fences, house siding, bricks, and so forth.

To prevent that, digital cameras have an anti-aliasing screen ahead of the pixels, so that light destined for one pixel gets spread out over more than one.

This fixes the moire pattern problem, but blurs the image.

So the camera post-processes the image to sharpen what looks like former edges.

The right combination of genuine bluriness and that post processing produces impressionism.

The sharpening is also responsible for unrealistically pasted-on looks for pictures of running dogs, for example. An edge that should be blurred is unblurred.

Some cameras have options to turn off the sharpening step, which I always do if it's available. You can always resharpen in the photo editor you're using.; 9/10/14, 3:07 PM
stlcdr said...: Why,really, would we be interested in averages?

It is actually specifics which are more interesting, typically extremes, or at least anything which is not average.

Guess what, we already know what an average wedding shot looks like. That's the whole point. We create an average shot so that we can concentrate on what makes this shot different - the people in it.

This kind of scientific process and research using computers to do the heavy lifting is like doing research into blunt instruments as a replacement for a knife and calling it an 'evolution' of the knife.; 9/11/14, 4:48 AM