Anyone keen to photograph some candles, for scientific experiment?

[amolitor]

I was a mathematician once upon a time. These days I write software.

 

[tris_d]

Tris, I have no trouble following Helen's posts.

I cannot follow your posts at all, they appear to simply be strings on non-sequiturs with some keywords sprinkled in. I say "appear" here quite deliberately -- I pass, in this post, no judgement on whether your remarks are correct or not. My point here is to note that if you plan to write a paper about this, you need to work on your expository skills. A publishable paper exists to communicate ideas to other people, and your writing on this forum simply doesn't accomplish that. As a people, I can state firmly that you have succeeded in communicating no ideas at all to me. My sense is that you have not communicated successfully with anyone else in this forum, either.

You should consider what to do about that, before sitting down to write your paper.

What part do you not understand?

1.) We are talking about an image of the night sky, formed by human eyes or a camera, and why does it look the way it looks.

2.) Solid angle has nothing to do with resolution or distribution. Distribution involves a sequence, that is more than one number.

3.) If the result of some equation is a single number, then it can not have any distribution, it's "uniform" just by being a single.

4.) If we calculate total intensity for either of those two images above we would get a result that is a single scalar number.

5.) If we look at the value of "total intensity" for either of those two images the result will indicate they are bright and uniform.

6.) If we take resolution into account we can realize "total intensity" does not accurately describe brightness nor its distribution.

 

[christop]

I still say he's a genuine physicist just trying to **** with us.

I think he really is a computer programmer as he says he is. When I was a less experienced programmer, I was also arrogant (to a much, much lesser degree) about how much I knew, and I came up with what I thought were "new" ideas which turned out to be fundamentally flawed and would never work in practice. By the time I got to my teenage years I had learned how much I didn't know. Luckily for me I didn't have access to the WWW (it was probably before the Web was invented) to flaunt my own ridiculous and laughable ideas.

 

[unpopular]

whats worse is that there will be a record if this madness for all eternity.

 

[Helen B]

Well, it looks like no matter what I write tris isn't going to read it, tris is just going to reply to what tris thinks I have written. Here's an excellent example of tris' imagination:

That's a bit of an odd thing to say. Resolution independent means that the result doesn't depend on the resolution chosen. Both words are in real dictionaries, and they have a meaning, so I don't need to use an imaginary dictionary.

We are talking about an image of the night sky here, formed by human eyes or a camera, and why does it look the way it looks. Your result being a single scalar number is not "resolution independent", it is COMPLETELY WITHOUT any resolution, and when talking about images that's a nonsense to start with.

Note how 'the result doesn't depend on the resolution chosen' has been switched for 'Your result being a single scalar number is not "resolution independent", it is COMPLETELY WITHOUT any resolution '. See how tris thinks that a result that is valid for any chosen resolution suddenly becomes one with no resolution at all? Resolution becomes no resolution in tris' mind. Puzzling, isn't it?

Solid angle has nothing to do with resolution

Tris has no idea what the relationship between solid angle and resolution is and yet tris claims that tris knows about this subject.

Don't you realize if you take "resolution independent" approach and calculate total intensity of either of those two images above you get a single number that would make you believe those images are both bright and uniform, which is obviously not the case if you take resolution into account. Do you understand now why such mathematics is wrong and unsuitable to deduce anything about any distribution or actual brightness?

It's fairly obvious that different resolutions would result in different values for the degree of uniformity, so this comparison would not meet the requirement for 'resolution independence'. For some weird reason, tris doesn't get that, simple as it is.

 

[amolitor]

What part do you not understand?

1.) We are talking about an image of the night sky, formed by human eyes or a camera, and why does it look the way it looks.

Ok.

2.) Solid angle has nothing to do with resolution or distribution. Distribution involves a sequence, that is more than one number.

Solid angle is pretty much the same thing as resolution. Given a lens, focusing an image of the night sky on a sensor, what gets imaged onto a pixel (or any square region of the sensor) IS a solid angle. So, #2 is wrong on this point.

We usually say "population" or "sample" when dealing with distributions, but sure, I'll grant you "sequence"

3.) If the result of some equation is a single number, then it can not have any distribution, it's "uniform" just by being a single.

Ok.

4.) If we calculate total intensity for either of those two images above we would get a result that is a single scalar number.

Ok.

5.) If we look at the value of "total intensity" for either of those two images the result will indicate they are bright and uniform.

I understand what you're saying here, sure. Note in passing that "uniform" is a word use to describe a distribution, so you're being sloppy with your terminology. Regardless, #5 seems to be simply a repetition of #4.

At this point you've argued, successfully, that "total intensity does not have a distribution, because it's a scalar". It's not clear what point #1 has to do with anything at this point, since "total intensity" has only a tenuous connection with what the night sky looks like.

6.) If we take resolution into account we can realize "total intensity" does not accurately describe brightness nor its distribution.

What? This is where the wheels fall off. Where did resolution come from? What does resolution have to do with anything in your remarks #1 through #5? You don't even mention resolution, except to make what appears to be an incorrect side remark in #2, above. Resolution appears to be completely unrelated to "total intensity", which is surely nothing more than the integral of light intensity over the entire sky (or whatever subset of it you're interested in).

If I were refereeing this, I would probably make remarks very much like what I wrote above, and recommend that the paper be rejected for now, with the author urged to re-organize the ideas in the paper and try to make clearer what the point, if any, is.

 

[tris_d]

I was a mathematician once upon a time. These days I write software.

Then perhaps you would like to hear about some of the stuff I made.

Tic-Tac-Toe game using artificial neural network with only a single layer perceptron, mapping 255,168 combinations into only 81 bytes!!! It does not use CPU, but it works on graphic video card hardware (GPU) by utilizing textures and parallel processing. Here is a full listing of the source code:

Driver-Man's operating system
OpenGL & OpenGL ES demos - gameBoX Linux

Driver-Man's MAME emulator for Android phones with online scoreborad, featuring new input method for mobile devices and new gameplay elements for classic arcade games:

Unfortunately friendly neighborhood Driver-Man, that's me, has a lots of enemies so this is not available for download on the Google Market at the moment, but if someone wants to try it out let me know. I'll upload new version on the market after New Year.


There is Amazing Driver-Man comic book on the market, if you wanna see just how crazy I am:


There are few more comic books that I have not yet published. Here are some snippets...


You don't see this kind of stuff every day, eh? Hehee, I'm craaazy!

It's my gift, my curse. Who am I? I'm your friendly neighborhood Driver-Man!