Re: Talking vs Doing

[P3D Brian Reynolds <reynolds@xxxxxxxxx>]

Larry Berlin wrote:
> 
> >Date: Thu, 09 Oct 1997
> >From: P3D John Ohrt  writes:
> >
> >P3D Mark Obusek wrote:
> >...................
> >> He laughed out loud and told me that he would love to see the
> >> work of many who posted technical notes on the list claiming that
> >> " science oriented people more often than not are lousy
> >> photographers and do all theoretical dreaming and
> >> speculation....and can't create a good image to save their
> >> lives!"
> >
> >Frankly, this is scarcely a new allegation.  However, a few things
> >are being overlooked.  The scitech people are not artistic in their
> >work, in fact it is frowned on.  People that manipulate data for a
> >pleasing presentation are viewed with the same distaste as those
> >who cheat the elderly with roofing scams!
> 

I agree that artists (and others) have been saying that scientists (or
technologists) do not appreciate the world from an artistic viewpoint
(or have artistic abilities) for quite some time, but I disagree that
scientific presentations do not contain artistic qualities.  If that
were so scientific papers would simply be tables of numbers and
perhaps a few equations.  I believe that the artistic (or creative)
influence in scientific work (as represented by presentations of
results) is the ability to present scientifically valid results (which
obviously can't be manipulated artistically) in a manner that
interests the audience (both visually at a paper presentation and
within the written paper itself).  Now I admit that many scientific
papers are dry and bland, but they are not all so.

As an example of artistic input into scientific presentations I would
point to various 3D computer rendered scientific visualization
animations presented at SIGGRAPH over the years.  Many of these
animations were made solely to be shown at SIGGRAPH, but many were
also made to be shown at scientific conferences for their intended
field of study (e.g., the various atmospheric animations).

Someone had to decide what colors to use, what lighting to use, from
what viewpoint to show the data, and in what form.  Someone had to
pace the animation, and pick background music (or leave it out).  An
example of this was NASA's "Mars: The Movie".  A dry presentation of
the data would have shown a few images of Mars from orbit followed by
a topographical map derived from that data.  Instead the animation
takes you on a high speed tour of Mars' various topographical features
with Holts' Mars playing in the background as a voice over describes
the various features and compares them to everyday experience.

As to whether scientists an be artistically creative outside of their
field of work I think the answer is "Yes!"  Richard Feynman was one on
the most publically visible example of this.  I think anyone who wants
to argue either side of the artist vs. scientist debate should read
"Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other
People Think!"


> ******  This includes NASA staff astronomers who have the mistaken
> attitude that existing space images, especially a few stereo moon
> images, are more scientifically accurate in their current extremely
> distorted state, than they would be if the distortions were
> corrected by hand manipulation.  Despite that particular attitude
> being held by *devout* scientists, I find it to be a singularly
> unscientific attitude. The stereo images in question show the
> distant horizon warping forwards and being closer to the observer
> than obviously nearer objects and crater edges. It's a long ways
> from scientific accuracy to leave them in their current distorted
> state, by either scientific or artistic consideration. It was
> explained to me that the distortions happened as a result of certain
> *automatic* image stretching processes. The attitude expressed in
> response to the idea that humans with an active mind would be able
> to undo the distortions was on the order of, machine induced errors
> are more accurate than any human could possibly be by direct
> manipulation. Even when the distortions are grossly out of
> proportion to the rest of the image.
> 

I think you are missing an unstated assumption.  In scientific work it
is a requirement that if you give a third party your original data and
a description of the techniques used to analyze (or manipulate) it
that third party must be able to come up with the same results.  This
strongly favors procedural ("automatic" or computerized) manipulation
over manual manipulation.  If I take some image data from a CCD camera
and apply a dark frame and flat field frame and pass the result
through a FFT and then apply various transformations and another FFT
to produce the output image I can give you the original data (the raw
image, and the dark and flat field frames) and a description of the
transformations and expect that you will be able to produce the same
output image.  If instead I fed all my data into Photoshop (for
example) and then started to tweak this part of the frame for a bit
better contrast, or smoothing that other part to get rid of a camera
problem (perhaps some vignetting) I would not be able to give you the
raw data and expect that you could reproduce my results.  You might be
able to come up with something similar, but you would not get my
results.

For scientific work reproducibility is more important than any
particular "reality".  "Reality" is based on what you are trying to
observe and how you are observing it.  After all, perhaps the
astronomers were more interested in the center of the field of view
(which might have been closer to correct) than the outer edges (where
the horizon was warped).  A similar example would be a map.  Only a
globe is truely accurate.  All of the various projections used to
create flat maps introduce distortion (e.g., look at the relative
sizes of Greenland and the US in a Mercator projection).  So long as
the person using the map understands the distortion it doesn't matter
how closely the map matches "reality."

For artistic work it is perfectly reasonable to introduce
non-repeatable changes to the data (or changes that do not reflect
"reality" or have scientific merit).  However NASA (and other
scientific organizations that produce work for public consumption)
must walk a tight rope.  It's OK for Sky Publishing (or some other
commercial enterprise) to produce manipulated pretty pictures to hang
on the wall, but NASA is expected to be held to a higher standard.
Some of their work is manipulated for visual effect (e.g., "Mars: The
Movie" has a black sky even though it wouldn't look that way from
Mars, and the pictures from the planetary flybys are all taken with
grayscale cameras and filters that do not match human visual
responses), but they have to be very clear about explaining what
manipulations were done and whether or not they have any scientific
basis.

-- 
Brian Reynolds     | "Knowledge, Sir, should be free to all!"
reynolds@xxxxxxxxx |  -- Harcourt Fenton Mudd
NAR# 54438         |     "I, Mudd"


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