On Sunday, January 12, 2014 5:02:07 PM UTC-5, Liz R wrote: > > On 13 January 2014 02:35, Craig Weinberg <[email protected] <javascript:> > > wrote: > >> How large does a digital circle have to be before the circumference seems >> like a straight line? >> > That depends on who is viewing it and where from, surely? >
Exactly, but if math doesn't have a term for that, then it is outside of mathematics. > Digital information has no scale or sense of relation. Code is code. Any >> rendering of that code into a visual experience of lines and curves is a >> question of graphic formatting and human optical interaction. With a >> universe that assumes information as fundamental, the proximity-dependent >> flatness or roundness of the Earth would have to be defined >> programmatically. Otherwise, it is simply “the case” that a person is >> standing on the round surface of the round Earth. Proximity is simply a >> value with no inherent geometric relevance. >> >> When we resize a circle in Photoshop, for instance, the program is not >> transforming a real shape, it is erasing the old digital circle and >> creating a new, unrelated digital circle. Like a cartoon, the relation >> between the before and after, between one frame and the “next” is within >> our own interpretation, not within the information. >> > I think what's it's doing is re-rendering the circle on a different scale. > I think that is our projection. I don't think that the computer re-members the old circle. You want pixels at certain coordinates, so it puts them there. You want the contents of a buffer dumped into screen RAM, then it does it. > The pixels that are set as a result are different, but the underlying > circle data is either unchanged, and a transformation matrix is changed, or > the circle data itself is transformed (the radius is changed, but the > centre remains unchanged). > I don't think that data has any concept of circularity or change. There are states and recordings of states which can be compared, but I think all of the transformation and formation that we project on computers disappears when we turn off the video screen or speakers, just as the conversation that a ventriloquist has with a dummy ends for the dummy, before it even begins. > > The real (underlying) circle is an abstraction stored as - I would guess - > a centre and radius, plus no doubt colour, style and so on. > I would say instead that reality is not the circle, the circle is always a figure which represents circularity. Reality is what is actually presented in addition to abstract patterns such as circles. Reality is concrete aesthetic phenomena. > > Didn't Plato say something about the world being an imperfect rendering? > :-) > Yes, but he may have had it upside down. Perfection is an imperfect rendering of the world. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
