On Fri, May 06, 2011 at 03:12:24PM -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > I fervently agree with the 4:3 minority, but there are many who > agree with the screen marketing departments instead. The reason
Sometimes I wonder how different things would be today if we had taken a different path in developing electronic display technology. The original Cathod Ray Tube and its immediate descendants (oscilloscopes and RADAR screens) are round. A round display might have been a good thing. With pixels packed hexagonaly it would lend itself to smoother anti-aliasing and color blending because the pixels would be spaced evenly from each other. A round display would have a number of other interesting properties too in terms of bit-mapping and indexing. Round screens might have inspired the makers of a certain OS from Redmond, WA to have named their product "Bubbles" instead. (So would that make their users Bubble-heads?) Or the engineers who design these ugly screens that just look wrong could learn a lesson from the ancient Greeks and use a proportion that doesn't give a human headaches to look at. One of the most aesthetically pleasing ratios of width to height in Greek design (which can be seen in the Parthenon and other classical Greek architecture) is the so-called Divine Proportion or (1 + sqrt(5)) / 2, or about 8:5. This number shows up in geometry and Nature so much that the Greeks were convinced it was a hint from the gods pointing out something built into the design of things. It is too bad that so much technolgical development is driven only by cost and profit. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
