This was extremely well written. Not being a photographer myself, the mathematical discussion and subsequent impact to optics/photography are very accessible. Kudos to the author!
I laughed when they tried to translate "Madres!", but a pissed off Latina mother running at you waving her sandal in the air like a medieval warrior swinging a truncheon is definitely an "Oh shit" moment.
My understanding is that centuries ago in Latin America "madre" became an euphemism for "madame of a brothel", while actual moms are called "mamá". In Spain it carries no such connotation.
Mamá means mom, madre means mother. You use either depending on the context. (I'm only talking about the Mexican use)
Madre is used more often in phrases, such as "Madre de dios!", Or "La madre putria," or "Pinche tu madre", or it's used as a formal to refer to one's mother. It's similar in English, such as "On my mother's side", "Mother fucker", "Mother of God!", etc.
In Mexico, "tu madre" can be a general insult, probably shortened from "pinche tu madre", though in English we have a similar vulgar retort of "your mother". As a weird turn on the phrase, "de puta madre" is slang for a good thing.
I'm not aware of an association with brothels in Mexico, but certainly in some Latin American country it could have.
I don't see any figures comparing the error of the formula with the previous error from numerical methods. While mathematically the discovery seems significant, it isn't clear to me this will actually improve lenses.
Note that "build" doesn't mean they built a physical telescope, they came up with lense shapes.
There are some serious problems when building large telescope lenses; if they get too heavy, they start to deform under their own weight, and non-spherical shapes are hard and expensive to produce.
It would be awesome if this analytical solution inspired improvement in real applications, but I'm cautions about that.
Not at the large scale - there aren't really any refracting telescopes left (based on lenses) when it comes to serious research, we replaced them with reflecting telescopes instead (based on mirrors).
There's a few notable exceptions, like the Lick Observatory, but in terms of impacting the state or progress of astronomy, the research from this article is unlikely to have an impact outside of small scale labs and amateur astronomy.
That's not to say the benefits there won't be appreciable for those who rely on optical telescopes, but you won't see this research make a difference for ground based arrays like NRAO, VLA, or in space telescopes.
VR headset lens already require software chromatic abberration correction -- I'm curious what constraints if any would limit the application of this new result for VR spherical aberrations. Would love some thoughts from an optics expert on this. I also wonder if this new knowledge could contribute to a software corrector.
Hopefully it leads to software-based spherical aberration correction too, which may mean better perceived quality with the same lenses, or even thinner/cheaper lenses over time.
Or maybe they'll find a way to apply it to make better lenses that need less software-based corrections. They struggle a lot not just with clarity at the edges but god rays and glare too.
> In this equation we describe how the shape of the second aspherical surface of the given lens should be given a first surface, which is provided by the user, as well as the object-image distance [...] (emphasis mine)
I didn't check out the paper in detail, sounds like the shape of the correction surface depends on the distance to what you're imaging? Does it do so in a non-trivial way? If so, this sounds a bit more like an academic victory, no?
Well in astronomy you usually want your telescope to be able to observe different targets. So it depends on the details of how the correction surface has to change when the image-object distance.
If it's just a mild deformation and offset, then yeah I guess technology similar to adaptive mirrors could work well.
Distances are usually treated as infinity, at least in astrophotography. I'd be surprised if this secondary lens was able to distinguish between light coming from 1ly and 1000ly
I used to be a photographer and have stared at the lens group diagrams from many a lens manufacturer, so take this with a grain of salt: In a lens there are multiple lens groups, it's often that the aberration correction is its own distinct group, with fixed input and output groups flanking it. I'd imagine that the distance to the projection surface, in this case the next lens group, can be fixed and thus distinct from the distance to your ultimate subject. A fun fact is that Helmholtz reciprocity says that regardless which direction light passes through an optical system you can reverse the distortion and reconstruct the input signal.
And to anyone who is averse to reading dense, long papers: it's only 4 pages long, and a quarter is pictures. It's heavy on the maths, because of course it has to be, but there isn't a single integral in the entire thing. It's remarkably accessible to anyone who took an introductory calculus course.
The paper is from Nov 2018, and is easy to find online. It’s a pretty amazing result; the examples they give in the paper are for some reasonable shaped primary surfaces and some really neat “exotic” stuff. The solution actually admits aberrant free solutions for any geometry that doesn’t include self-crossing rays. So, some of the ‘weird’ examples include a Bessel-function cross section, negative index of refraction, and lenses that focus at negative infinity.
The author’s have a paper from March 2019 (in arXiv) that uses the result to build some novel telescope geometries.
I'm not sure I really follow how this actually will result in better lenses. Is the precision of the numerical solution really the problem, or is the problem the actual precise manufacturing of the lens elements?
I have a strong suspicion that the numerical solution is as precise as needed and the limiting factor is the manufacturing, but I would be interested to hear how this results in something new.
Your suspicion is justified. The news here is the discovery of an analytical formula - which is "precise," sure, but whether using it directly in an actual computation could yield a more accurate and practically useful result is a good question, due to the complexity of the formula.
I think the problem was being unable to solve a generalized version of the equation. Our old methods only made it economically viable to make "good enough" lenses and now this method makes it economically viable to make "perfect" lenses.
Your suspicion is right, as far as manufacturing goes.
The real boon of this discovery is in designing lenses. For example, the authors have already used it to design a single-lens telescope for the first time [1]. I don't know much about the forefront of optics, but at least in my field having analytical models that you quickly iterate on and use to prime intuition are extremely useful.
I have not checked the actual paper, but according to the article itself:
> Moreover, the solution involved aspherical elements, which are harder to manufacture in a precise way and are thus more costly.
> Their findings were published in the article General Formula for Bi-Aspheric Singlet Lens Design Free of Spherical Aberration, in the journal Applied Optics.
I’m no expert in optics, but that does not sound like the kind of advancement that cheapens lenses, even if the math work is mathematically relevant
I have not read the original paper, I'm not an expert in optics, but the article clearly makes an argument that seems contradictory:
- Current solution is expensive because it uses aspherical elements.
- New solution promises cost reduction.
- New solution uses aspherical elements as well.
Either there's some hidden detail that the article fails to mention, or it's claims are overstated. If you actually know about optics, I'd be glad to know which is the true or if I'm missing anything here, otherwise I would appreciate to keep your snarkiness to yourself.
It also doesn't sound like the kind of advancement that makes camera lenses play mp3 files, but then: neither of those two things are even remotely relevant to the article?
These people solved optical abberation. Even if their work leads to lenses that are twice as expensive as they are today, people whose research, or jobs, rely on perfect optics will be more than happy to pay what it costs to work with those.
Anyone else can wait until one or more companies figures out how to make the manufacturing process cost effective at scale.
> It also doesn't sound like the kind of advancement that makes camera lenses play mp3 files, but then: neither of those two things are even remotely relevant to the article?
How is it not? The article actually makes that claim:
It would help make better and cheaper to manufacture optical systems in all areas, be it telescopes, microscopes, and everything in between.
Aspheric lenses are frequently molded and these molds are used to make vast quantities of precision lenses. We've been molding lenses in quantity since Kodak perfected the process in the 70's. Yes, grinding aspherical lenses is more costly (yet still possible,) but there are numerous applications for which molded lenses are entirely sufficient.
Something like this could be an advance for optical systems where plastic moulded lenses are suitable. One lens could replace several elements in systems with monochromatic light. Think optical drives
Slightly related: One thing I've learnt in Physics is that there are still a huge number of practical and fundamental problems to be solved. You might expect everything easy will already be done by now but that's just not true. Hence we still manage to write so many papers! In fact many Physicists have too many papers they want to write and not enough time to write them. This was a huge surprise for me coming in to my PhD. I had naively assumed that physicists were all scrounging for any morsel of content to publish!!
Of course it depends on the field. It's a requirement here in the UK to publish a paper to get your PhD (at least I've been led to believe that), and many particle physics students really struggle to manage to fulfill this. On the other hand gravitational wave detectors have a huge amount of unexplored science as there are so many things that we still do not fully understand about the detectors themselves.
I agree with this big time. One of my favorite Feynman quotes is that science is an "expanding frontier of ignorance". There is always somewhere to go and something on the other side, that may change everything and invalidate deeply held convictions forever, all it takes is the guts to, again quoting Feynman, "be willing to stick your neck out".
Oh, I'm sure there are lots of things to discover, but I think this underestimates what it takes to actually know enough to find the frontier and decide on a good problem to solve.
While Feynman is correct on expanding the frontier of ignorance Asimov is also correct about the relativity of wrong (that we come asymptotically closer to the truth). This is why people think most of physics is solved, because in the context of what most people need it is extremely accurate.
> It's a requirement here in the UK to publish a paper to get your PhD
Categorically false. I did my physics PhD in the UK and while I did publish a paper, it was not a requirement and I have plenty of friends who did not publish a paper and still got their physics PhD.
I believe that even if humanity were given a book that perfectly describes physics on the smallest levels, there'll still be hundreds of years of work to find useful approximations and abstractions.
That's of course nevermind the effort involved in grokking the book. Especially, if particles are more subdivided than we think/know they are.
Think of it as knowing the rules of the game vs developing strategies for it.
Just yesterday I was watching a video about machining flat surfaces, and it was mentioned that the reason why two very flat surfaces stick together isn't thoroughly understood yet.
We can build things that deal with unimaginable precision, create new elements, compute with quantum effects, but we don't know why flat things stick together?
To put it simply, two clean flat surfaces stick together for the same reason each of the two objects is held together in the first place: weak and strong nuclear forces and electromagnetism. However the specifics of this might vary greatly depending on the material and other circumstances.
> After months of working on solving the problem, Rafael González recalls, “I remember one morning I was making myself a slice of bread with Nutella, when suddenly, I said out loud: Mothers! It is there!”
> He then ran to his computer and started programming the idea. When he executed the solution and saw that it worked, he says he jumped all over the place. It is unclear whether he finished eating the Nutella bread.
This is my favorite quote from the article. Soon to be the most famous slice of Nutella bread?
the full equation for general relativity would take many pages to print, but Einstein notation makes it much shorter looking. This was not the case here.
Isn’t that how most of us are solving complex problems? Building context and then walking away from the desk for a walk, or perhaps while we’re in the shower in the morning or at night, not focused on the problem but our brain working on it in the background until it is brought forward to our consciousness?
There are many similar stories. Famously Tesla's recollection of himself "inventing the inductive motor" while walking in some garden in Hungary, and the discovery of the Benzene ring.
It wasn't thought of, it was calculated using a computer algebra system. Such systems are very powerful, but tend to be fairly bad at writing things nicely and simplifying, so they often produce insanely big and complicated formulas.
That formula is just a Mathematica dump. If you read the paper, which is unfortunately paywalled, you'll see the result is the solution to a complex system of equations, which are far easier to digest than the result you see there.
It's really natural, on first mention, to refer to something using a member of the degenerate set of its most unique identifier, right? From that point on, to avoid repetition, mix in antecedents or generic names.
Brands exploit this mechanic in language so that any time a, thereto unknown, good has to be addressed, that identification become advertising. It shifts from being a unique identification of an object/item/thing to a conjuring of the ethos/identity that contextualizes that good as being different from all the others (un)like it.
I'm sure the dude was just having some hazelnut spread and that's how they recalls it but us, like them, are getting hacked. Now if you'll excuse me, the rey--, I mean tinfoil, is starting to get itchy, I need to switch it out.
>> It's really natural, when first mentioning it, to call something using by a member of the degenerate set of its most unique identifier, right?
Huh? ‘degenerate set’ being what, the brand placement? I likes me some Semiotics, though not sure what this passage refers to.
In the context of a photography site, brand mentions must be a hazard. The author has no problem name dropping an Ancient Greek, Newton, Leibniz, Huygens. Why not Nutella? Rather than increasing the cognitive gap between the auditor (us) and the subject (2000 year old problem), Nutella seems to take the shining brilliance of those luminaries down a notch and in line with the form of writing—a neutral density filter? Haha. Or maybe it’s just a laugh and some color.
I don't know any Semiotics! But, in an effort to drive the conversation, I can be more precise with what I'm trying to say.
I'm working with this informal idea that there is always a relationship between the audience and the speaker. That relationship define a shared knowledge space.
If I am speaking to a group of my friends and need to refer to my brother the set of identifiers that uniquely conveys his identify to my friends might be {brother, Joe, Joe Blow, brother-man, etc}. Any of those identifiers coming from to me specify exactly one person, my brother. The degeneracy is that they equally identify him to the audience.
If you were not that close to me, and I say "brother", you might wonder if I have more than one brother. If you did not know me at all I might say Dr. Joe Blow to identify him and why he might be relavent in some area of expertise. As the relationship between speaker and and audience grows more distant the set size decreases. Inversely, the context-free uniqueness of the identification provided by the remaining identifiers has to be greater, with proper names maintaining greater uniqueness (sorry to the John Smiths of the world!) than nicknames and so forth.
To return to my point, the scientist in question called it Nutella because he does not have a deep relationship with his audience and that is the most unique way of identifying it. I don't believe he was doing anything atypical or nefarious. If he knew the audience well, he could have just said "breakfast", and they would know exactly what he meant because he has the same thing for breakfast most mornings.
The problem is that brands, unlike most proper names(obviously famous people are an exception), have a greater ethos associated with them. If my brother was named Joe Blow or Jim Deal, my unique referencing of him doesn't do much to color the statement around it. This is contrast to how much extra you get when you call a car a Ferrari vs a grand tourer. My point is that advertisers recognize this linguistic norm and exploit it, this is what brand identity is. As such, just the natural mention of a good becomes advertising.
There is a lot to unpack in your response, but I guess it’s your use of the term ‘degenerate’ which confuses me. It’s not common in the Semiotic cannon, and so you say it’s not something you’ve studied.
From your original comment: “...contextualizes that good as being different from all the others (un)like it.”
This is textbook Semiotics. Meaning is not derived from the designation (‘apple’ is the red fruit with the thin skin and firm ...eh flesh. Rather, Apple is not a banana; not a kiwi; not a tomato; not beef; ad infinitum.
It's totally common when talking about quantum states that have identical energies! Which is not helpful at all in this conversation. It's just one of the words in my everyday tool bag and I used it without thinking too deeply.
All that said I just order an intro book on Semiotics. Interest definitely peeked.
Most people would just say "sandwich" unless the spread is somehow critical to the tale. I know it's a quote, but it sounds most odd to me as most people I know don't really brand drop in conversation. Coke is probably the big exception there...
TIL what ziploc bags are. Just called "sandwich bags" here. Cling film isn't "sarran wrap" here either. :)
There used to be a distinction in the US: Saran Wrap was made of Saran and was much less oxygen-permeable than other cling films as a result. In a development that represents some kind of evidence about trademark law, Saran Wrap in the US is no longer made of Saran, due to concerns about plasticizers leaching into food; but it is still sold as "Saran Wrap". Here in Argentina, I can still get cling film made of PVDC, just not Saran-brand PVDC.
I don't understand the downvoting of the parent here, which is factually correct and worth noting. It's incredibly unhealthy and this is just down to marketing that anybody eats it. You can make really nice chocolate spreads with your own hazelnuts
Just to clarify: it wasn't bad-faith, I was just (trying to be) sarcastic, as most of the store-bought food nowadays "may contain traces of nuts and/or eggs and/or celery" etc.
Nothing in that comment is factually correct or worth noting. Do you realize what butter, Marmelade, Margarine or vegetable spreads are mostly made of?
I think 13% hazelnuts, 8.7% powdered milk and 7.4% cocoa[0], are quite a lot more than "traces". Sure it could be better, but then you could say that about 90% of products in the average supermarket.
Yes, I'm aware that it's made with hazelnuts. But in order for someone to refer to it as a "hazelnut spread", hazelnuts would have to be the dominant flavor. They're barely there at all.
(Compare the consistency of nutella to the consistency of peanut butter.)
We are discussing in the context of what people use in everyday language. In the U.S., the use of "hazelnut spread" over Nutella is exceedingly rare. Even when dealing with an off-brand, non-nutella "hazelnut spread".
It's just a writing device, in this case. The contrast of mundane detail and the high calling. Used all the time, e.g. NYT's style has pretty much devolved to the formula “begin with the details, then introduce the central topic.”
Not really, no. There's no scientific funding riding on your reading this article in a photography magazine.
Specificity is almost always recommended in any creative writing from song lyrics to infotainment like this. It enhances humor and mental imagery, which enhance general enjoyment. That's all that's happening here. Hanlon's razor is your friend.
Indeed. That is why I like the Nikon product placement a lot better because it just highlights what kind of a problem they create with the decision to have only one card slot.
For anyone unfamiliar: supposedly, while bathing; he suddenly realized the principals of buoyancy. He then jumped out of the bath and ran down the street -- without clothes -- yelling "Eureka!" (I have found it). Not sure if this is true or just a legend, but I doubt we'll ever find out what happened to that Nutella bread either...
Probably should include what problem Archimedes has been stuck on until his realization of the principles of buoyancy gave him a solution.
The King had order a gold crown, and after receiving it suspected that the goldsmith may have replaced some of the gold with cheaper silver. The King asked Archimedes to figure out if the crown was pure gold.
Archimedes could do that by figuring out its density, but to do that he needed to get the weight of the crown and the volume of the crown. Weight was easy, but he had no idea how to get the volume, other than melting it down and reshaping it into a shape whose volume he could calculate. Naturally, the King wanted Archimedes to answer the question without destroying the crown.
His realization that the volume of water displaced by an object that is more dense than water is equal to the volume of the object gave him a way to get the volume of the crown without harming it.
I wonder that programming language he used. Many ideas are lost because we don't have something to write it on. That's the good thing about the so-called 'scripting languages' that IMO reduce the latency between idea and its materialization.
The article says Nutella bread, but I wonder if it was toast.
Which I prefer. And the time waiting for the toast allowed long enough for his mind to wonder to the solution.
Since no one has clearly pointed it out, "¡Madres!" is a multipurpose Mexican expression that rarely has to do with actual motherhood. "Holy crap!" is a good analogy in this case.
It's a good article if you enjoy jokes and references about photographers and how they behave. It's not a good article if you want a minimum of fluff and just want to understand what the discovery is and why it might be significant.
While I usually enjoy a good amount of fluff, I must say I, too, was underwhelmed by the amount of detail and/or substance reported. The formula makes no sense to me, and was apparently just thrown in in this form for a gag.
I also didn't like it, the title calls him a physicist and in the article it says mathematician, they did an experiment with 500 samples and got how many 9s, the presumption that Newton was the greatest scientist (von Neumann?), the comparison between such theoretical luminaries and someone who did a numerical optimisation of someone else's theoretical work, ... it reminds me of A Beautiful Mind, where the real accomplishments are obscured (and here greatly exaggerated) purely to tell a story to lay-people. More attention to the facts please, less attention to the sandwich.
To clarify: the innovation isn't that they design better lenses. It's that given the first surface of a lens, they have an analytical formula for the lens's second surface so that the lens doesn't exhibit spherical aberration. Traditionally, numerical methods are used to compute this second surface instead of an analytical formula. Also, as a practical matter, designers often use several spherical lenses instead of a few aspherics because the latter are harder to manufacture/more expensive.
It's an interesting mathematical result, but note that gives a solution for the problem of the spherical aberration, but real lens have also chromatic aberration. I.E. the speed of light for each color inside the glass is slightly different, so the value n (refraction index) in the equation is different, so in the equation you get a different surface for each color. In the real lens you must pick one surface, so the effect is that one color is perfectly focused and the other colors are not focused and you get some rainbow-like effects.
The solution is to use combination of a few lens of different glasses, to compensate the differences. It's not easy to design these kind of system, because they must compensante also for other types of aberrations.
12 nines? Yawn. Let me know when they get to 15. j/k
That's some serious precision. I wonder if this would have been possible to calculate on a Pentium?[0] After last week, cloud service providers would be happy for 3 nines.
The article talks about the corners of an image being less sharp than the center. That’s not spherical aberration; that’s off-axis aberration. Spherical aberration causes the image to be less sharp at larger apertures.
I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if this result helps indirectly with off-axis aberration, though — a closed-form solution to the spherical aberration problem may make it easier to optimize for lens shapes that minimize other aberrations.
Physics, but not optics. Also, I read and understood the paper. The Wikipedia link seems to agree with me too. Look at the diagram there, and compare it to the diagram for coma [0].
Spherical aberration causes the single point in the center of the object to focus to a different place depending on where the ray hits the lens. This means that the image of that single point is not fully sharp. If you restrict what parts of the lens can be hit by rays from that point (by closing the iris, for example), you reduce the area in the focal plane that the rays hit.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadMadre is used more often in phrases, such as "Madre de dios!", Or "La madre putria," or "Pinche tu madre", or it's used as a formal to refer to one's mother. It's similar in English, such as "On my mother's side", "Mother fucker", "Mother of God!", etc.
In Mexico, "tu madre" can be a general insult, probably shortened from "pinche tu madre", though in English we have a similar vulgar retort of "your mother". As a weird turn on the phrase, "de puta madre" is slang for a good thing.
I'm not aware of an association with brothels in Mexico, but certainly in some Latin American country it could have.
"The author’s have a paper from March 2019 (in arXiv) that uses the result to build some novel telescope geometries."
There are some serious problems when building large telescope lenses; if they get too heavy, they start to deform under their own weight, and non-spherical shapes are hard and expensive to produce.
It would be awesome if this analytical solution inspired improvement in real applications, but I'm cautions about that.
There's a few notable exceptions, like the Lick Observatory, but in terms of impacting the state or progress of astronomy, the research from this article is unlikely to have an impact outside of small scale labs and amateur astronomy.
That's not to say the benefits there won't be appreciable for those who rely on optical telescopes, but you won't see this research make a difference for ground based arrays like NRAO, VLA, or in space telescopes.
Or maybe they'll find a way to apply it to make better lenses that need less software-based corrections. They struggle a lot not just with clarity at the edges but god rays and glare too.
I didn't check out the paper in detail, sounds like the shape of the correction surface depends on the distance to what you're imaging? Does it do so in a non-trivial way? If so, this sounds a bit more like an academic victory, no?
If it's just a mild deformation and offset, then yeah I guess technology similar to adaptive mirrors could work well.
/joke
The author’s have a paper from March 2019 (in arXiv) that uses the result to build some novel telescope geometries.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11129 "Single lens telescope"
Any reasonable chance of of implications for projective geometry?
I have a strong suspicion that the numerical solution is as precise as needed and the limiting factor is the manufacturing, but I would be interested to hear how this results in something new.
The real boon of this discovery is in designing lenses. For example, the authors have already used it to design a single-lens telescope for the first time [1]. I don't know much about the forefront of optics, but at least in my field having analytical models that you quickly iterate on and use to prime intuition are extremely useful.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11129
> Moreover, the solution involved aspherical elements, which are harder to manufacture in a precise way and are thus more costly.
> Their findings were published in the article General Formula for Bi-Aspheric Singlet Lens Design Free of Spherical Aberration, in the journal Applied Optics.
I’m no expert in optics, but that does not sound like the kind of advancement that cheapens lenses, even if the math work is mathematically relevant
- Current solution is expensive because it uses aspherical elements.
- New solution promises cost reduction.
- New solution uses aspherical elements as well.
Either there's some hidden detail that the article fails to mention, or it's claims are overstated. If you actually know about optics, I'd be glad to know which is the true or if I'm missing anything here, otherwise I would appreciate to keep your snarkiness to yourself.
These people solved optical abberation. Even if their work leads to lenses that are twice as expensive as they are today, people whose research, or jobs, rely on perfect optics will be more than happy to pay what it costs to work with those.
Anyone else can wait until one or more companies figures out how to make the manufacturing process cost effective at scale.
But yes, only for applications that care about abberation.
How is it not? The article actually makes that claim:
Of course it depends on the field. It's a requirement here in the UK to publish a paper to get your PhD (at least I've been led to believe that), and many particle physics students really struggle to manage to fulfill this. On the other hand gravitational wave detectors have a huge amount of unexplored science as there are so many things that we still do not fully understand about the detectors themselves.
Categorically false. I did my physics PhD in the UK and while I did publish a paper, it was not a requirement and I have plenty of friends who did not publish a paper and still got their physics PhD.
That's of course nevermind the effort involved in grokking the book. Especially, if particles are more subdivided than we think/know they are.
Think of it as knowing the rules of the game vs developing strategies for it.
We can build things that deal with unimaginable precision, create new elements, compute with quantum effects, but we don't know why flat things stick together?
This article is alright.
I hope you mean alright alright, and not just _alright_ because I loved that line!
> He then ran to his computer and started programming the idea. When he executed the solution and saw that it worked, he says he jumped all over the place. It is unclear whether he finished eating the Nutella bread.
This is my favorite quote from the article. Soon to be the most famous slice of Nutella bread?
Poof! And the solution materialized. Of course, all the groundwork had been laid. All the neurons primed. Just incredible.
And that formula. Damn.
Why would I think that?
Work hard on it for a while, then leave it for one-two days. More often then not this give a way better end result.
amazing what people think of
...snapped into focus
After placing an ice-cube in my delicious glass of refreshing coca-cola brand carbonated beverage, I yelled Eureka! and jumped out of the bath.
Is that really how it happened? Is it not inconsistent with the pursuit of truth?
Brands exploit this mechanic in language so that any time a, thereto unknown, good has to be addressed, that identification become advertising. It shifts from being a unique identification of an object/item/thing to a conjuring of the ethos/identity that contextualizes that good as being different from all the others (un)like it.
I'm sure the dude was just having some hazelnut spread and that's how they recalls it but us, like them, are getting hacked. Now if you'll excuse me, the rey--, I mean tinfoil, is starting to get itchy, I need to switch it out.
Huh? ‘degenerate set’ being what, the brand placement? I likes me some Semiotics, though not sure what this passage refers to.
In the context of a photography site, brand mentions must be a hazard. The author has no problem name dropping an Ancient Greek, Newton, Leibniz, Huygens. Why not Nutella? Rather than increasing the cognitive gap between the auditor (us) and the subject (2000 year old problem), Nutella seems to take the shining brilliance of those luminaries down a notch and in line with the form of writing—a neutral density filter? Haha. Or maybe it’s just a laugh and some color.
I'm working with this informal idea that there is always a relationship between the audience and the speaker. That relationship define a shared knowledge space.
If I am speaking to a group of my friends and need to refer to my brother the set of identifiers that uniquely conveys his identify to my friends might be {brother, Joe, Joe Blow, brother-man, etc}. Any of those identifiers coming from to me specify exactly one person, my brother. The degeneracy is that they equally identify him to the audience.
If you were not that close to me, and I say "brother", you might wonder if I have more than one brother. If you did not know me at all I might say Dr. Joe Blow to identify him and why he might be relavent in some area of expertise. As the relationship between speaker and and audience grows more distant the set size decreases. Inversely, the context-free uniqueness of the identification provided by the remaining identifiers has to be greater, with proper names maintaining greater uniqueness (sorry to the John Smiths of the world!) than nicknames and so forth.
To return to my point, the scientist in question called it Nutella because he does not have a deep relationship with his audience and that is the most unique way of identifying it. I don't believe he was doing anything atypical or nefarious. If he knew the audience well, he could have just said "breakfast", and they would know exactly what he meant because he has the same thing for breakfast most mornings.
The problem is that brands, unlike most proper names(obviously famous people are an exception), have a greater ethos associated with them. If my brother was named Joe Blow or Jim Deal, my unique referencing of him doesn't do much to color the statement around it. This is contrast to how much extra you get when you call a car a Ferrari vs a grand tourer. My point is that advertisers recognize this linguistic norm and exploit it, this is what brand identity is. As such, just the natural mention of a good becomes advertising.
From your original comment: “...contextualizes that good as being different from all the others (un)like it.”
This is textbook Semiotics. Meaning is not derived from the designation (‘apple’ is the red fruit with the thin skin and firm ...eh flesh. Rather, Apple is not a banana; not a kiwi; not a tomato; not beef; ad infinitum.
All that said I just order an intro book on Semiotics. Interest definitely peeked.
No one says "hazelnut spread", they say Nutella.
No one says "resealable sandwich bags", they say ziploc bags.
TIL what ziploc bags are. Just called "sandwich bags" here. Cling film isn't "sarran wrap" here either. :)
Even then, it may not be. There are plenty of places where Coke has become the generic name for pop, and doesn't necessarily refer to the brand.
Because a spoonful of palm oil and sugar with hazelnut flavoring is tasty?
[0]Just went into the kitchen to check
Everyone says resealable bags. I've never even heard the word ziploc. In New Zealand.
Perhaps no one in New Zealand, but New Zealand has the population of a small US state.
For one thing, Nutella is chocolate flavored. No one would ever even consider calling it "hazelnut spread".
https://www.amazon.com/Ferrero-Nutella-Hazelnut-Spread-26-5/...
(Compare the consistency of nutella to the consistency of peanut butter.)
Why would your definition be more valid than the manufacturers?
In other words, Brands by definition must be distinct from regular language.
Not really, no. There's no scientific funding riding on your reading this article in a photography magazine.
Specificity is almost always recommended in any creative writing from song lyrics to infotainment like this. It enhances humor and mental imagery, which enhance general enjoyment. That's all that's happening here. Hanlon's razor is your friend.
For anyone unfamiliar: supposedly, while bathing; he suddenly realized the principals of buoyancy. He then jumped out of the bath and ran down the street -- without clothes -- yelling "Eureka!" (I have found it). Not sure if this is true or just a legend, but I doubt we'll ever find out what happened to that Nutella bread either...
The King had order a gold crown, and after receiving it suspected that the goldsmith may have replaced some of the gold with cheaper silver. The King asked Archimedes to figure out if the crown was pure gold.
Archimedes could do that by figuring out its density, but to do that he needed to get the weight of the crown and the volume of the crown. Weight was easy, but he had no idea how to get the volume, other than melting it down and reshaping it into a shape whose volume he could calculate. Naturally, the King wanted Archimedes to answer the question without destroying the crown.
His realization that the volume of water displaced by an object that is more dense than water is equal to the volume of the object gave him a way to get the volume of the crown without harming it.
Shouldn't be too hard to figure out appropriate contact details. :)
Maybe it should have convinced him to procrastinate instead. Now, I know where all my inefficiency is coming from.
In math terms, f:X->X where X is compact and convex, and f is continuous, has a fixed point (exists x_0 in X, f(x_0)=x_0)
Since no one has clearly pointed it out, "¡Madres!" is a multipurpose Mexican expression that rarely has to do with actual motherhood. "Holy crap!" is a good analogy in this case.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=madre https://www.spanishdict.com/translate/madre
The solution is to use combination of a few lens of different glasses, to compensate the differences. It's not easy to design these kind of system, because they must compensante also for other types of aberrations.
More details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration
https://kenrockwell.com/tech/lenstech.htm
That's some serious precision. I wonder if this would have been possible to calculate on a Pentium?[0] After last week, cloud service providers would be happy for 3 nines.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
definitely generated by mathematica
I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if this result helps indirectly with off-axis aberration, though — a closed-form solution to the spherical aberration problem may make it easier to optimize for lens shapes that minimize other aberrations.
Spherical aberration causes the single point in the center of the object to focus to a different place depending on where the ray hits the lens. This means that the image of that single point is not fully sharp. If you restrict what parts of the lens can be hit by rays from that point (by closing the iris, for example), you reduce the area in the focal plane that the rays hit.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma_(optics)