Comments on: Just Beautiful

By: m

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:47:05 +0000

maybe this is what q meant, but it looks like (in family blog-speak) lady bits

you know, like orchids, butterflies, etc.

is this too evo-psych?

By: PaulG

PaulG — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 07:15:11 +0000

Are you saying that the images would be equally beautiful if the color mapping were random?

I took the picture and added a gradient map to it. It’s not quite the same as changing the color mapping (or maybe it is, I am not really sure how much information is lost in the conversion to grayscale), but you get the idea: http://img193.imageshack.us/i/gradientmap.png/

By: Wei Dai

Wei Dai — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 03:03:00 +0000

Err, my comment was supposed to link to a picture of a flame fractal. (I can't find the one that I originally posted.)

By: Tim Tyler

Tim Tyler — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 07:40:17 +0000

Living things are not normally expected to care much about wasting negentropy – unless they are in a confined space where they can’t get any more of it.

Normally there are more important things than how much is wasted – namely getting to the negentropy first, and rapid utilisation of it.

By: q

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:51:39 +0000

looks like enya

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:29:42 +0000

Yes of course they can play with the frequency to color map; but they don’t play with the angle to frequency map, which is where most of the info in the pict is found.

By: billswift

billswift — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:04:49 +0000

Hubble: Space Doesn't Really Look Like That! a little about how pictures like this are made.

By: Wei Dai

Wei Dai — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:39:09 +0000

Did anyone else look at that and think, “Wow, what a waste of negentropy?”

Here’s an alternative for those of us who are cheap:

Hmm, that doesn’t look quite as pretty somehow. Is it possible that God created this universe just because He needed a new background picture for his desktop?