Oh, what a shame that Nature Communications wasted all their time with their silly peer-review process when they have just asked Professor BitZstream from the University of... where was it again?
Are you sure you're not just mad because you always felt so clever when you told people at parties that zebras had stripes to confuse lions?
Have these scientists demonstrated something about flies vision that the stripes interfere with?
That much has already been shown to be the case - or at least, that flies have an aversion to landing on striped surfaces.
I had heard the theory that zebra striping was a kind of dazzle camouflage [wikipedia.org] which confused larger predators when trying to pick out one animal to pursue.
I don't think the article's particularly clear about this, but these guys aren't necessarily claiming to be the first with the idea. They've just done the work to back it up.
as stripless equine species also had predators to deal with but not the flies the flies are the more plausible answer. the effects against predators are therefor likely to be a secondary benefit, and could have caused zebra's to have evolved into forming larger groups then most other animals their size to take advantage of that.
--
I cant wait for the next "science" article here on slashdot.
And I can't wait for the next hastily ill-informed, condescendingly dismissive post in reply to that article.
Seriously, why can't we have cables that fit into each other as well as be symmetrical.
The one you've linked to isn't symmetrical. My brain's aching a bit just trying to work out if it's even possible with multiple pins and the requirement for good electrical contact. Plus you don't want to increase the complexity of the controllers if you can help.
If it is possible it might have to be circular, which would be wasteful of space. It might also require an increase in controller complexity. I don't know, it's late.
I should have clarified - I live on a small island with only one dual carriageway. In that case, I would get out of the way. Everywhere else on the island, it's not an option.
If anyone gets to within 1m of me at any kind of speed I'll slow down, to a crawl if necessary, until they get the hint*. Partly for both our safety, but also because it's fun to be a jerk to jerks.
Like several previous posters, your second statement doesn't logically follow from the first.
It's illegal to break the law in question; it's not illegal not to know that it's against in the law in the first place. It's just that you can't use it as a defence.
How do you know which of the painters that are long dead were trying to capture an actual Zebra with the actual amount of stripes in the exact pattern and colors they saw?
Statistically, it doesn't matter. When people run polls, how do they know how many people are lying to them? That's why they use large samples, so the signal can rise above the noise.
I'll find Zebras with unicorn horns and monkeys riding them.
You'd be extremely unlikely to do so, and even if you did, as long as you sample enough zebra paintings, its noise would be swamped by the signal. Most zebra paintings would show a realistic, if not 100% accurate, size and number of stripes, especially if the artist could look out of his window and see a zebra.
The great majority of artists strive for emotion, not realism
The other inputs still don't matter in a large enough sample. Grass (on average) will be green. Clear daytime skies (on average) will be blue. Leaves on trees in autumn (on average) will be golden brown. Zebras (on average) will have black and white stripes and be horse-shaped.
These people did not all have photographs to go by.
They had real sunsets to go by (a photograph, particularly a digital one, wouldn't capture the full range of colour visible to the human eye, so in that sense a sunet is better). Even if they didn't paint them "live" - though it's not unreasonable to suspect that most did, at least in part - they would still have been influenced by true sunset colours around that time.
This changes color and hue drastically, especially when you are mixing your own paints.
My understanding of the paper is that they looked not only at red/green ratios per painting, but also red/green ratio changes within the painting. That will have removed some of the kind of uncertainty you're talking about.
On the one hand there are these scientists, presumably well educated in their field, who have spent days and weeks poring over data and making calculations, and have come up with what they freely admit is a tentative proposal. On the other hand there are the people who declare it to be strictly impossible after reading an article about the study. Why should I side with the latter over the former?
but I stay within browns, blacks, whites, and grey colors.
Exactly. Your primary influence is the actual colour of horses, and so it will be for the majority of artists.
Let's simplify things and discuss zebras. If zebras in the 18th century were 25% white and 75% black, but those in the 19th century were 50% white and 50% black, you would expect paintings to reflect this quite well, wouldn't you? What if they were once 40% white and 60% black, but now 50-50? That information would also seem likely to be recoverable, especially given a variety of paintings by a variety of artists.
So where do you draw the line were suddenly it becomes impossible to determine any useful information on historical zebra colour from paintings? You can't. It's arbitrary. There are a huge number of factors in play, I don't dispute that. The noise can swamp the signal such that it would be impossible to read it given your limitations on measuring the noise. But you can't firmly reach that conclusion in any particular case on a hunch.
If I wanted viewers to feel more tranquil, I'll probably use lighter colors. If I want them to feel more sullen I would use darker colors.
If you were a sullen painter, all of your paintings would be influenced in that direction. If your mood was variable, your paintings would vary in both directions from reality. Either way, your later paintings of real zebras would still, on average, be more likely to show zebras with more evenly balanced stripes (and the same goes for horses of, for simplicity's sake, a single but varying-over-the-centuries colour).
Using my horse example above I'll agree with you to some extent. To claim you can measure the evolution of horse hair color based on my, and various other artists renditions of horses is not possible.
It's perfectly possible, given enough data, and I'd go so far as to say that my hunch is that it's probably possible in the real world in this specific case of horse colour. Everything else is just a matter of arguing over degrees and amounts of noise.
Colors chosen have something to do with reality, but are not like photos that you can measure reality with.
Yes, you can. You just can't measure it as accurately. It's the difference between monitoring temperatures using a thermometer and going out into the street every day and asking fifty people to rate the heat on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "nippy" and 10 is "toasty". The latter will still give you information on temperature changes, it's just nowhere near as accurate.
Take an art class for pity sake, or even a basic psychology course can tell you how colors impact our emotions.
None of those things undermine the basic concept that artists' choice of colours is primarily influenced by the actual colour of an object. If something is blue, an artist is far more likely to paint it as blue than red. That's all you need to recover useful information.
If you asked 10 artists to paint a bowl of fruit (possibly using a pre-drawn outline if you were actually to undertake this experiment) why would you expect the average of their paintings to be anything but a more accurate reflection of reality than any one individual painting?
For example, I find alchemy fascinating but don't believe fish oil and lead makes gold. If someone told me that they could do so and that the Government should give them lots of our tax dollars to study the process I'd say "NO" to them too.
What these authors are proposing (tentatively) is nothing like alchemy. They're not claiming to have invented a process; they're claiming to have found a signal in amongst the noise - a single that must have had some influence, no matter how small, on how these artists painted their paintings. Have a hunch that there's too much noise for them to have found the real signal, by all means. But it's a big step from "extremely unlikely" to "physically impossible," and the latter is a more extraordinary claim than it being possible.
What you seem to miss completely is that an artist does not choose colors by the colors they see
If that was literally true, every painting would be random colours, wouldn't it?
Colors are chosen more for providing an emotion, or to have continuity in the painting, or to emphasize a color in the focus area, or to help move a persons eye to a different region of the painting, or countless other things.
I disagree. Colours in art are chosen primarily for what things actually look like, otherwise we'd have paintings of Elizabeth I with blue hair and red skin. But for some reason everyone painted her as pasty and redheaded, because she was. In almost all cases, those things you've mentioned are secondary factors. I don't think you'd find many artists who'd paint a clear daytime sky as hot pink just because they'd have an argument with their significant other.
And those other things will be far more randomised than the "real colour" factor. That could, in theory, lead to an averaging, noise-reducing effect as you take more and more examples into account. If it's safe to assume that nearly all artists start with "real colour" as their starting point - and what else could they start with when painting from life? - then, unless artists have colluded over the centuries, all those other factors would be more-or-less random noise which could be averaged out.
If a sky is redder, an artist is far more likely, on average, to paint redder than he otherwise would at that moment - would you dispute that? Is that enough to overcome the noise of all the other influences? I don't know, though I suspect it is. Unless you've researched it, I'm going to assume that you don't know either. The authors, at least, think they've come to a tentative conclusion via scientific methods. Have they succeeded? Eh, the jury is still out as far as I'm concerned. But I won't dismiss the idea out of hand on a hunch.
They intentionally limited the paintings and artists reviewed to back their poor logical correlation (which never equals causation).
How do you know they did that? I'm not saying you're wrong, but is that your hunch (in which case, why state it as a fact?) or do you actually know it to be so?
You are not generalizing that we can know how bad everyone's cataracts are by looking at all paintings of waterlilies made over the last X amount of time. I think you would agree that me making a claim that I could, would be extremely foolish.
Actually I do find it plausible that you could find evidence of a correlation between progression of cataracts and the colouring of paintings in a number of artists' works. Other artists who didn't suffer cataracts might reduce the correlation, but they wouldn't undo it.
I'll gladly admit that it may be that these guys got a little too excited about their "tenuous proposal" while they were working on it. But, to be honest, one of the reasons I'm defending the possibility so strongly is exactly because of those people who are always itching to dismiss just about anything remotely interesting simply because they can't believe it.
Port forwarding is similarly handled via a pointy-clicky interface.
Pointy-clicky-typey last time I checked. And it requires knowing your IP address - most tech illiterates probably couldn't even tell you their machine's name, let alone it's IP address (which would be usually set by DHCP and therefore liable - thought not likely - to change).
It's definitely something that you can explain to a technically illiterate person who to do (although explaining what they're doing and why is a bit more tricky).
And implementing the web-based TLS-using file server? I'd certainly never recommend putting your own out there on the internet over using a third party's service and letting them deal with the security hassles (assuming they can do so without a week's downtime, of course).
Good lord, you don't submitters actually write their own summaries, do you?
No, it's your basic Slashdot cut-and-paste job. At least one other person has copy-pasted the "thousands" version in a post so it looks like the article writer thought they were writing for rednecks, but have since been corrected.
I'm bit suprised at bad reputation HFT has at Slashdot.
[...]
This is war.
Asked and answered, perhaps?
I, for one, feel that the human race has far better things it could be doing with its time instead of obsessing over increasing some numerical values to the detriment of other numerical values.
But then, that's a bit like my (admittedly ill-informed) thoughts on money, sometimes. We invented it, and yet somehow we no longer seem to be in control of it, and it's got us dancing to its tune. Never mind Skynet; what happens when the money markets decide they no longer need us?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, what a shame that Nature Communications wasted all their time with their silly peer-review process when they have just asked Professor BitZstream from the University of... where was it again?
Are you sure you're not just mad because you always felt so clever when you told people at parties that zebras had stripes to confuse lions?
Have these scientists demonstrated something about flies vision that the stripes interfere with?
That much has already been shown to be the case - or at least, that flies have an aversion to landing on striped surfaces.
I had heard the theory that zebra striping was a kind of dazzle camouflage [wikipedia.org] which confused larger predators when trying to pick out one animal to pursue.
It can, of course, be both.
I don't think the article's particularly clear about this, but these guys aren't necessarily claiming to be the first with the idea. They've just done the work to back it up.
It's the approach that's completely original, not the hypothesis.
I dunno. Try it and get back to me.
Nope, it seems that predators are not a threat to zebras, and it's all about flies.
There's no such implication in the article.
The question is not "Why are zebras camoflauged?" but "Why do zebras have stripes?"
As an AC below has suggsted:
as stripless equine species also had predators to deal with but not the flies the flies are the more plausible answer. the effects against predators are therefor likely to be a secondary benefit, and could have caused zebra's to have evolved into forming larger groups then most other animals their size to take advantage of that.
--
I cant wait for the next "science" article here on slashdot.
And I can't wait for the next hastily ill-informed, condescendingly dismissive post in reply to that article.
Thank you. Bloody summary doesn't make sense without that nugget.
DARPA Embraces Nature
Or seeks to bend it to its will?
Why all what hate? Where?
Seriously, why can't we have cables that fit into each other as well as be symmetrical.
The one you've linked to isn't symmetrical. My brain's aching a bit just trying to work out if it's even possible with multiple pins and the requirement for good electrical contact. Plus you don't want to increase the complexity of the controllers if you can help.
If it is possible it might have to be circular, which would be wasteful of space. It might also require an increase in controller complexity. I don't know, it's late.
How I Discovered World War IIs Greatest Spy
Might not work in all areas....
Probably illegal, too. E-ink, on the other hand...
I should have clarified - I live on a small island with only one dual carriageway. In that case, I would get out of the way. Everywhere else on the island, it's not an option.
Otherwise, sound advice.
If anyone gets to within 1m of me at any kind of speed I'll slow down, to a crawl if necessary, until they get the hint*. Partly for both our safety, but also because it's fun to be a jerk to jerks.
*this rarely happens.
Like several previous posters, your second statement doesn't logically follow from the first.
It's illegal to break the law in question; it's not illegal not to know that it's against in the law in the first place. It's just that you can't use it as a defence.
Amazingly, it is illegal not to know the law.
No it's not. The former statement does not logically follow from the latter.
How do you know which of the painters that are long dead were trying to capture an actual Zebra with the actual amount of stripes in the exact pattern and colors they saw?
Statistically, it doesn't matter. When people run polls, how do they know how many people are lying to them? That's why they use large samples, so the signal can rise above the noise.
I'll find Zebras with unicorn horns and monkeys riding them.
You'd be extremely unlikely to do so, and even if you did, as long as you sample enough zebra paintings, its noise would be swamped by the signal. Most zebra paintings would show a realistic, if not 100% accurate, size and number of stripes, especially if the artist could look out of his window and see a zebra.
The great majority of artists strive for emotion, not realism
The other inputs still don't matter in a large enough sample. Grass (on average) will be green. Clear daytime skies (on average) will be blue. Leaves on trees in autumn (on average) will be golden brown. Zebras (on average) will have black and white stripes and be horse-shaped.
These people did not all have photographs to go by.
They had real sunsets to go by (a photograph, particularly a digital one, wouldn't capture the full range of colour visible to the human eye, so in that sense a sunet is better). Even if they didn't paint them "live" - though it's not unreasonable to suspect that most did, at least in part - they would still have been influenced by true sunset colours around that time.
This changes color and hue drastically, especially when you are mixing your own paints.
My understanding of the paper is that they looked not only at red/green ratios per painting, but also red/green ratio changes within the painting. That will have removed some of the kind of uncertainty you're talking about.
On the one hand there are these scientists, presumably well educated in their field, who have spent days and weeks poring over data and making calculations, and have come up with what they freely admit is a tentative proposal. On the other hand there are the people who declare it to be strictly impossible after reading an article about the study. Why should I side with the latter over the former?
but I stay within browns, blacks, whites, and grey colors.
Exactly. Your primary influence is the actual colour of horses, and so it will be for the majority of artists.
Let's simplify things and discuss zebras. If zebras in the 18th century were 25% white and 75% black, but those in the 19th century were 50% white and 50% black, you would expect paintings to reflect this quite well, wouldn't you? What if they were once 40% white and 60% black, but now 50-50? That information would also seem likely to be recoverable, especially given a variety of paintings by a variety of artists.
So where do you draw the line were suddenly it becomes impossible to determine any useful information on historical zebra colour from paintings? You can't. It's arbitrary. There are a huge number of factors in play, I don't dispute that. The noise can swamp the signal such that it would be impossible to read it given your limitations on measuring the noise. But you can't firmly reach that conclusion in any particular case on a hunch.
If I wanted viewers to feel more tranquil, I'll probably use lighter colors. If I want them to feel more sullen I would use darker colors.
If you were a sullen painter, all of your paintings would be influenced in that direction. If your mood was variable, your paintings would vary in both directions from reality. Either way, your later paintings of real zebras would still, on average, be more likely to show zebras with more evenly balanced stripes (and the same goes for horses of, for simplicity's sake, a single but varying-over-the-centuries colour).
Using my horse example above I'll agree with you to some extent. To claim you can measure the evolution of horse hair color based on my, and various other artists renditions of horses is not possible.
It's perfectly possible, given enough data, and I'd go so far as to say that my hunch is that it's probably possible in the real world in this specific case of horse colour. Everything else is just a matter of arguing over degrees and amounts of noise.
Colors chosen have something to do with reality, but are not like photos that you can measure reality with.
Yes, you can. You just can't measure it as accurately. It's the difference between monitoring temperatures using a thermometer and going out into the street every day and asking fifty people to rate the heat on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "nippy" and 10 is "toasty". The latter will still give you information on temperature changes, it's just nowhere near as accurate.
Take an art class for pity sake, or even a basic psychology course can tell you how colors impact our emotions.
None of those things undermine the basic concept that artists' choice of colours is primarily influenced by the actual colour of an object. If something is blue, an artist is far more likely to paint it as blue than red. That's all you need to recover useful information.
If you asked 10 artists to paint a bowl of fruit (possibly using a pre-drawn outline if you were actually to undertake this experiment) why would you expect the average of their paintings to be anything but a more accurate reflection of reality than any one individual painting?
For example, I find alchemy fascinating but don't believe fish oil and lead makes gold. If someone told me that they could do so and that the Government should give them lots of our tax dollars to study the process I'd say "NO" to them too.
What these authors are proposing (tentatively) is nothing like alchemy. They're not claiming to have invented a process; they're claiming to have found a signal in amongst the noise - a single that must have had some influence, no matter how small, on how these artists painted their paintings. Have a hunch that there's too much noise for them to have found the real signal, by all means. But it's a big step from "extremely unlikely" to "physically impossible," and the latter is a more extraordinary claim than it being possible.
What you seem to miss completely is that an artist does not choose colors by the colors they see
If that was literally true, every painting would be random colours, wouldn't it?
Colors are chosen more for providing an emotion, or to have continuity in the painting, or to emphasize a color in the focus area, or to help move a persons eye to a different region of the painting, or countless other things.
I disagree. Colours in art are chosen primarily for what things actually look like, otherwise we'd have paintings of Elizabeth I with blue hair and red skin. But for some reason everyone painted her as pasty and redheaded, because she was. In almost all cases, those things you've mentioned are secondary factors. I don't think you'd find many artists who'd paint a clear daytime sky as hot pink just because they'd have an argument with their significant other.
And those other things will be far more randomised than the "real colour" factor. That could, in theory, lead to an averaging, noise-reducing effect as you take more and more examples into account. If it's safe to assume that nearly all artists start with "real colour" as their starting point - and what else could they start with when painting from life? - then, unless artists have colluded over the centuries, all those other factors would be more-or-less random noise which could be averaged out.
If a sky is redder, an artist is far more likely, on average, to paint redder than he otherwise would at that moment - would you dispute that? Is that enough to overcome the noise of all the other influences? I don't know, though I suspect it is. Unless you've researched it, I'm going to assume that you don't know either. The authors, at least, think they've come to a tentative conclusion via scientific methods. Have they succeeded? Eh, the jury is still out as far as I'm concerned. But I won't dismiss the idea out of hand on a hunch.
They intentionally limited the paintings and artists reviewed to back their poor logical correlation (which never equals causation).
How do you know they did that? I'm not saying you're wrong, but is that your hunch (in which case, why state it as a fact?) or do you actually know it to be so?
You are not generalizing that we can know how bad everyone's cataracts are by looking at all paintings of waterlilies made over the last X amount of time. I think you would agree that me making a claim that I could, would be extremely foolish.
Actually I do find it plausible that you could find evidence of a correlation between progression of cataracts and the colouring of paintings in a number of artists' works. Other artists who didn't suffer cataracts might reduce the correlation, but they wouldn't undo it.
I'll gladly admit that it may be that these guys got a little too excited about their "tenuous proposal" while they were working on it. But, to be honest, one of the reasons I'm defending the possibility so strongly is exactly because of those people who are always itching to dismiss just about anything remotely interesting simply because they can't believe it.
What society really needs to do is admit that some people are simply unfit to be in control of a vehicle and deny them a license.
Eventually it will come to the conclusion that all people are unfit to be in control of vehicles, and let the vehicles drive themselves.
Radio DJs do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Port forwarding is similarly handled via a pointy-clicky interface.
Pointy-clicky-typey last time I checked. And it requires knowing your IP address - most tech illiterates probably couldn't even tell you their machine's name, let alone
it's IP address (which would be usually set by DHCP and therefore liable - thought not likely - to change).
It's definitely something that you can explain to a technically illiterate person who to do (although explaining what they're doing and why is a bit more tricky).
And implementing the web-based TLS-using file server? I'd certainly never recommend putting your own out there on the internet over using a third party's service and letting them deal with the security hassles (assuming they can do so without a week's downtime, of course).
Good lord, you don't submitters actually write their own summaries, do you?
No, it's your basic Slashdot cut-and-paste job. At least one other person has copy-pasted the "thousands" version in a post so it looks like the article writer thought they were writing for rednecks, but have since been corrected.
It now says:
Researchers from Canada and Singapore have discovered that the ancient viruses which entered our ancestors' genomes millions of years ago...
I'm bit suprised at bad reputation HFT has at Slashdot.
[...]
This is war.
Asked and answered, perhaps?
I, for one, feel that the human race has far better things it could be doing with its time instead of obsessing over increasing some numerical values to the detriment of other numerical values.
But then, that's a bit like my (admittedly ill-informed) thoughts on money, sometimes. We invented it, and yet somehow we no longer seem to be in control of it, and it's got us dancing to its tune. Never mind Skynet; what happens when the money markets decide they no longer need us?