On 13 January 2014 02:35, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> 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? > 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. 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). The real (underlying) circle is an abstraction stored as - I would guess - a centre and radius, plus no doubt colour, style and so on. Didn't Plato say something about the world being an imperfect rendering? :-) -- 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.
