12:00pm • February 10, 2023 • Open Forum
Abstract:
Nearly all pictures that exist (or have ever existed) are digital--that is, made of pixels. Yet hardly anybody knows what a pixel is. A very common misunderstanding is that pixels are little squares, but they never have been. In fact, they are not visible. I will explore this mystery and many others that come into focus once the basics are clearly understood. From this comes a rewrite of the histories of the sampling theorem, movies, television, computers, digital displays, and, of course, computer graphics, and other specialty branches of what I call Digital Light. Moore's Law is shown to be the driving force of high technology--of more than supernova strength and beyond any person's understanding. In Part 1 I covered Fourier, Sampling, Computation, and Movies (the old kind). In Part 2, I will greatly expand on Moore's Law, NYIT, Lucasfilm, and Pixar, which I only hinted at in Part 1. Then I'll talk about the coming explosion.