Google is amazing. But there’s one serious concern (not problem, but concern in the sense of “something we need to consider”). Google Book Search will become a stunning addition to the armamentarium, but is full of first drafts of scanned books: full of errors and missing pages.
Google Maps is a wonderful resource too. But look where I ended up staying the night:
Look at the Renaissance where I’m staying (blue “X”) and the adjacent dark gray building to the west. Give you a headache?
I know what happened, of course: two aerial (satellite?) photographs taken from different points on different days were stitched together, and quite rightly so: we have a fine-scale map now covering vast tracts of Seattle.
But here’s the kicker: Will this ever get “fixed”, or will we undergo a cultural adaptation—a blindness, as it were—to the physical impossibility of this sort of image? Will we all go through Google Book Search and replace those missing and damaged digitized pages, or will we adapt to their lack by simply calling it good enough?
Is this how maps will look in the future? Escheresque?
Blindness indeed. I didn’t see anything wrong with the picture for at least a minute (pixilation and lateness aside). I was so fixated on the _destination_ marked with the blue speech bubble that nothing else seemed to matter.
The march toward “efficiency,” away from workmanship,may very well do just that. The Wal-Mart mentality might take over everything we do.
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I don’t see the skewed buildings as an ‘error’ necessarily. Long before photography told us there was only one vanishing point, old 3-D maps of medieval cities and roadways as well as Chinese landsape paintings depicted similar leaning buildings. You could call them multiple-point perpectives.
Matt, I agree. But that said, I bet somebody somewhere who values “realism” above all else is, say, scanning buildings in a city in 3-D to build an “accurate” virtual version of them in data.…
A few centuries ago, a similar cultural adaptation took place in the field of music. The twelve-note piano scale, now taken for granted in Western music, was essentially invented as a hack around technology limitations.
The original scales in almost all harmonic music use notes whose frequencies are small whole-number ratios of the root note. These notes simply sound “right”. For example, one major scale and its frequency ratios might be C (1), D (9÷8), E (5÷4), F (4÷3), G (3÷2), A (5÷3), B (15÷8), C (2). The problem is, once you tune your instrument to some scale, you’re stuck with it. You can’t play in any other key.
At some point, someone discovered that a twelve-note scale, with the notes equally-spaced (on a log scale) across the octave, can approximate those ratios rather well. The frequency multipliers are now 2^(x/12), and the major scale (skipping the “black keys”) is now:
C: 1
D: 1.122 instead of 1.125 (or 9/8)
E: 1.260 instead of 1.250 (or 5/4)
F: 1.335 instead of 1.333 (or 4/3)
G: 1.498 instead of 1.500 (or 3/2)
A: 1.682 instead of 1.667 (or 5/3)
B: 1.887 instead of 1.875 (or 15/8)
C: 2
The advantage to this scheme is that, since all notes are equally-spaced, you can choose any note as a root note. Modulating to a new key now just entails shifting your hands, not retuning the entire instrument. The disadvantage, of course, is that almost all of the notes are wrong! Some (eg, A and B) are especially wrong.
At the time, this sparked outrage. These were instruments that were essentially out-of-tune by design, and they sounded terrible to people weaned on natural scales. But the technical advantages trumped aesthetics, and “equal-temperment” flourished in the hands of musicians eager to experiment with modulation.
Today, we essentially have a cultural blindness to this mistuning. We hear an equal-tempered C, E, and G as a major chord, even though the E is a full cent sharp. In fact, we’ve become so accustomed to our approximation, real (ratioed) notes sound wrong to us at first.
So, that’s the auditory system for you. As for our visual system, it’s probably even more forgiving of errors. Books on drawing perspective routinely present “tricks” that make the illustrator’s job easier at the expense of correctness. And cartooning and caricature essentially rely on the brain’s need to make sense of what it’s shown, even if it’s not physically accurate.
It is completely reasonable to expect the emergence of a cultural blindness to some artifact of technology.
The notion of “one-point” perspective has always—since I was very young—troubled me. I would always ask in elementary school, “With which eye?!” since it was patently obvious to anybody who could close either eye that stuff moves when you switch. Heck, by that standard, any flat image is a hack of sorts.
I’m feeling pragmatically Sperberian this morning. The only thing these representations need to do is match our shared mental models of what we expect is being communicated. Detail like conflicts of dimension, the odd little tuning incident, or Escherian local paradox are not relevant to the main message being conveyed.