Friday, November 19, 2004
As far as the eye can see
Here is a zoomable 2.5 gigapixel image from Delft. Pick something interesting near the horizon and zoom in.
One thing that surprises me is how quickly, even with a 2.5 gigapixel image, you reach the end of the zooms. (Well, 2.5 billion isn't that many, when you consider it is the resolution of a 50k by 50k matrix, so anything "shorter" than 1/50k of the initial view won't be discernable.) There sure is a lot of data hitting our eyes.
I'm reminded of a "scientific" paper I just read in the Annals of Improbable Research, on a cheap new alternative to electron microscopy: the ordinary office copier, set on iterative zoom. The authors claimed to "image", through 48 enlargements, a single deuterium atom (and, oddly, a discrete noncollapsed representation of the quantum fuzziness around it---but I never did understand quantum, so I'm sure the oddness is all in my perception).
Imagine what the creators of the Xerox Quantum Microscope could do with a 2.5 gigapixel image!
One thing that surprises me is how quickly, even with a 2.5 gigapixel image, you reach the end of the zooms. (Well, 2.5 billion isn't that many, when you consider it is the resolution of a 50k by 50k matrix, so anything "shorter" than 1/50k of the initial view won't be discernable.) There sure is a lot of data hitting our eyes.
I'm reminded of a "scientific" paper I just read in the Annals of Improbable Research, on a cheap new alternative to electron microscopy: the ordinary office copier, set on iterative zoom. The authors claimed to "image", through 48 enlargements, a single deuterium atom (and, oddly, a discrete noncollapsed representation of the quantum fuzziness around it---but I never did understand quantum, so I'm sure the oddness is all in my perception).
Imagine what the creators of the Xerox Quantum Microscope could do with a 2.5 gigapixel image!
