SSDD
Gold Member
- Nov 6, 2012
- 16,672
- 1,966
- 280
Here is a link to an interesting bit of software. It is called AverageExplorer. It was developed by some folks at the University of California, Berkley. The user inputs a search topic and the software can go out and get hundreds, perhaps thousands even tens of thousands of images that match the search topic and then creates an average. Here are a few of the images in the paper which can be found HERE
This one is an average of photos of kids with Santa
This one is an average of Tabby Cats
There are quite a few more on the paper which is not firewalled. Interesting stuff...interesting to me at least. But what does this have to to with climate you might ask. I was just getting to that.
Climate science is essentially numbers....and everything that springs from climate science is numbers...averages to be precise. When we talk about averages in terms of numbers, the number, even though it is an average looks pretty concrete. You can look at the number and in your mind, being a number, it interprets to something pretty definite...even if it isn't.
This software takes images and averages them and the result is very similar to the averages of numbers...in fact, they are the averages of numbers since the photos are converted to numbers before they can be averaged.
When you look at those average photographs, you can see, in reality what an average looks like in terms that we, being visual creatures can really see. An average number looks like a number and you see, and interpret it as a number...a number that has some meaning in your brain. An averaged photograph, which is virtually the same thing as an averaged number leaves you with the impression that you are looking at something familiar, but it is wide open to interpretation as to exactly what it is.
This software gives us a dead on visual that we can translate to what we are really seeing when we look at the averages upon which climate science is based.
An average doesn't really bear much resemblance to anything in the real world, does it? A valuable consideration when looking at this is to note that these average images are made with between 1600 and 17000 or so images....it is easy to see how far they are from anything you might see in the real world....With climate science, the averages go into millions, perhaps billions of individual snapshots....imagine how much further the average of a billion snapshots would be from reality than the average of sixteen thousand.
This one is an average of photos of kids with Santa
This one is an average of Tabby Cats
There are quite a few more on the paper which is not firewalled. Interesting stuff...interesting to me at least. But what does this have to to with climate you might ask. I was just getting to that.
Climate science is essentially numbers....and everything that springs from climate science is numbers...averages to be precise. When we talk about averages in terms of numbers, the number, even though it is an average looks pretty concrete. You can look at the number and in your mind, being a number, it interprets to something pretty definite...even if it isn't.
This software takes images and averages them and the result is very similar to the averages of numbers...in fact, they are the averages of numbers since the photos are converted to numbers before they can be averaged.
When you look at those average photographs, you can see, in reality what an average looks like in terms that we, being visual creatures can really see. An average number looks like a number and you see, and interpret it as a number...a number that has some meaning in your brain. An averaged photograph, which is virtually the same thing as an averaged number leaves you with the impression that you are looking at something familiar, but it is wide open to interpretation as to exactly what it is.
This software gives us a dead on visual that we can translate to what we are really seeing when we look at the averages upon which climate science is based.
An average doesn't really bear much resemblance to anything in the real world, does it? A valuable consideration when looking at this is to note that these average images are made with between 1600 and 17000 or so images....it is easy to see how far they are from anything you might see in the real world....With climate science, the averages go into millions, perhaps billions of individual snapshots....imagine how much further the average of a billion snapshots would be from reality than the average of sixteen thousand.