Jeffrey Weil wrote:I doubt the reason they didn't show was due to your communication skills.
We-e-e-ll. At one time, I actually went through a lot of trouble to make sure that anyone who wanted to work here had all the materials that we could provide; we once coated 40 plates because someone said they needed a lot of plates, but the person in question never showed up. Now, I expect that people who want to do their artwork here won't show up, so I don't coat anything. But, if/when they don't show up, I can ask one of two questions:
1. So, what happened? I thought you wanted to do some artwork here, but you never showed.
2. I am so sorry that we missed you. I was so looking forward to working with you because it would have been so much fun (and educational!) to collaborate on an art project with you. Maybe there were family problems? Please let's work together as soon as it's possible to work this out. By the way, I hope that nothing too bad prevented you from coming here. It will be fun working with you and I can't wait!
Now, there is no way on earth I'm ever going to sound like 2. My personality is most definitely 1! So, communication does seem to matter. If someone makes a statement committing themselves to something, I expect them to honour it. If they don't, they're not worth bothering about!
Jeffrey Weil wrote:"No matter what subject your talking about, no matter how complex it is, if you can't describe it to a layman in a paragraph or two, then you don't really understand the subject yourself."
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Yes! Absolutely1 I pride myself that if someone genuinely wants to learn (rather than get "brownie points" by creating a sense of knowledge from mere vocabulary), I can explain everything from Fourier Transforms to the Higgs boson. But,
Jeffrey Weil wrote:I would think art speak is the same.
I have tried for years to get the artists to explain themselves, with absolutely no result! They honestly don't seem to understand themselves what they do! I mean:"What is art?", "Art is what we do", "Well, what do you do?", "We do art" This is explanation?! I think it finally hit home to me when all the tech folks at ISDH, to a man and woman, said that they didn't understand any of the "art" papers! I suspect that the artists probably didn't understand the tech papers either, but they don't seem to want to. If they hear <famous person> say something technical, they feel a sense of awe that they're hearing <famous person> say something they don't understand. After Nils' Abramson's paper on the relativity of holography, I went up to him and told him that almost all the derivations he gave were in Weyl's 1926 paper on Weyl Transformations. He asked, alarmed, "You mean this was done before!". I pointed him to Weyl's paper and he said he was going to look it up. But the artists lapped it up though, without understanding a word!
The problem is, there's no
discussion of holography; this forum is simply a "help resource". I mean, here we are at the "optics" section. We talked about the Pennington/Lin procedure for eliminating cross talk by projection of a mask onto a plate. Is this possible with a lens system? What kind of a lens system? Can you do/has anyone done a Fourier Transform hologram using three wavelengths? If you illuminate a real object with coloured light, the shadow is the inverse colour. If you illuminate an object for a hologram, is the holographic reconstruction of the shadow also in inverse colours? It would be interesting to see a colour hologram complete with the shadows it threw. Liquid lenses are making a splash (
http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v ... 006.2.html ). Can/has anyone used them for holography? There's a topic worthy of discussion!