I'm a reasonable and stable man in his forties who has made two jack-o'-lanterns featuring Lee Harvey Oswald. Here's why.
An article in the November 1973 issue of Scientific American magazine entitled “The Recognition of Faces” detailed the work of Bell Labs scientist Leon Harmon who had altered the portrait of Abraham Lincoln that appears on the five dollar bill. The method he used was pixelation, a process familiar to anyone who has seen basic cable nudity. The question became how few pixels could be used before the obscured shape becomes usefully identifiable, a question familiar to an adolescent subset of the above mentioned group.
He found that the president was still recognizable portrayed in a 256 pixel grid. And for reasons lost on me here in 2015, this was very exciting.
The article exists behind the Scientific American paywall, which means I'm probably never going to read it. This hasn't stopped me, though, from judging the research. Like, yeah. Lincoln. That's a very specific-looking guy. You can spot Lincoln, particularly this image, at considerable distance from a moving train. How large is the array of pixels that will allow you to differentiate between John Tyler and William Henry Harrison?
Although Harmon was approaching this research from the perspective of human cognition, one might suppose that Bell Labs, if not Leon Harmon in particular, was interested in optimizing visual data for digital storage and transmission. There was a time, of course, when digital storage was scarce and expensive*. As late as the development of the Mosaic browser (1993 or so) there was a push-back against the inclusion of imagery in digital media, in part because of bandwidth. Slimming down the imagery was the only viable tactic in a world where the hardware was not yet in place.
It's amusing to imagine a world where status is determined by the minimum number of pixels to create a useful image of a person. Well, kind of. A world where people measure status based on Twitter followers would also seem like social satire if it were predicted decades ago. Forget I mentioned it.
Arguably, the best application of this research has been the Salvador Dali painting Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea, a haunting and evocative use of the principles at work in Harmon's research applied to the themes of mortality and martyrdom. As a tribute, Dali included Harmon's image in his painting, small and in the lower left. In response, Harmon announced in the May, 1981 issue of Omni magazine that he intended to sue.
That issue of Omni is where I first read of Harmon's research. Not in 1981, though. I'd come across the issue at a library used book sale and Omni was a huge thing for me when I was a kid. It's a lot of fun to re-read them thirty years hence.
The whole archive is currently available online.
Around the time I found that issue, I was watching some JFK assassination thing on television. When they showed the photo of Lee Harvey Oswald with the rifle, it occurred to me that a lot of things in this picture, the angle of the gun barrel, the gunman's posture, the white newspapers against the dark shirt would make this one of those viable lo-rez images. And it was October. In my house, there was some pumpkin talk, one thing led to another... boom. Assassin pumpkin.
I don't know how you would compare the effectiveness of pixels vs vectors in terms of conveying visual information. And I'm not going count the number of straight lines in this, my vegetable opus. But I think the economy of shapes is most effectively pushed to the limit in my Sequel Pumpkin, which I made almost exclusively due to the obvious truth that "Jack-Ruby-O'-Lantern" is much funnier than "Lee 'Carvey' Oswald".
Notice how little information is needed to convey Jack Ruby. We don't even need a face, just a hat band, the back of a paunchy neck and the context of fifty years of highly-contested fascination with the death of a president.
I don't see a viable future for research into pumpkins as a medium of data compression. And now I'm stuck with these things, which are too weird to put out on the porch but too time-intensive to throw away. AND, worst of all... I feel like there should be three.
You know what they say about pumpkins that reference national tragedy, one is too many... two is not enough...
*The 7 Mb that I am currently wasting by having, on my phone, duplicate copies of two songs by The Cars would have cost $6,160 in 1984, the year they were released.
The reason for those multiple copies will be addressed in excruciating detail in part five of this series.
Interesting stat on the cost in 1984 dollars for 7 Mb of digital storage. In 1999 at my first Spring Internet World in Los Angeles, there was a company with a GoCo whose whole thing was being able to greatly reduce the storage size of .jpgs and other similar formats by converting them to another format which they were touting as the digital equivalent of micro-microfiche.
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