sep 12

discuss assignment

• what do you already know about
  • light ... (no, what is it *really*)
    • what is a 'wave'?
    • where does it come from?
    • what is color?
  • vision ... details?
    • how do you see color? how many different colors?
    • how sharp ?
  • lenses and cameras ... see optics and vision page
• wiki : comments? questions?

this week

• numbers
• computer images
• light, vision, cameras
• play with GIMP

where do you look to find out?

• online
  • wikipedia
  • google
  • follow the links ...
• library
• how do you know if its right?
  • check the citations
  • connect with what you already know (reality check)

how much information

• size in kB (kilobyte), MB (Megabyte), GB, TB, PT, ...

• big numbers
  • powers of 10
  • notations like 1.3e10 means "1.3 times 10 to the 10th power"
  • 1,3000,000,000
  • one trillion three hundred million
  • often helpful to compare with other big numbers (e.g. US budget per capita)

• basic unit of information
  • 1 Byte (capital B) is
    • one ASCII character
    • 8 bits (lowercase b)
    • 00000000 to 11111111 base 2 (explain base 2)
    • 0-255 base 10
    • 0x00 to 0xFF in hex (explain hexidecimal)

• so:
  • how many bits to store words in the bible?
  • to store all words in our library?

• bandwidth
  • bits per second (bps)
  • streaming information from here to there
  • dialup? campus network?
  • human vision??? (Ah hah - that's where he's going with all this "how sensitive is the eye..." stuff.)

computer images

• pixels
• color depth
• how big is a "typical" image?

compression, raster, vector, file types

• open discussion - start a list
• lossy vs lossless
• where do you look?

gimp

• boot it up and start playing around...