Computer Basics

When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work-- that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge.

Both of these images are wrong. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.

What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They're not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.

I've never liked the term "computer science." The main reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia. At one end you have people who are really mathematicians, but call what they're doing computer science so they can get DARPA grants. In the middle you have people working on something like the natural history of computers-- studying the behavior of algorithms for routing data through networks, for example. And then at the other extreme you have the hackers, who are trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters. It's as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same department.

Sometimes what the hackers do is called "software engineering," but this term is just as misleading. Good software designers are no more engineers than architects are. The border between architecture and engineering is not sharply defined, but it's there. It falls between what and how: architects decide what to do, and engineers figure out how to do it.

What and how should not be kept too separate. You're asking for trouble if you try to decide what to do without understanding how to do it. But hacking can certainly be more than just deciding how to implement some spec. At its best, it's creating the spec-- though it turns out the best way to do that is to implement it.

Perhaps one day "computer science" will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component parts. That might be a good thing. Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking.

Bundling all these different types of work together in one department may be convenient administratively, but it's confusing intellectually. That's the other reason I don't like the name "computer science." Arguably the people in the middle are doing something like an experimental science. But the people at either end, the hackers and the mathematicians, are not actually doing science.

The mathematicians don't seem bothered by this. They happily set to work proving theorems like the other mathematicians over in the math department, and probably soon stop noticing that the building they work in says ``computer science'' on the outside. But for the hackers this label is a problem. If what they're doing is called science, it makes them feel they ought to be acting scientific. So instead of doing what they really want to do, which is to design beautiful software, hackers in universities and research labs feel they ought to be writing research papers.

In the best case, the papers are just a formality. Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software. But often this mismatch causes problems. It's easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers.

Unfortunately, beautiful things don't always make the best subjects for papers. Number one, research must be original-- and as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure that you're exploring virgin territory is to to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants. Number two, research must be substantial-- and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome in order to get things done. Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions. Most of AI is an example of this rule; if you assume that knowledge can be represented as a list of predicate logic expressions whose arguments represent abstract concepts, you'll have a lot of papers to write about how to make this work. As Ricky Ricardo used to say, "Lucy, you got a lot of explaining to do."

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

The first and the most common trouble that photographers have is the red eye phenomenon. This specific problem happens because of the wide open pupil of the subject mirroring light back to the camera lens. Even though most digital SLR's have flash settings to do away with the problem of red eye, it will still happen even if you are utilizing the latest professional type of SLR camera. Adobe Photoshop incorporates a red eye facility that will be able to identify red eye in a photograph and entirely eradicates its appearance, even those from your pets. 

This program will also allow you to make cleaner and lighter photos because in the end it is a software program intended for adjusting an image. If you captured a an image in a bad lighting circumstance, you will be able to better its appearance by raising or lessening contrast, brightness level, hue, and even color intensity. Even if the photograph you are working with was taken in a dark environment, you'll be able to make it seem as if it was captured in the best possible lighting situation. 

It is also possible to get rid of physical objects in a specific photo, so for instance, if your vacation group pictures were destroyed by a complete unknown person in the background, you can have them removed. You can apply the clone facility to maintain the texture of the picture and in addition on the area where you got rid of the physical object, then for close up headshots, you can adjust blemishes on the face. It is quite probable, you will hear regular complaints about how individuals look in their close-up shots. Some will say that they appear so ages with the wrinkles on their face - that they look too pale - too overweight or lean in the photograph, and, you will even learn people complain just about their acne marks and pimples. You can adjust all these things according to the needs of the individuals moaning about their own image. 

With Adobe Photoshop, you can show the face to seem broader or leaner, remove wrinkles to make the person look more youthful, do away with undesirable acne marks and pimples, even ensure colorless faces look healthier! The program can even ensure the lips are heartier or redder, in addition to give you the opportunity to trim off the eyebrows. So, there are quite a lot of things you can do with Adobe Photoshop when it comes to image editing. So, as a photographer, you will definitely have to have this piece of software and then with the facilities supplied, you will be in a position to ensure your work look clean and very capable.