Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Here at Cosmic Variance, we’re all about bringing science to nonscientists, and tend to think that it is a great thing if scientists are willing to speak to anyone who is interested, and to cultivate the patience needed to convey one’s point to a fascinated, but often technically untrained listener.

But sometimes your spidey sense tells you that there’s something a little fishy about some requests for technical advice. As Ben Goldacre points out in The Guardian, if a PR company asks

We are conducting a survey into the celebrity top 10 sexiest walks for my client Veet (hair removal cream) and we would like to back up our survey with an equation from an expert to work out which celebrity has the sexiest walk, with theory behind it. We would like help from a doctor of psychology or someone similar who can come up with equations to back up our findings, as we feel that having an expert comment and an equation will give the story more weight.

you might begin to suspect that your application of the objective scientific method isn’t really what is being requested. Particularly when the survey hasn’t been conducted yet! Goldacre knows their tactics, because this is exactly how they approached him.

As it turns out, they got a Cambridge mathematician to analyze the data, but didn’t clear the press release claiming

Jessica Alba voted sexiest walk: with the figures to prove it.

with him.

Although you only get a snippet of it in the Guardian article, the mathematician in question - Richard Weber - felt that he was severely misrepresented. Fortunately, Goldacre has a blog to accompany his column, and the discussion there is much more comprehensive, and contains the full text of Weber’s comments about his involvement and its misuse.

The whole story reminds me of the emails I frequently receive, that one might paraphrase as

I am conducting an investigation into some of the most difficult and complicated questions and phenomena in the universe and would like to back up my ideas with an equation or some data from an expert to work out which of my ideas is most valid, with theory behind it. I would like help from a doctor of philosophy or someone similar who can come up with equations to back up my vague ideas, as I feel that having an expert comment and an equation will give the idea more weight.

As scientists, we all know how to deal with this kind of approach, and we should probably recognize the same thing when it comes from a PR company, for example. So we can probably take some blame for even talking to someone who approaches us this way. But you’ve got to wonder about a newspaper (in this case The Telegraph) that reports on this “scientific” result without even checking with the scientist involved. We desperately need more science journalism, but we only want it if it’s good.

Cambridge might want to think about not bragging about this in their news cuttings archive.

I thought Atrios was kidding, but no. Vosges Haut Chocolat has indeed come out with a bacon-flavored chocolate bar. I’m not sure if it qualifies as long-awaited, but it should have been.

From the description:

Bacon Exotic Candy Bar - New

Applewood smoked bacon + Alder smoked salt + deep milk chocolate

Deep milk chocolate coats your mouth and leads to the crunch of smoked bacon pieces. Surprise your mouth with the smoked salt and sweet milk chocolate combination.

Crisp, buttery, compulsively irresistible bacon and milk chocolate combination has long been a favorite of mine. I started playing with this combination at the tender age of six while eating chocolate chip pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Beside my chocolate-laden cakes laid three strips of fried bacon, just barely touching a sweet pool of maple syrup. Just a bite of the bacon was too salty and yearned for the sweet kiss of chocolate syrup. In retrospect, perhaps this was a turning point, for on that plate something magical happened: the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it–chocolate.
–Katrina

Vosges is my favorite chocolatier (if you know what I mean). Not only do they blend excellent chocolate with a wide variety of exotic spices to create uniformly interesting and delicious combinations, but I stumbled upon them when they were just a tiny one-shop operation in Chicago, before their blossoming into international success. And a friend of mine once claimed that every type of food is enhanced by the addition of bacon, including ice cream. (Although I did manage to give her pause with my suggestion of bacon-flavored water.) So I’m thinking I’m going to have to give the new experiment a try. You only live once.

Speaking about how someone with a physics background might approach economics, you might prefer intimidatingly-informed commentary over my unfettered-by-knowledge noodling. In that case, you should zip over to Cosma Shalizi’s blog, where he offers a thoroughly-hyperlinked meditation on the state of econophysics. Full of good stuff along the lines of:

So then: why oh why don’t we have better econophysics?

The first reason which occurs to me, now that I’m a dues-paying, card-carrying statistician, is that almost all econophysicists are theoretical physicists, and moreover statistical physicists. (I’m one myself, or at least was through my Ph.D.) Modern physics began, in the 17th century, by fusing mathematical
theorizing and artisanal craft, but one result of our progress has been to impose a specialized division of labor, sharply separating theory and experiment; Fermi was probably the last physicist to be both a great theorist and a great experimenter. (Perhaps this is connected to his invention of Monte Carlo?) This means that it is very rare for a theoretical physicist to analyze actual empirical data (say, measurements of magnetic susceptibility), which is what the experimentalists do. Theorists instead deal with experimental results (say, that the susceptibility depends on temperature in such-and-such a way). In high energy physics, theorists are actually so remote from contact with experimentalists that a separate guild of interface specialists (”phenomenologists”) has arisen to mediate between them. As a natural consequence of this division of labor, theorists receive no instruction at all in data analysis, let alone statistical inference.

There is much more. Jim Cronin once loaned me some videotapes of old news shows from the 1940’s that featured interviews with Enrico Fermi. He was an amazing guy, the kind who would kill time on a free afternoon by coming up with an explanation for the origin of cosmic rays. It’s too bad that, in the popular or semi-popular imagination, his name doesn’t immediately pop up on the list of the demigods of 20th-century physics. You could make a solid case that he should be number two after Einstein.

Crooked Timber links to Cosma’s post, and also features a post by John Quiggin that follows up on mine. He notes that most of my suggestions are well-incorporated into economics, which is no surprise. The part that is judged interesting is the idea that social scientists would be well-served to distinguish between descriptive notions of what people do and prescriptive notions of what is considered “rational.” A blog at The Economist (the magazine they like to call a newspaper) makes a similar point, so maybe there is something there. Indeed, we are informed that this kind of reasoning keeps popping up despite the fact that Joseph Butler demolished it 300 years ago, so there must be something attractive about it. (Hey, David Hume demolished the argument from design before William Paley even popularized it, but you don’t see it fading away, do you?)

A while back, Brad DeLong referred to Ezra Klein’s review of Tyler Cowen’s book Discover Your Inner Economist. (Which I own but haven’t yet read; if it’s as interesting as the blog, I’m sure it will be great.) The question involves rational action in the face of substantial mark-ups on the price of wine in nice restaurants:

I did once try to convince Bob Hall at a restaurant in Palo Alto not to order wine: the fact that the wine would cost four times retail would, I said, depress me and lower my utility. Even though I wasn’t paying for it, I would still feel as though I was being cheated, and as I drank the wine that would depress me more than the wine would please me.

He had two responses: (i) “You really are crazy.” (ii) “Think, instead, that it’s coming straight out of the Hoover Institution endowment, and order two bottles.”

He is crazy, of course — crazy like an economist. I left a searingly brilliant riposte in the comment section of the post, which mysteriously never appeared. He will probably claim it was a software glitch or that I hit “Preview” instead of hitting “Post,” but I know better. What are you afraid of, Brad DeLong!?

Economists have a certain way of looking at the world, in which (to simplify quite a bit) people act rationally to maximize their utility. That sort of talk pushes physicists’ buttons, because maximizing functions is something we do all the time. I’m not deeply familiar with economics in any sense; everything I know about the subject comes from reading blogs. Any social science is much harder than physics, in the sense that constructing quantitative models that usefully describe the behavior of realistic systems is made enormously difficult by the inherent nonlinearities of human interactions. (”Ignoring friction” is the basis of 98% of physics, but nearly impossible in social sciences.) But I can’t help speculating, in a completely uninformed way, how economists could improve their modeling of human behavior. Anyone who actually knows something about economics is welcome to chime in to explain why all this is crazy (very possible), or perfectly well-known to all working economists (more likely), or good stuff that they will steal for their next paper (least likely). The freedom to speculate is what blogs are all about.

Utility is a map from the space of goods (or some space of outcomes) to the real numbers:

U: {goods} -> R

The utility function encapsulates preferences by measuring how happy I would be if I had those goods. If a set of goods A brings me greater utility than a set B, and I have to choose between them, it would be rational for me to choose A. Seems reasonable. But a number of issues arise when we put this kind of philosophy into practice. So here are those that occur to me, over the course of one plane ride across a couple of time zones.

• Utility is non-linear.

This one is so perfectly obvious that I’m sure everyone knows it; nevertheless, it’s what immediately popped into mind upon reading the wine story. We need to distinguish between two different senses of linear. One is that increasing the amount of goods leads to a proportional increase in utility: U(ax) = aU(x), where x is some collection of goods and a is a real number. Everyone really does know better than that; the notion of marginal utility captures the fact that eating five deep-fried sliders does not bring you five times the happiness that eating just one would bring you. (Likely it brings you less.)

But the other, closely related, sense of linearity is the ability to simply add together the utility associated with different kinds of goods: U(x+y) = U(x) + U(y), where x and y are different goods. In the real world, utility isn’t anything like that. It’s highly nonlinear; the presence of one good can dramatically affect the value placed on another one. I’m also pretty sure that absolutely every economist in the world must know this, and surely they use interesting non-linear utility functions when they write their microeconomics papers. But the temptation to approximate things as linear can lead, I suspect, to the kind of faulty reasoning that dissuades you from ordering wine in nice restaurants. Of course, you could have water with your meal, and then go home and have a glass of wine you bought yourself, thereby saving some money and presumably increasing your net utility. But having wine with dinner is simply a different experience than having the wine later, after you’ve returned home. There is, a physicist would say, strong coupling between the food, the wine, the atmosphere, and other aspects of the dining experience. And paying for that coupling might very well be worth it.

Physicists deal with this by working hard at isolating the correct set of variables which are (relatively) weakly-coupled, and dealing with the dynamics of those variables. It would be silly, for example, to worry about protons and neutrons if you were trying to understand chemistry — atoms and electrons are all you need. So the question is, is there an economic equivalent to the idea of an effective field theory?

• Utility is not a function of goods.

Another in the category of “surely all the economists in the world know this, but they don’t always act that way.” A classic (if tongue-in-cheek) example is provided by this proposal to cure the economic inefficiency of Halloween by giving out money instead of candy. After all, chances are small that the candy you collect will align perfectly with the candy you would most like to have. The logical conclusion of such reasoning is that nobody should ever buy a gift for anyone else; the recipient, knowing their own preferences, could always purchase equal or greater utility if they were just given the money directly.

But there is an intrinsic utility in gift-giving; we value a certain object for having received it on a special occasion from a loved one (or from a stranger while trick-or-treating), in addition to its inherent value. Now, one can try to account for this effect by introducing “having been given as a gift” as a kind of good in its own right, but that’s clearly a stopgap. Instead, it makes sense to expand the domain set on which the utility function is defined. For example, in addition to a set of goods, we include information about the path by which those goods came to us. Path-dependent utility could easily account for the difference between being given a meaningful gift and being handed the money to buy the same item ourselves. Best of all, there are clearly a number of fascinating technical problems to be solved concerning strategies for maximizing path-dependent utility. (Could we, for example, usefully approximate the space of paths by restricting attention to the tangent bundle of the space of goods?) Full employment for mathematical economists! Other interesting variables that could be added to the domain set on which utility is defined are left as exercises for the reader.

• People do not behave rationally.

This is the first objection everyone thinks of when they hear about rational-choice theory — rational behavior is a rare, precious subset of all human activity, not the norm that we should simply expect. And again, economists are perfectly aware of this, and incorporating “irrationality” into their models seems to be a growth business.

But I’d like to argue something a bit different — not simply that people don’t behave rationally, but that “rational” and “irrational” aren’t necessarily useful terms in which to think about behavior. After all, any kind of deterministic behavior — faced with equivalent circumstances, a certain person will always act the same way — can be modeled as the maximization of some function. But it might not be helpful to think of that function as utility, or as the act of maximizing it as the manifestation of rationality. If the job of science is to describe what happens in the world, then there is an empirical question about what function people go around maximizing, and figuring out that function is the beginning and end of our job. Slipping words like “rational” in there creates an impression, intentional or not, that maximizing utility is what we should be doing — a prescriptive claim rather than a descriptive one. It may, as a conceptually distinct issue, be a good thing to act in this particular way; but that’s a question of moral philosophy, not of economics.

• People don’t even behave deterministically.

If, given a set of goods (or circumstances more generally), a certain person will always act in a certain way, we can always describe such behavior as maximizing a function. But real people don’t act that way. At least, I know I don’t — when faced with a tough choice, I might go a certain way, but I can’t guarantee that I would always do the same thing if I were faced with the identical choice another hundred times. It may be that I would be a lot more deterministic if I knew everything about my microstate — the exact configuration of every neuron and chemical transmitter in my brain, if not every atom and photon — but I certainly don’t. There is an inherent randomness in decision-making, which we can choose to ascribe to the coarse-grained description that we necessarily use in talking about realistic situations, but is there one way or the other.

The upshot of which is, a full description of behavior needs to be cast not simply in terms of the most function-maximizing choice, but in a probability distribution over different choices. The evolution of such a distribution would be essentially governed by the same function (utility or whatever) that purportedly governs deterministic behavior, in the same way that the dynamics in Boltzmann’s equation is ultimately governed by Newton’s laws. The fun part is, you’d be making better use of the whole utility function, not just those special points at which it is maximized — just like the Feynman path integral established a way to make use of the entire classical action, not just those extremal points. I have no idea whether thinking in this way would be useful for addressing any real-world problems, but at the very least it should provide full employment for mathematical economists.

Okay, I bet that’s at least three or four Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel lurking in there somewhere. Get working, people!

We now have a Facebook group for Cosmic Variance! But let me work up to it.

I had heard about Facebook many times, but had effortlessly resisted the temptation to learn anything about it or get involved in any way. It’s a social-networking site, allowing people to keep each other up to date with stuff they are doing. A pastime in which I pretty much have no interest, despite what one might gather from the fact that I have a blog and all that. While I’ll tell stories about travel or amusing anecdotes for purposes of local color, and mention the occasional big event, for the most part I prefer to use the blog to talk about ideas and keep the fascinating details of my everyday life a tightly-shrouded mystery.

But at some point, the “everyone is doing it, how hard can it be, and maybe it could even be fun” argument kicks in, and in a moment of weakness you sign up. I blame Carl Zimmer, who just joined himself, with the usual disclaimers. It’s free, and easy as pie — you sign up, post a photo if you like, and that’s it.

The basic point of Facebook, according to my limited understanding, is to have “Friends.” That is, a set of other Facebookers with whom you have (mutually) agreed to allow access to your profile and information. There is a quite brilliant application via which, if you choose to allow it, Facebook can zip through a conventional email program (Gmail, apple, etc) looking for email addresses of other people with Facebook accounts, and let you ask them to be friends. And then there are networks of common interest and all that stuff. The obvious use is that you can simply tell Facebook when you’ve decided to quit your job and hike across the Andes, rather than emailing all of your friends individually.

But there is a deep problem of postmodern community ethics here — who is a “Friend,” in the official Facebook sense? One group would be, you know, your actual friends. Another would be people with whom you have some less tangible, but nevertheless pretty mutual and well-defined, relationship — maybe you’ve exchanged emails, or comments on each others blogs. It’s all up to you where to draw the line.

But personally, I wouldn’t count someone as a “Friend” if I had simply read their book, or visited their blog, or listened to their radio show, without them knowing me at all. And vice-versa. I mean, I think — to be honest, I’m new at this, and have no idea what the standards are. It might be very natural, for example, for regular CV readers to want to be my friend, but I’m not really sure it fits my notion of what friendship is really all about.

Then I noticed that Crooked Timber has its own Facebook group. Which seemed, at first, like the dumbest thing in the world — why do you need some proprietary social network when you already have the damn blog?

Upon digging deeper, however, I realized it was actually the smartest thing in the world. (A very fine line.) With the Facebook group, people can come together and share pictures, or relevant stories or rants, without being “friends” and dealing with constant updates about what they all had for dinner last night. (Although advancing to friendship — or more! — is always possible.) And in fact there are lots of blogs that have their own Facebook group.

So, now, so do we. Go ahead and join up. Upload your photo (or not). Share videos and pictures from the regular “Fans of CV” get-togethers which I’m sure happen all the time. The Pharyngula group has over a hundred members — you don’t want to be shown up by a bunch of godless cephalophiles, do you?

But there’s no way I’m ever having a MySpace page.

Update: Seems to be working! Over a hundred members, and the irrepressible Mark Jackson has even started a conversation about physics-related movie titles.

On Friday evening I emerged from what have been a crazy couple of months, during which I’ve been in a paper crunch. When one works on a number of different projects at any one time, with a variety of collaborators, postdocs and students, the resulting papers generally seem to see the light of day at seemingly random times. Sometimes a few papers come out more closely together than at other times.

But sometimes it gets a bit ridiculous, and that’s what happened this summer, with a lot of projects suddenly getting close to completion about the same time - five papers to finish up in the space of a couple of months. I can’t complain - I love the work - but I found this particular random bunching of projects reaching completion to be a bit much, and I haven’t been getting much free time or even time to sit back and spend time focusing on any new ideas (or even time to blog!!).

But on Friday my collaborators (Rachel Bean and Eanna Flanagan, from Cornell) and I finished up two of the papers we’ve been working on. We’ve been studying a class of instabilities that can occur if dark matter and dark energy are coupled in a nontrivial way. There are a number of models in which this happens, and indeed one might think that if one tried to include both dark components of the cosmic energy budget into a simple particle physics theory, then there might quite naturally be couplings other than gravity between them.

We’ve done a great deal of work on this problem, and our long paper is sufficiently involved that we accompanied it by a letter that covers the main points and physical interpretations without all the analysis and examples that we have in the longer paper. For an idea of what we’re about, the abstract to the longer paper reads

We consider theories in which there exists a nontrivial coupling between the dark matter sector and the sector responsible for the acceleration of the universe. Such theories can possess an adiabatic regime in which the quintessence field always sits at the minimum of its effective potential, which is set by the local dark matter density. We show that if the coupling strength is much larger than gravitational, then the adiabatic regime is always subject to an instability. The instability, which can also be thought of as a type of Jeans instability, is characterized by a negative sound speed squared of an effective coupled dark matter/dark energy fluid, and results in the exponential growth of small scale modes. We discuss the role of the instability in specific coupled CDM and Mass Varying Neutrino (MaVaN) models of dark energy, and clarify for these theories the regimes in which the instability can be evaded due to non-adiabaticity or weak coupling.

It’s very satisfying to complete a project, although also a little sad, since one usually has such fun working on them, and learns a great deal. In this case, we’re still working on more projects and have lots of new ideas, so I’ll still be enjoying the collaboration, even though this particular project is over. Plus, I can now devote a little more time to a few other ideas I’ve been working on with my graduate students, who’ve been putting in the bulk of the calculational work on them over the last couple of months.

I referred to this scene from Annie Hall in my talk yesterday. A classic.

“Something he read.” That’s always the problem, isn’t it?

(Note that everyone seems to be buying into some sort of Big Rip cosmology. It makes for a more vivid eschatology.)

John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts has a great post about the development of the modern definition of “Life” (which, one strongly suspects, is by no means fully developed). Once we break free of the most parochial definitions involving carbon-based chemistry, we’re left with the general ideas that life is something complex, something that processes information, something that can evolve, something that takes advantage of local entropy gradients to make records and build structures. (Probably quantum computation does not play a crucial role, but who knows?) One of the first people to think in these physical terms was none other than Erwin Schrödinger, who was mostly famous for other things, but did write an influential little book called What Is Life? that explored the connections between life and thermodynamics.

Searching for a definition of “Life” is a great reminder of the crucial lesson that we do not find definitions lying out there in the world; we find stuff out there in the world, and it’s our job to choose definitions that help us make sense of it, carving up the world into useful categories. When it comes to life, it’s not so easy to find a definition that includes everything that we would like to think of as living, but excludes the things we don’t.

For example: is the Milky Way galaxy alive? Probably not, so find a good definition that unambiguously excludes it. Keep in mind that the Milky Way, like any good galaxy, metabolizes raw materials (turning hydrogen and helium into heavier elements) and creates complexity out of simplicity, and does so by taking advantage of a dramatic departure from thermal equilibrium (of which CV readers are well aware) to build organization via an entropy gradient.

Update: Unbeknownst to me, Carl Zimmer had just written about this exact topic in Seed. Hat tip to 3QD.

We outsource to Clifford the task of advertising the Categorically Not! events that KC Cole organizes at the Santa Monica Art Studios. Except for this Sunday, since I’m going to be one of the presenters, and I never shy from doing my own PR. The event (see blurb below) will begin at 6:30; everyone is welcome.

The topic is Mistakes! I think we’re all familiar with them. As the scientist, I suppose it’s my job to talk about mistakes made by scientists, and I’m not too proud to stoop to using Einstein as my example. He made some whoppers, and that’s not even including his personal life.

Any fun examples of scientific mistakes? Best would be those that teach some cute lesson about how true progress is impossible if you’re too timid to make mistakes, etc etc. Ideas are welcome.

Here is the blurb:

Blunders, boo boos, bloopers, errors, slip-ups, goofs, misinterpretations and misunderstandings. Everyone makes mistakes. In science, the notion of “mistake” is often itself misunderstood. Frequently, a “mistake” often turns out to be nothing more than a limited or skewed perspective. Or as Einstein put it, discovering a new theory is not so much like tearing down a house to build a new one as climbing a mountain from which one can see farther; the old “house” is still there, but is seen in a vastly different context. Mistakes in personal life and matters of policy can ruin lives; but “mistakes” in a humorous context can also make us laugh.

For our September 9th Categorically Not!, Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll will talk about how mistakes are an inevitable part of scientific inquiry. From Aristotle through Kepler to Einstein, leaps in understanding have often been the offspring of wrong ideas, or right ideas that were suggested for the wrong reasons. (And what about Einstein’s so-called “biggest blunder”?) Sean is the author of a textbook on general relativity, lecturer in a course on cosmology offered by the Teaching Company, and a blogger at Cosmic Variance.

For a psychological perspective, social psychologist Carol Tavris will talk about her new book: Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. She’ll describe the biases that blind us to our mistakes, make us unwilling to change unsupported beliefs, and allow us to think ourselves above conflicts of interest. She’ll also explain how the need to justify mistakes prevents us from realizing we might be wrong, ensuring we make the same mistakes again. The antidotes are the scientific method, and a sense of humor.

And as for sense of humor, the endlessly talented Orson Bean will talk about how mistakes are the basis of comedy. Orson won a Tony nomination for his role in Subways Are For Sleeping, appeared regularly on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar (and later Johnny Carson), and hosted numerous game shows (he is the last surviving panelist from To Tell the Truth). More recently, he played Dr. Lester in Being John Malkovich as well as numerous other film and TV roles. He is also the author of the book Me and the Orgone: One Guy’s Search for the Meaning of it All.

This may not be the world’s most pressing problem, but it’s one that has started to become more and more odd to me as time has gone by. On the surface, you can easily understand how it has arisen, but the more you consider it the more you wonder just how other people do see the world around them.

We are saturated with video imagery now, in our homes, in shopping malls, airports, and on line. It’s only going to increase with time. So, I ask, why can’t we get the friggin’ aspect ratio correct anyway on all this video?

Up until the last few years, just about all video in the US (and Japan and elsewhere) was displayed in a 4:3 format called NTSC. (Europe adopted different standards, PAL/SECAM, but never mind that for now.) With good old TV, the NTSC format had a resolution of 486 horizontal lines. Translate that into a digital video screen and you’d need 648×486 pixels.

Typical computer screens in the early days had resolutions on that order, but quickly got better. Before long, “XGA” became very common, with 1024×768 pixels. This neatly utilized 10 bits for the horizontal and retained the 4:3 aspect ratio. Cool: all you had to do was translate the video NTSC signal into a digital signal and you could use a digitial monitor!

I’ll skip all the details, but in the past decade we’ve seen an explosion of flat-screen plasma and LCD monitors, which are almost all a wider 16:9 format. This allows them to accomodate the HDTV format, which is designed to have such a ratio, with resolution such as 1920×1080. That’s an aspect ratio of 1.78, quite a bit wider than the old 1.33, but not nearly as big as modern Hollywood films (2.35!).

The problem is that a lot of television (broadcast and cable) is still transmitted in 4:3 ratio, but then displayed on a wide-format 16:9 screen. The designers of the 16:9 monitors have built in the choice (often the default) of simply stretching the 4:3 image to fit the 16:9 screen. The result, as I am sure you have all seen, is that faces and bodies are distorted horizontally by a factor of 4:3 or 1.333. Everyone looks 33% wider, unless of course they are laying down, in which case they look 33% taller. The alternative is to set the monitor to display the 4:3 image so that it uses up all the vertical part of the display but not the horizontal. That seems to bother some people even more than the distorted faces - why buy a big expensive wide screen display and then not use it all?

My own strong preference is to never distort the aspect ratio of image, no matter how big a TV you have. It just looks really stupid to do that. But here we come to the firtst odd thing that I have noticed: some people apparently don’t even notice that there is a distortion! I first encountered this in an electronics store, where the salesperson swore up and down he could see no difference. I’ve asked some random people in various places if they could see the distortion, and around a third claimed not to. You have to wonder how the human visual processing system works…are people who don’t see the distortion internally correcting for this automatically or something?

Even more bizarre is the video you can get online from news outlets like CNN. It’s hard to believe, but they acutally put the distortion into their online video, even though there is absolutely no reason to do so, except perhaps to make it look like it does when distorted on displays you see in public, or in upscale hotel rooms. They are intentionally distorting the image! WTF ? I find this totally baffling.

Here is a random example of some CNN video:

Now if we shrink it horizontally by 25% (3:4 of course!) then it looks like this:

If you cannot see the difference between these, I am baffled. And if you don’t prefer the one where the nice-looking mom’s face is not grossly distorted, then I am even more baffled!

There are perhaps deeper reasons for this effect. Somehow, perhaps CNN thinks that since people have been going around seeing distorted images all over the place, they’ve started to think that this is the new normal? Or perhaps it’s part of the vast media conspiracy aimed at making us feel good about being fat? It’s a fact that more and more obese people are appearing in advertisements…this makes good marketing sense in that people want to identify with the people they see in ads (or at least the advertisers want the target audience to do so) and since such a huge proportion of Americans are obese, adding an additional 33% to their video width is, well, just good marketing.

I would like to believe that this is all a phase, growing pains of our new digital culture. As video designers get better and the hardware gets more sophisticated, I hope that the distorted faces we see all around us will begin to look like the unfortunate by-product of the early phase of this technology. Some day we’ll look back on this and…cringe.