Visualizing lens aberrations -- why do it?

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi

Well, I got a *charge* out of this post.

Stan

 

[emdundronald]

In mid-level France you go to a restaurant, and they have a chef and source some everyday wines. People often lunch there every day. People who dislike the chef go to another, but knowing the place well definitely allows you to have pleasant meals in a familiar setting with friends or colleagues, and concentrate more on people rather than wondering whether you’ll get food poisoning. There are food « experts » but they are interested in the food itself, not the meal with friends.

Hi

Well, I got a *charge* out of this post.

Stan

 

[Thomas Guenther]

I would not go so far: TOO much information or TOO less information is not necessary "negative".

Yes it is, it’s just that such statements are meaningless without context.

In your example, too little light to make a decent exposure is not too little light to go to sleep, even if it’s the same amount of light, because the contexts are different.

And yes, the level of light that you might consider too much to sleep in would probably different from the level of light that I would consider too much, but that’s just part of the context.

Some contexts are subjective, as above; others are not: a pint of water is too much to fit in a half-pint jug but it’s not too much to fit in a quart jug.

But whatever the context, “too much” or “too little” or “too whatever” always implies a negative consequence.

The amount of your PSA values is TOO small before having the problem of prostate cancer. This is NOT a negative implication.

 

[Doppler9000]

In mid-level France you go to a restaurant, and they have a chef and source some everyday wines. People often lunch there every day. People who dislike the chef go to another, but knowing the place well definitely allows you to have pleasant meals in a familiar setting with friends or colleagues, and concentrate more on people rather than wondering whether you’ll get food poisoning. There are food « experts » but they are interested in the food itself, not the meal with friends.

Is there a difference between an expert and an « expert »?

I don’t believe that expertise, per se, is mutually exclusive to enjoying camaraderie, or the moment.

 

[Doppler9000]

I would not go so far: TOO much information or TOO less information is not necessary "negative".

Yes it is, it’s just that such statements are meaningless without context.

In your example, too little light to make a decent exposure is not too little light to go to sleep, even if it’s the same amount of light, because the contexts are different.

And yes, the level of light that you might consider too much to sleep in would probably different from the level of light that I would consider too much, but that’s just part of the context.

Some contexts are subjective, as above; others are not: a pint of water is too much to fit in a half-pint jug but it’s not too much to fit in a quart jug.

But whatever the context, “too much” or “too little” or “too whatever” always implies a negative consequence.

The amount of your PSA values is TOO small before having the problem of prostate cancer. This is NOT a negative implication.

”My PSA test came back negative. Thankfully my PSA levels were too low to indicate a positive result!”

——

 

[Doppler9000]

Too much information at the wrong time is a negative rather than a plus in this context.

A linguistic nit that I picked on something I am currently writing -

Characterizing too much as a negative is tautological.

I settled on ‘a lot can be a negative’, but I am still pondering.

Eh? How is "too much information" tautological? Where's the redundancy (the basis for a tautology)?

That is a very unique point of view.

In keeping with (some) of the tenor of this thread . . .

Unique means "one of a kind."

A thing can't be very one of a kind.

Thank you for pointing this out - another pet peeve of mine.

Yet another:

”The Ford F150 is the only truck in America to be rated number 1 in customer satisfaction.”

 

[Doppler9000]

Warning - contains profanity.

Spinal Tap at the grave of Elvis

 

[JimKasson]

I am told that certain older Leica lenses, certainly the non-APO lenses as well as lenses that lack the more modern lens coatings have aberrations, that among other things cause them to not be extremely sharp in the center and to lose much of whatever sharpness they have going toward the edges. Some of those aberrations result in reduced contrast and softer swirly bokeh.

Is swirly bokeh the same as soap bubble bokeh?

As I understand it, one component of soap bubble bokeh is mechanical vignetting.

https://blog.kasson.com/the-last-word/lomography-58-mm-petzval-psfs/

Cats eye bokeh is cause of vignetting . Soap bubble is cause of spherical aberration. (And Onion rings cause of defects in asphere technology.)

I think that you have reversed the cause and the effect. That said, thank you for the explanation. Where does swirly fit in all this?

I will be posting examples of transfocal behavior in the presence of over and under corrected SA.

For the soap bubbles: The best written article I know on this topic (A Technical View of Bokeh, by Harold M. Merklinger):

http://www.trenholm.org/hmmerk/ATVB.pdf

 

[Thomas Guenther]

I would not go so far: TOO much information or TOO less information is not necessary "negative".

Yes it is, it’s just that such statements are meaningless without context.

In your example, too little light to make a decent exposure is not too little light to go to sleep, even if it’s the same amount of light, because the contexts are different.

And yes, the level of light that you might consider too much to sleep in would probably different from the level of light that I would consider too much, but that’s just part of the context.

Some contexts are subjective, as above; others are not: a pint of water is too much to fit in a half-pint jug but it’s not too much to fit in a quart jug.

But whatever the context, “too much” or “too little” or “too whatever” always implies a negative consequence.

The amount of your PSA values is TOO small before having the problem of prostate cancer. This is NOT a negative implication.

”My PSA test came back negative. Thankfully my PSA levels were too low to indicate a positive result!”

——

Does not work to translate directly . I am not a native speaker, but hopefully you got it anyway.

 

[Jeff Biscuits]

The amount of your PSA values is TOO small before having the problem of prostate cancer. This is NOT a negative implication.

I am not at all familiar with the topic, so forgive me if my brief googling is incorrect. It shouldn’t affect the linguistic topic at hand, anyway, so best to overlook it.

I can’t really make sense of your statement. I guess you are proposing a hypothetical remark from a doctor (?), ie “your PSA levels are too low for you to have prostate cancer”. This would be a wildly incorrect and misleading statement in the same way that I was once (many years ago) told a doctor that I was “too young to have cancer” (or whatever condition it was, but it was certainly one that was suffered by people younger than I was).

There is no “too high” or “too low” in this context; it is merely a measurable quantity that has some correlation with the occurrence of prostate cancer, but the correlation is statistical, not purely causative. As PSA levels rise, the probability of having prostate cancer increases; in other words you are at greater risk of it. And much like any form of risk, everyone takes a subjective view of what they will accept or what they perceive as a problem.

This is the boundary which needs to be defined, even arbitrarily, in order for “too low” or “too high” to have meaning. You can be told you are “too old to have an operation”, but this is not an absolute, it is a function of the statistical research and the hospital’s risk appetite—which is itself a function of other things. What it means is either “we think the chances of you surviving it are lower than we’d be comfortable with” or “this fails our calculations of person-years-value through which we have to allocate finite resources”. At the end of the day you’re never objectively too old: you can always pay your own cash and find a surgeon who isn’t bothered by a horribly low survival probability. So “too old”—too anything—needs a specific threshold. Whether it’s objective or subjective, quantitative or qualitative, these must always be that half-pint cup that’s too small for the pint of water.

If you merely mean that “your PSA levels are too low for you to have prostate cancer” (setting aside the medical/statistical misguidedness) is a positive thing then overall, yes, but the context of the phrase “too low” is that of having cancer, so while the overall statement is positive (“yay, no cancer”), the phrase itself is still negative in its function: it’s inverting the unhappy business of having cancer.

To put it more plainly, if I were to ask my doctor, “do you think I have prostate cancer?” and he said, “no, your PSA levels are too low to imply a higher than background probability” then (a) he’s be answering with a negative, not a positive (even though I’d feel positive about the response) and (b) I’d be reassured that he wasn’t closing his mind to the realities of statistical correlation

 

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi,

I usually put it as X-spurt.

X is an unknown.

Spurt is a drip under pressure.



Stan

 

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi,

Meanwhile, I have found (for over 40 years as a customer) that the F350 is far more satisfying than the F150.

Stan

 

[Jeff Biscuits]

Thank you for pointing this out - another pet peeve of mine.

Yet another:

”The Ford F150 is the only truck in America to be rated number 1 in customer satisfaction.”

Well… maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but there are multiple ways in which that statement could be neither redundant nor incorrect:

1. there are multiple surveys “measuring” customer satisfaction of trucks, and in all of them the F150 was the top result (hence it is the only one to achieve this accolade)
2. there are multiple surveys, but they all consider multiple vehicle types, and all of the other top results were cars (hence it is the only truck to achieve this accolade)

I mean, this still means that detail behind the statement is rather opaque, and thus it’s not a very clear statement (and I can’t speak for its factual correctness), but still…

 

[Doppler9000]

Thank you for pointing this out - another pet peeve of mine.

Yet another:

”The Ford F150 is the only truck in America to be rated number 1 in customer satisfaction.”

Well… maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but there are multiple ways in which that statement could be neither redundant nor incorrect:

1. there are multiple surveys “measuring” customer satisfaction of trucks, and in all of them the F150 was the top result (hence it is the only one to achieve this accolade)
2. there are multiple surveys, but they all consider multiple vehicle types, and all of the other top results were cars (hence it is the only truck to achieve this accolade)

I mean, this still means that detail behind the statement is rather opaque, and thus it’s not a very clear statement (and I can’t speak for its factual correctness), but still…

I agree - excellent points.

The ad in question referred to one, particular survey, which is an important detail that I omitted.

 

[DavidMillier]

Hi,

Ok. So at that point, 1995, I was making small hand held cell phones the size of a Snickers candy bar. Both 1G (analog), which was still the most used, and 2G (digital).

I was also making the first Amateur Radio for the astronauts on the space shuttle to talk to kids in school.

Stan

I was bullying audit managers into entering their audit budget cash figures into our corporate resource management system and reporting those who failed to do it up the line. I feel I lost out in the goodness of 1995...On the other hand, I met my wife and went on holiday to Australia and New Zealand so not all bad

 

[emdundronald]

In mid-level France you go to a restaurant, and they have a chef and source some everyday wines. People often lunch there every day. People who dislike the chef go to another, but knowing the place well definitely allows you to have pleasant meals in a familiar setting with friends or colleagues, and concentrate more on people rather than wondering whether you’ll get food poisoning. There are food « experts » but they are interested in the food itself, not the meal with friends.

Is there a difference between an expert and an « expert »?

I don’t believe that expertise, per se, is mutually exclusive to enjoying camaraderie, or the moment.

When you go to a 3_*_ restaurant as a person with average means you are attentive to the experience but cannot necessarily afford it. When you go to a normal restaurant you are attentive to the companionship, and can afford a bottle wine more.

That happened to me, when I got my Ph.D, I took a couple of friends out to La Tour d’Argent, a decent second tier Paris restaurant notorious for its duck press, and it went well until one friend demanded to choose another bottle and grabbed their 200 page wine list. I guess if I had been in the income class of most of the members of this forum, or an heir to the Sultanate of Brunei that would not have been a problem. The low end Burgundy we convinced him to get for only $200 or so was pretty good I remember, as was the relief of saving a friendship while avoiding a night in a holding cell

Edmund
--
Ouch, my name is mistyped - my name is Edmund Ronald
http://instagram.com/edmundronald

 

[brick33308]

Where does swirly fit in all this?

Here's a link to sample pics from Fred Miranda's review of the new LightLensLab 50/1.5 Z21. There you'll see some swirly that, even to my enjoyment of certain Leica vintage lenses, is for my tastes too much. p.1 #2

 

[JimKasson]

When you go to a 3_*_ restaurant as a person with average means you are attentive to the experience but cannot necessarily afford it. When you go to a normal restaurant you are attentive to the companionship, and can afford a bottle wine more.

That happened to me, when I got my Ph.D, I took a couple of friends out to La Tour d’Argent, a decent second tier Paris restaurant notorious for its duck press, and it went well until one friend demanded to choose another bottle and grabbed their 200 page wine list. I guess if I had been in the income class of most of the members of this forum, or an heir to the Sultanate of Brunei that would not have been a problem. The low end Burgundy we convinced him to get for only $200 or so was pretty good I remember, as was the relief of saving a friendship while avoiding a night in a holding cell

I once ate at two Alain DuCasse restaurants in a week. That's close to a star a day. The first one was in Paris, and the second in Monaco. I paid for the first, and the company paid for the second. I remember being shocked by the prices both times.

 

[JimKasson]

Winefrog.com informs us: (My Ital to mark as excerpted)

WineFrog explains Wine Character

In wine descriptions, you’ll often hear the word "character" bandied about usually combined with an adjective or descriptor. The most common use of the word is to describe the overall sense of the wine. Pretend that a glass of wine is like a character in a book. The type of wine it is, will be its "character" - if the author (aka winemaker) has done their job right, the wine’s character can be classified with more than one wine term. Here are some of the most common:

• Assertive
• Attractive
• Balanced
• Big
• Crisp
• Closed
• Complete
• Complex
• Delicate
• Dense
• Developed
• Depth
• Elegant
• Fading
• Flat
• Full-bodied
• Graceful
• Neutral
• Potent
• Robust
• Round
• Soft
• Supple

https://winefrog.com/definition/4/wine-character

Ah, the overall sense of a lens and its "character" . . .

Some of those terms have well defined meaning. Others fall into the category of what I call wine poetry, which I find in general to be pretentious and not useful in a descriptive context. The poetic terms are used a lot by people trying to sound more knowledgeable than they are, or by people in the business of selling wine. They have been quite justly parodied, as in, "It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption."

What the heck does attractive, potent, complete, or assertive mean, really? Flat could refer to lack of carbonation in a sparkling wine, or too much residual sugar for the amount of acid, or too little acid for the amount of residual sugar, or maybe some other things.

And then there is what I call lens poetry...

 

[JimKasson]

They have been quite justly parodied, as in, "It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption."

Credit where credit is due: that quote is from James Thurber.