[HN Gopher] A statistical analysis of the work of Bob Ross (2014)
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A statistical analysis of the work of Bob Ross (2014)
Author : frumpish
Score : 66 points
Date : 2023-05-18 04:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (fivethirtyeight.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fivethirtyeight.com)
| nologic01 wrote:
| > "The majority of people who watch Bob Ross have no interest in
| painting," she said. "Mostly it's his calming voice."
|
| There must be a correlation when creating a calming narrative
| with statistical features of the paintings: Painting two or more
| of a thing allows you to talk about friends, not being alone etc.
|
| But somehow the friend effect only applies to natural objects.
| Charming little cabins don't seem to need a friend (or a
| chimney).
| dylan604 wrote:
| Charming little cabins (in the woods) are where friends go to
| hang out under the happy little clouds next to the happy little
| bushes while viewing the waterfalls
| wahern wrote:
| Perhaps part of the calming effect was being _alone_ with Bob
| Ross. Adding human characters to the scene might invite people
| to project their stressful relationships or lack of
| relationships.
|
| Not quite the same thing, but I do have vague memories of him
| sometimes adding wildlife--a squirrel here, a fawn there. Am I
| misremembering? Or maybe he _talked_ about how an animal might
| enjoy a space, but didn 't often actually paint them?
| eganist wrote:
| Funny thought: this write-up will probably be instrumental for
| calculating future valuations of Bob Ross paintings should his
| estate ever consider selling them.
|
| I wonder if that's why they agreed to it?
| phkahler wrote:
| Right? Suddenly I want one of the two with people in them, or
| the one and only chimney!
| te wrote:
| Love Bob Ross, but that's a sad little chimney. Actually a
| vent pipe.
| weeksie wrote:
| Growing up in Alaska I had always taken it for granted that when
| Bob Ross painted outdoor scenes they looked just like the
| outdoors I was used to. It's funny how that never stood out
| enough for me to see it as peculiar, given that absolutely no
| other media showed landscapes that were similar to the one I grew
| up in.
| itronitron wrote:
| Having grown up east of the Mississippi River, I always assumed
| they were fantastical, imaginary landscapes.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I was surprised that deciduous trees edged-out conifers. My
| (completely uninformed) mental image of Alaska is "Mostly pine,
| with other conifers sprinkled in." Can you confirm that
| deciduous trees are prevalent in Alaska?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My first impression when i saw that grid of paintings was that
| they could have been made by DALL-E.
| bena wrote:
| Bob Ross wasn't the most skilled painter, and he would probably
| be the first to admit to that. He had a certain skill set that
| lent itself well to certain styles of paintings. Now, he
| developed that skill set because he _liked_ pictures like that,
| so it 's not any knock against the man at all.
|
| To my knowledge, he didn't to portraiture or urban landscapes
| or people in general. Few, if any, animals.
|
| Mountains, trees, waterfalls, sunsets, sunrises, moonlight
| reflecting off a lake. Occasionally a house or barn or shed of
| some sort. All very nature oriented and pastoral. He wanted to
| bring what he saw as the peace of the Alaskan wilderness to
| people.
|
| But it does lend itself well to the sort of generative content
| created by DALL-E. Bob Ross had a method for painting
| mountains. A lot of his mountains are fairly interchangeable.
| He had a set of trees. He had techniques for river banks and
| flowers, etc. Bob Ross was in a very real sense, sort of a
| human DALL-E.
| atdrummond wrote:
| Isn't the point of Bob Ross the journey of painting, less so
| than the result? In that sense, it shouldn't be surprising
| that originality isn't a variable he's optimizing for with
| his output or television programme.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > Isn't the point of Bob Ross the journey of painting
|
| The joy of it, even.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| The godfather of ASMR.
| shagie wrote:
| I recently saw a color breakdown of Bob Ross videos on reddit:
| [OC] Color Frequency in Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting
| https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1330smg/oc...
|
| And then when looking for some other items found a Tableau report
| of all of the elements:
| https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/calloni/viz/TheJoyofP...
| (which has the additional neat feature of linking to the
| corresponding videos that make use of that element)
| floatrock wrote:
| So 10 years ago this author manually examined all the photos and
| tagged them to find the conditional probabilities and all the
| neat stats-blog content.
|
| I'd love to see a redo of this post using today's AI tools. Like,
| I know midjourney can spit out images "in the style of bob ross",
| but I mean how do you use these tools to analyze features across
| the bob ross corpus and ask "How many pictures contain happy
| little clouds?" And can these tools answer more abstract
| questions like "what kinds of bob ross paintings tend to have
| happy little clouds vs paintings with no clouds?"
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Oh yes we can! Its already a component of these generative
| tools:
|
| https://huggingface.co/spaces/pharma/CLIP-Interrogator
|
| You might want to finetune it to reliably recognize " _happy
| little clouds_ " with some samples of what you consider to be
| happy little clouds, as well as not happy and not little clouds
| for regularization.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Also, see LLaVA, aka CLIP hooked up to an LLM, if you are
| looking for more verbose and logical analysis of images:
| https://llava-vl.github.io/
| dsr_ wrote:
| Remember that just because you know that 19% of the painting have
| snow and 7% have a beach, you do not have a good estimate of how
| many paintings have both snow and a beach.
|
| (There is one which might qualify, but upon viewing, I don't
| think it actually has a beach in it.)
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(page generated 2023-05-19 23:02 UTC)