[HN Gopher] Self-Portrait by Ernst Mach (1886)
___________________________________________________________________
Self-Portrait by Ernst Mach (1886)
Author : Hooke
Score : 82 points
Date : 2026-03-05 23:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (publicdomainreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (publicdomainreview.org)
| totetsu wrote:
| Seems similar to Donna Haraway's ideas of Situated Knowledges
| vijucat wrote:
| I've always been struck by how long sentences are in writing from
| a century or more ago. To my mind whose attention-span has been
| poisoned by YouTube Shorts (even if they are mostly about
| trigonometry) and Tweets (even if I tell myself that's the new
| newspaper), they are most difficult to read. I often have to
| restart from the beginning.
|
| Albeit an extreme example, here's a sentence from Henry James'
| "The Ambassadors", 1909:
|
| The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with
| the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive -
| the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to
| find himself looking, after so much separation, into his
| comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he
| simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the
| nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I remember reading the sentences in Adam Smith's "Wealth of
| Nations" and thinking this. A hell of a job to parse some of
| these.
|
| Audiobook narrators often get it wrong reading these older
| texts, they'll put emphasis in the wrong place.
| jonahx wrote:
| I recently picked up Washington Square, and while it has that
| old-fashioned flavor you describe, I was struck by how
| _readable_ the long sentences and baroque turns of phrase were.
| They flow well, they 're easy to parse. And the chapters have a
| Netflixy, binge-able quality. I got through it much faster than
| I expected.
| dvh wrote:
| > I've always been struck by how long sentences are in writing
| from a century or more ago
|
| May I recommend Ulysses by James Joyce
| adonovan wrote:
| Likewise! I often marvel at the patience of readers of earlier
| times. Of course, they had more time and fewer distractions,
| and I suspect that there was a dynamic at work in which both
| the writer and reader derived a certain satisfaction from long
| meandering sentences, the writer proving their skill, and the
| reader proving (to themselves) their stamina.
|
| Nowadays we tend to write in a plainer style demanding a
| smaller "parser stack". Some style manuals have excellent
| examples of sentences of equal length but very different "stack
| depth" and thus ease of comprehension.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| I like how details fade around the edges -- though for maximum
| accuracy, there should only be a tiny area of high detail in the
| center, with most of the visual field being indistinct (as well
| as a total blind spot to one side). The brain just knows how to
| fill in remembered details of stuff you're not looking at
| directly, same way you tune out the sight of your own nose. Gaze-
| tracking and foveated rendering is a neat way of taking advantage
| of this quirk to speed up graphical processing:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_rendering
| fwipsy wrote:
| I would argue that the viewer's eye already provides this
| effect. Whichever part of the image you focus on is sharp; the
| rest is indistinct. The result is that we are drawn into the
| scene better; we see as if our eye were allowed to roam around
| the scene as his was, rather than seeing the much more limited
| perspective with a fixed gaze.
| jcynix wrote:
| And the eye's periphery, while it isn't sharp, is highly
| sensitive to movement. Which is "obvious" if you ponder the
| question where dangerous things appear first. Thus things
| dangling from the rear mirror in a car are a bad thing, they
| need (subconscious) attention.
|
| The cone cells in the eye's center are color sensitive, but
| need a lot of light, while the rod cells at the edges are
| highly sensitive to motion, even in low light. And that might
| be one of the reasons why flicker is strenuous for the eyes.
| Funny side effect is that looking at stars in the night sky
| seems to work better when you look slightly besides a star, I
| guess that's because then the low light parts take over.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| The article mentions Mach numbers, but it leaves out what is most
| interesting about Mach's place in the history of science, which
| is as a bridge to Einstein and General Relativity. Essentially
| Einstein read Mach and took a bunch of mind-bendingly profound
| but vague philosophical ideas like Mach's Principle[0] and put
| together General Relativity out of it. And this self portrait
| gives that side of Mach too - the philosopher obsessed with
| phenomenology and how local perception relates to the large scale
| universe out there.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle
| fidrelity wrote:
| As a side note, Einstein read Mach but strongly opposed logical
| positivism[0].
|
| [0]:
| https://philosophynow.org/issues/133/Einstein_vs_Logical_Pos...
| rebolek wrote:
| Ernst Mach is such an interesting guy! I've started working on a
| synth which is named by him [1] and I believe he needs much more
| recognition - this self portrait exactly captures his philosophy
| - there's no absolute frame of reference, everything is relative,
| which leads directly to you know what. I wish he would be
| remembered for more than just Mach number.
|
| [1] https://pokuston.com/mach-i.html
| baruchel wrote:
| If I remember correctly, this picture is commented in the very
| good book "Exact thinking in demented times", together with
| Mach's ideas.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-07 23:00 UTC)