Pixels Quotes

Our visual field, the entire view of what we can see when we look out into the world, is divided into billions of tiny spots or pixels. Each pixel is filled with atoms and molecules that are in vibration. The retinal cells in the back of our eyes detect the movement of those atomic particles. Atoms vibrating at different frequencies emit different wavelengths of energy, and this information is eventually coded as different colors by the visual cortex in the occipital region of our brain. A visual image is built by our brain's ability to package groups of pixels together in the form of edges. Different edges with different orientations - vertical, horizontal and oblique, combine to form complex images. Different groups of cells in our brain add depth, color and motion to what we see. ~ Jill Bolte Taylor

The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth. It's taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you're throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels. ~ Ren Ng

When you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents. A man looks like a man, a man with a large bicep looks like a man with a large bicep, and a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama" looks like a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama."

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm. ~ Mohsin Hamid

As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. It was a horrible, stilted, panicky sensation, hard to put into words. ~ Ruth Ozeki

I'm sitting here on the Kaye Gibbons Show, and all I can think is that the whole country is sick. Sick with the idea that it's good to be known as seen by as many people as possible, to show every part of our lives to the public at large. Whether it's Facebook photos, blogs, or reality TV, it's like nobody is content to just live life. The worth of our existence seems to be measured in pixels and megabytes and "likes." Those of use whose lives can be downloaded seem to have the most value – until someone outrageous comes along to claim their time in the spotlight. ~ Heather Demetrios

[...]No human being has ever directly seen their own face. It's impossible within nature - the most you can do is glimpse your nose and, for those with full lips, the curve of you upper lip. And so we only see ourselves through external sources, whether as images in mirrors, pixels on the screen, or words on the page, words of love from a mother, words of hate from an ex-lover.
Long before Furo's story became my own, I was already trying to say what I see now, that we are all constructed narratives. ~ A. Igoni Barrett

Please be careful of becoming so immersed and engrossed in pixels, texting, ear buds, Twittering, online social networking, and potentially addictive uses of media and the Internet that you fail to recognize the importance of your physical body and miss the richness of person-to-person communication. Beware of the digital displays and data in many forms of computer-mediated interaction that can displace the full range of physical capacity and experience. ~ David A. Bednar

The core idea is that for an information processing system to be conscious, it needs to be integrated into a unified whole that can't be decomposed into nearly independent parts. This means that all parts need to compute jointly with lots of information about each other-otherwise there would be more than one independent consciousness, such as in a room full of people or, perhaps, in the two brain halves of a patient whose connecting corpus callosum has been cut out. If there are fairly independent parts that are too simple, then these won't be conscious at all, like the independent pixels of a video camera. ~ Max Tegmark

Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dancing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense representational power. Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle, ~ Gregory Benford

As time passes, the cast and crew go the way of all flesh, though their celluloid echoes remain--walking, talking, fighting, fucking. After enough time, every person you see onscreen will have died, transformed through the magic of cinema into a collection of visible memories: light on a screen, pixels on a videotape, information on a DVD. We bring them back every time we start a movie, and they live again, reflected in our eyes. It's a cruel sort of immortality, I guess, though it probably beats the alternative. ~ Gemma Files

There is a movement happening, a quiet one.
A low-profile, low-resolution revolution.
Comprised of writers and dreamers, of guerrilla artists and thought-ninjas.
Those with something to say.
They communicate through text inscribed on true public spaces, rather than blogs and forums.
Choosing fewer words, even without being bound by 140 character limits.
Using ink instead of pixels.
Sending messages in living, breathing space.
Pens scream louder into the void.
Even if permanent ink is not aptly named. ~ Erin Morgenstern

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake. ~ Charlie Brooker

Human beings are pixels of love, trust, and kindness
We came from Milky Way, dust, and brightness. ~ Debasish Mridha

If this code works, it was written by Paul DiLascia. If not, I don't know who wrote it ..I'll be laughing when I'm old and and all my programmer friends have gone alexic from staring at too many tiny pixels ~ Paul Dilascia

The sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s, including advocates for 'adult' material such as Hugh Hefner and Al Goldstein, represented porn to us as a great social radicalizer. But a nation of masturbating people who are looking at screens rather than at one another - who are consuming sex like any other product and who are rewiring their brains to find less and less abandon and joy in one another's arms, and to bond more and more with pixels - is a subjugated, not a liberated, population. ~ Naomi Wolf

Science is often described as an iterative and cumulative process, a puzzle solved piece by piece, with each piece contributing a few hazy pixels of a much larger picture. But the arrival of a truly powerful new theory in science often feels far from iterative. Rather than explain one observation or phenomenon in a single, pixelated step, an entire field of observations suddenly seems to crystallize into a perfect whole. The effect is almost like watching a puzzle solve itself. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. ~ Mohsin Hamid

If you need to strap a camera to you or get in a small space, then it makes sense to use digital.I do think it is possible to use a digital camera artistically, but it can only be good if you are using film technique. Film has grain, and digital has pixels, and there is not that much of a difference, but digital does not replace the need to create a scene and light it properly and spend time considering the shot. ~ Vilmos Zsigmond

Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow Crash?"
A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You
ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention.
Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of getting
that information. It's probably nothing.
The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would be normal
in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you can't sell drugs
in the Metaverse, because you can't get high by looking at something.
The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called Snow Crash
before. That's not unusual -- a thousand new drugs get invented each year, and
each of them sells under half a dozen brand names.
But a "snow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash -- a bug -- at
such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls
the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen,
turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. Hiro has seen
it happen a million times. But it's a very peculiar name for a drug.
The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. He has an
utterly calm, stolid presence. It's like talking to an asteroid. Which would
be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of sense.
Hiro's trying to read some clues in the ~ Neal Stephenson

Computer monitors can operate in many different video modes. In most cases, the decision about how many pixels and colors to display is yours - but not always. ~ Charles Petzold

As computers have become more powerful, computer graphics have advanced to the point where it's possible to create photo-realistic images. The bottleneck wasn't, 'How do we make pixels prettier?' It was, 'How do we engage with them more?' ~ Jefferson Han

What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing. ~ Ruth Ozeki

Buffering is that time you spend waiting for the pixels of your life to crystallize into a clearer picture; it's a time of reflection, a time of pause, a time for regaining your composure or readjusting your course.We all have a limited amount of mental and emotional bandwidth, and she of life's episodes take a long time to fully load. ~ Hannah Hart

Any files I give to the model are downsized (typically 800x1200 pixels) ... By not giving out my high resolution files, they cannot be used without my knowledge. ~ A.K. Nicholas

The screen filled with a pure and simple blue in which a few black pixels floated. ~ Mal Peet

What we face is not a loss of books but the loss of a world. As in Alexandria after Aristotle's time, or the universities and monasteries of the early Renaissance, or the cluttered-up research libraries of the nineteenth century, the Word shifts again in its modes, tending more and more to dwell in pixels and bits instead of paper and ink. It seems to disappear thereby, as it must have for the ancient Peripatetics, who considered writing a spectral shibboleth of living speech; or the princely collectors of manuscripts in the Renaissance, who saw the newly recovered world of antiquity endangered by the brute force of the press; or the lovers of handmade books in the early nineteenth century, to whom the penny dreadful represented the final dilution of the power of literature. And yet, the very fact that the library has endured these cycles seems to offer hope. In its custody of books and the words they contain, the library has confronted and tamed technology, the forces of change, and the power of princes time and again. ~ Matthew Battles

There is always the easy way out, although I am loath to use it. I have no children, I do not watch television and I do not believe in God- all paths taken by mortals to make their lives easier. Children help us to defer the painful task of confronting ourselves, and grandchildren take over from them. Television distracts us from the onerous necessity of finding projects to construct in the vacuity of our frivolous lives; by beguiling our eyes, television releases our mind from the great work of making meaning. Finally, God appeases our animal fears and the unbearable prospect that someday all our pleasures will cease. Thus, as I have neither future nor progeny nor pixels to deaden the cosmic awareness of absurdity, and in the certainty of the end and the anticipation of the void, I believe I can affirm that I have not chosen the easy path. ~ Muriel Barbery

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took. ~ Rebecca McNutt

A scrap of seventeenth-century sunlight compressed into dots and pixels, ~ Donna Tartt

Digital platforms are worthless without content. They're shiny sacks with bells and whistles, but without content, they're empty sacks. It is not about pixels versus print. It is not about how you're reading. It is about what you're reading. ~ Maureen Dowd

We often plough so much energy into the big picture, we forget the pixels. ~ Silvia Cartwright

People find it hard to get their heads around nominating a computer-generated character, but every time you see Gollum on the screen, that's me who is acting up there - even if it is behind a mass of pixels - and it's my voice you hear. ~ Andy Serkis

Smellin' the beefaloes and leanpigs turnin' on their spits, holding a cold cheer-beer in my hand, watchin' the stars poppin' out one by one like random pixels on God's antique
monochrome display, listenin' to the joyful chatter of my fellow gips, contemplatin' the easy job ahead of me, I was as near to heaven asI have ever been on this mostly sad ol' earth. ~ Paul Di Filippo

The biggest surprise watching video on the tiny, 2.5-inch screen (320 by 240 pixels) is completely immersive. Three unexpected factors are at work. First, the picture itself is sharp and vivid, with crisp action that never smears the screen is noticeably brighter than on previous iPods. Second, because the audio is piped directly into your ear sockets, it has much higher fidelity and presence than most peoples TV sets. Finally, remember that a 2.5-inch screen a foot from your face fills as much of your vision as a much larger screen thats across the room. ~ David Pogue

The longtime standard for American TV was 525 lines from top to bottom of the image. As a practical matter, that was roughly equivalent to 350 thousand pixels - pretty crude, given that photos made with your iPhone boast five million pixels. ~ Seth Shostak

A girl needs options. To me, video games are like shoes. But with more pixels and a plot. ~ Annie Bellet

I don't do emoticons unless I'm making a big deal out of them. I'll type out, 'This is so amusing it makes me want to grin in pixels.' And then do it. ~ Sloane Crosley

In reality, it is impossible to build such an agent because it is computationally intractable to perform the requisite calculations. Any attempt to do so succumbs to a combinatorial explosion just like the one described in our discussion of GOFAI. To see why this is so, consider one tiny subset of all possible worlds: those that consist of a single computer monitor floating in an endless vacuum. The monitor has 1, 000 x 1, 000 pixels, each of which is perpetually either on or off. Even this subset of possible worlds is enormously large: the 2(1,000 x 1,000) possible monitor states outnumber all the computations expected ever to take place in the observable universe. Thus, we could not even enumerate all the possible worlds in this tiny subset of all possible worlds, let alone perform more elaborate computations on each of them individually. ~ Nick Bostrom