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.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle</a>
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:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_rendering" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_rendering</a>
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.
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.<p>Albeit an extreme example, here's a sentence from Henry James' "The Ambassadors", 1909:<p>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.
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.<p>Audiobook narrators often get it wrong reading these older texts, they'll put emphasis in the wrong place.
I recently picked up Washington Square, and while it has that old-fashioned flavor you describe, I was struck by how <i>readable</i> 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.
> I've always been struck by how long sentences are in writing from a century or more ago<p>May I recommend Ulysses by James Joyce
Seems similar to Donna Haraway’s ideas of Situated Knowledges
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