Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Unreasonable effectiveness is all you need" considered harmful
Don’t let unreasonable effectiveness become the enemy of reasonable effectiveness.
A closer look at unreasonable effectivenessness.
The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
51–60 of 167 posts
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#52Okay, who's gonna write the story > The unreasonable effectiveness of The Unreasonable Effectiveness title?
Unreasonable effectiveness is all you need.
I did some analysis on top title patterns. Both of these make the list pretty handily: https://projects.peercy.net/projects/hn-patterns/index.html
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#53Once you start looking at the world through the lens of frequency domain a lot of neat tricks become simple. I have some demo code that uses fourier transform on webcam video to read a heartrate off a person's face, basically looking for what frequency holds peak energy.
I don't think pulsing skin (due to blood flow) is visible from a webcam though.
Plenty of sources suggest it is:
https://github.com/giladoved/webcam-heart-rate-monitor
https://medium.com/dev-genius/remote-heart-rate-detection-us...
The Reddit comments on that second one have examples of people doing it with low quality webcams: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/llnv93/remote_...
It's honestly amazing that this is doable.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#54Once you start looking at the world through the lens of frequency domain a lot of neat tricks become simple. I have some demo code that uses fourier transform on webcam video to read a heartrate off a person's face, basically looking for what frequency holds peak energy.
I don't think pulsing skin (due to blood flow) is visible from a webcam though.
You will be surprised of The Unreasonable Effectiveness of opencv.calcOpticalFlowPyrLK
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#55Once you start looking at the world through the lens of frequency domain a lot of neat tricks become simple. I have some demo code that uses fourier transform on webcam video to read a heartrate off a person's face, basically looking for what frequency holds peak energy.
I don't think pulsing skin (due to blood flow) is visible from a webcam though.
It is, I've done it live on a laptop and via the front camera of a phone. I actually wrote this thing twice, once in Swift a few years back, and then again in Python more recently because I wanted to remember the details of how to do it. Since a few people seem surprised this is feasible maybe it's worth posting the code somewhere.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#56Once you start looking at the world through the lens of frequency domain a lot of neat tricks become simple. I have some demo code that uses fourier transform on webcam video to read a heartrate off a person's face, basically looking for what frequency holds peak energy.
I don't think pulsing skin (due to blood flow) is visible from a webcam though.
It is, but there's a lot of noise on top of it (in fact, the noise is kind of necessary to avoid it being 'flattened out' and disappearing). The fact that it covers a lot pixels and is relatively low bandwidth is what allows for this kind of magic trick.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a saying about Gauss: when another mathematician came to show him a new result, Gauss would remark that he had already worked on it, open a drawer in his desk, and pull out a pile of papers on the same topic.
One of the things I admire about many top mathematicians today like Terence Tao is that they are clearly excellent mentors to a long list of smart graduate students and are able to advance mathematics through their students as well as on their own. You can imagine a half-formed thought Terence Tao has while driving to work becoming a whole dissertation or series of papers if he throws it to the right person to work o…
Well, in that time it was more or less how mathematics worked. It was a way of showing off, and often it would be a case of "Hey I've solved this problem, bet no-one else can". It was only later it became a lot more collaborative (and a bit more focused on publishing proofs).
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#58A signal cannot be both time and frequency band limited. Many years ago I was amazed when I read that this fact I learned in my undergraduate is equivalent to the Uncertainty Principle!
On a more mundane note: my wife and I always argue whose method of loading the dishwasher is better: she goes slow and meticulously while I do it fast. It occurred to me we were optimizing for frequency and time domains, respectively, ie I was minimizing time so spent while she was minimizing number of washes :-)
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#59[deleted]
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#60Okay, who's gonna write the story > The unreasonable effectiveness of The Unreasonable Effectiveness title?
It's a play on the famous essay 1960 "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". I agree this is getting old after 75 years. Not least because it seems slightly manipulative to disguise a declarative claim ("The Fourier transform is unreasonably effective."), which could be false, as a noun phrase ("The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"), which doesn't look like a thing…
Also how most of the articles with this kind of title (those posted on HN at least) are about computation/logical processes, which are by definition, reasonable.