To whom it may concern:
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
(After the critical success of part II, and the strong box office sales of part III in spite of mixed reviews, will part IV finally see the June Open Thread jump the shark?)
Do you think you could describe this image to an arbitrarily talented artist and end up with an image that even looked like it was based on it?
http://smithandgosling.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/the-reader.jpg
It's not so much, "Such insolence, our ideas are so awesome they can not be broken down by mere reductionism" as "Wow, words are really bad at describing things that are very different from what most of the people speaking the language do."
I think you could make an elaborate set of equations on a cartesian graph and come up with a drawing that looked like it and say fill up RGB values #zzzzzz at coordinates x,y or whatever, but that seems like a copout since that doesn't tell you anything about how Fragonard did it.
You could probably get pretty good results without messing with complex equations, by first describing the full picture, then describing what's in four quadrants made by drawing vertical and horizontal lines that split the image exactly in half, then describing quadrants of these quadrants, split in a similar way and so on. The artist could use their skills to draw the details without an insanely complex encoding scheme, and the grid discipline would help fix the large-scale geometry of the image.
Edit: A 3x3 grid might work better in practice, it's more na... (read more)