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Comment by dazzawazza | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago I worked on a series of CDROMs detailing Vermeer's Chick with the Pearl Earring (unofficial name) and Bellini's Feast of the Gods.

We included infra-red, x-ray and colour information and overlayed them. Users could scroll around the surface of the paintings in great details looking at how the artist constructed their work. The tech we used was previously used to render 3D globes with overlayed information. I think you could only buy the CDROMs at the Washington Museum of Art.

At the time it was pretty ground breaking and I certainly enjoyed working on it. It's amazing to think that this is all free on the web now at massively high resolutions.

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I think if you want to do it right you could even use incident light from different angles, camera from different angles, do a spectral analysis per pixel, measure thickness of paint, measure/extract specularity/diffusion and stuff like that.

Yeah, something about how "the network is the storage support".

Why do you have to use derogatory language to describe Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring?

Oh, no, he's referring to the little-known Vermeer painting of a literal young chicken with a pearl earring on its head.

Chick is "informal + sometimes offensive"

Offense is taken, not given

So why take offense to this? Explained above that the unofficial name is used as a term of endearment, and obviously not used in a demeaning context.

I can't imagine self-censorship to avoid offending a painting.

Even better, the young woman in the painting isn't a girl and she isn't even real. It's all imagined by Vermeer.

No one minds that she is called a 'girl' when she is most definitely a young woman even by today's standards and most definitely by the standards of the day.

All of this was 20 odd years ago though, for me, when the term chick was much more widely used in both the US and UK.

> the young woman in the painting... isn't even real

There is some evidence that Vermeer could have been using optical tools to create his photo-realistic paintings.

If so, she would have been a real person, as that is how the technique is imagined to work - use an optical apparatus that allows you to see your painting and the subject in the same view, and then paint so that they blend into each other.

A pretty cool documentary was made about this called Tim's Vermeer[1] (starring Tim Jenison and directed by Penn & Teller), and led to an installation at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania. Really interesting, and well worth experiencing both!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer

"Never offend anyone" seems a dubious goal to me.

You're reading too much in to it. This was the informal title the curators often used for the painting. It was a sign of affection for what is a wonderful painting of a very enigmatic young woman. The art historians and scientists we worked with always used the formal names of course.

> You're reading too much in to it.

Is that true? I don't doubt that you meant no harm, but the language is demeaning regardless of intent or origin.

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