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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

I am not a marine biologist, but worked in VFX: Of course this is sped up, watching those ships travel their routes in realtime would be a bit like watching paint dry.

Certain aspects/patterns of movement will only become visible when the playback speed is changed (early 20th century theorist Walter Benjamin called this the Optical-Unconscious). So e.g. it is easier to judge patterns in the traffic flow of vehicles in a sped up video than in real time footage. Both display the same movement but something else becomes visible.

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You seem to be missing the point of the OP wittingly. It's inconsequential that playing the animation at its normal speed would be a bad idea, what is also important is the effect it will have on an average reader of the Independence, the most obvious impression is that the whale is running for its life, which makes this disingenuous.

I don't know enough about how whales perceive time, distance and the unnatural disturbances coming in with the speed of sound in water to know whether the playback speed is misleading in reflecting the whales feelings or not.

The "obvious impression" you are talking about might not be as obvious as you think it is. For me at least it helped in seeing two interesting patterns: whale roams around and seems to change direction when a ship drives into it's path. Sometimes though it seems to go specifically into the area where a ship "just" drove through.

What was clear to me is that that dot would move differently without ships around it.

The choice of speed seems consciously intended to make it seem more frantic than it is. It's too fast to make out what's going on. If they played it half speed, it would be closer to reality and also easier to see and understand, so why is it this fast?

Or this was the speed things came out when converted to video.

I think attributing this to malice is really not a great move, given that we can only guess here and a lot of people without advanced video knowledge wouldn't make this a conscious choice unless it is much too slow or fast

Another simple hypothesis: a frantic-looking animation is more likely to get upvoted on Reddit so if 5 people posted animations at different speeds, a frantic-looking one might have a better chance at surviving

I often default to arguments like this. But I make an exception when the mistake is both inaccurate and seems to favor the conclusion chosen by the author. They should have realized this and slowed the video to avoid even the appearance of attempting to create a false implication. In my opinion.

That's why I say "seems" instead of "was". I don't want to assume it's on purpose. But I'm sure they had control over the speed of the animation. If they didn't make it look frenetic on purpose, they were incompetent in their attempt to make it describe reality.

If they didn't mean it to seem that way, the responsibility is on them to fix it. This is only my opinion, but I'm sure I'm not alone.

What's your opinion on weather map/satellite images then? You are aware they're not real time and the storms/wind isn't actually moving that fast?

Are the people who make them incompetent? Or would they simply be useless if played back in real time - since you would hardly be able to see any movement at all.

Wow, not sure if I'm being unclear, but I'll try again. This specific animation is issued at a speed that I think is faster than is useful. I think it is more useful and interesting to see the detailed interaction between the whale and an individual boat at a granular level. As played, you see the whale ping pong around between ships, but it's hard to get much of a sense for what is going on. I can't think of another reason for the video being that speed except that they want to imply that the whale is panicked (also the subtext of the study, so not exactly a complete stretch), or that it was an actual oversight that just so happened to make a covert emotional argument that favors their conclusion, which I consider a scientific faux pas.

If you speed up a video of pedestrians at cross-walks it suddenly becomes pedestrians running across the street to avoid being run over by cars going way too fast.

Sure playing it at half speed works be closer to real life. But playing a week sped up to 90s isn't going to be much different.

I'd much rather see focus on the whale and its interaction with individual ships. This doesn't show any of that nuance at all, and I don't know why. (But I have ideas)

Half speed... so we take half a week to watch it?

The result here is that the whale's motion looks frantic, whether it is or not. We can't even tell whether the whale is really interacting with the ships, or interacting with their wake, whether it is really avoiding, or giving chase.

A better solution would be to fast forward (faster) through the uninteresting parts and play the interesting parts close to real-time.

How do you explain the 50km wakes?

They are not wakes, but speed indicators. I guess there was a choice to represent speed with length bars, as opposed to with color or numbers. Although I would expect length bars to be a natural choice made by a data scientists who is used to think of vectors as a bar with a length and a direction.

They aren't speed indicators, like how you would represent a vector field (e.g. in a quiver plot). If they were they would always be straight lines, and probably be arrows that point in the direction of travel.

The look like wakes. People will assume they are wakes.

This was explained in the Twitter thread[1].

https://twitter.com/NiklasAstrand/status/1358321916369592321

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