Marc Berman

speaker

637 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6 Jul

Marc Berman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

So then a few years later, my current PhD student, Nakwon Rim, we actually tested this.

So we actually took hundreds of images where we had humans rate the images for how natural they thought the images were on a scale of one to seven, with one being not very natural and the seven being very natural.

And then we ran a JPEG compression style algorithm on these images.

So, I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, but just to kind of reiterate, what JPEG compression does is you might have an image that's a hundred megabytes,

But to save room on your computer, on your phone, maybe you can remove a lot of information from that image.

So you throw away a lot of information.

Your eye might not be able to tell that anything has changed, but maybe you've taken this image that's 100 megabytes and now it's down to 10 megabytes.

So you've saved so much room on your phone or your computer.

So we ran these JPEG-style algorithms on hundreds of nature and urban images, and we did find that more natural images tended to get compressed down into fewer bits than the urban images, suggesting that, you know,

There is more compression.

There's more throwing away of information in nature scenes and urban scenes.

And remember, too, this is based, you know, these JPEG compression algorithms were based on human visual perception, right?

They work well because they've been tuned to how the human eye sees things.

Actually, I didn't even know that.

It's not purely mechanical.

Yeah, it's tuned for humans.

Although we could ask, you know, you had L.V.

Smith here.

He probably knows quite a bit more about this than I do.

Showing 281–300 of 637 · page 15 of 32