From: Phil Mercurio Subject: Re: CONF: SIGGRAPH "nanosex" panel Date: 16 Aug 1993 20:49:20 GMT Organization: San Diego Supercomputer Center @ UCSD My wife and I both attended the panel (she's a grad student in Russian Lit). The speaker you're talking about is Joan Snavely (sp?). We talked about the panel for about an hour afterward, especially about Joan's totally inane comments on Cartesian coordinates. Best we can figure, she was using a figure of speech called metonymy, in which a part of something is used to refer to the whole. In this case, we think what she was complaining about realism (as in photorealism) in CG, and using Cartesian coordinates as a (poor) stand-in. [Insert gross generalization warning here:] A realistic image of a naked woman will be arousing to many men, while an equivalent image of a man won't be arousing to women. Women can be aroused by visual imagery just as men can, but the sort of imagery women find appealing is more than just photorealistic, it has to tell/contain a story. As my wife put it, she couldn't imagine a picture of a naked man just sitting there that she would find arousing. Women see erotic imagery more holistically, while men take more of a reductionist, body-parts sort of view (NTTAWWT). This, to the best of our figuring, is what Joan was trying to say, although she did a very poor job of it. Chris Shaw's assessment of "intellectual laziness" is right on the mark. --- Phil Mercurio Advanced Scientific Visualization Lab mercurio@sdsc.edu San Diego Supercomputer Center "It's never too late to have a happy childhood." -- Tom Robbins