Series

Area — the series

2 essays on one idea, from the one that introduces it to the one that assumes the rest.
  1. the photographthe ground, rectified5.205 m²four marks fix the plane; the shoelace does the rest1.8e-14

    An area, out of one photograph

    A patch of ground comes back at 5.205 m² from one photograph, to 1.8 × 10⁻¹⁴, through a homography built from four marks and their four known positions. What is worth knowing is how it degrades — the patch's extent across the picture is read with an error growing as the depth, its extent into the picture with an error growing as the depth squared, and at twenty-eight metres the two are sixteen times apart — which is the depth divided by the camera's height.

    part 1 · metrology
  2. 21 of 36 tiles still countablethe floor starts 18 m away

    Counting is a measurement

    A tiled floor gives its area with no reference length at all — count the tiles and multiply. The count is an integer, so it is exact wherever it can be made, which is a completely different error law from the rectifier's smooth decay. And the distance at which it fails is set by the tile's depth edge, which foreshortens as one over the depth squared, so 18.7 m for a 62 cm tile, where the across edge alone would have allowed 217.

    part 2 · metrology

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