SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Digital imaging pioneer Russell Kirsch dies at 91 – TechCrunch:
Russell Kirsch, whose research going back to the '50s underlies the entire field of digital imaging, died earlier this week at the age of 91. It's hard to overstate the impact of his work, which led to the first digitally scanned photo and the creation of what we now think of as pixels.
Born to Russian and Hungarian immigrant parents in 1929, Kirsch attended NYU, Harvard and MIT, eventually landing a job at the National Bureau of Standards (later the National Institutes of Science and Technology) that he would keep for the rest of his working life.
Although he researched, coded and theorized for 50 years and even after his retirement, his most famous accomplishment is no doubt the first scanned digital image — decades before the first digital camera.
[...] This foundational work led directly to the creation of methods, algorithms and storage techniques for digital images that would inform decades of computer science. Kirsch continued his work on early AI right up until retirement, and even then continued tinkering with his idea of adaptive pixels that would enable much clearer images at lower resolutions. The idea has merit, naturally, though memory and bandwidth aren't quite the bottlenecks they once were.
Throughout his life Kirsch and his wife, who survives him with their children, were also travelers, climbers and artists. No doubt his rich life contributed to his important work and vice versa.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by looorg on Sunday August 16 2020, @02:25PM (1 child)
This 91 year old you never heard of that created something you rely on every single day. I guess you could at least take a second or two out of your very busy day, or life, to make note of his passing.
There are other and probably more suitable places if you want to discuss and talk about the current world, political-, news then this place. I guess we just use this place for radically different things. I come here to mainly read interesting things that are not really part of the mainstream news or world-problems.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Sunday August 16 2020, @04:54PM
The irony being that top poster had to use a device with a pixel display in order to grace us with their opinion on how unimportant the inventor of said pixels is compared to other news of the day.
I fully concur with you. If I want my daily dose of human-created insanity, I can visit any of the myriad of news site out there that cater to the general public with regards to current affairs . Sites that cater to nerdy pursuits are not as common, as we are at the end of the day, a minority in the world. So I am happy if a specialist site such as Soylent caters to the more nerdy news out there, and long may it continue.
Saying that, said top poster could have better spent their time submitting the stories under the "Politics" topic if they feel so strongly. At least there would be a chance they get published (although it may help if they have some kind of nerdy angle)
General news I can find all over the place. The death of Russell Kirsch, not so easily. I read some of his work in the 00's when I was doing research for an image search engine. So many thanks for your contributions to computing and imagery, and may you Rest In Peace.