Reading Response 4 - Skip Brea

Cory Arcangel in On Compression overall had me very interested in the concepts of the two kinds of compression. Lossless, and Lossy’s were made very interesting in that the examples that Arcangel uses are examples that I can relate with. Arcangel had a valid argument that even today the fastest way of sending large amounts of data is by physical mail. I tried taking a look at the math that he challenged us to take a look at; in general looking at all of the formulas was very overwhelming, but looking over the formulas was also very impressive do my lack of strength in the areas of mathematics.

             Arcangel uses the simplest way of helping the reader understand what are the two kinds of compressions. Lossless being the first, doesn’t lose any information from the original source which makes it excellent for sending text; this type of compression shortens the data by making it easy to transport, storing more information and using less space. Arcangel compares it to the opposite of a zip file, making it easier for me to understand. Continuing onto the lossy compression, which loses data, I would say is one of the most common compressions often used. In today’s society we have people who send images, videos, and music back and forth more than anything else due to the media being one of our biggest advancements. His explanation for the lossy compression was a little bit more sophisticated than the lossless, but his examples in the figures really got the point across, making the visual and mental connection between what he’s saying and what he’s showing really helped.

            The visual and mental connection really came in handy when he began talking about the Discrete Cosine Transform, which is a math formula in the lossy compression. If it wouldn’t have been for the Figure examples I would’ve been completely lost. Also it was interesting learning about quantization, which is a way to discard DCT coefficients. I would have to say my favorite part of the whole article was a tie between finding out what a JPEG really meant, or the fact that he uses a picture of Jay-Z, and Beyonce as an example.