Emma Bovary's eyes are irrevocably black.
I spent a wonderful five days in France last week, during which I bought a copy of Flaubert's great novel and remembered how Emma Bovary's eyes have steered a great deal of controversy and how Julian Barnes has so wittingly criticized literary critics, using the colour of Emma's eyes as a starting point, in his great book about Flaubert. (chapter 6 for the lazy ones)
Emma Bovary's eyes are naturally black.
Nonetheless there is a flowing ambiguity when it comes to their appearance. Sometimes they appear blue, others brown, most of the times it's hard to tell. Given my somewhat frustrating situation at work it is hard not to think about Emma's eyes when I look at the results on the screen of my computer. Quite often the numbers appear reasonable, but sometimes they acquire rather unfamiliar values, strange shapes and weird distributions. But science -we have been told- is objective, therefore my plots and numbers should be naturally making sense, or not. There should be no inbetweens, no greyzones, no conflicting conclusions. Alas, this is not the case.
Emma Bovary's eyes are most ardently black.
But the real wonder in them is their ever-changing impression, their transcendental hues, their unequivocal ambiguity. Sadly though, Emma Bovary is a fictional character of a great French novel while my results are the mere outcome of a poorly supported, sloppily applied algorithm. And since poor science cannot even remotely compare to the literature of masterpieces, my plots' changing shapes have nothing transcendental or charming, romantic or mysterious. These are simply bad results. There is nevertheless something comforting about them and this is exactly the fact that when one (me in this case) tries to present them in their lack of clarity, when one tries to explain why a plot of the same kind looks sharp in Figure 1 and suddenly bends over in Figure 4b, the resulting feeling is more to the frustration than to the amusement of the reader. Science, it is, cannot be converted to literature, the romantic ambiguities remain safe under the pen of geniouses of a different caliber and we are ascertained that the joy we get from a good book will never be spoiled by bad science.
Emma Bovary's eyes are naturally black.
Nonetheless there is a flowing ambiguity when it comes to their appearance. Sometimes they appear blue, others brown, most of the times it's hard to tell. Given my somewhat frustrating situation at work it is hard not to think about Emma's eyes when I look at the results on the screen of my computer. Quite often the numbers appear reasonable, but sometimes they acquire rather unfamiliar values, strange shapes and weird distributions. But science -we have been told- is objective, therefore my plots and numbers should be naturally making sense, or not. There should be no inbetweens, no greyzones, no conflicting conclusions. Alas, this is not the case.
Emma Bovary's eyes are most ardently black.
But the real wonder in them is their ever-changing impression, their transcendental hues, their unequivocal ambiguity. Sadly though, Emma Bovary is a fictional character of a great French novel while my results are the mere outcome of a poorly supported, sloppily applied algorithm. And since poor science cannot even remotely compare to the literature of masterpieces, my plots' changing shapes have nothing transcendental or charming, romantic or mysterious. These are simply bad results. There is nevertheless something comforting about them and this is exactly the fact that when one (me in this case) tries to present them in their lack of clarity, when one tries to explain why a plot of the same kind looks sharp in Figure 1 and suddenly bends over in Figure 4b, the resulting feeling is more to the frustration than to the amusement of the reader. Science, it is, cannot be converted to literature, the romantic ambiguities remain safe under the pen of geniouses of a different caliber and we are ascertained that the joy we get from a good book will never be spoiled by bad science.
Emma Bovary's eyes are wonderfully black.
Strangely enough, your picture reminds me of someone's eyes (someone... but who could that be?)
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