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IMHO an under-explored bit of intuition is crops in the frequency domain.

If you want to try this for yourself grab a megabyte of photos of “conventionally attractive” selfies and a megabyte of selfies chosen at random and gzip them.

I’m personally not all that symmetrical so I don’t compress all that well. But I suspect you’ll find that “pretty” people compress better.

Same experiment with pop music vs serious jazz, same result.

I have a pet theory that everything from caffeine to alcohol is cropping in the Fourier domain.

It’s a fun experiment, try it out!



I don't believe that, especially because jpeg is already compressed using Fourier analysis before you gzip it using non-Fourier compress.


I was being a bit flip when I said gzip, a lossless mechanism is unlikely to give much insight!

I should have said JPEG or 264 or something: a DCT is what I meant.

Thank you for the correction.


What do you mean by crop in frequency domain? Low pass filtering i.e. removing higher frequency components?


I hope I adequately advertised this as personal metaphysics, certainly I don’t have figures that I can share.

Asymmetry, blemish, teeth a different color than the corpus all consume entropy in the Shannon sense.

In a very real sense, movie stars are the most boring people to take still photos of.




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