I was looking at deinterlacing filters and saw the term "laplacian" come up again. I wondered to myself, "what does that mean anyway, and how does it relate to video processing?"
So I said, "wikipedia, explain what laplacian means" and upon reading the first paragraph felt like I'd been drag-and-dropped into the middle of the Pacific ocean, left to fend for myself. This sounds more like Star Trek technobabble than Star Trek technobabble. This reads like the exaggerated parody of Star Trek technobabble. I lowkey love it. It's like peeking into a Pandora's box of a whole other side of human interest and then gently closing the lid again going "I'm not going down that rabbit hole."
wasn't that one of the spears in Evangelion or something.
brb gotta convolve my Gaussian so it doesn't turn into a dark blob. Gotta avoid those dark blobs, y'know. That's why I never go out without my multi-scale blob detector with automatic scale selection. Thank god for that scale-normalized Laplacian operator or I don't know how we'd all still be alive.
I just wanted to learn more about deinterlacing.
"imaginary numbers are real" - things only those bitten by the rabies known as mathematics would utter
very, "the audience for wikipedia articles are the people on the talk page" vibes on this one
As a Math Knower, Wikipedia is not good with intro-level explanations for things. The average intro paragraph for a topic basically how you would explain it to someone with a PhD in a different area of mathematics.
This article is an example of a common pattern where a simpler topic is explained in terms of more complicated topics that are also more general. By contrast, if you were explaining to a lay audience, or even an undergrad-level Math audience, you would probably explain in terms of simpler or less-abstract topics.
This example also has the Math Brain cardinal sin of explaining things in terms of what they are rather than what they're for or why anyone cares. The "motivation" section is about two screens down; I would have led with that, because anyone who's going to Wikipedia to find out what the Laplacian is, that's the part they need to hear first.
I like that I've drawn the attention of Math Cohost™ though, y'all have good luck explaining what any of this means to a guy who barely managed to comprehend high school grade algebra and financial math
