Re: tonal inversion and pigment loads

On Jan 30, 2006, at 8:39 AM, altprinter wrote:

> Katharine,
>
>
>
>> I like your idea that it's probably some sort of static charge that's
>> holding the loose pigment to the substrate in areas where there's no
>> hardened gum, and where the pigment hasn't penetrated fibers to
>> create an indelible stain, and I think your insight about that is a
>> great contribution.
>>
>>
>
> Has anyone tried to measure the static charge involved? Without
> doing any measurments, just attributing this affect to static
> charges is just specious.
>

Goodness, Don, these are just ideas people are throwing out as
possible hypotheses to explain an interesting phenomenon; I think
Jack's idea is a good one, but of course it's just a hypothesis so
far; I'd think that would be obvious. But that's where science
starts, with hypotheses.

>
> Of course I suppose most of what has been exprressed thus far about
> tonal inversion is simply conjecture based on emperical observations.
>

Anything that's ever said about gum here, is nothing but conjecture
based on empirical observation. If we prohibited conjecture based on
empirical observation, there wouldn't be anything left that anyone
could say about gum printing, period.

>
> Frankly, I don't see that tonal inversion matters to the average
> gum printer since inversion seems to be an anomaly of the process
> rather than the norm.
>

But the problem is that when you're the guy with the anomaly, then it
matters a lot. Like the person who came on here recently to say that
he was starting to print gum and he couldn't get anything *but*
inversions. In cases like that, it would be very useful to be able
to tell him what causes it and what he needs to do to fix it.

Perhaps a distant analogy, but think about learning how to read. Most
people learn to read easily and quickly; many grasp it seemingly
whole in an instant. But when someone can't read, then it's a very
big problem, and whole sub-departments of neurology in teaching
hospitals have been set up to look at what is going on in the brain
when a person can't read. (I spent a year as an intern in one of
those sub-departments once, and believe me, understanding how the gum
process works is a piece of cake compared to understanding how the
brain works).

By the same token, in alternative processes, as Mark said the other
day, sometimes it's the anomalies that make you sit up and pay
attention, and it's the anomalies that help you learn something
important about how something works. To me, the most interesting
thing in considering the tonal inversion anomaly is the light it
might shed on the question of top-down hardening.

>
> In short why all the fuss over this? You guys are becoming obessive
> and keep repeating the same things over and over.
>

If the discussion annoys you, why are you reading it? There are
enough things in this world to be annoyed about without deliberately
causing yourself annoyance by reading things that make you unhappy.
But you don't have the right to kill a discussion about gum printing
just because it doesn't interest you personally.

Besides, this discussion is still evolving; new observations have
been made even in the last couple of days, so it's hardly just going
around and around in the same circles, as it apparently looks to you.
But I don't understand why you would let yourself get all wound up
about this anyway. Even a discussion that's going around in circles
will eventually die out of its own accord, and setting yourself up as
a judge of when a discussion should end isn't going to make it end
any sooner. If the discussion doesn't interest you, don't read it.
The subject line on this thread indicates that it is clearly about
tonal inversion, so you aren't being forced to read about tonal
inversion unless you choose to. My mail program lets me delete a
whole thread without reading any of it, and I often do that, when I
don't find the discussion interesting. Why not do that, and be happy?
Katharine Thayer
Received on Mon Jan 30 12:53:50 2006