Re: tonal inversion and pigment loads

Don,

I agree with Katharine. It is not good form to tell other people on the
list in which way they may carry a discussion on a topic
or, even worse, to stop it.

There are perhaps six or seven people interested in varying degrees in
this inversion effect. The rest just bear with us and
probably ignore and delete our posts without ever reading them. I do the
same with posts of people interested in platinum,
for example, a beautiful technique that I'm simply not be interested in.

You speak of the 'average gum printer'. Is there such a thing on this
list? If so, how many? Have you counted them? And how do
you know that they are not even slightly interested in this discussion?
Have you conducted a poll?

If you have not measured this supposed lack of interest, you might also
be guilty of specious attributing, to use your words.

But to answer your questions: no, in my case I have not measured the
static charges involved. Not for lack of interest but because of
lack of a laboratory and the necessary skills. I suspect that the others
have the same limitation. So we interchange observations,
discuss results, hoping that someone will come up with a feasible test,
another explanation, another hypothesis. I can understand
that this process will be extremely boring for someone, but in that
case, as Katharine says, just skip the thread.

Tom Sobota
Madrid, Spain

Katharine Thayer wrote:
> 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 17:44:06 2006