"I'm interested in the fakeness of all those colorful photographs of the universe that we've been looking at all these years."

I said, in the course of contemplating what Maureen Dowd said about Robert Redford's hair and after reading that "There are no 'natural color' cameras aboard the Hubble and never have been. The optical cameras on board have all been digital CCD cameras, which take images as grayscale pixels." I also tweaked "the atheist Christopher Hitchens" for "burbling about 'the color and depth and majesty' of the Hubble photographs as he urges us to see the revelations of science as more awe-inspiring than the old stories told by religions." I exclaimed: "But the color is fake! The purveyors of science, like religionists, can scam us too."

Reader Gabriel Hanna emails:

To say that something is a scam [is] to say it is dishonest and done for financial gain.  

Now, technically, I did not say the color in the Hubble photographs is a scam. I said it was fake, and then, in a separate sentence, I stated a generality — "The purveyors of science, like religionists, can scam us too" — which is my standard warning to pay attention and be skeptical.

Astronomers, it is true, are largely taxpayer-supported, they are using the Hubble images to convince people to pay for astronomy. But the other element of a scam is dishonesty, and I do not agree that the Hubble images are dishonest — or if they are, they are no more dishonest than any photography.

Light is inherently greyscale, there is no color in it.  Light has only frequency.  Human eyes are sensitive to three sets of frequencies, and the human brain interprets these as color.  All cameras have to "fake" color in the sense that you accuse Hubble astronomers of faking color, because a machine cannot record a subjective human experience.

Hubble, like any digital camera, records numbers that correspond to frequencies of light.  The colors are put into the images by the algorithm that converts the numbers to an image.  In a film camera the data is collected and stored chemically and the developing process does what software does for digital cameras.

When a photographer adjusts white balance, or shoots in sepia, that is "false color" in the exact sense it is for Hubble images.  We do not call that dishonest in the case of digital photography, and it is not a scam even if the photographer sells the photographs.  Like digital photography, most Hubble images are boring, and for public consumption astronomers select the beautiful ones in the same way that a blogger takes hundreds of shots before she gets one good enough to post. Like digital photography, brightness and white balance of Hubble images might well be adjusted, or colors altered in the same way as shooting in sepia, but if we don't call it a scam in the one case we ought not to call it one in the other.

It is especially unfair in that Hubble extends human capabilities to non-visible wavelengths.  It seems very unfair to say that honesty demands that all radio or x-ray astronomy images be rendered in flat black because humans cannot see those colors, and to do anything else is a "scam."

But I stand by my warning. The scientists do want our money, as Hanna concedes. And people like Hitchens call us to replace religion with science because science is so beautiful. If scientists, seeking dominance, punch up the beauty of their images, we must take that into account as we analyze arguments and implicit pleas for money that are based on the beauty of what they are showing us. The art photographer — processing the camera's digital file — is forthrightly guided by aesthetics. The Hubble images can be presented as artwork manipulated for aesthetic pleasure, but to the extent that they are not — as in Hitchens's argument — it is rational and scientific to catch a whiff of scam.

"And Mr. Chandor can verify to skeptics Mr. Redford’s claim that his hair remains naturally Hubbell strawberry blond."

"His locks survived the months of sun and chlorine, with no colorist in sight," writes Maureen Dowd in that NYT article that we're already talking about in that first post of the day.

“No one believes me,” Mr. Redford said. “Even my kids didn’t believe me. I keep thinking of Reagan. It’s freaking me out.”

Chandor is J. C. Chandor, the director of Redford's new movie, "All Is Lost," which is a seafaring tale, hence the "sun and chlorine."

Dowd doesn't say whether she believes him, but she quotes "No one believes me" without stating her view. She has the mysterious line "Mr. Chandor can verify," but did she ask Mr. Chandor, and who can believe that Mr. Chandor watched Mr. Redford at all times? Who thinks Ronald Reagan didn't dye his hair? But it's nice of Robert Redford to keep thinking about Ronald Reagan. These slow-aging Hollywood RRs need to stick together with their age-defying secrets.

What does Hubbell refer to in "naturally Hubbell strawberry blond"? The Hubbell telescope? "There are no 'natural color' cameras aboard the Hubble and never have been. The optical cameras on board have all been digital CCD cameras, which take images as grayscale pixels." It's Hubble, not Hubbell, so it can't be that — though I'm interested in the fakeness of all those colorful photographs of the universe that we've been looking at all these years.

Here's the atheist Christopher Hitchens burbling about "the color and depth and majesty" of the Hubble photographs as he urges us to see the revelations of science as more awe-inspiring than the old stories told by religions:



But the color is fake! The purveyors of science, like religionists, can scam us too.

Now, back to the possible scam of the color of Robert Redford's hair. And I got a sudden inspiration about the meaning of Hubbell. Some character Redford played long ago? I go to his IMDB page and search. Ah! It's the name of the guy he played in "The Way We Were." Am I ashamed not to have known? Absolutely not! I'm damned proud I never saw that movie. It was back in 1973 too, when we went to see every movie we thought was supposed to be good. We knew better.

In the comments at that first post of the day, Amexpat calls bullshit on Redford:

He hasn't aged honestly or gracefully (Paul Newman did a better job at that). His hair looks ridiculous for a man his age.

I note that he claims it's all natural, and the lovely redhead Maureen Dowd backs him up at least insofar as no one on set saw a hairdresser. I offer a poem parody (original here):

Who has seen the hairdresser
Neither you nor I
But when the 77-year-old has yellow hair
The hairdresser has passed by

One of the stated themes of that post is "Where's God?" (which came up in the context of Redford's sidekick Nick Nolte, who asked the question in the context of saying you'll kill yourself trying to answer it). So I say:

Where's God?

With the hairdresser.

But that's a joke, everyone knows that like Nick Nolte, God has gray hair:



What if God were one of us? He might go grocery shopping with Nick Nolte:



But go ahead, if you're the creative type — you don't have to be as creative as The Creator (He's so creative!) —  to take that iconic Michelangelo image of God and photoshop us a post-hairdresser pic, with God's flowing tresses rejuvenated into Hubbell strawberry blond.

Here:



You could change Adam into Robert Redford. Did you know that in the movie "All Is Lost," Robert Redford's character is called only "Our Man" and that in the Bible, Adam means "man"? Anyway, the scenario here in this imagined photoshop is God and The Man at The Hairdresser. They look about ready to consult The Manicurist. While we're punching up awe-inspiring images with color, it's probably time to repaint God's pink dress. Maybe something effulgently red, gold, and green, like the colors with which a science huckster would infuse the Hubble's pixels.

"I don’t see myself as beautiful. I was a kid who was freckle-faced, and they used to call me 'hay head.'"

Said Robert Redford, who also reports that when he was 18, studying art in Italy and France, the women there did not find him attractive.

So — if we can believe that — even the prettiest pretty boy may still fall within the shadow of the old adage "You're only pretty as you feel."

Now, after years of recognition as incredibly good-looking — he's 77 — he says:

"And I guess the nice thing about getting older is that you don’t have that [beauty] quite so much anymore. I never had a problem with my face on screen. I thought it is what it is, and I was turned off by actors and actresses that tried to keep themselves young."

That face is the only face we get to see in his new movie — "All Is Lost" — in which he's (apparently) the only actor.  I've seen the trailer. He's lost at sea. Tom Hanks is also having lonesome, though not that lonesome, trouble at sea in a big movie this fall, and Sandra Bullock is alone in a space suit, bereft even of gravity in a grave situation in "Gravity."

It must say something about us that we're being presented with tales of rugged individualists far adrift from any foundation. Did we ask for that? It's what Hollywood decided, back when this fall's movies were given the go, that we'd need in the Fall of 2013. There's no reason to give much credence to Hollywood's notion of who we are right now. Hollywood thought we were the Lone Ranger and Tonto last summer, and the people said no. Perhaps the Lone Ranger isn't lone enough for our alienated psyches. He had Tonto. Where's my sidekick? the public that shunned "The Lone Ranger" might have thought. How can we identify with his loneliness when he has Johnny Depp?

Robert Redford famously had a sidekick, Paul Newman, in the 2 movies that made him seem to be even more handsome than the already-impossibly-handsome Paul Newman — "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting." And Redford did have another movie in the works with Newman — a movie version of Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods" (my second-most-listened-to audiobook). Newman died 5 years ago, but now the news is that it will be made with the not-always-completely-cute Nick Nolte. If you know the book, you may agree with me that Nolte seems more like Bryson's "Walk in the Woods" sidekick Stephen Katz than does Paul Newman.

You might think Newman was more like Katz because he was (half) Jewish. ("Newman had no religion as an adult, but described himself as a Jew, saying, 'it's more of a challenge.'") Nolte, on the other hand, is (apparently) a man disconnected from any particular religion. ("'Where’s God?' You’re gonna kill yourself with that. You’ll never be able to answer that.")

But Bryson's Katz — despite the distinctively Jewish name — is not Jewish, as Bryson reveals in his memoir of childhood, "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" (my most-listened-to audiobook):

Some years ago when I came to apply a pseudonym to one of my boyhood friends, I chose the name Stephen Katz partly in honor of a Des Moines drugstore called Katz’s, which was something of a local institution in my childhood, and partly because I wanted a short name that was easy to type. Never did it occur to me that the name was Semitic. I never thought of anybody in Des Moines as being Jewish. I don’t believe anyone did. Even when they had names like Wasserstein and Liebowitz, it was always a surprise to learn they were Jewish. Des Moines wasn’t a very ethnic place.

Anyway, Katz wasn’t Jewish. He was Catholic.

You've come to the end of this longish first-post-of-the-day, and maybe you're wondering, What are we supposed to talk about now? The issues are: beauty, aging, loneliness, sidekicks, floating adrift without foundation, the extent to which Hollywood may know who we really are, and Where's God?