1 guest wrote:
verbalobe wrote:
...ORYR:
New Evidence: Obama's Digital Birth Certificate; Metadata and Object Code Prove ForgeryMara Zebest wrote:
...colors displayed that are NOT within a pure (grayscale color value) range of black.
WTF is a "pure range of black"?
She's a moron.
Well, she is a moron, but not in this case. Colors on digital images have three components - there are different versions, but you end up with the same results. The RGB version is the most commonly used. You have a Red component, a Green component, and a Blue component. For the "pure (grayscale color value) range of black" all three of those components are equal. Thus you would have a color like R240,G240,B240 or R133,G133,B133.
That's not a birtherism, and it's in no way racist. It just
is.
I agree it's not a racist dog-whistle.
However, my 'moron' comment was more aimed at the sloppy use of language. I know all about RGB and the rest -- and on reflection I think you've accurately divined what she was getting at -- but black is black. There is no 'range of black.' Thus there is no 'pure range of black.' She really meant 'pure range of gray', if anything. Picky, I know.
More to the point, she is challenging someone to come up with a Quartz-generated PDF that exhibits -- via automated optimization -- the exact characteristics of the Obama online LFBC. She seems pretty confident that it won't be accomplished. But isn't it curious that she doesn't also issue a similar challenge to come up with a completely manually constructed PDF that exhibits the same characteristics?
Start with the elements that a forger might have: A clean background of security paper, individual scanned elements of signatures, stamps, and seals and the like, a scan of all the letters typed out by a period typewriter, a scan of an original 1961 LFBC form... now combine them on layers in Photoshop, and create
exactly the same result as the online LFBC: signatures split apart so as to appear on different layers, typographic elements fractured onto different layers, etc., and it has to be high-resolution enough to produce the AP version, but
also exhibit the exact pixellation and haloing as the LFBC, the same 24/48% scaling, the same rotation of the original elements, and -- this is key -- no
other characteristics.
I'm not entirely sure it's possible at all, but if it is, it would take many hours more -- or extraordinary Photoshop expertise -- to arrive at that result, for
no earthly reason. You'd have someone who'd have done maybe 10-, 20-times the amount of work necessary -- why? To put parts of Ann Dunham's signature on two different layers, merging part of it with some typographic elements from another source, and some linear form elements from yet a third source? And then 'knocking out' the background security paper completely unnecessarily, and carefully scaling each part so as to mimic the automated optimization of Quartz? And then editing the exif data?
Pretty soon -- goalpost alert! -- the birthers will be claiming NOT that the forger was a bumbling moron who forgot to flatten the image, but rather that he was a top virtuoso image expert, highly schooled in rare and arcane secret NSA methods of manually creating PDFs that
flawlessly pretend to be the result of optimized scans.....
