Wednesday

I think I may have made a major breakthrough on a filter today. It isn't working right now, so I must be typing it in wrong, because it should work in theory. I am hoping to get Dr. Oldham's help tomorrow. I don't want to say too much before I have something presentable, but if this works out it will be going in my final project.

Tuesday

Today I made what might be described as a visual pun.

original

Get it?

Monday

My idea this weekend about pasting the image into a canvas to resize it was stupid. That's still only going to double the size of the picture. Lacking Photoshop on my laptop, I Googled a solution. I resized the image using "paint." Did you know you can do that?! I learned something today. Anyway, here's the image. I may go back and work on that residual green. I'm still trying to decide if it's worth it.

 

Update: I used the picture tool to zoom in on the green pixels, and the lowest threshold I needed was 0.78. When I got all the green pixels out, P-Roush started to look a little blocky. Maybe it's just the size of the image.

Unplanned Assignment 2

Please forgive me as, from this point forward, I use the American spelling of "color." (I will try not to get carried away, lest I find myself attending "Center College.")

It seems to me that the people who think that bits have color, to continue the metaphor, are the same people who think that computers are intelligent.

Also, I was very dissatisfied with the author's assertion that source is color. The same bits that compose any of Shakespeare's sonnets are never going to  be generated by a random number generator. "Yeah, but they could." No, my computer would crash if I tried to compute how astronomically low the odds are. If Z were the universe's circumference in femtometers (meters * 10^-15), it would be 1 to Z^(Z^Z). Source is tangibly present. It is not the same as the "color' of the
two "4:33"s, which does not exist.

Response to Lab Step 2

Was Robert Silvers' work sufficiently "nonobvious" to merit a patent? Of course it was. The first time I saw a photomosaic, I thought to myself, "Wow, cool! That's a great idea." I did not think, "Well, duh. I could've done that." If the idea were obvious, photomosaics would have emerged decades ago, long before the first digital photography. Yet, digital cameras were commercially available for 5 years before Silvers patented his algorithm.

Should code be eligible for a patent? Again, the answer is clear.  It is intellectual property. Code is something invented, like so many other great innovations, not something discovered, like mathematical formulas. A person generous enough to share their invention with the world deserves to get credit for its creation.

This Weekend

This weekend, I resisted the temptation to paste President Roush into a variety of potentially compromising locations, and instead settled for pasting him into the cast of Jersey Shore. I didn't get very far, because I ran into trouble with the size of the image (P-Roush is approximately 2/3 the height of Snooki), which became a problem because the scale would not scale down the background image by 2/3. I believe the solution to this problem may be to paste P-Roush into a canvas, resize the canvas, and then crop the canvas out. I have nothing presentable to show at this point, but there may be a finished version to come later.

Plan

I plan to make my project a photomosaic. It will be a composite image of Andy Warhol. I am going for an artistic statement that is not quite irony, but rather that oddly appropriate feeling that there is no term for. Right now my plan is to make the composite image a compilation of thousands of the same image, but this plan may evolve over time to become a compilation of his artwork. I will use methods we have learned in class, such as creating a canvas, tiling images, and blending.

Thursday

Tuesday

What I did in lab today:

original

If you are sensing a theme here, that is because Audrey is the single most gorgeous person who ever lived. Also, purple is my favoite color. I would much rather look at purple than red. The picture was originally pretty bright, so I had to raise both thresholds a little bit.

In other news, I have no idea where I am going with this project. I really need to come up with something so I can blog about it.

Monday

This is the sepia that I came up with during class on Monday. I actually made it in response to step 1, before reading any of the rest of the lab, and by coincidence it was almost identical to sepia 2.

original

Response to Carr

The most important benefits of e-books that I immediately see are accessibility and the ease of correcting typographical errors. Accessibility is the factor that has popularized e-books in the first place. Every time I buy textbooks, I'm onboard. My choices are to make the 5-mile hike to the bookstore in the freezing rain, or order from home and wait 5 to seven business days for my books to show up, and either way half my money goes to paper and ink? I think I'll pass. And how often have you found a typo in a book and thought to yourself, "That's not a word. Who got paid to edit this thing?" knowing that it would not be corrected until the next printing (maybe). It would be satisfying to know that you could post a comment in a forum and have a corrected version of your book in your hands this week.

Convenience, however, comes at a high price. The benefits of e-books are overshadowed by the possibility of manipulation. The very word "censorship" leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but it is a legitimate threat when media becomes digitized. The possibility of perpetual revision is also disconcerting, but digital media is the present and future, so we must learn to deal with its mutable nature. This is not an issue to be dealt with through legislation. When I read the phrase, "Such abuses can be prevented through laws," the anarchist-leaning libertarian in me shouted "I object!" Publishing protocol should be to assign a new edition number each time an edit beyond the correction of minor typographical errors occurs, in order to make it clear that the text differs from earlier editions. This introduces yet another obstacle. Can you imagine a trying to teach a piece of literature in the classroom? Teachers would stand in front of classes and say, "Make sure you download The Invisible Man edition 19.2; edition 19.3 is crap." For now, I am going to choose to have enough faith in my country to trust that its government would not be authoritarian enough to severely censor my books, and say that the ethical treatment of digital text is ultimately the responsibility of publishers, and the demand thereof is the responsibility of consumers. Citizens of countries under such authoritarian rule can't afford e-readers anyway.

What I Did This Weekend

I realize it's not much to look at. My goal was to show only the yellow flowers in color, then only the orange, only red, etc. I don't know why I made it my goal for the weekend. These pictures have nothing to do with my project so far, but we were putting things in grayscale on Friday, so it seemed to make sense at the time. I didn't quite get them where I wanted them to be; this is what I settled for.