About This Blog

I kept this blog during my First Year Studies class at Centre College in 2012. The class was called Topics in Computing: Multimedia Bit by Bit. It was centered around manipulating photos with code, by customizing filters provided by the professor and by experimenting with our own, all in Jython. Most posts show the products of said experimentation, though some are class discussions.

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.