Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦

Even modern gorillas, orangutans, or bears walk quite upright when they’re bipedal

I asked @barackobama.bsky.social if aliens are real.

Our Office at McGill, dedicated to separating sense from nonsense for the public, was founded by three chemists in 1999. Earlier this morning, one of them, David Harpp, passed away.

David had a sharp mind and a kindness about him that I will miss dearly.

www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/...

This is terrific, and I hate it, thanks

The Gold Rush of Testosterone Replacement Therapy If you’ve never injected yourself with dog semen, don’t worry: someone has done it for you. Seventy-one years after the initial publication of Frankenstein, the medical journal The Lancet would dedica...

Testosterone Replacement Therapy is everywhere you look and, unfortunately, the evidence does not support the near-miraculous claims made for it.

It has its uses but it's not a fountain of youth.

My latest for @mcgilloss.bsky.social.

www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/...

All about "reactionary centrism" Michael Hobbes joins me to diagnose the pundit class's obsession with scolding the left while the right burns down the house.

Today on Volts: I'm joined by the great @michaelhobbes.bsky.social to discuss "reactionary centrism," an intellectual tendency that's come to dominate US public life. You know the type: would never view themselves as conservative, yet finds voluntary pronoun use vastly more aggravating than fascism.

If you are instead rephotographing images (even just with your phone) you need to account not just for squaring up the rotation of the image relative to the camera, but also pitch and yaw. You want the camera sensor square to the image surface, because fixing image distortion later is also lossy

For your… scanning needs? A suitably nerdy thread

Without getting too much into image manipulation in this thread, do pay attention to the tools your image software offers to preserve quality—file types again, but also adjustment layers, and what Photoshop calls smart layers. These preserve the underlying information until final output

Many adjustments you may want to make to the scanned image are lossy—rotation, again, but also stuff like sharpening and cropping. You’re better off having extra resolution you can afford to throw away. (When resizing up or down, default to increases to 200% and decreases to 50% where possible)

Not every use case calls for insane resolution or quality, but I’ve never thought “I wish I captured less.” You can size down later much more easily than you can size up. Print demands high resolution, and if you’re doing photo restoration you want to be able to pixel peep right down to the grain

Similarly, whether using a scanner or camera, you want the image in focus!! High resolution doesn’t matter if it’s blurry. This is often an issue when scanning slides or negatives, as desktop scanners have essentially zero depth of field. Any bending or distance off the glass is going to be blurry

If you’re using a scanner, make your scan at the machine’s maximum resolution, and in full color, even if the image or your ultimate use purpose are in black and white—again, capturing as much information as possible. Do not jar the scanner while scanning! I’ve had pro shops deliver high res garbage

If you are instead rephotographing images (even just with your phone) you need to account not just for squaring up the rotation of the image relative to the camera, but also pitch and yaw. You want the camera sensor square to the image surface, because fixing image distortion later is also lossy

Then, position your source image completely square on the scanner bed! Pixels are literally a bunch of discrete squares, so you lose information any time you need to rotate a digital image by anything other than increments of 90 degrees. Rotate the physical image to square to begin with, or rescan

This is a bit advanced, but some old photos may have fingerprints or crud that can be washed off by totally immersing the photo in water, gently rubbing, then hanging the photo to dry or lying flat to dry on a silkscreen-type surface. Never spot apply liquid to a photograph though!

You want the scanner bed to be clean and as free as possible of all dust and debris. You also want to blow any dust off your source image. (“Clean” is relative and impossible—ask NASA!—but do your best, it will save time later)

If you’re using a scanner, you want one with very high resolution; software settings that allow you to turn off noise removal, automatic rotation, and any other auto corrections; and which allows you to select less lossy or lossless image types (tiff etc)

First, source quality: if you’re working with photographs, can you get the original negative? If you’re working with artwork or illustrations, can you get the original, or a first (or early) generation original copy? I’ve often bought or located original historical books or newspapers to scan from

If you ever need to restore a photograph (or prep an image for print etc), digitizing it is the crucial 1st step—and I can say from many years experience sourcing and prepping images, there are frequently missteps at this stage. The goal is maximum information to work with, with minimal loss

Enlarging doesn’t increase image quality, but can often degrade quality (as does rotating an image by anything other than 90 degree increments)

Turned off interactions on this one because strangers who don’t follow me were responding to whatever they imagined my position on “AI” to be. Nothing bad, just non sequitur clutter

Makes a critical distinction: knowledgeable technicians can “enhance” information that actually exists in a photo or video (increasing contrast or lightening shadow values to make certain pixels more visible, say), but generative “AI” can’t enhance anything. “AI” can only invent pretend information

Honestly it is pretty amazing that we invented machines you can ask “compose a sonnet about sea urchins” and it will just output what you asked. I’m still guessing the “AI” future, good or bad, hinges on what companies will really charge to run that tech profitably over time *and* recoup investment

i feel like this guy is my spiritual sibling

I learned training dogs that it’s best not to give commands they’re just… not gonna follow. This effort to dominate popular culture just exposes them as more visibly laughable and out of touch. Absurd overreach is the right’s critical weakness. They can’t resist picking fights they can’t win

Damn it

Destiny awaits!

@grok remove the kidnapper's mask and show us what he looks like Matt Wallace C @MattWallace888 This is what I got! Better than nothing.

This isn’t how AI works. It’s not how anything works.

Just commenting on the screenshot: don’t say “so-and-so *believes* such-and-such.” You don’t know that, especially if the person under discussion is infamous for just saying wild shit all the time. Use “says” or “claims” or similar