I looked into this a few years ago when I was thinking along the same lines as you: it looked like a LOT of work. I looked at the printout today and it's fading badly. I'm going to try to run it careful through and optical scanner and see if OCR can read the faint letters and numbers.

If so many people think God wrote a book IMHO it becomes relevant to study it at least superficially just so you can co-exist and communicate with all these people.

The stories in the book are mostly not history but the book itself and how it came to be certainly is.

Seriously if God is omnipotent and knows everything this book of his shows a strong sense of humor rather than much intelligent design. Like having bits and pieces garbled by running them back and forward through ancient humanoid versions of modern day OCR, machine translation and political censorship.

I love the Septuaginta bit (not in this video) where mythically 70ish scholars were secluded for 70ish days and each came up with his own Greek translation and they were all mythically identical. Where in reality the translation took decades, was a team effort that garbled the texts to appease current rulers and added whole new books.

As opposed to this conceited d0uchebag, who is obviously a med!ocre troll.

Um, that is game changing if it is real and actually performs that well, which is why I don't buy it. I suppose it is just a combination of OCR and the Google translate engine with some fancy font and vector graphic effects, but in my experience those things are far from perfect on their own let alone in combination.

Still, damn. I would not be surprised at all if it sort of worked okay some of the time, which means in ten years it will work pretty damn well most all of the time. That will be tremendously useful. Well, not for me, I'm an American. It's everybody else's job to adjust their language for my convenience.

I don't know if I ever said he was born in Kenya. I don't know. He ( his parents) did list him as being Kenyan citizenship on some school for or such.
His grandmother or great grandmother indicated he was born in Kenya-- So there is that.

I did say that the birth certificate he posted as a pdf did indeed look odd- When opening it in illustrator.

If you were to get your Birth Certificate copy they would give it to you in person or mail you a copy. If you were to "post" it as the White House did why would you not scan to JPEG or PNG?


They posted PDF. But would that truly produce 13 layers and look that way? We all scanned or OCR a document - you end up with odd characters and broken sentences but not what was posted by the White House..

Odd Very Odd---- never resolved- It ran for 1 week and Bin Laden was taken out and wiped this issue off the radar.

That's pretty wicked sick object recognition. I suppose your object needs to be in their database, but even then, I'd love to see that algorithm. I did some work with OCR and it's no joke.

You can't think of a single reason why someone would OCR a birth certificate? Granted, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you just don't have experience with such things.

OCR'ing documents is incredibly useful in the modern age. When you simply scan an image. It's an image, nothing more. When you OCR it, those images get interpreted as actual letters and words. Those words can be searched. If you have a hundreds of thousands, if not millions of birth certificates from people who were born long before the information age, do you think it might be useful to OCR them into the system so they can be...searched...instead manually looking through them. There's lesson the first.

Lesson the second: I know you seem to forget that we have these things called memories and have the ability to remember the previous things you may have said and/or posted. You might have forgotten you submitted the following sift:

http://videosift.com/video/Confirmed-Obamas-Birth-Certificate-Not-Authentic-2012

Are you admitting that you were wrong, or at the very least you have changed your mind? That said, if you can admit that he is in fact, a US Citizen, what does it matter that his birth certificate looks so shitty as you say? There are any number of reasons the document looks shitty, it could be a copy of a copy of a copy. they could have shitty scanners..anything. All of which are irrelavant since you are now changing your argument.

When has ANY President had such scrutiny over their birth certificate? What could possibly be the reason why no one cares about Bill Clinton's birth certificate? Or Jimmy Carter's? Or Ronald Reagan's or the Bushes'? Someone at the beginning had to say "hrm, I just don't think that person is a citizen, I better look into that" Do you think anyone ever said that about Clinton? Reagan? Carter?? Bush Sr. and Bush Jr?? Why is that do you think?

If there was ANY shred of truth to his birth certificate being fake, it would have been discovered in 2008, if not earlier when he ran for senate. It's very plausible to say that there has never been a president under as much scrutiny as Obama been through. If his biggest critics and enemies can't find it in all this time...then your arguments just don't hold much weight.

Lesson the third: Once again, here we are talking about irrelevant things or things that cannot be proven. We're talking about birth certificates instead of actual relevant things. You make the accusation that he is anti-american...Prove it. You guys guys make those ad-hom arguments all the time. Not only is it yet another logical fallacy, you never back it up. He's anti-american....because you say so. Sorry, but we're going to need something a LITTLE more concrete than that. If you want to be taken seriously and talk with the grownups, you actually need to back up the shit you spew.

Lesson the fourth: You know what also ruins your credibility? Your horrible horrible grammar. You are frequently incapable of writing a coherent post without making numerous errors. Why should anyone take you seriously when you can't even take the time to spell or write properly. We all make mistakes, buddy, but you make them a LOT. It speaks to your intelligence and your ability to be thoughtful.

Here endeth the lesson.

>> ^bobknight33:

Vodoo,
I think that Obama was born in Hawaii.
That being said why did Obama did put out a piss poor excuse of a birth certificate. no image has 13 layers. If you scan an image it is one layer.
Even if you OCR the document ( why would you even do it) it would not have look as bad as the document he put out.
What ever rock Obama crawled out of under, Americans will let him go back to it in November.
Buy the way Obama is anti American. He has done more to thwart America than to make it a leader among nations.
>> ^VoodooV:
Just to play devil's advocate, but let us suppose for a moment that the conservatives are right and Obama is the worst, most liberal President in all of American History.
The message STILL gets diminished because conservatives are associated with nutbag ideas like the birther loonies.
You want people to take conservatives seriously? ditch the birther loonies, ditch the racist tea-baggers. Tell Romney to make a statement without being proven a liar ten seconds later.
If Obama is so bad, you should be able to easily make a rational argument without the lunatics playing the racist card.
Problem is...they haven't. They don't have a leg to stand on, so they grasp desperately for anything, no matter how flimsy.
I've lost count of how many times my rational republican friends get pissed off at their own party because they do actually try to offer up some legit complaints against Obama, stuff I would actually agree with since no one has ever made the argument that he's perfect, but the rational discourse gets drowned out by the racists and the conspiracy theories that don't hold any water or the nonsense Romney spews.
Believe it or not, there are actually Republicans out there who want to collaborate and work together and put their good ideas forth, they just get drowned out amongst all the people screaming Kenyan, Communist, Muslim, or un-American.
Even McCain had to dial it back and defend Obama from the nutbags.

Vodoo,

I think that Obama was born in Hawaii.

That being said why did Obama did put out a piss poor excuse of a birth certificate. no image has 13 layers. If you scan an image it is one layer.
Even if you OCR the document ( why would you even do it) it would not have look as bad as the document he put out.

What ever rock Obama crawled out of under, Americans will let him go back to it in November.

Buy the way Obama is anti American. He has done more to thwart America than to make it a leader among nations.

>> ^VoodooV:

Just to play devil's advocate, but let us suppose for a moment that the conservatives are right and Obama is the worst, most liberal President in all of American History.
The message STILL gets diminished because conservatives are associated with nutbag ideas like the birther loonies.
You want people to take conservatives seriously? ditch the birther loonies, ditch the racist tea-baggers. Tell Romney to make a statement without being proven a liar ten seconds later.
If Obama is so bad, you should be able to easily make a rational argument without the lunatics playing the racist card.
Problem is...they haven't. They don't have a leg to stand on, so they grasp desperately for anything, no matter how flimsy.
I've lost count of how many times my rational republican friends get pissed off at their own party because they do actually try to offer up some legit complaints against Obama, stuff I would actually agree with since no one has ever made the argument that he's perfect, but the rational discourse gets drowned out by the racists and the conspiracy theories that don't hold any water or the nonsense Romney spews.
Believe it or not, there are actually Republicans out there who want to collaborate and work together and put their good ideas forth, they just get drowned out amongst all the people screaming Kenyan, Communist, Muslim, or un-American.
Even McCain had to dial it back and defend Obama from the nutbags.

>> ^Mysling:

>> ^bobknight33:
That would be fine if you just wanted the text from the document. In this case the the document as a whole is what is of interest. Anyone with any graphic sense would scan into photoshop since the image would be a photo. This would present itself as 1 and only 1 layer.
No one would OCR scan to PDF execpt those with out photoshop. Sure the scanner will have software provided for OCR ( optical character recognition).

The problem is that you are assuming that this was done by a person with graphic sense, or with knowledge of photoshop.
If the birth certificate was simply scanned by some office worker in Hawaii, with no graphic sense and no photoshop available, and sent to the White House for publication, would that not explain the entire thing?


Not quite...the -real- problem is that you seem to assume that the birther crowd have -any- concern or connection to reality. They don't. They will not -ever- accept that we have a black president. For every bullshit claim that is refuted, they'll simply spawn a new variant.

You can see that perfectly clearly in our own local variety..."fact" just isn't a meaningful concept to them.

Continuing the discussion is like wrestling with pigs...the only thing you're going to achieve is to waste your time and amuse the pigs.

Good question. The news and or OBAMA indicated that his attorney went to Hawaii and obtained it. It then would make sense the the attorney would come back with an official copy/ duplicate. The White house staff would then process it and post it on the web.


To indicate that the "locals" scanned it and then email it or such is a possible point but it still does not answer the alterations.

The white surly have access properly knowledgeable individuals of photoshop and other ADOBE products.

>> ^Mysling:

>> ^bobknight33:
That would be fine if you just wanted the text from the document. In this case the the document as a whole is what is of interest. Anyone with any graphic sense would scan into photoshop since the image would be a photo. This would present itself as 1 and only 1 layer.
No one would OCR scan to PDF execpt those with out photoshop. Sure the scanner will have software provided for OCR ( optical character recognition).

The problem is that you are assuming that this was done by a person with graphic sense, or with knowledge of photoshop.
If the birth certificate was simply scanned by some office worker in Hawaii, with no graphic sense and no photoshop available, and sent to the White House for publication, would that not explain the entire thing?

>> ^bobknight33:

That would be fine if you just wanted the text from the document. In this case the the document as a whole is what is of interest. Anyone with any graphic sense would scan into photoshop since the image would be a photo. This would present itself as 1 and only 1 layer.
No one would OCR scan to PDF execpt those with out photoshop. Sure the scanner will have software provided for OCR ( optical character recognition).


The problem is that you are assuming that this was done by a person with graphic sense, or with knowledge of photoshop.

If the birth certificate was simply scanned by some office worker in Hawaii, with no graphic sense and no photoshop available, and sent to the White House for publication, would that not explain the entire thing?

That would be fine if you just wanted the text from the document. In this case the the document as a whole is what is of interest. Anyone with any graphic sense would scan into photoshop since the image would be a photo. This would present itself as 1 and only 1 layer.

No one would OCR scan to PDF execpt those with out photoshop. Sure the scanner will have software provided for OCR ( optical character recognition). in such case then you would und up with a plain text document with no background. According to what you wrote, then all of these TEXT areas would have to be reassembled and arranged to fit onto the green pattern background. That does not make sense. Why would anyone pull a document apart just to put it back together? The only logical way to do this is to scan into Photoshop and save as a jpeg or equivalent. To convert it ti PDF then I would open it in Illustrator and do a save as PDF.Or on a Mac just print to PDF



In the video they use Illustrator to open the document. Illustrator will open a PDF and if there were any layers then they would be available also.

Again there is no reason for this document to have this amount of adulteration that this has.


>> ^mfsteele:

Here's a very simple explanation I found on a forum I frequent:
When you scan a document into PDF, you can use a mode which does text recognition. This will produce a document with layers. It stores the text as actual text instead of an image. This option is there because it typically generates a smaller PDF file.
In the areas where the birth certificate is near-black, Adobe's PDF-rendering engine eliminates the 8-bit RGB data and replaces it with a 1-bit layer with alpha. It's all in the interest of reducing file size
Try scanning ANY item directly into Acrobat using the twain tool, which the EXIF data shows was done. Run OCR on it, as is required by all federal and state agencies that work under the paperwork reduction act. Multiple control layers are added, as are masks for objects.

Here's a very simple explanation I found on a forum I frequent:

When you scan a document into PDF, you can use a mode which does text recognition. This will produce a document with layers. It stores the text as actual text instead of an image. This option is there because it typically generates a smaller PDF file.

In the areas where the birth certificate is near-black, Adobe's PDF-rendering engine eliminates the 8-bit RGB data and replaces it with a 1-bit layer with alpha. It's all in the interest of reducing file size

Try scanning ANY item directly into Acrobat using the twain tool, which the EXIF data shows was done. Run OCR on it, as is required by all federal and state agencies that work under the paperwork reduction act. Multiple control layers are added, as are masks for objects.

Interesting concept but I wonder if OCR will ever truly get good enough - and fast enough - for me to be able to use a device like that.

No, I mean, I know OCR's getting very good, it's just that I write like I'm defacing a Metallica concert poster.

Most are racist boneheads, but if I was an Israeli security guard in a mall, I would definitely be mindful of any woman wearing a hijab ocr burkah.

btw

at 6:23 - Sadly, as a Swede, I can confirm his statement.