Look at the digit ‘1’ on the right side. It is anti-aliased.
Aliasing is a distortion which only appears in digital images. Note that each pixel has a unique shade, whereas the other numbers are all black.
Wikipedia has a description of aliasing here :
ok, now that’s a fake………….
Ok, now you’re a ‘faker’.
;O)
When I zoom the original image being circulated, the 4 doesn’t look anywhere near as solid as the “zoomed” image above.
I’ll believe you if someone else comes forward with the same certificate number (and there will be numbers greater than 10641 for 1961). Meanwhile, it looks like Serreze looking for a death spiral that isn’t there.
The images I posted are screen shots of the document downloaded from the White House web site and zoomed in acrobat reader. I have not altered them in any way.
Woah..
I had been zooming on a GIF you posted earlier.
I just went to the PDF in Safari (on a Mac) and zoomed right in. It does indeed look like as above, but when the zoom level is high enough, the background and the last “1” disappears.
Another site I went to theorises that there would have been around 15000 births in Hawaii in 1961, so if they’re truly sequential starting from 00001 in that year, the number fits the time of year, but it was still startling when the “1” disappeared..
This is going to be interesting..
Yes the one disappears on a pc with abobe reader as well.
Oh.. I just noticed a whole bunch of other stuff also disappears.. like the “R” in BARACK, and a number of other artifacts.
It beats me why it has ended up layered like that; perhaps making it a PDF wasn’t the greatest of choices by the US government.
If altered, then Obama has picked people to do the work with the same competence level as the people he has running our government.
Agreed.
After looking at the letters again, is it possible the white around them and the reason why there are so many layers is whatever scanner was used had OCR turned on which may also explain the number “1” being digitally recreated? I still can’t imagine this is anything but another setup used for political meat.
There are other letters with the same appearance as the “1”. The “K” on Kenya, “D” on Dunham, “S” on Stanley, the first few letters on the signature (18a. to the “D” of Dunham), and the “Non” of None looks weird regarding tones.
However, of more concern is that the signatures of the Attendant and the Local Register also have this “aliasing” effect and the dates of record (boxes 20. and 22.) are mixtures of two tones. If I was to alter a certificate, the signatures and the record dates would be very important. Much of the rest of the certificate might fit the needs at the time.
I do not know what this means, but it surely will not help the verification process. You would think that his people would have made sure the pdf was wonderfully clean and acceptable.
When the document was released earlier I said to my wife someone is going to check the BC issued before obama and the BC after Obama and see if it actually came from that bound record book.
Just now I read the following from Corsi, the author of the soon to be released Obama book:
What is it about twin girls born day after Obama?
“# As WND reported, the long-form birth certificates issued by Kapi’olani to the Nordyke twins have certificate numbers lower than the number given Obama, even though the president purportedly was born at the same hospital a day earlier than the Nordykes.
# Note, Susan Nordyke, the first twin, was born at 2:12 p.m. Hawaii time Aug. 5, 1961, and was given certificate No. 151 – 61 – 10637, which was filed with the Hawaii registrar Aug. 11, 1961.
# Gretchen Nordyke, the second twin, was born at 2:17 p.m. Hawaii time Aug. 5, 1961, and was given certificate No. 151 – 61 – 10638, which was also filed with the Hawaii registrar Aug. 11, 1961.
# Yet, according to the Certification of Live Birth displayed by FactCheck.org during the 2008 presidential campaign – and now according to the long-form birth certificate the White House released yesterday – Barack Obama was given a higher certificate number than the Nordykes.
# Note, Obama was given certificate No. 151 – 1961 – 10641, even though he was born Aug. 4, 1961, the day before the Nordyke twins, and his birth was registered with the Hawaii Department of Health registrar three days earlier, Aug. 8, 1961.
[…]
Before yesterday, Obama may have attempted to explain away problems with the short-form Certification of Live Birth as the work of his supporters.
Before yesterday, the president largely remained above the fray. Now, he has fully engaged in the presentation and defense of his birth records and his status as a “natural born citizen” under Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution.
Obama’s presidency now depends upon the White House being able to support the veracity of all the information contained in the birth document released yesterday morning.
In the final analysis, proof that the document is an authentic Obama birth record will await forensic examination.
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=292457
I’m not a birther but I can’t figure out why this document if real was not released years ago. Why couldn’t Obama’s buddy the Gov. of Hawaii find this document?
I’m not a racist, some of my best friends are black…
Paul in Sweden
Seeing those numbers (unless they got forms out of sequence—or if sequence didn’t matter) then it would have been better if President Obama had not released this at all. Now there is real information that anyone, and everyone, can look into. And since he waited 2 1/2 years to release it he created a fertile soil of curiosity.
Barack Obama is very intelligent and cunning? For anyone to assert he is doesn’t seem to make sense. But if you lower your expectations of him then the way he is handling things begins to make sense.
Trump will eat this man alive. And it will be entertaining. We’ll see if Donald Trump is out doing this in sport. Good luck to you Mr. President. Welcome to life outside Chicago. It was easier intimidating bank president, wasn’t it.
The explanation I came up with is that every few days or so the guy who runs the number stamp takes the pile from his in box and just runs through the stack.
There is much for the birthers to sink there teeth into on this.
With the layering, I can see the Dept. of Health digitally scanning the BCs and some scanning software will break the text, forms and sigs out as separate elements. It would also give the option of correcting numbers, so that is a possible explanation for aliasing the number one in the cert. number. There are plausible explanations for many of the issues.
It was not smart to release a layered digitally enhanced layered document(real or not.). This issue is going to go on and on. 🙂
“Trump will eat this man alive.”
We do need an emperor!
Aliasing and other distortions you see are also due to compression (like when using jpeg). 90% or more of the source digital material can be thrown away and you won’t notice at all from a distance as all major features are retained. Same with .mp3, DVD, etc. There is no need to store every pixel as read for a reasonably faithful reproduction.
Try scanning a dollar bill at 6000 dpi, and save as a .bmp (which is completely lossless, as is a .wav file). It will be a HUGE file. Now save it as a .jpg, close it, re-open and zoom in. It will be a much smaller file, and you’ll see the difference in a pixel level zoom. Huge blocks will be converted to single value squares to save data.
What you are describing as anti-aliasing is the natural state of a scanned letter, the pixel will be assigned the average (R,G,B) values for the average color at that position on the sensor. It has no idea it is a letter at this point. After the OCR is done, the processor has already identified the characters it can read, found the outline of where a best-fit black outline should be placed, probably even best-fit that outline with an algorithm that determined what font it was, what size it was, what color it was, and probably even embellished the result based on the identified font and character to make it more readable. Finally, it fills the character in as the color it identified, which will de-pixellate it. Next, it probably applied another algorithm to contrast-enhance the identified characters by choosing a contrasting color (white) to de-colorize and de-pixellate the background, which will be blended with the background at a specified distance from the identified character.
Doing all of this allows even more compression to take place, which is desirable from a storage cost perspective. I think you are looking at a highly processed image, by a machine. Not all of the characters were recognized. (think about that next time you use a copy machine). You’ll see that that the ones that were not recognized were still contrast enhanced. You’ll also see an algorithm at work in the signatures, borders, etc. Some areas above a certain width, if they were continuous, were enhanced and filled in, Others were below the threshold and were left as an image. I don’t see anything strange, but it would have been smarter to take a few high resolution, non-processed, non-compressed images of it as well, then take that and print it as a .pdf.
Anti-aliasing is a process to soften edges by taking a two value image and creating a multi-value edge to make it appear smoother. What you are seeing in the image is the opposite effect. The multi-value edge is being processed to attempt to return it to a sharper state, yet still allow more data to be disposed of (lossy compression).
You are missing the point. One digit is anti-aliased, * the adjacent ones aren’t. * That doesn’t happen unless the one or the other digits has been touched.
Yes he did miss the point, and he probably gave you a reason why you were wrong……no wait…. that’s wrong…..he gave you several probablies in an effort to make people believe you were wrong….. while probably attempting to sound authoritative.
Sadly, he conflated two different technologies in the endeavor. Of course, most of what he stated was, or could be correct depending upon the application or machine being used. Character recognition isn’t part of a typical copy machine’s work. But I think ‘natural’ knows that.
He’d(she’d?) have sounded better if he used the word “gradient”. That would have really befuddled us unwashed masses.
The birth certificate was released only this morning and the White House thought it was over. DOH!
They need to release the original untouched paper document. This digital document has had a lot of work done to it.
Could it be that they just weren’t smart enough to realize that it would be scrutinized? Maybe they felt backed into a corner by Trump and didn’t think enough. Maybe they made a rash decision based on emotions.
But maybe they just aren’t that sharp.
If you wanted to forge it you wouldn’t do it electronically 😉
Tin foil hat conspiracies have no place on a blog called Real Science.
Andy
Clearly the image is a “digital composite with a green background layer”. HOWEVER if this is what the State of Hawaii does to make digital PDF versions of the document for people whose records where NOT computerized then the document is as it says, “I CERTIFY THIS IS A TRUE COPY OR ABSTRACT OF THE RECORD ON FILE IN THE HAWAII STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH” with the signature of “Alvin T. Onaka, Phd., STATE REGISTRAR”. If you know anything about legal notarization of documents this could very well be a properly notarized legal true copy EVEN WITH ALL THESE DIGITAL ASPECTS IN THE PDF FILE.
The best solution is a LIVE HD broadcast where multiple film crews from CNN, FOX, MSNBC, …, get to follow Alvin T. Onaka into the Hawaii State Department of Health records archive and have him show them the original copy and let them film close ups of it with their HD 1080p cameras and let them take tons of digital photographs of it at super high resolution. That would possibly settle the matter. Maybe.
But it’s all moot as the real issue is does Obama meet the qualifications of “Article II” of the US Constitution to be President? Well, seemingly no even if he was born in Hawaii!!!
Why not?
This is why Obama doesn’t meet the requirements of President:
?”Irrefutable point: Article II, section 1, pa. 5 states: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
That limits who may be President to persons who meet the following requirements:
Those who are 35 years old or older, AND
Those who have been a resident of the US for 14 years or longer, AND
Those who are natural born citizens, OR
Those who were US citizens at the time the Constitution was adopted
Why did the Constitutional Convention include that last exception, allowing those who were citizens at the time the Constitution was adopted to be President? The ONLY POSSIBLE REASON FOR THAT EXCEPTION IS THAT WITHOUT IT, NO ONE COULD CONSTITUTIONALLY BECOME PRESIDENT, BECAUSE NO ONE COULD SATISFY THE CONSTRAINT OF BEING A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN.
If “natural born citizen” means “born on US soil, with parents who are US citizens,” then it would in fact be true that no one alive at the time could have satisfied the “natural born citizen” requirement, in which case there is a good reason for the exception.
But if “natural born citizen” means essentially the same as “natural born subject” (differing only to the extent that a citizen differs from a subject,) then any citizen of the US at the time the Constitution was adopted would satisfy the “natural born citizen” requirement, so there would be no need for the exception, and its inclusion in the Constitution makes no sense. No sense at all. ” – A.L.
So really it’s moot if Obama was born in Hawaii or Kenya, since his FATHER wasn’t a US Citizen!
Oh, and then there is the adoption problem when his Step Father allegedly adopted him in Indonesia as that might have caused Obama to automatically give up his US Citizenship upon if the adoption mean he became a citizen of Indonesia. This could in the worst case scenario mean that Obama is an illegal alien… a lawyer is suing on this basis. Woops if true.
We live in very interesting times.
There is no dual nationality in Indonesia. However they did have a laissez faire adoption method. It would have been nigh impossible for a foreigner to become an Indonesian citizen back in the sixties and seventies. (There were and probably still are many stateless persons in Indonesia).
Non indigenous Indonesians BORN in the Dutch colonial era entered a legal and bureaucratic nightmare in the sixties and early seventies to obtain Indonesian citizenship – ask me how I know.
Legal Arguments Why Obama Doesn’t Qualify For US President Even If He Was Born In Hawaii
http://pathstoknowledge.net/2011/04/27/legal-arguments-why-obama-doesnt-qualify-for-us-president-even-if-he-was-born-in-hawaii/
When does the Impeachment Begin?
Impeachment doesn’t equate to removal. Clinton was impeached.
Either way you look at it I don’t think he will be removed. I think he will be there until January 2013.
It is more likely he would resign than be removed. With someone like Trump on him all the time maybe he would pine for a vacation and resign just to get one.
;O)
This is not a “digital PDF”. At work today using Adobe Illustrator, this thing is so botched it is impossible to not be a joke. No wonder he’s laughing. He is purposely milking this for everything he can to feed birthers and keep the light off his incompetence as Chief Executive Officer (President) driving his company (country) to bankruptcy (ruin).
We have a teenager running the government.
Love this site & read it daily.
On this one though I think you are wrong. I use Photoshop professionally now for well over a decade. I downloaded the whitehouse.gov version (not a screenshot) and edited it in photoshop.
When you zoom in the last digit DOES look slightly different. However the “aliasing” Steven is referring to must be an artifact of his “screenshot to adobe reader process.” It DOES NOT appear the same in Photoshop, which is a far “cleaner” process to look at the data.
If you zoom in and something disappears in a PDF, assume its the PDF. I saved it as a JPG and saw no such thing.
This was a scanned document. With scanned documents you can get all sorts of reflection artifacts (the white around the numbers might be due to glare from a very slightly reflective ink) and the final digit, the “1” does NOT look any different than the other digits if you use Photoshop, OTHER than its very slightly in greyscale vs. solid black for the other digits. Easily explainable by a typewriter that did not strike the paper hard enough, leaving it a little lighter and when the scanner interpolates the data it doesn’t see it as solid black.
If any part of this had been edited, when you zoom up real close you would see a lot more “mess” in the pixelated areas surrounding the edit. Its just not here, unless you count the very small area to the upper left of the “1” in question. But I also see “smudges” like that appearing at random throughout the document.
I really don’t think there is anything here. Gotta call em as I see em.
Cheers!
Sitting in my comfy deckchair in the balmy Swedish summer sunshine, I’m quite bemused by all this.
Let’s just say the document is authentic and BHO jr. is truly born in HI. Then it certainly does call into questions whether BHO jr. is a ‘natural-born citizen’. In order to be POTUS, one must be a ‘natural-born citizen’, which should not be confused with ‘natural child birth’.
For the US citizenship is not just determine by where the child is born, but also to whom the child is born.
In this case, we have BHO jr, born in HI to an American mother, some will argue was too young to pass along citizenship…but that does not matter…AND, to a father born in Kenya and a subject of the UK, since Kenya at the time was under British rule.
In 1968, United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black, in a concurring opinion in Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145 (1968), emphasizes his reliance upon the statements made by Representative Bingham and Senator Howard in Congress which pertain to the drafting and adoption of the 14th Amendment. Justice Black stated that “it is far wiser to rely on” the words of Bingham and Howard when analyzing the 14th Amendment.
Rep. John Bingham, is considered the “father of the 14th Amendment”. On the House floor, he stated:
“All from other lands, who by the terms of [congressional] laws and a compliance with their provisions become naturalized, are adopted citizens of the United States; all other persons born within the Republic, of parents owing allegiance to no other sovereignty, are natural born citizens. Gentleman can find no exception to this statement touching natural-born citizens except what is said in the Constitution relating to Indians.” (Cong. Globe, 37th, 2nd Sess., 1639 (1862))
In 1866, Rep. Bingham also stated on the House floor:
“Every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.” (Cong. Globe, 39th, 1st Sess., 1291 (1866))
In 1866, Senator Howard stated:
“The first amendment is to section one, declaring that all “persons born in the United States and Subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside. I do not propose to say anything on that subject except that the question of citizenship has been fully discussed in this body as not to need any further elucidation, in my opinion. This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. (Congressional Globe, 39th Congress pg. 2890 (1866))
Sen. Howard clarified his statement a few days earlier with:
“That means ‘subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof.’ What do we mean by ‘complete jurisdiction thereof? Not owing allegiance to anybody else. That is what it means.” (Congressional Globe, 39th Congress pg. 2893 (1866))
Examine the following statement by Representative Thayer from the same period:
“To accomplish this great purpose, the bill declares, in the first place, that all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign Power, are citizens of the United States. Now, I do not regard that as the enunciation of any new principle. It is, in my judgment, but declaratory of the existing law. According to my apprehension, every man born in the United States, and not owing allegiance to a foreign Power, is a citizen of the United States.” – Rep. Thayer, March 2, 1866. (Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st Session, p. 1152 (1866))
The same sentiments were also uttered by Senator Trumbull who stated that it meant “Not owing allegiance to anybody else.”
By BHO jr. very own admission, he is not eligible to be the POTUS.
Many people want to believe they live in interesting times. Well, welcome to a US Constitutional Crisis. What could be more interesting than that?! …for Americans, anyway
Probably had the guy who created the word document of Bush’s guard review forge it.