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The original Principia Discordia.

Started by Kai, February 01, 2012, 10:25:55 PM

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Cramulus

from DrJon Swabey-----

QuoteWhen I have any further knowledge, I'll share it. I'm waiting to hear, myself, but the principal folks have, as I understand it, been snowed under of late.

El Sjaako

There is also a low-resolution copy of the third edition floating around. It's not readable, but it does sort of prove it exists/existed.

Nephew Twiddleton

Could attempts be made to make it reasonably legible? Cuz that would be kinda cool considering how different the first edition seems to be from the fourth.
Strange and Terrible Organ Laminator of Yesterday's Heavy Scene
Sentence or sentence fragment pending

Soy El Vaquero Peludo de Oro

TIM AM I, PRIMARY OF THE EXTRA-ATMOSPHERIC SIMIANS

El Sjaako

Sample page:
http://imgur.com/e3qTs

That's the highest resolution I have. I think this is the file I have it from: www.23ae.com/files/pd3rd.zip

So either there is a really cool technique I don't know if, someone has better scans, or no, we can't read much from it.

Nephew Twiddleton

Will check when i get home (approx hour and forty)
Strange and Terrible Organ Laminator of Yesterday's Heavy Scene
Sentence or sentence fragment pending

Soy El Vaquero Peludo de Oro

TIM AM I, PRIMARY OF THE EXTRA-ATMOSPHERIC SIMIANS

Triple Zero

Quote from: Billy the Twid on February 02, 2012, 10:36:39 PM
Could attempts be made to make it reasonably legible? Cuz that would be kinda cool considering how different the first edition seems to be from the fourth.

Interesting idea. The parts using a regular font (say, from a typewriter) should technically be able to be deciphered. Computer OCR trained on very noisy very low-res (say, 6x3 pixels) character images are actually able to attain way higher accuracy than a human can, as long as the training data is of the same font and noise-profile as the target data.

(OT: You can even decipher those screenshots where sensitive data has been blurred out. Which is why you should always just paint a black square over it, to actually destroy the data (make sure no ascenders or descenders stick out, and that the length of the square is a bit longer than the word you're blotting out). This is because, if you know the font is Verdana, you can just reproduce the blur and see which blurred letters match up. To a human a blurred "a" might look like an indistinguishable cloud, but it is slightly different than a blurred "b". )

It won't be easy, but it might be possible.

http://i.imgur.com/e3qTs.jpg

... well! :lol: One thing, those spotty dotty letters look about the same quality as the OCR/noise paper I read claimed to be able to attain about 70% correct recognition rate for. Which is better than nothing.

Problem is that they worked with pre-segmented characters, so you'd need an additional algorithm to cut up the image into tiny chunks of pixels each containing one character. Fortunately a typewriter is monospaced (each letter is the same width), which would help with that.

Then, you need a trainingset with labeled data (examples of blotchy character images labeled with what letter they are). Which is also possible, because squinting at the text, you can see it's at least partly the same content as the PD, so we could guess quite a few things.

Then, dump that data into a machine learning algorithm and see what rolls out. This is actually the easy part, as always in a ML task, preparing the training and target data is the most work.

I'm going to have to think about this for a bit. It's one thing that it's theoretically possible, it's another question if such a project is the size of a few afternoons or a PHD thesis :P
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Cramulus

I love the idea that we may have to interpret the 1st edition PD for ourselves

I feel like a Talmudic scholar with a boner.

Q. G. Pennyworth

"BATTLE HYMN OF THE ERISTOCRACY was written by Lord Omar" starts the second to last paragraph of the first column. Page of credits?

Triple Zero

Quote from: Cramulus on February 02, 2012, 11:07:16 PM
I love the idea that we may have to interpret the 1st edition PD for ourselves

I feel like a Talmudic scholar with a boner.

You mean the 3rd edition?

Cause the 1st is legible, it's just hidden.
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

El Sjaako


Nephew Twiddleton

Quote from: el sjaako on February 02, 2012, 10:45:16 PM
Sample page:
http://imgur.com/e3qTs

That's the highest resolution I have. I think this is the file I have it from: www.23ae.com/files/pd3rd.zip

So either there is a really cool technique I don't know if, someone has better scans, or no, we can't read much from it.

I see. If Trip can find a way to clean it up, that would be pretty cool.
Strange and Terrible Organ Laminator of Yesterday's Heavy Scene
Sentence or sentence fragment pending

Soy El Vaquero Peludo de Oro

TIM AM I, PRIMARY OF THE EXTRA-ATMOSPHERIC SIMIANS

Telarus

Quote from: el sjaako on February 02, 2012, 11:52:51 PM
Not sure why this hasn't been linked to yet: http://www.scribd.com/doc/27611396/Principia-Discordia-1st-Edition

That's a really excellent collection. There's some of the 1st Ed PD in there (can't be sure as I just scanned through quickly and would have to compare side-by-side), but there's also quite a lot of "lost" single page flyers and letters (with ODD#s!!!!!!! I wonder if they're version 1 or version 2 ODD#s...).

Nice!
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Triple Zero

Quote from: Billy the Twid on February 03, 2012, 01:28:33 AM
I see. If Trip can find a way to clean it up, that would be pretty cool.

Don't hold your breath, really :)

Studying the images, however, one thing I wonder about is the colours. There's this sort of "rainbow shine" going through the text, anyone else notice this?

It sort of reminds me of the "ClearType" font rendering on LCD screens. Dunno if you ever heard of it, but as you know pixels on an LCD screen are in fact tiny red, green and blue dots next to eachother. So they figured fonts are usually one colour anyway, we could increase the horizontal resolution of the screen threefold by treating these R, G and B dots as separate pixels. So they did and lo, fonts appeared to be sharper and crisper. But if you look reaaaaally close, or take a screenshot and zoom in, you can see a sort of rainbow glitter colouring at the edges of diagonal lines and curves.

The scanned images sort of look like that, except rotated 90 degrees (so the RGB dots are vertically above eachother).

See for example this zoomed part of page 12:



You can see part of the text is underlined with a ruler, but the lines are all wonky rainbow coloured. That's because the line is not exactly horizontal and therefore crosses through the separate RGB components, slowly fading one into the next, creating a rainbow-like colours.

If this hypothesis is right, I should be able to separate the RGB components and triple the vertical resolution. ... Just need to figure out which of the six permutations of RGB, RBG, GRB, GBR, BRG, BGR "fits".

... nope tried it. IF this is what's causing the rainbow artifacts, the order is *probably* RGB, but there's other crap going on such as that the blue channel keeps fucking up, making stripes, probably because it's been colour corrected or something. And GIMP, while it's nice that it *can* do it, doesn't make it that easy to quickly switch back and forth between hypotheses.

Question, anyone, any idea what could be causing these rainbow artifacts? Another possibility could be chromatic lens aberration, but I dunno if you'd get that with paper text like this and afaik it looks slightly different than what we see here. Ideas?

Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Cramulus

#28
Quote from: el sjaako on February 02, 2012, 11:52:51 PM
Not sure why this hasn't been linked to yet: http://www.scribd.com/doc/27611396/Principia-Discordia-1st-Edition

fucking SWEEET

sometimes I love working at a publishing office. I made this in about 3 minutes:





my very own 1st edition PD!

Kai

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