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Mathias Baumann

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  1. Can this be done with a regular desktop PC or do you need some special hardware?
  2. Excellent video, but I don't quite agree with the conclusion at the end. I think it's been shown that Kennedy and Connelly could've been hit by the same bullet if it came from one of the lower floors of the Dal-Tex building. Concerning the back wound: Notice the wrinkles in the neck just below the hairline. --> http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/zimmerman/frontmenu_i000003.jpg I think the doctors are pulling and pushing Kennedy's skin to move the wound upwards. I did an experiment of my own and it showed that by doing so a spot in the back can be moved up to 5 centimeters closer to the base of the neck.
  3. Andrej, thank your for your opinion. It is my belief that Morales indeed had a scar. I think he could have been the man observing Oswald when he was handing out leaflets in New Orleans. Jim Garrison describes him as a muscular Latino and also mentions the scar. Morales was indeed quite chunky and also half-Mexican.
  4. I wish you good luck with that and am curious to see the results. Now I realize this is off-topic, but there's something else I'd like to hear your opinion on, being an expert in photography. Please look at these three photos of David Morales: What do you think is the dark, elongated area above his left eyebrow?
  5. Jim, I'm sure Robert somehow stayed in touch with his family during his service. Lee may have told him about this show by mail or on the phone.
  6. Andrej, You could be right about that. Maybe PULSE could be used to identify Prayer Man by trial-and-error, that means by feeding it different images of different people and see which output looks most realistic. I don't know. But I see a technical problem here: So it appears you need some special hardware. CUDA was developed by Nvidia. I have a AMD RADEON HD 6450 installed in my computer. I don't think it'll support CUDA, but I'll give it a try anyway.
  7. Andrej, I think what Dr Rudin was trying to say is this: the output of her software is determined by the input. So if you feed it a picture of Oswald you'll get Oswald as an output. If you feed it Sarah Stanton you'll get Sarah Stanton. You can't use it to enhance the quality of the image. It's only useful if you already know who's in the picture and if you have high-quality photos of that person that you can feed into the software.
  8. Jeremy, I think Oswald was a very intelligent person, much more intelligent than some people give him credit for. He learned Russian in a remarkably short time. I'm sure he would've been able to understand the not so subtle difference between Stalinism and Trotskyism, if he'd wanted to. Oswald was clearly an agent provocateur, in my opinion. The Fairplay for Cuba Committee warned him not to distribute pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans. And yet he did it anyway. Some weeks later the FBI takes him of the watch-list. After he'd openly advertised his support for America's sworn enemy! Oswald was on a mission for the FBI to discredit the FCC, which was probably run by former FBI officer Guy Banister.
  9. Can you point me to a source where I can download the entire film in high resolution?
  10. I showed Prayer Man to a friend of mine, who is an expert in computer graphics. He says the image quality and resolution are way too poor to tell anything with reasonable certainty. The reason is it is not possible to know which pixels represent real information and which just digital artifacts. And I think this is further confirmed by Dr Rudin's remarkable observation. What you posted here is a good example. The pixels that make up Prayer Man's face can correspond to a great variety of different faces. We'll never be able to tell with certainty if Prayer Man is man or woman, let alone what shirt he/she is wearing or what he/she is holding in their hands. The information in the picture is just insufficient.
  11. Andrej, I'll see if I can the Python software running on my computer. But I suspect I'll need a more powerful GPU to perform this kind of calculation. Unfortunately I only have a run-of-the-mill desktop PC.
  12. So I just had an e-mail exchange with Dr Rudin. As I suspected her software is not suitable for identifying Prayer Man. In fact, she wrote that I guess that means we'll never know who Prayer Man is. There's just not enough information in the picture.
  13. "I Led 3 Lives" first aired in 1953, so the same year Oswald allegedly started to display his left-wing leanings. For a 13-year-old to become fascinated with a political ideology as complicated as Communism is a rare and remarkable thing. (Most adults cannot comprehend the philosophical and economic ideas that form the basis of Marxism.) However, playing the role of your favorite TV character in real life is more like the behavior you'd expect from a person that age. I think Oswald was never genuinely interested in Communisum. He never met a real communist in his life. And a real communist would not subscribe to both a Stalinist and a Trotksyite newspaper.
  14. Sandy, it is known that the digitization of photos leaves all kinds of unwanted artificial artefacts. That is precisely why I'm highly skeptical of all attempt to identify certain people or objects without access to the original material, because the observer cannot distinguish between what is real and what is artificial. Anyway, I've just written an e-mail to Dr Rudin and asked her if she thinks that her software could be helpful in improving the face of an unknown person. (I didn't mention the Kennedy assassination.) I don't think it can, but I'll let you all know when/if I hear back from her.
  15. First I'll send her an e-mail and ask her if her software is the right tool for the job. Because after reading this on the PULSE website (http://pulse.cs.duke.edu/) I'm not so sure anymore, but I guess "blurred out" in this context means that a face has intentionally been made unrecognizable, which is not the case with Prayer Man. Regarding the Python software: I know some VBA, but I guess that won't help me much with the implementation. However, I know someone who might be able to help, if he has the time. Anyway, there's some in-depth documentation on the software, which can be found here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03808.pdf
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