Powderhorn

His stuff is always excellent, but this really stood out an an explanation for something I've always been curious about, as well as how technological advances are actually making the problem worse.

I sort of figured S&P would deliver the first blow with a credit downgrade. This is not a list one wants their country on.

I wasn't exactly sure where to put this as analysis. Hopefully it fits here.

Buckle in; it's 45 minutes but very helpful to understand where we're at. I was linked on the local Discord and had never heard of this channel, but it's now a new subscription.

This is a somewhat interesting look at, like, how seemingly useless words outside of context function.

Yeah, more good news.

Great. Just great.

Growing up in Arizona (little fluffy clouds), this unnecessary twice-a-year routine is still baffling.

Did Weaver try to grow corn?

by Peter Hahnloser

The Daily of the University of Washington

May 18, 2000

I'm sure you've been losing sleep all week, waiting for the next issue of The Daily to come out so you can see if Jasmin Weaver actually doctored the photo on her flyer or if it was just cropped. With complex issues such as this, all the facts can never come to light at once, and with each explanation we get one step closer to the truth.

Clearly, the question is what "doctored" and "cropped" mean. This is certainly a valid question -- our president showed us the vagueness of the word "is" just over two years ago.

And both "doctored" and "cropped" are far longer words, not to mention conjugated for the past tense.

I decided to do some good, old-fashioned snooping around the office earlier this week to see if I could shed some light on the issue, and was surprised at what I discovered. Now, I know I went a bit overboard when I actually checked a dictionary, but I think I'm on to something.

First, the latest quote from Weaver on the subject: "I don't think what I did was anything other than cropping." And, to explain her position, she also said, "'Doctored' really means to me 'to cut and paste in' ... [Cropping means] modifying something to clarify."

As a graphic designer, I was, at first, somewhat wary of these definitions. The cropping tool in Photoshop has never inadvertently erased people and replaced them with a gaudy wallpaper pattern in a photo I've ever used it on -- nor, for that matter, has it removed half of someone's hair. But I had to give her the benefit of the doubt -- perhaps Photoshop doesn't like people sitting behind Gary Locke.

Working off this theory, I referenced the Photoshop 5.0 user's guide, which had the following to say: "To crop an image using the Crop command: Use the rectangle marquee tool to select the part of the image you want to keep." It was a dead end -- there was nothing there about Gary Locke, and the index didn't mention him either.

But we presume people innocent until they're proven guilty, and my two years of professional experience and the technical writers at Adobe might both have been off, so I needed something to prove her wrong beyond the shadow of a doubt. The dozen or so people I spoke with on the subject all concurred with my gut reaction but it still wasn't enough.

At wits' end, I looked for a dictionary that might help me in my quest for truth. And I stumbled upon Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, which happens to be an official reference for the Associated Press. But that was a mere trifle -- clearly, if it's collegiate, it's perfect for answering this specific question.

The easiest way to research this without bias was in alphabetical order. So, I first hunted down "cropped" and found that it was the past tense of "crop." There were a number of verb definitions, which suggested to me that perhaps I hadn't been considering the appropriate one.

The first definition was "to remove the upper or outer parts of." This certainly didn't apply, so I moved on to "to cut off short." While this applied to half of Weaver's hair, I figured this was more of a concern for her stylist. Next came "to cause (land) to bear a crop," which might have applied to the flyer if Weaver's campaign platform had been, "We must grow corn in abundance on the HUB lawn."

It would have been a noble idea, but she apparently decided that the UW's crop yield was sufficient in its current state, so that definition did me no good, either. "To grow as a crop" was equally useless, as were the last three: "to feed by cropping something," "to yield or make up a crop" and "to appear unexpectedly or casually." I hadn't been expecting her flyers to appear, so this seemed the answer until I again realized that the issue was not the flyer but the photo, which she was not dressed casually in.

Clearly, the photo had not been "cropped."

I moved on to "doctored," which suffered from the same affliction as "cropped" -- namely, its tense. "Doctor" had six definitions as a verb. First was "to give medical treatment to." Nope. "To restore to good condition" didn't seem right either, but I hit paydirt with the next one: "to adapt or modify for a desired end by alteration or special treatment."

This sounded dead on. Noah Purcell explained to The Daily that the other people in the shot were removed for "logistical" purposes - which sounds to me like modification "for a desired end."

To be fair, I checked the remaining definitions or "doctor." "To alter deceptively" was too slanted to be applicable, while "to practice medicine" and "to take medicine" were both totally irrelevant. And that was all Webster's had to say on the subject.

So I concluded that the photo was doctored, not cropped, and was satisfied by the evidence given to me.

But don't worry, I'll reconsider my stance the very first time cropping a photo produces a suspicious rubber-stamp-like wallpaper effect in one of my photos or removes hair from a subject.

Or if the HUB lawn produces corn this fall.

It has begun.