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[fred_bled]

The rays are NOT important

[jere7my]

The rays aren't anything, I'm afraid—they're artifacts of the coordinate conversion. The simple conversion to polar coordinates results in a circular image, and the software just extends the edge pixels to fill out the borders of the rectangle. Photoshop will do that with any rectangular image.

Sorry!

[fred_bled]

Oh crap - my humble apologies - I seem to have pressed the "new topic" button instead of "reply"

Someone please merge this into the hole2-thread.

*crawls away back under a rock*

[SixSider]

[jere7my]

[Lyria]

[chief]

Thanks fred for pointing that out. I stand corrected on the rays - no photoshop here so I had no way to know.

So....NOW what?

[theonetruebix]

"Hanso lets down twin quota."

[Shawn David Struck]

[empath]

Re: Masking?

[Abraxas]

Please don't call any numbers you have to make up first. If they want us to dial a number it will be very obvious. As in "plain text" obvious. If not, they could get in trouble.
It might be no big deal to receive a call from a stranger, but if that person gets a hundred because of a far-fetched hunch, it's not funny for them any more.

[Etymologician]

Ok, I'm going to make an argument for the polar coordinate map. Not sure it's the right path, but...

1) True, the rays will show up in any picture converted to polar. They come from the last row of pixels at the bottom. I tried converting those to binary with no luck.

2) The ring or "frame" around the elephant comes from the coat / shoulders of the man. I tried erasing everything inside the ring and got back a headless man.

3) Thus, the elephant comes from the face / hair area. The reverse mask (erasing the rays and frame leaving only the elephant) gives back -- surprise -- a disembodied head.

4) It's a faceless face, of course. The parts missing from the face create the outline of the elephant when converted to polar. With some imagination, you can see the elephant in the face... The hair becomes the trunk, the ear -- the head, the shadow on the cheek -- the feet up in the air.

So, it could be a coincidence that the erased parts of the face generate an elephant-looking logo in polar coordinates, but I'd be more willing to write it off if it looked more like that polarized sloth picture that somebody posted -- a big smudge with rays coming out of it.

All that said, my gut tells me that those highlights in the hair are a mask for some other image. The first thought I had about the lines in the upper right were that they were a guide, like on printing proofs.

[theonetruebix]

Not to keep harping on this, but one other reason I think the clue is actually the filename: Speaker's remark ISN'T that we were looking at the image incorrectly. His remark in full was:

[lostviolinist]

Hey - I've read a lot here, just never had much to add.

I too am weary about the polared image; it seems too complicated then things normally are. BUT, if it looks like anything to me, it looks like the Dharma swan...





als2002: to me seems to obvious to say "alvo last seen 2002"; persephone already showed us his last travel plans. Plus it ignore q9. Perhaps we're simply spinning our wheels and this will all make complete sense when something else shows up.

[DaveShramek]

I must stress one more time that the the picture made up of binary information in clear lines seems to be what's important. What does .gif compression do? Is that the one that says, "this color for this many pixels, this color for this many pixels?" If so, then perhaps that information, the "number of pixels" is important data. Perhaps also, reencoding a rotated gif might also give us interesting information.