They Can Still Impress . . . Sometimes

5/4/2022

Anyone involved in university-level education knows how rarely students manage to do anything that inspires admiration or respect. The only amazing thing about university students these days is the banal and apathetic quality of their work. Nevertheless, every once in a while something manages to break through and impress.

Case in point, a student presentation from yesterday. The presentation itself was uninspired and dull, but the nature photographs with which the student populated his PowerPoint slides were quite impressive. That the student had taken the photos was even more impressive.

Below is an example. I don't know about you, but the image -- featuring a roe buck in a grain field -- ranks among the most beautiful wildlife/nature photos I have ever seen.

Note added: Of course, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the photo is not actually the student's photo, or that he photo-shopped it, or that he had a friend hold a stuffed deer trophy head in the field to capture this image, but for the time being I'm going to assume the photo is authentic and enjoy the good feelings that stem from that.

6 Comments

Coronald McDonald

5/4/2022 16:58:27

Meh -- that is GMO grain and it obviously has stunted the growth of Bambi's antlers, alas...

Francis Berger

5/4/2022 17:16:59

@ Coronald - For what it's worth . . . if official sources are to be believed -- and there is no reason that they should be believed -- Hungary is GMO-free. Since the grain field is in Hungary, it is probably not GMO grain.

https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/report/downloadreportbyfilename?filename=Agricultural%20Biotechnology%20Annual_Budapest_Hungary_10-19-2018.pdf

Stunted antlers? Well, I suppose that's a matter of perspective.

Carol

5/4/2022 19:53:08

@Coronald - umm, it's quite obviously still very young, practically a baby, why would you expect it to have bigger antlers?

lea

5/6/2022 03:16:46

Lads and lasses, coronald was joking, almost certainly.

Having almost no qualifications in formal education myself, i am rarely impressed with anything i hear stemming from the system, mostly because it's all sounding very dogmatic lately. Not joking; i met and asked a student working in quantum computing/ nanotech whether the generic 'scientific method' is applicable to social sciences in the same way as to his area's of interest and the 'hard sciences' in general, because i would posit there are many concerns of ambiguity, semantic problems, and general vagueness. He replied something along the lines of 'Yes of course, the scientific method just works'. There are so many things wrong with this statement that i just stopped bothering to try and remember his name, or talk to him from that point forward on my night out. Just because someone can do a page long equation does not mean they have insight, rather then computational skills. Perhaps he was not aware of 'woke science' at all, a sign of living in a personal bubble in that case, but more alarmingly; apparently you can close in on finishing a technical masters without more then a week or two of philosophy being offered. Sounds eerily familiar to my endocrinologist that had 2 weeks of his EIGHT year studies spent on nutrition. He could talk about my liver function for 3 days straight but had not the faintest clue what could be wrong about eating highly processed white bread every day, i digress.

5/6/2022 17:49:10

@ lea - Whenever I get to thinking about these sorts of things, I always remind myself that the world has never been flooded with as many university degrees as it is now. And where has that brought us?

Bookslinger

6/30/2022 14:14:32

To see where else a photo has appeared on the net, I use www.tineye.com

This photo doesn't appear elsewhere according to tineye.

You can also enter the url of the photo (ie, the photo's url on your blog) as a search on goog.

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There are apps/programs you can buy that can analyze photos to see of they are photoshopped. They can detect where the seams or stitches are.

But, photos constructed/assembled by AI can't always be detected.

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The focal depth of the deer's head and the surrounding wheat seems to be off here. Sharp focus deer versus soft focus wheat.

A Hungarian biologist may also know if the age and time of year indicated by the antlers matches the maturity of head, and the maturity of the wheat. The antlers may have been photoshopped onto the head.

The height of the deer vs the height of the wheat may be another tell. The height of the wheat depends on the variety being grown and time of year. Does that matfh the age/height of the deer and its antlers?

I don't know enough about Hungarian deer and Hungarian wheat farming to tell.

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As to GMO, yes, CR's comment was intended as humor. And Wiki says there is no commercially grown GMO wheat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_wheat

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They Can Still Impress . . . Sometimes

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