Daily Archives: December 31, 2020

Amerithon challenge

Amerithon, Rants

Getting pretty tired (real world tired)… i wonder if i will make it the next 2800 virtual miles (fake world).. LOL.  The tiring part is that so much advertising is fake, so much news is fake, so many opinions that are only reflections of a personal reality are biased. It is difficult to sort physical reality from my own reality.  Case in point… estimate from LivingComfort for repairs vs replacement of a gas boiler.  I see four numbers in a row (parts and labor) 888.00 for an expansion tank, 888.00 for a boiler refill drain thing, and 888.00 for a back flow preventer and 888.00 for an air scoop.  Give me a break.  If i had 9 items in a dataset, and four of them were 888.00 i would immediately say… check for errors and copy pastes.  This is fake.

Image processing to fit what I see

Methods to assess TEM and AFM images

If I count peaks along a segmented line in ImageJ and the the numbers are the same between two images but the plots show different results, what does that say about visual assessments about AFM images vs those which are digitally manipulated.

I understand the sensitivity of programs, some plots show every pixel, very noisy, but is this relevant information. It is possible to smooth out that noise, it is done in many different applications all the time. Is smoothing the noise helpful.  Here are two images, plotted in ImageJ, the one on the left enhanced with a color height map, the one on the right proccessed many times in three programs. Both image however present to the “eye” seven peaks.  The image on the right was processed thusly:


Original color-height map image where distortion was corrected in photoshop with edit>transform>skew, exported as a tiff, imported into gwyddion where an integral transform>CWT-5px-gaussian was performed, then in photoshop converted to grayscale, contrast enhanced and an additional 10px gaussian filter was applied as well as an unsharp mask at 50% amount, 50px radius, level of threshold=0.