Thanks for the further info. I notice that in the uncropped version, the car on the right, that looks to be a little over twice as far away as the Prius, has an almost totally illegible number plate, while the next car up the road, probably three times as far away, has a completely illegible plate. Whereas, if I crop out the ’suckers’ plate and reduce it in size even by a factor of four, it’s still easy to read.

RW, please notice that the other plates are about 1/10 the area of the prius plate. In digital photography that can cause characters to dissolve into pixellated blur. Reducing the size of an image isn’t as important as reducing the pixel count. If the original had the small plates at a pixel limit, they are blurred, no matter the physical size. Also, center of a lens is always more sharp then edge, often by quite a bit, especially in recent non-pro non-35mm cameras. Like 1/4 to 1/8 as sharp. Add to that the effect that rotation of a one handed hold with an edge place shutter release imparts and the plates near the edge being more blurred is expected. There is no difference in sharpness of other insignia on the vehicles vs. the plates on each vehicle at least as far as I can see in the image.

That looks to me as though the camera focused on the Prius
Yup.
Looking at the center line and road grooves, I think there’s some camera and car motion effects that do some odd things
[...]
I don’t see anything other than some odd effects with grooves that would warrant any suspicion, and the grooves ought to be explainable with a bit of camera motion, car motion, and the scan speed of the image sensor.

The groove cutting machine in California has a random motion built into it (so that motorcycle tires don’t get ‘stuck in a rut’ – SHUDDER – bad memory of early parallel grooves of constant depth and a motorcycle tire with straight ribs…) so the degree of depth, ‘wobble’, and everything else about the grooves tends to ‘come and go’ unpredictably. (And I’m glad for it, even if my present M.C. tires have no parallel ribs… I still get the willies on grooved pavement even though the state responded to MC rider protests and went to the randomizer). The look of the groves don’t tell you much.

The shadows place the sun medium low on the horizon. 5pm?. Most recent digital cameras hang out at about f4 to f5.6 unless pushed elsewhere (the small sensor size makes this ideal, with wider apertures suffering soft focus, if they are available at all, and smaller apertures being diffraction limited). The depth of field at f4 to f5.6 would soft focus the more distant cars, and the limited light of an afternoon to setting sun with high speed shutter to reduce motion blur pretty much says f4 (ish) to f5.6 exposure (never trust the meta data in forensics…) though again, a bit of lab time would give a better answer than eyeballing it.

I see nothing in this picture that is suspicious. [Nikon D50, a couple of 35mm Nikons, Canon FTQL (ancient) F1 (ancient), several Minolta 7000x series and 5000x series (damn it), and several misc. minor cameras plus darkroom equipment (now obsolete, damn it again) and many 10s of thousands of pictures taken, mostly badly, and I have taught forensics class at Sacramento State) though I have to say that with modern software a digital image can be made to show anything and without access to the original bits it's hard to prove.]

My take on it is that if this were a fake it would have taken far too much time to make than it would be worth to make this quality. I also think I’ve seen the same car, though I can’t place exactly where… (Sacramento? Stockton? Kettleman City? ) or when. (Vague memory of a chuckle while near highway hypnosis.)

The light, shading and direction on the plate are all ‘correct’ (though I can’t explain the shadow the car is in. Truck on the shoulder? Billboard?) as are the relative sharpness of the car and plate. There are no errors of color temperature nor of lighting source. The shadows and highlights are all correct. There are no unexplained reflections. The resolution seems consistent between the plate and car. I see no aliasing that is out of place. The plate image is of the same plane and orientation as the surface it is on. There are no proportion artifacts and no cropping artifacts. Looks good to me.

RW, as someone who’s professionally paranoid (they WERE always out to get me and and the log files showed it…) I’d suggest that you need to moderate your caution. At least get a valid, though unused day to day, email address. It’s not very hard to pick up a gmail, or whatever, account that you just don’t read very often. And cut Anthony some slack. The work it would take to fake the picture just isn’t worth it to someone who has as much on his plate as he has…

I’ve spent far more time on this than it deserves and I’m ready to move on.

REPLY: FYI I boosted the sharpness and brightness a tad in the cropped photo, to make a better presentation for the web page. No other enhancements were made. The original photo is as posted. If I recall correctly the shadow is an overpass we just went under. The photo was taken south of Fresno on I-5. – Anthony

Thanks for the further info. I notice that in the uncropped version, the car on the right, that looks to be a little over twice as far away as the Prius, has an almost totally illegible number plate, while the next car up the road, probably three times as far away, has a completely illegible plate. Whereas, if I crop out the ’suckers’ plate and reduce it in size even by a factor of four, it’s still easy to read.

That looks to me as though the camera focused on the Prius, a sensible thing to do. I considered that the optics might be lame, as in less sharp on the edge of the field, but if that were the case I’d expect to see some distortion too, and I don’t. Looking at the center line and road grooves, I think there’s some camera and car motion effects that do some odd things, and I think the camera is actually focused _before_ the Prius which would exacerbate focus for more distant cars.

I think Anthony’s car is just before an unseen while lane marker, that would put the Prius 2.5 markers away. The Yukon is 7 markers away, the next car 9 or 10.

I don’t see anything other than some odd effects with grooves that would warrant any suspicion, and the grooves ought to be explainable with a bit of camera motion, car motion, and the scan speed of the image sensor.

Tim (21:27:22) :

I’m not deriding anyone’s car, Prius drivers or Hummer drivers. I just want people to pay the full cost of oil, inclusive of subsidies such as the military one.

Oh I know, Tim. I wasn’t trying to imply that you were, but that some greenies do. No offense intended.

But if you say it’s entirely real, I’ll take your word for it. Plenty of things in photographs may look anomalous at first sight, and as I say, I was just curious. I wasn’t ‘demanding’ any details, and I don’t see how putting in a false e-mail address should imply any lack of integrity. Should I hand out my e-mail address to anyone who asks for it?

REPLY: Well if you simply put your valid email address in the post, I could have emailed you directly. Email addresses allow me to contact people that comment with questions or responses. It seems a reasonable courtesy to expect. – Anthony

REPLY: I can understand the skepticism. I carry a camera on all trips I make. As you may know, I operate the http://www.surfacestations.org project and this happened to be a trip to survey stations. To me recent meant in the last few months. With LCD Displays on the rear of cameras now, and large megapixel resolution, getting this shot was quite easy. Aim in general direction as seen on LCD, snap, then crop out what you want from the large megapixel image.

Here is the original image before cropping. Notice the spots on the windshield in foreground. Bugs I think:

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/100_1501.jpg

I find it curious though that you question me and demand such details when you don’t even have the integrity yourself to put in a valid email address in your post x@yyy.zzz is not a real email address. – Anthony

“Wow – nothing like a Prius to get people foaming at the mouth.”

Sorry, Tim. Guilty as charged. Seeing a Prius on the road is like having Algore, Hansen, and the entire California state government encapsulized next to you….
I can relate a little bit. One of my cars is a Porsche….”

LOL Jay. I understand. Just know not every Prius driver is a left wing wacko.

FWIW Tim, I don’t have a problem with anyone driving any vehicle. It’s when someone drives a specific vehicle and then derides others for not being as foresighted or “green” as they are. This happens with other vehicles besides Priuses (Prii?), like the silly Smart Car.”

I’m not deriding anyone’s car, Prius drivers or Hummer drivers. I just want people to pay the full cost of oil, inclusive of subsidies such as the military one.

“It’s the federal tax credits that piss me off personally. (Don’t believe they are available here in Canada – could be wrong). I don’t give 2 hoots what you choose to drive. All the power to you. Just don’t do it on my dime. (Note: I recognize I don’t pay taxes down there). I tried to go to your link but it wouldn’t let me. That being said, if you are worried about foreign oil dependency, that quantity of risk, as interpreted by the market is built into the price of oil. Econ 101 – All future expecations are built into a product’s price; especially with commodities.”

Well gee Mike, I don’t much like subsidizing the cost of oil (via U.S. military deployments and expenditures in the middle east that secure the world’s oil supply). So I guess that really pisses me off. So think about that next time you are driving on the U.S. taxpayer’s dime. And last time I checked, “the market” wasn’t footing the bill for the U.S. military, it is me, the U.S. taxpayer. So how about sending us some cash from Canada?

Pamela Gray (11:15:07) :
[...] it will have to hogtie me first. Hell, those little cars can’t even haul a hogtied female to jail.

You’re flirting again aren’t you? ;-)

I’d hate to be the gov’t agent assigned to hogtie and haul Pamela to jail.
He might be left with an interesting story behind the scars. :-)

Little Saturn SL2 vs. brand new GMC Sonoma pickup? The Saturn was totaled,
of course, but the pickup driver regretted not seeing us before the
left turn he made. See http://wermenh.com/saturn.html – complete with
physics. The replacement Saturn has 227 Kmi so far.

You are correct it’s uranium.

Thanks for your other comments, they all cut wood.

If you look at the whole show from a distance, people worry to much.
But they should be bit more careful about the crooked politicians they choose to represent them.

Yup. But quantity has a quality all it’s own… Distributed sources will always suffer a disadvantage relative to the ‘big boys’ simply due to financing costs if nothing else. Wal Mart is monster sized because it is monster sized and monster sized means it can purchase cheaper. The electric utility will always be able to buy solar cells or wind turbines cheaper than you can.

For many individuals, depending on circumstances, the new technologies provide an opportunity to get away from the local power company and Big Oil’s Service Stations for fueling the car.

And I can make my own biodiesel (and have) and my own ethanol (and have) and my own gasogen for producer gas and my own methane digester (and have) and… but at the end of the day it’s cheaper to fill up at the local gas station due to economies of scale. This will not change. (It’s that dismal science thing again. Sigh.)

Honda for example delivers a hydrogen generator as a domestic application. The system, the size of a fridge, converts Propane into heat to warm your home and provides hydrogen to fuel up your car.

This, IMHO, is the only way hydrogen can work. As a byproduct of cogeneration in some way.

Shell already markets a “clean diesel” made from natural gas (plant in Quatar).

This is the GTL / CTL technology. Lots of folks are doing it. BP, Chevron CVX, Conoco Philips COP, even MRO (Marathon Oil) who have a very interesting bromine based tech. It’s substantially the same product that SASOL has made for 30+ years in South Africa (SSL) from coal.

I do not believe we already have reached peak-oil.

We have.

Recently, huge oil fiellds were found in China, The Huzdar Region of Balochistan, Pakistan (Bolochistan borders with Afghanistan and the current fight for independance from Pakistan has everything to do with the oil and gas that has been found), Colombia and off coast of Brazil. Forget about the Arctic.

Peak oil does NOT mean no more will be found, it just means that the rate of finding drops below the rate of depletion. It has. Yes, big finds. No, not bigger than depletion.

Natural Gas, read diesel oil and jet fuel, can be found everywhere.

Not a peak oil issue. Peak Oil is not Peak Fossil Fuels… I’d count Nat. Gas as part of the ‘alternatives’ to get gasoline and Diesel. Ditto coal.

If we only take the US resources into account that could secure domestic oil consumption for the next 118 years all those peak oil stories can be archived under the same hoax department as AGW.

Yes and no. Peak Oil as described by Hubbert is exactly right. It took us 100 years to reach the peak and we’ll be pumping oil (at every lower rates) for the next 100 years. A more or less symmetrical curve.

We will gradually turn more natural gas and coal into gasoline and Diesel (Modulo Obama…) so the Peak Oil Gloom & Doom HYPE is the same as the AGW HYPE. Coal derived gasoline and Diesel are good for another couple of hundred years. Then there is algae derived oil (millions of years) and nuclear powered synthesis of motor fuels (millions of years). There is no energy shortage and there never will be.

ANY shortage of motor fuels in the next few hundred years are entirely due to political decisions not to use natural gas and coal. Peak oil or no.

By the way, the mini nuclear power plant comes at container size

A city in Alaska tried to get one of these from Toshiba? but was shut down. They would have avoided some tens of thousands of gallons of Diesel fuel burn each year… There is still some hope they will succeed.

http://www.primidi.com/2005/02/06.html

A Japanese scientist has found a way to extract plutonium from seawater so this energy source could last for ever.

Um, that ought to be Uranium. Plutonium is mostly man made… But yes. The quantity that erodes into the ocean each year is less that what is required to power everything on the planet. We can take it out “forever”.

and the link