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The approach from the original paper is to remove seams like you are decreasing the size, which provides you with a set of exclusive seams that can be added to the original image (with some mapping logic). This produces an output without repeating the same seam repeatedly.
For North American phone numbers, it's fairly common to input your phone number with the preceding country code of 1. It would be nice if the library accounted for that.
Protein structures can also be resolved via other methods such as x-ray crystallography of crystallized proteins. Unfortunately, that process can be rather time intensive and isn't viable for all proteins.
You can actually see a picture of it on the wikipedia article for pinhole cameras: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera