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Mars anomalies

Timothy

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T
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Mar 1, 2005
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542
I have Randi to thank for a sleepless night.

After reading his commentary item that points to www.marsanomalyresearch.com I visited the site. I spurned sleep and read page after page of the most fascinating insight into mental illness, delusion, paranoia, outright stupidity and ignorance that I have ever witnessed. I couldn't stop. It was like watching the train wreck of a human life. I slapped my forehead in amazement and befuddlement and pity for the poor disturbed man who devotes his life to spewing out his self-deluded fantasies.

My jaw aches from constantly dropping at each increasingly bizarre statement in his diatribes.

I still can hardly believe that people exist who can write and express themselves fairly normally, but are clearly so mentally ill.

- Timothy


"Jesus had a really bad weekend for our sins."
 
Aw, man... rule(8) those rule(8)ing rule(8)ers!!! Gives me rule(8)ing heartburn to see that kind of rule(8)y pseudoscience!
 
The Bad Astronomer said:


My Mars debunking
Click to expand...

Phil, I sent your site an email on this, simply because although reading Hoagland's nonsense before, I never had the idea that he was mentally ill, simply deluded and a big old media hog ... whereas Joseph Skipper's paranoic mania with automatic image tampering and blurring by supercomputers and his insistance that *every single* little image artifact is a Martian building, and *every single* blurry or uniformly colored area is evidence that an important Martain artifact has been removed from the image in the service of "the secrecy agenda".

While one can with very little detailed knowledge completely destroy his arguments, I found particularly telling his analysis of the "image tampering" of the photo of the rovers high gain antenna ... because my company built the high gain antenna (as well as the Pamcam Mast Assembly) and I am intimately familiar with its construction. To watch as he speculates, while every single speculation is completely incorrect, just makes me cringe in pity.

- Timothy
 
Not to boost anybody's ego, but as a geeky person who reads www.space.com a couple of times a week, let me just say that there are some seriously cool people on this forum. It seems no matter what field of extreme HiTech gadgetry is discussed, there are always someone here with direct hands-on experience. :D

Hmm... How about world domination, guys? ;)

Ririon
 
Ririon said:

Hmm... How about world domination, guys? ;)

Ririon
Click to expand...

Dude, you'd have to be NUTS to want to run this asylum!!!
 
jj said:
Dude, you'd have to be NUTS to want to run this asylum!!!
Click to expand...

Hey, it's not like I would do it. Come to think of it, people who actually want to run a country, let alone the world, are usually the last people we should let do it. Down with democracy, give us bullyocracy... Meaning instead of electing presidents, we should find somebody who desperately does not want to rule anything, and force them to do it... ;)

Ririon
 
Timothy said:
I have Randi to thank for a sleepless night.

After reading his commentary item that points to www.marsanomalyresearch.com I visited the site....

I still can hardly believe that people exist who can write and express themselves fairly normally, but are clearly so mentally ill.
Click to expand...

It's pretty common. Try this and this .

Both are pretty-well known on the sci.space.* usenet groups, and I'd be pretty surprised if Phil Plait hasn't encountered them. They're both real nut-jobs; the second author complained about me to the then-chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and one of his sons has placed me under a sort of fatwah of his own.
 
Brad Guth joined my bulletin board, actually. By his fourth post he was being rude, condescending, and used a bad word. I booted him.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Why is the first photo at MarsAnomaly a photo of a butt crack?
Click to expand...
It's the source of the much-ballyhooed methane.
 
Not sure if I get it.

www.randi.org/images/gallery/RANDI1.jpg

Really big photo of Randi, proffered as a source of artifacts.

Well, it is a source of artifacts, but that's kind of a lot of server bandwidth to eat up just for that pun.

So is that it, or am I missing something else?
 
number9 said:
Not sure if I get it.

www.randi.org/images/gallery/RANDI1.jpg

Really big photo of Randi, proffered as a source of artifacts.

Well, it is a source of artifacts, but that's kind of a lot of server bandwidth to eat up just for that pun.

So is that it, or am I missing something else?
Click to expand...

I share your confusion. I presume the idea is that if you zoom in on it enough as in the other links, you will generate artifacts.

Tell me though- What is a "vaccum emboitement?"
 
number9 said:
Not sure if I get it.

Really big photo of Randi, proffered as a source of artifacts.

So is that it, or am I missing something else?
Click to expand...
Most prominently, on Randi's suit, immediately next to the back of his hand, are compression artifacts (orthogonal patterns of pixels) extremely similar to those touted as features on Mars.

- Timothy
 
number9 said:
Not sure if I get it.
Click to expand...

Dan Pallotta points out that JPEG compression can produce blocky artifacts because of the numerical processing on 8-by-8-pixel blocks. Before transmitting images to Earth, this particular satellite (the Mars Express, launched by the European Space Agency) uses a compression similar to standard JPEG (except that the processing "bins" can be set from 1-by-1 up to 8-by-8 pixels, depending on the compression desired). In fact, the Mars image in question appears to have been compressed at least twice. I say that because JPEG recompression can cause banding and checkerboarding artifacts within the original block artifacts, precisely like those seen in the "anomaly" images.

Also, although it isn't mentioned at all on that marsanomalyresearch.com site, this is not a direct image from the satellite, but is actually a computer-generated "perspective" view. That is, the camera was pointed down, but it has two extra channels that record stereoscopic information, and that depth information was used to construct a digital topographic model of the crater. The visual image was then applied to the computed surface of this 3D model, and then an algorithm was used to produce a perspective view of the result, as if seen from a low angle. (Apparently, the second JPEG compression was done before applying the image to the model, possibly to resize it.) It is this processing that causes the compression and recompression artifacts to appear to be lying on the surface and at an angle, rather than aligned with the pixels in the finished perspective view.

To simulate this effect, I took a small section from the picture of Randi that Mr. Pallotta referenced. (It's a section of the background on the left side.) In the following image, I have simple converted that section to gray-scale colors and applied a "histogram equalizing" algorithm (which proportionally redistributes the brightness from pure black to pure white), to show the 8-by-8-pixel JPEG artifacts clearly.

http://opendb.com/images/randiMars1.jpg

Then, I enlarged that image by 300% and re-saved it as a JPEG file. I reloaded that image, applied a simple perspective-simulating algorithm, and rotated it right by 5 degrees. The second image below shows the result, side-by-side with a section of the image that Joseph P. Skipper alleges is evidence of a civilization, which I also converted to gray-scale and applied the histogram equalizing algorithm.

http://opendb.com/images/randiMars2.jpg

Obviously, Skipper is incorrect to assert that the "city" can't be imaging artifacts.
 
The Bad Astronomer said:
In my Mars debunking, I give an example of JPEG compression artifacts here.
Click to expand...


Nice site! :D

Looking at marsanomalyresearch.com some more, there sure is a lot of silliness there! One that really cracked me up was the "head monument" at http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-reports/2000/003/colossal-monuments.htm
Not that it doesn't look a heck of a lot like a head -- it really does, and in fact it's a much better illusion than the "face" (although the "animal monument" beside it takes considerably more imagination). But a little closer look shows something wrong: The two craters in the upper right show that the light is coming from the left, but the reflection on the head is on the right side, which is just wrong if that's a dome shape. But that's not what got me laughing; it was the final image at the bottom of the page, which is an earlier image taken by Viking, with somewhat higher resolution and the light coming from the other direction. No head in that one, but the rocks that formed the illusion are right there: Skipper draws an arrow right past the "nose" rocks, across the left "eye", ending on the "forehead", and captions it "Head monument is missing." (Unfortunately, he completely missed the depression that's clearly the "animal monument", points to an empty area to the right of it and declares the "Animal monument is missing!" :p ) Now the punch line: Does this image cause Skipper to think that, just maybe, those are lighting illusions in the first image? Of course not! It's incontrovertible proof that the Viking image has been tampered with to destroy the evidence!

Then, there's the "mining or manufacturing facility" at http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-reports/2005/081/tithonia-civilization.htm. Yeah, this does look like it could be a building, but... so do lots of things if their image is only a few pixels wide. (Skipper points to a site by Stewart C. Best, who has an amazing ability to detect all sorts of other details in this image, often from a single pixel!) But again, something's wrong: If this is really a building, then it would appear that the camera is imaging it from an elevation of about 30 degrees or so. (We see more of the "front wall" than we do the roof.) But the image details from MSSS indicate that the MOC was looking almost straight down! If this is a building, then it's obviously slid backwards into a ravine.

That site is a veritable catalog of errors people make when "analyzing" Mars images.
 
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