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Free Associating On The Surface Of Mars
jdaily writes "Apparently, while NASA scientists are busy analyzing the more than 10 gigabits of data returned by the rovers thus far, earnest space enthusiasts are dissecting the images and reporting discoveries of fossils, letters of the alphabet, and a white bunny. The 'Net really needs a kook hall of fame."
I would love to see a list of all the anomalous photographs from the missions. I'm sure all the tin foil hat types are moving on this, but not necessarily in a constructive way. I saw the so called fossil rock (interesting, but not compelling enough to be likely over chance), and the bunny (a piece of the craft) and a couple of others, but it would be funny to get them organized into one place with the raw images (not photoshop altered) so we could play with statistics, so to speak.
-Sean
I used to see all sorts of things in the rocky landscape. A lot of the things I saw looked liked gremlins to me, which featured prominently in my nightmares. Now that I look back on it, putting the mural on the wall was maybe not a good idea.
At least I had the sense to realize that it was just my imagination. I never once thought there was anything actually living on the Moon.
I know this sounds like a troll but I was having a look on the website and these rovers don't move very much do they?
:)We send lumps of plastic, metal and silicon hurtling throught the big black to crash land on a ball of red rock only to have them creep around slower than an arthritic ant with a particulalrly large tree on its back. Nearly half a century after getting the first man-made object into space we're still playing with very expensive, very slow, very delecate, short-lived radio controlled cars. If computers had advanced at the same rate we'd still be using mercury delay lines.
Good talent for understatement you have there
Yes, I'm very impressed that NASA can get overgrown fireworks off the ground most of the time. They don't even need the blue touchpaper these days. But I just wish someone would decide it'd be a good idea to divert some of the billions spent on finding ways to blow eahc other up towards developing decent manned space exploration. Preferably while there are still people to do the exploration.
It's funny... for all the silly crap the nutzo's are claiming to see in Mars images, hardly anything has been made of the unidentified flying object in this image (large streak near the bottom). That's a 15-second exposure of part of the early morning Martian sky, a segment of a panorama series designed to also grab the Earth... the streak is likely one of the 30-some or so defunct and/or lost spacecraft that may be orbiting Mars right now.
DiscDividers tabbed plastic CD dividers: divider cards f
If you're interested, there's a lot of relevant psychological research on this topic (past the clever Sagan quote). Basically, the big finding is that humans like to take lots of ambiguous data, pick a relevant category, and fit it in any way they can.
There has been much research into stereotyping from this angle - that is, People take ambiguous data (Suzie is good at Math and Reading but has trouble with English and Science) and generalize to positive or negative impressions of this person's academic achievement based on previous priming with a stereotype (Suzie is Black, Suzie is Latino, Suzie is White, etc). Asked why these pick these things, participants point to skewed examples from the ambiguous facts: "Suzie is bad at Science, therefore she has trouble", or "Suzie is good at Reading, therefore she is a good student".
This is basically the same phenomena we're witnessing here. There's a whole lot of ambiguous data (there *might* be life, there *might* not be), and these guys approach it from the "There IS life" mentality. Given all that ambiguous data, one can surely find outlier examples which seem to support their hypothesis.
A good review of the 'Positive Test Strategy', 'Expectacy Confirmation Bias', or 'Hypothesis Conformation Bias' can be read in "Social Cognition", by Kunda et al.