Slashdot Mirror
Seeking a Ghost via Web Cam
dogberto writes "It seems that people are using a web cam for everything these days. Starting with a web cam to watch the daily lives of people in their rooms. Now, it seems that the folks at The Evansville Courier & Press have decided to install a video camera in the 114 year old Willard Library to give internet viewers a chance to spot the legendary ghost (a.k.a., the "Lady in Grey") via this Ghost Cam. CNN was the first I saw running an article. The Willard Library link gives some more background on the ghost.
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The great JPEG Blur search of Halloween '99
BTW, I've already submitted my faked ghost sighting, I put my slashdot username on the picture and recommend any /.'ers with some time to waste to do the same. Damn it, we want verifiable ghost cams!
There are a lot of ways to post a photo that you have created but not stored, and still tell whether it was unmodified when you get a copy back from an untrusted reporter.
Off the top of my head,
Also, Photoshop has a digital signature filter which works on similar methods. I think it has lots of redundant information so that it won't break down with lossy compression (or even print-then-scan cycles). It was intended to FIND photos, not to DISCARD photos, that may be from a given source, such as porn CD-ROMs stockpiling illegal scans of Playboy (C) artwork.
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why the hell are they always in academic institutions?!?!?! I suppose the buildings are old and thus chock full of explanations for the presences
Georgia Tech's Library is the perfect setting for a ghost story. When one first walks into the place, they feel a sense of age without glory, as if the building is in the process of dying. It is heightened by the creaky wood staircases, the cramped little restrooms set in odd places, and the sealed-off stairwell with water-corroded paint that can only be seen by looking out the right windows in another stairwell.
The bare flourescent light tubes are covered by parallel, flat plates in the shape of a half-arc that stick down like small guillotines. The large atrium formed by floors 1 and 2 of the West wing is duplicated on floors 3 and 4 (like the old identical-room-switcharoo trick). The building incorporates at least 6 different architectural styles among its operative stairwells: one of them is straight, small, narrow, and creaky; another is constructed like a huge, tomato-green spiraled tube that secretly snakes down towards the basement.
The East wing is two or three floors taller than the West wing, and from here one may peer down on the oldest of campus buildings. The light behaves differently on these floors... the sunlight traces shadows through ancient, hazed-over glass. Even when I stand there, beholding it with my own eyes, the scene appears impossibly faded, like one of grandma's wedding pictures (or maybe some JPEG compression artifacts).
The building has many secret places. Most striking are the many locked rooms that appear randomly scattered throughout the floor plans... their practical purposes forgotten. In this one particular room, statues and busts can be seen through the darkened glass. If I remember correctly, the entire top floor of the East Wing is closed to the public, accessible only to invisible research librarians.
Finally, the building stands at the highest geographical point on campus. "The Hill" was of strategic significance during the civil war battle that this region of Atlanta saw.
Funny, though... Nobody here is creative enough to make up any stories about it. That's Tech for you...
Stephen Bennett
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
how much you wanna bet people start superimposing images of ghosts or whatever on it (i'm talking actually doing a decent job, working with translucency, etc) and saying they plucked it off the site and were the first to see it? aye. seems kinda ridiculous to me to even put one up, but i guess it's a decent way to generate page impressions.
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you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to find the URL for the Loch Ness web cam.
This page has pictures that people have submitted who claim to have spotted the ghost. Having made every effort to try not to be overly cynical, I must say that those pictures combined with their comments make for the dumbest reading ever. This would likely be more interesting to an individual with vision impairment than it is to me, because I can clearly see that there isn't a ghost.. they'd have to squint or take the ignorant folks' words for it. People appear to be seeing ghosts in the graphic compression algorithm (blocky images in certain places), not to mention some outright hallucination.
At first glance it seems as though this is some public service to people who are ghost-seeking folks. But, then you scroll down and see ad banners and (at least to me) it all clicks. They want tons of people to spend their entire day sitting on their web site looking at the "ghost cam" as it refreshes every 30 seconds, building up tons of impressions. Okay, don't think I'm pretending that 90% of Slashdot readers didn't realize this.. but for those of you who are too skeptical to even go look at the Ghost Cam (or when everyone wakes up in the morning in the US and the site dies), I think my explanation is pretty valid.
Another thing that's interesting is that all of the "comments" on the proof page seem strikingly similar. Without knowing anything else I'd say that most of them were fabricated. Who knows? I think I have an extreme aversion to anything on the Net with a central theme of "ghosts". Except maybe GhostView.
Ghost cams have been around for quite a while now, some other interesting ones are @
GhostWatch
Ghostwatcher
I believe there is even a Loch-ness monster cam @
"Offical Lochness Site
Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
You may be to explain away the ghostly shadows, but try to explain how the camera ... ended up pointing in a different direction one day!!!!!! It's inexplicable! I'm starting to believe that there's really something out there!
I don't deny that you saw what you saw. However, I take issue that what you saw were ghosts. I have had my "paranormal" experiences too.
:) That everything has a rational explanation. This is why I mentioned "The Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark". It is very good reading, and could teach many people skeptical thinking skills.
:)
Most recently while driving home after a long whitewater kayaking trip (I had been awake for 2 days straight) I witnesses one of the shadows on the right of the road... Get up and walk across the road! Not only that, but my tired brain saw it as one of the Nine Riders in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings!!!
I swear to you that this is what I saw. Now, I don't for a moment believe that one of the Nine is out walking along the highway near my house. I do believe however that I was very tired and started to hallucinate. (Sleep deprivation causes such things, so sayeth my Psycology professors). Really, I should NOT have been driving under those conditions.
Now, after I saw this apparition I thought "Cool!", then I burst out laughing at myself. I don't think myself immune to hallucinations. I don't think anyone REALLY is. (If they were, LSD would have no effect on those people IMO.) Not that I have done LSD, but my point is that the human brain is a electro-chemical device. Minor changes in brain chemistry (for whatever reason) or simple changes in thought processes can radically alter how we percive our world. I have had other events similar (and creepier) than this occur throughout my life. I don't find the events reproducable, nor quantifiable under current scientific (Physical and Psycological) thinking.
I think its fine to believe in what you saw. Again, I am not doubting that you actually saw what you did, I am doubting that what you saw was explanied "only" by ghosts. There are other explanations.
As to the "poltergeist" you describe, there are many other reasonable explanations (other than hallucination). Occham's [sp] razor comes into play here: The simplest solution is probably the correct one. I won't proffer any explanations, I will leave it as an experiment for the readers of slashdot (those who understand the scientific method anyway) to come up with their own.
It is fine to believe in ghosts (or relgion, or magnetic therapy, or channeling, or crystals, or...) Again, many people believe in such things.
I however do not.
I believe (notice that believe is a key word here!
I just hope to see more skeptical thinkers in this world. A lack of skepticisim IMO breeds faith (which can be quite a positive force!) but faith can become fanatacism. I fear fanatics.
Thats my take anyhow!
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Okay, if they were REALLY trying to catch this bastardly little ghost, then why aren't there ANY fraud protection in place to prevent it... I mean, really, I could stick a picture of Mickey Mouse in there at this point, at a little gaussian blur, crank down the opacity, and voila... instant ghost.
Anyway, it would be so easy to prevent this from happening, it's as if they don't care. First and foremost, time-stamp all the images. Duh.. Secondly, (and they had BETTER be doing this already) recording the feed on location, or AT LEAST archiving each image that gets posted to the web.
With these two SIMPLE procedures in place, in the event of a really convincing shot, it will give them the ability to see if the shot being submitted is at least the same shot as the one that was on the web, without any altering.
PS - Maybe it's just me, but the circles and arrows and whatnot bugged the hell out of me... If there HAD been something there, I wouldn't have seen it because it was already too grainy WITHOUT the distracting yellow indicators. Also, I really don't think I saw anything ghost-worthy. One pic with a blur close to the camera was okay, but coulda been faked far too easily..
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