Where do you get that from? Looking at the actual results, I see numerous instances where the initial count differs from the recount. More often than not it's just a 1 or 2 vote discrepancy, but it is pervasive. During the early stages of the recount it was being reported that getting on for 1% of the votes hadn't been counted; either the machines would ignore every 100th ballot or so, or they'd ignore a whole batch because pens with the wrong kind of ink had been used. Most of the batched errors were caught on the day of the count, but it took a recount to show up the sporadic individual errors.
Why is this important? One reason is because there is a demographic difference between hand-counted and machine-counted areas, so if you're going to disenfranchise 1% of the population in machine-counted areas, even if it's done entirely at random, that reduces the elective power of the demographic in those areas, which can tip a close election. Besides, isn't every vote supposed to be counted? Isn't that why you go and vote, because you believe that your vote will be counted? How many voters wouldn't bother if they knew it was some sort of lottery?
Another point: a partial recount will never disclose a fraud if the people choosing the areas to be recounted are also the people behind the fraud. They will simply leave the areas where the fraud took place until last, secure in the knowledge that the recount sponsor's finances or resolve will run out before the recount gets that far. And it certainly was the case that Kucinich couldn't specify exactly what was recounted. His requests for a tally of the uncast ballot papers, for instance, fell on deaf ears. So what happened to those uncast ballots? Did they get cast after all?
There's been some interesting discussion here, so it's kind-of unfortunate that the paper has been withdrawn because of "the discovery of a serious bias resulting from the systematic dimming of galaxies with larger ellipticities away from the North Galactic Pole. Thus the conclusion that there is a special axis along which the elliptical galaxies tend to be aligned is incorrect."
Just follow the link to the abstract. I'm surprised that nobody else seems to have noticed. I tried to download the preprint for future reference about half a day ago and got "The author has provided no source to generate PDF, and no PDF."
Oh well. It'll get interesting when the real anisotropy is discovered, but for now we can all settle back down in our seats. Panic's over.
Since the purpose is to fix embarrassing errors before users get to see them, there's no need for an as-you-type checker. Instead the code could be fed as a whole through a batch spellchecker. This could be a normal spellchecker with a preprocessor which converts "CamelCode" to (non-) "camel code". The preprocessor could then discard any resulting fragments which are just one or two characters long. Known keywords could either be filtered out by the preprocessor or just added to the spellchecker's dictionary.
This leaves the problems of ubiquitous abbreviations in code, e.g. QuatMult for quaternion multiplication, and non-English function names in pre-existing libraries over which we have no control. These problems can be solved by counting the occurrences of candidate errors and seeing if the count exceeds some threshold. If "quat" occurs 100 times in your code then it's a safe bet that it's a valid abbreviation and/or part of some widely used library. In that case we could consider automatically adding it to the dictionary. It's only likely to be a misspelling of quit if it occurs just three or four times (I'm assuming that the spellchecking operation is performed frequently enough to catch all such errors "in the bud" before they propagate wildly. If not then it's likely to be a case of StabulDoorHorseBolted.)
If widely-used character sequences are automatically added to the dictionary, we could rely on this same process to add the keywords of the language to the spellchecker dictionary automatically, saving some manual effort. It would then be easy to add the few remaining false positives (rarely used keywords) to the dictionary by hand. Of course there's probably some code somewhere that does all this already.
I had to strain to get RedHat to fit onto a system that XP had no problem fitting onto.... How hard is it to offer cut down versions of Mandrake? KDE edition contains all the KDE stuff. Gnome edition contains all the gnome stuff. Not hard.
Linux is bigger than Redhat+Mandrake. It's even bigger than RH+Mandrake+SuSE+Debian+etc.
It's so big that some of it is really tiny, because when someone decides they want a small Linux, it's possible for them to do something about it. DamnSmallLinux (www.damnsmalllinux.org) is 50MB. Feather Linux (featherlinux.berlios.de/) is less than 64MB. Puppy Linux (www.goosee.com/puppy/) is about 42MB and loads entirely into memory, and despite the tiny size it has a nice intuitive gui interface and a reasonable collection of apps. And there's others...
But that leads us into another kind of choice. Instead of being faced with one distro of 10 or more CDs, and installing the lot because we can't decide what we'll need, we're faced with numerous tiny distros. Which to go for? Help!! But then you get the best choice of all, and nobody will convince me that it's a choice I shouldn't have. Why not have the lot? Most of these distros come as Live CDs - just insert and boot up the PC to try the distro. Try them all. Pick the one you like best, and install that one on your HD.
Know what I think would be really cool? A CD with a boot manager and ten or so mini linuxes on it. Then for the price of just one CD a potential Linux user could boot it up, select any one of the ten linuxes, and try it. And keep trying, comparing and contrasting, till they find one they like. If they find one that has a user interface they love and a decent set of base applications but it lacks one or two apps that they really need, then they can download those extra apps or order a CD or set of of CDs containing an expanded version of the Linux that they know they like.
If you find this prospect terrifying, it's because you're used to *irrevocable* choices, a.k.a. decisions. You're used to having to splash out big money on systems that probably don't do what you want, where you'll only find out the shortcomings when it's too late. One-off choices like that are terrifying, but only because of the lack of choice that comes afterwards. But undoable choices are great. They allow you to say "what if..". They allow you to play. Who doesn't like to play?
Yes, the "therefore" is not explicitly stated, but I believe it to be implied.
You can believe what you like, and so can the o.p. But belief without proof is what is commonly called faith. Is it appropriate for someone who calls himself an "Agn0stic"?
As I recall about the Glass Worm photo, Plait says that perspective is deceptive is many astronomical photos, presents an example that looks like a crater in one orientation and a dome in another, and suggests that a similar perceptual trick is probably at work in the case of the "worm."
In the immortal words of Christine Keeler, "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?"
Only, there are numerous "glass worms", not just one. Some of them seem to cross one another, and at least one goes down into a depression, forming a glassy pool there, and emerges from the other side. And every one of them looks like a glass worm, and not one looks like a train of dunes. And Plait helpfully shows an upside-down image of one, and despite his assertions, to me at least it still looks like an (upside-down) glass worm.
He also explains the "glassy" appearance in terms of an imaging effect. This is a far better hypothesis than any Hoagland has proposed,
Better in what way? Has it stood up to testing better than Hoagland's hypotheses? Have there even been any tests proposed? Are there any photos of Earth dunes, anywhere, that look like glass worms?
My own hypothesis is that the "glass worms" are glaciers. They are shinier and more transparent than Earth glaciers because no snow ever falls on them. And the difference between this hypothesis and Plait's is that mine actually explains what is observed, and not in a contrived way. The "worms" tend to follow valley floors because that is what water does, even when in the form of ice. The transverse markings are caused by seasonal variation in rate of flow, and are similar to crevasses in Earth glaciers. And, Just like Earth glaciers, the "worms" can go uphill for short distances. The pressure of ice entering and filling a depression is enough to force ice uphill on the other side of the depression.
But there was no point putting forward such a hypothesis in the past, because it implies that surface water has been observed, and that is a no-no. Even yesterday's announcement was only about water in the long-ago past. So we have official explanations about "optical illusions". Given the lameness of these explanations, it's hardly surprising that many people prefer to roll their own hypotheses.
and while I would love to be able to explore Mars inch by inch, in the absence of infinite money, work like Plait's is the best we have.
Can we really not do any better than that? Whatever happened to *testable* and *tested* hypotheses? And Mars is covered with a vast number of anomalous features, totally diferent from anything on Earth, of which we have tantalising images with *almost* enough resolution to tell us definitively what they are. There are "spiders" (actually huge plant-like objects, which seem to grow and die down with the Martian seasons, and which in some regions in the southern hemisphere seem to form huge forests). There are "dalmatian dunes", i.e. "dunes" which are covered with large dark spots like dalmatian dogs. These too are shiny, suggesting a glacial nature, and the dark spots have an organic look to them. Could be oil, could be some kind of life form. Either case ought to arouse some interest, but.. no. And there is much, much more. A whole planetful of stuff, in fact.
Where is the serious discussion of these items? Why the insistence on prosaic "explanations" that don't actually explain anything? Or on an absence of explanation, in cases where no prosaic explanation can be found?
I think it is because once a notion (in this case the notion that mars is dry and dead) has taken hold, it is practically impossible to shift it, and no amount of evidence can make any difference. People think it has been proven beyond doubt that Mars is dry and dead, even though when pressed they can't point to any proof, or even to any real evidence to support that hypothesis.
"Flamebait is a message posted to an Internet discussion group, such as a newsgroup or a mailing list, with the intent of provoking an angry response (a "flame")." -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamebait
I'll admit that I can barely restrain myself from posting an angry response, but not to the post, which is well thought out and informative, and properly backed up with links to a serious article, and a relevant image.
..First I should note that if microbes exist then they should leave a trail... And that trail may be as big as to be visible from above:
Life on Mars: Giant Fossils
http://www.resa.net/nasa/mars_life_gifossil.htm
This isn't even slightly contentious. Bacteria do exist in huge colonies. Their secretions or their dead bodies can build up into huge structures, in much the same way that small creatures produce coral reefs. Huge fossil bacterial mounds are so common that there is a name for them, stromatolites. They can be seen from above, often from a great height. Anyone following the link would have discovered this. If Mars has followed a similar evolutionary path, stromatolites should be even more visible there than on Earth, because there has been little recent biological activity there that might cover them up or recycle them into something else like there has been on Earth.
Second there's the chemistry of rocks. The more deep we study them, the better we get into their evolution. In some cases the "phases" or "cycles" of processes around certain minerals can be done only with the help of microorganisms.
Again a perfectly valid point, in an informative post by a person who seems to have a good professional grasp of his subject.
Is that a fossil? Well that thing has many things that point to organics....
and the writer goes on to point out those things. But he admits the object could be a tiny lump of stone that just happens to be nearly symmetrical, and just happens to have the other characteristics mentioned. On its own it is not conclusive.
But the worst this something has is the fact that is laying there lonely and unique...So until someone gets a better enhancement of that (there are six frames of that rock) or we find something similar, it will remain something.
- and spot the similarities. Two specimens
of the same fossil species? It's hard to be sure because the parafossilA.png object is well eroded,
but there's a definite similarity in shape. And there is a very large number of other fossil candidates in the Nasa images. Nothing is laying there "lonely and unique".
The planet is quite dead and you don't need microscopes to be sure of that.
Now I would say that really is contentious. But it's hardly flamebait in the context of this site, because it agrees with the scientific consensus.
very few scientists will admit to errors, and even fewer will go out on a limb by putting forwards the original hypotheses which are the essential prerequisite for any true science. They don't want to get "reamed". So, for instance, they won't use the "f-word" ("fossil") in connection with Mars images, even though the images seem to be crammed full of fossils of various types and species.
.. responding to myself now, but what else can I do? Discussion of Martian fossils is obviously anathema here, but in the absence of such discussion I look like the troll that I am being painted as.
This is by an author who is being as sceptical as the mainstream could wish for (".. and would assign the spherules maybe a 3 percent chance of being organically formed. His proposed microbial or algae mat has maybe a 4 percent chance of being organic....") but I would say that the evidence he presents speaks for itself, and he has done a good job of collating that evidence. The low probabilities of biological origin that he assigns to the various phenomena are based on his preconceptions about the history of Mars; preconceptions which should have been blown away by the images that he is studying with their sheer profusion and variety of biological candidates, and by the other indications that have arisen in the time since he wrote that article.
And yes Hoagland gave them the names he did in the hopes that others would make the same mistake the poster of the parent of your post did.
"We are not saying there are stoves or pistons on Mars," Hoagland said in a telephone interview. "Absolutely not. When we began looking at these objects, what struck us was how remarkably symmetrical, how remarkably designed-looking, how remarkably manufactured some of these things looked."
Hoagland's web site, however, does not make this distinction with many rover images. A headline on the home page flatly states that some objects on Mars are non-natural: "Spirit Sees (and Still Ignores) More Artificial Junk."
- all this is from a space.com article by Robert Roy Britt. Note that despite Britt's implications there is no inconsistency in Hoagland's position; you can believe that something is artificial without necessarily believing that it is a stove or a piston.
He is a charlatan and a fake.
This may be the case. However, he is the one presenting actual evidence to back up his claims, instead of relying solely on innuendo.
He isn't crazy, he is very carefull to not fuck up (like actually making the claim that any of those rocks are stoves) but he all but makes those claims because he knows that there are gullible people that will eat it up... (they'll assume he REALLY meant stoves).
But those gullible people can look at the pictures on his site and decide for themselves what they reckon the labelled objects really are. It is *others* that are trying to create the impression that Hoagland is claiming there are stoves and pistons. *Not* Hoagland. Because it's obvious, if everyone thought that Hoagland was making claims about actual pistons and stoves, nobody would bother to look at his site. It would be dismissed, unexamined. And that's the point.
You know, I was going to respond to this, when I finally realized you're a crackpot. I've been trolled! *grin*
Why not respond anyway? I'm afraid I can't be bothered to do the usual trollish thing like call you names and pretend to address your statements without actually referring to any of them. But I'm sure you can do that for me.
Seriously. Go to college. Take a first-year philosophy class. All your questions are dealt with there.
I only asked three questions - "Unfounded beliefs: Where to begin? The Big Bang? Black Holes?"
I can imagine a first year philosopy class dealing with the first of those questions, but not with the other two.
Oh, well, it was fun while it lasted...
The fun is only just beginning, if you really like this sort of thing.
Mainstream science, however, is all about proof, and if you don't have it, you get reamed.
Mainstream science has very little to do with proof. It is, or should be, about testability, which generally means the possibility of *dis*proof. A hypothesis is produced, to explain an observed phenomenon. Attempts are then made to disprove the hypothesis. If these are genuine honest attempts, then the more they fail, the more confidence we can have in the validity of the hypothesis - but we can never be certain that it is right. Certainty and science do not mix, or should not. Unfortunately, much of what passes for science now is actually forceful assertion of established "truths", coupled with active discouragement of the formulation of alternative hypotheses, often using debating tricks/logical fallacies such as ad hominem, "guilt by association", and misrepresentation of the hypothesis to be "debunked".
Some scientific statements may seem to be provable, but only if they relate to a small "hypothesis space" which can be exhaustively
searched. E.g. it might seem that "There is
a monster in Loch Ness" could be proved by
actually producing one, and that "there is
no monster in Loch Ness" could be proved by dragging or scanning the entire Loch with negative
results. But
the most interesting hypotheses are not provable because they are "universal", i.e. they apply to a potentially infinite class of observations. And even the seemingly provable statements aren't really, if we allow open-ended ad hoc "explanations" ("There is a monster, but it's invisible to radar thanks to the stealth techology that it has evolved")
- ridiculous example, but there's a lot of science that works just like that.
If you make errors, you get reamed when someone double-checks your work.
Yes. That's why very few scientists will admit to errors, and even fewer will go out on a limb by putting forwards the original hypotheses which are the essential prerequisite for any true science. They don't want to get "reamed". So, for instance, they won't use the "f-word" ("fossil") in connection with Mars images, even though the images seem to be crammed full of fossils of various types and species.
Seriously. Show me an unfounded belief, error, or unstated assumption that has stuck around in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other scientific field for a signifigant period of time. Something that is clearly and demonstrably false, yet which the mainstream community refuses to correct. Good luck.
Unfounded beliefs: Where to begin? The Big Bang? Black Holes? Errors: "Mainstream science, however, is all about proof, and if you don't have it, you get reamed"; Unstated assumptions: An object which appears to be billions of light years distant really is located where it appears to be, or thereabouts, so that a galaxy which appears to be a billion light years distant in one direction cannot be identified with a similar galaxy which appears to be a billion light years distant in the opposite direction. Light paths are subject only to very slight bending. All the millions of quasar images which appear at the limits of what is visible are not in fact all the same quasar. The universe is at least as big as the apparent size of that part of it which we can observe.
"does this look like a sphinx?".. actually it does, a little bit. Is it a sphinx? Almost certainly not, if it is culled from a Mars photo. Is Hoagland claiming it is a sphinx? I don't know, it's an image called sphinx4.jpeg. That tells me nothing in the absence of the web page that references it. For all I know, it could actually be a picture taken on earth, of something which is clearly and demonstrably a sphinx.
"Hoagland claims that some Martian rocks look like stoves and tools". NO HE DOES NOT. He attaches labels, "the bowl", "the safe", "the stove", to various objects which may or may not be rocks. He does think that they are artefacts, but he is not claiming that they are actual bowls or stoves etc., or that any resemblance they may have to such household items is anything more than a coincidence. Nasa does exactly the same thing with its "berrybowl", "sharkfin", "cards" etc. labels.
"As far as we can tell from the pictures, they're just plain old rocks" - maybe that's what they are, but some of them display a remarkable degree of symmetry, or regular geometry/corrugation, or significant difference from their surroundings, or other features which ought at least to arouse suspicion and mention. And yet if Hoagland hadn't mentioned then, do you think they would have been mentioned, by anybody? Probably not. They are anomalous. Shouldn't we be looking for anomalies?
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this important? One reason is because there is a demographic difference between hand-counted and machine-counted areas, so if you're going to disenfranchise 1% of the population in machine-counted areas, even if it's done entirely at random, that reduces the elective power of the demographic in those areas, which can tip a close election. Besides, isn't every vote supposed to be counted? Isn't that why you go and vote, because you believe that your vote will be counted? How many voters wouldn't bother if they knew it was some sort of lottery?
Another point: a partial recount will never disclose a fraud if the people choosing the areas to be recounted are also the people behind the fraud. They will simply leave the areas where the fraud took place until last, secure in the knowledge that the recount sponsor's finances or resolve will run out before the recount gets that far. And it certainly was the case that Kucinich couldn't specify exactly what was recounted. His requests for a tally of the uncast ballot papers, for instance, fell on deaf ears. So what happened to those uncast ballots? Did they get cast after all?
Just follow the link to the abstract. I'm surprised that nobody else seems to have noticed. I tried to download the preprint for future reference about half a day ago and got "The author has provided no source to generate PDF, and no PDF."
Oh well. It'll get interesting when the real anisotropy is discovered, but for now we can all settle back down in our seats. Panic's over.
This leaves the problems of ubiquitous abbreviations in code, e.g. QuatMult for quaternion multiplication, and non-English function names in pre-existing libraries over which we have no control. These problems can be solved by counting the occurrences of candidate errors and seeing if the count exceeds some threshold. If "quat" occurs 100 times in your code then it's a safe bet that it's a valid abbreviation and/or part of some widely used library. In that case we could consider automatically adding it to the dictionary. It's only likely to be a misspelling of quit if it occurs just three or four times (I'm assuming that the spellchecking operation is performed frequently enough to catch all such errors "in the bud" before they propagate wildly. If not then it's likely to be a case of StabulDoorHorseBolted.)
If widely-used character sequences are automatically added to the dictionary, we could rely on this same process to add the keywords of the language to the spellchecker dictionary automatically, saving some manual effort. It would then be easy to add the few remaining false positives (rarely used keywords) to the dictionary by hand. Of course there's probably some code somewhere that does all this already.
Linux is bigger than Redhat+Mandrake. It's even bigger than RH+Mandrake+SuSE+Debian+etc.
It's so big that some of it is really tiny, because when someone decides they want a small Linux, it's possible for them to do something about it. DamnSmallLinux (www.damnsmalllinux.org) is 50MB. Feather Linux (featherlinux.berlios.de/) is less than 64MB. Puppy Linux (www.goosee.com/puppy/) is about 42MB and loads entirely into memory, and despite the tiny size it has a nice intuitive gui interface and a reasonable collection of apps. And there's others ...
But that leads us into another kind of choice. Instead of being faced with one distro of 10 or more CDs, and installing the lot because we can't decide what we'll need, we're faced with numerous tiny distros. Which to go for? Help!! But then you get the best choice of all, and nobody will convince me that it's a choice I shouldn't have. Why not have the lot? Most of these distros come as Live CDs - just insert and boot up the PC to try the distro. Try them all. Pick the one you like best, and install that one on your HD.
Know what I think would be really cool? A CD with a boot manager and ten or so mini linuxes on it. Then for the price of just one CD a potential Linux user could boot it up, select any one of the ten linuxes, and try it. And keep trying, comparing and contrasting, till they find one they like. If they find one that has a user interface they love and a decent set of base applications but it lacks one or two apps that they really need, then they can download those extra apps or order a CD or set of of CDs containing an expanded version of the Linux that they know they like.
If you find this prospect terrifying, it's because you're used to *irrevocable* choices, a.k.a. decisions. You're used to having to splash out big money on systems that probably don't do what you want, where you'll only find out the shortcomings when it's too late. One-off choices like that are terrifying, but only because of the lack of choice that comes afterwards. But undoable choices are great. They allow you to say "what if..". They allow you to play. Who doesn't like to play?
You can believe what you like, and so can the o.p. But belief without proof is what is commonly called faith. Is it appropriate for someone who calls himself an "Agn0stic"?
In the immortal words of Christine Keeler, "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?"
Only, there are numerous "glass worms", not just one. Some of them seem to cross one another, and at least one goes down into a depression, forming a glassy pool there, and emerges from the other side. And every one of them looks like a glass worm, and not one looks like a train of dunes. And Plait helpfully shows an upside-down image of one, and despite his assertions, to me at least it still looks like an (upside-down) glass worm.
He also explains the "glassy" appearance in terms of an imaging effect. This is a far better hypothesis than any Hoagland has proposed,
Better in what way? Has it stood up to testing better than Hoagland's hypotheses? Have there even been any tests proposed? Are there any photos of Earth dunes, anywhere, that look like glass worms?
My own hypothesis is that the "glass worms" are glaciers. They are shinier and more transparent than Earth glaciers because no snow ever falls on them. And the difference between this hypothesis and Plait's is that mine actually explains what is observed, and not in a contrived way. The "worms" tend to follow valley floors because that is what water does, even when in the form of ice. The transverse markings are caused by seasonal variation in rate of flow, and are similar to crevasses in Earth glaciers. And, Just like Earth glaciers, the "worms" can go uphill for short distances. The pressure of ice entering and filling a depression is enough to force ice uphill on the other side of the depression.
But there was no point putting forward such a hypothesis in the past, because it implies that surface water has been observed, and that is a no-no. Even yesterday's announcement was only about water in the long-ago past. So we have official explanations about "optical illusions". Given the lameness of these explanations, it's hardly surprising that many people prefer to roll their own hypotheses.
and while I would love to be able to explore Mars inch by inch, in the absence of infinite money, work like Plait's is the best we have.
Can we really not do any better than that? Whatever happened to *testable* and *tested* hypotheses? And Mars is covered with a vast number of anomalous features, totally diferent from anything on Earth, of which we have tantalising images with *almost* enough resolution to tell us definitively what they are. There are "spiders" (actually huge plant-like objects, which seem to grow and die down with the Martian seasons, and which in some regions in the southern hemisphere seem to form huge forests). There are "dalmatian dunes", i.e. "dunes" which are covered with large dark spots like dalmatian dogs. These too are shiny, suggesting a glacial nature, and the dark spots have an organic look to them. Could be oil, could be some kind of life form. Either case ought to arouse some interest, but .. no. And there is much, much more. A whole planetful of stuff, in fact.
Where is the serious discussion of these items? Why the insistence on prosaic "explanations" that don't actually explain anything? Or on an absence of explanation, in cases where no prosaic explanation can be found?
I think it is because once a notion (in this case the notion that mars is dry and dead) has taken hold, it is practically impossible to shift it, and no amount of evidence can make any difference. People think it has been proven beyond doubt that Mars is dry and dead, even though when pressed they can't point to any proof, or even to any real evidence to support that hypothesis.
Yer what??
"Flamebait is a message posted to an Internet discussion group, such as a newsgroup or a mailing list, with the intent of provoking an angry response (a "flame")." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamebait
I'll admit that I can barely restrain myself from posting an angry response, but not to the post, which is well thought out and informative, and properly backed up with links to a serious article, and a relevant image.
This isn't even slightly contentious. Bacteria do exist in huge colonies. Their secretions or their dead bodies can build up into huge structures, in much the same way that small creatures produce coral reefs. Huge fossil bacterial mounds are so common that there is a name for them, stromatolites. They can be seen from above, often from a great height. Anyone following the link would have discovered this. If Mars has followed a similar evolutionary path, stromatolites should be even more visible there than on Earth, because there has been little recent biological activity there that might cover them up or recycle them into something else like there has been on Earth.
Second there's the chemistry of rocks. The more deep we study them, the better we get into their evolution. In some cases the "phases" or "cycles" of processes around certain minerals can be done only with the help of microorganisms.
Again a perfectly valid point, in an informative post by a person who seems to have a good professional grasp of his subject.
http://cydonia.ksu.ru/parafossil/parafossilA.png
Is that a fossil? Well that thing has many things that point to organics. ...
and the writer goes on to point out those things. But he admits the object could be a tiny lump of stone that just happens to be nearly symmetrical, and just happens to have the other characteristics mentioned. On its own it is not conclusive.
But the worst this something has is the fact that is laying there lonely and unique. ..So until someone gets a better enhancement of that (there are six frames of that rock) or we find something similar, it will remain something.
But compare it e.g. to the dark object on the right hand side in http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/oppor tunity/20040323a/Dells_C-B058R1_br.jpg
- and spot the similarities. Two specimens of the same fossil species? It's hard to be sure because the parafossilA.png object is well eroded, but there's a definite similarity in shape. And there is a very large number of other fossil candidates in the Nasa images. Nothing is laying there "lonely and unique".
The planet is quite dead and you don't need microscopes to be sure of that.
Now I would say that really is contentious. But it's hardly flamebait in the context of this site, because it agrees with the scientific consensus.
.. responding to myself now, but what else can I do? Discussion of Martian fossils is obviously anathema here, but in the absence of such discussion I look like the troll that I am being painted as.
All I can do is point you to a URL. Mars Fossils, Pseudofossils or Problematica?
This is by an author who is being as sceptical as the mainstream could wish for (".. and would assign the spherules maybe a 3 percent chance of being organically formed. His proposed microbial or algae mat has maybe a 4 percent chance of being organic. ...") but I would say that the evidence he presents speaks for itself, and he has done a good job of collating that evidence. The low probabilities of biological origin that he assigns to the various phenomena are based on his preconceptions about the history of Mars; preconceptions which should have been blown away by the images that he is studying with their sheer profusion and variety of biological candidates, and by the other indications that have arisen in the time since he wrote that article.
And you know this because...?
And yes Hoagland gave them the names he did in the hopes that others would make the same mistake the poster of the parent of your post did.
- all this is from a space.com article by Robert Roy Britt. Note that despite Britt's implications there is no inconsistency in Hoagland's position; you can believe that something is artificial without necessarily believing that it is a stove or a piston.
He is a charlatan and a fake.
This may be the case. However, he is the one presenting actual evidence to back up his claims, instead of relying solely on innuendo.
He isn't crazy, he is very carefull to not fuck up (like actually making the claim that any of those rocks are stoves) but he all but makes those claims because he knows that there are gullible people that will eat it up... (they'll assume he REALLY meant stoves).
But those gullible people can look at the pictures on his site and decide for themselves what they reckon the labelled objects really are. It is *others* that are trying to create the impression that Hoagland is claiming there are stoves and pistons. *Not* Hoagland. Because it's obvious, if everyone thought that Hoagland was making claims about actual pistons and stoves, nobody would bother to look at his site. It would be dismissed, unexamined. And that's the point.
You know, I was going to respond to this, when I finally realized you're a crackpot. I've been trolled! *grin*
Why not respond anyway? I'm afraid I can't be bothered to do the usual trollish thing like call you names and pretend to address your statements without actually referring to any of them. But I'm sure you can do that for me.
Seriously. Go to college. Take a first-year philosophy class. All your questions are dealt with there.
I only asked three questions - "Unfounded beliefs: Where to begin? The Big Bang? Black Holes?"
I can imagine a first year philosopy class dealing with the first of those questions, but not with the other two.
Oh, well, it was fun while it lasted...
The fun is only just beginning, if you really like this sort of thing.
Mainstream science has very little to do with proof. It is, or should be, about testability, which generally means the possibility of *dis*proof. A hypothesis is produced, to explain an observed phenomenon. Attempts are then made to disprove the hypothesis. If these are genuine honest attempts, then the more they fail, the more confidence we can have in the validity of the hypothesis - but we can never be certain that it is right. Certainty and science do not mix, or should not. Unfortunately, much of what passes for science now is actually forceful assertion of established "truths", coupled with active discouragement of the formulation of alternative hypotheses, often using debating tricks/logical fallacies such as ad hominem, "guilt by association", and misrepresentation of the hypothesis to be "debunked".
Some scientific statements may seem to be provable, but only if they relate to a small "hypothesis space" which can be exhaustively searched. E.g. it might seem that "There is a monster in Loch Ness" could be proved by actually producing one, and that "there is no monster in Loch Ness" could be proved by dragging or scanning the entire Loch with negative results. But the most interesting hypotheses are not provable because they are "universal", i.e. they apply to a potentially infinite class of observations. And even the seemingly provable statements aren't really, if we allow open-ended ad hoc "explanations" ("There is a monster, but it's invisible to radar thanks to the stealth techology that it has evolved") - ridiculous example, but there's a lot of science that works just like that.
If you make errors, you get reamed when someone double-checks your work.
Yes. That's why very few scientists will admit to errors, and even fewer will go out on a limb by putting forwards the original hypotheses which are the essential prerequisite for any true science. They don't want to get "reamed". So, for instance, they won't use the "f-word" ("fossil") in connection with Mars images, even though the images seem to be crammed full of fossils of various types and species.
Seriously. Show me an unfounded belief, error, or unstated assumption that has stuck around in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other scientific field for a signifigant period of time. Something that is clearly and demonstrably false, yet which the mainstream community refuses to correct. Good luck.
Unfounded beliefs: Where to begin? The Big Bang? Black Holes? Errors: "Mainstream science, however, is all about proof, and if you don't have it, you get reamed"; Unstated assumptions: An object which appears to be billions of light years distant really is located where it appears to be, or thereabouts, so that a galaxy which appears to be a billion light years distant in one direction cannot be identified with a similar galaxy which appears to be a billion light years distant in the opposite direction. Light paths are subject only to very slight bending. All the millions of quasar images which appear at the limits of what is visible are not in fact all the same quasar. The universe is at least as big as the apparent size of that part of it which we can observe.
"Hoagland claims that some Martian rocks look like stoves and tools". NO HE DOES NOT. He attaches labels, "the bowl", "the safe", "the stove", to various objects which may or may not be rocks. He does think that they are artefacts, but he is not claiming that they are actual bowls or stoves etc., or that any resemblance they may have to such household items is anything more than a coincidence. Nasa does exactly the same thing with its "berrybowl", "sharkfin", "cards" etc. labels.
"As far as we can tell from the pictures, they're just plain old rocks" - maybe that's what they are, but some of them display a remarkable degree of symmetry, or regular geometry/corrugation, or significant difference from their surroundings, or other features which ought at least to arouse suspicion and mention. And yet if Hoagland hadn't mentioned then, do you think they would have been mentioned, by anybody? Probably not. They are anomalous. Shouldn't we be looking for anomalies?