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Rxke

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2003-11-03

Posts: 3,669

Re: Mars gone wild - Wired article

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.0 … ad_6]Wired

from the article:
Mars began its career as a cosmic Rorschach blot in 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli stared through a 9-inch Merz refracting telescope and declared that the spidery lines he saw etched on the planet's surface were "canali."

and:

Hornet number one is a fellow named Richard Hoagland, a science writer who subsequently built a small empire atop the "face on Mars."

etc.

Cobra Commander

Member

From: The outskirts of Detroit.

Registered: 2002-04-09

Posts: 3,039

Re: Mars gone wild - Wired article

:laugh:  Good article.

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Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Palomar

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2002-05-30

Posts: 9,734

Re: Mars gone wild - Wired article

Though Plait has no respect for Hoagland, whose evidence he regards as "crap," most of the people he goes after are "not necessarily fraudulent evil bastard liars," but merely deluded. Plait spent five years processing Hubble images at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and he knows how tricky astronomical images can be, even for trained scientists. One of the main problems with the anomaly crowd, he says, is pareidolia: misperceiving a vague but suggestive shape as something definitive. "It's very clear that human brains are designed to pick out patterns," says Plait. "If you can't pick out the tiger hiding in the grass, you are lunch; you don't reproduce." On the other hand, if you think the burn mark on your tortilla is actually the mother of God, you are probably suffering from pareidolia.

*I -don't- give Hoagland the benefit of the doubt as to self-aggrandizement and etc.  I wonder if he even believes all that he's written.  He's found a sure-fire way of getting personal attention and some limelight.  There's an analogy I could use (TV cameras, collection plates, organ music)...but nah.

Pareidolia:  Yeah, Carl Sagan discusses this issue in _The Demon-Haunted World:  Science as a Candle in the Dark_.  The difference being, of course, noticing "it looks like" versus claims of "it IS."

--Cindy

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We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)

oscar

Banned

Registered: 2004-07-18

Posts: 62

Re: Mars gone wild - Wired article

Pareidolia identifies also mathematic proportions or just recognizable faces? Hmmm? Now, if you see a photograph of a rock taken some cm distance with a perfect square and unnatural hole and other stones looking like jigsaw puzzle pieces or crystal "tubes", etc, etc, are they part of that interesting name? It seems the critics are forgetting we're not dealing with just ordinary images but infrared, MOLA, 3 Dimensional structures and even the other complete sphinx in frnt of twin "peaks" taken from short distance. Yap, I said it before, if some people can't see the difference between something natural and something created EVEN ON PLANET EARTH, they won't ever recognize something outside.
Now, if the face of "Christ" appears in a door or in a Mexican tortilla, fortunately we have scientists that make the chemical analysis to say that's a simple spot caused by determined X ethiology. But, if the same face appears in a window, door or Mexican tortilla without any reasonable explanation and suddendly perhaps we're facing another kind of hyperdimensional oddity of the same kind shared by the farmers or ignorant peasents and wake up in the morning and find fractal geometry in wheat field and further analysis reveals more astonishing details without any kind of explanation....maybe the same entity playing games with your ignorance. Now, that's explained by hyperphysics in a very exact science like mathematics were there are no coincidences beyond certain limits. :hm:

oscar

Banned

Registered: 2004-07-18

Posts: 62

Re: Mars gone wild - Wired article

The writer of that issue follows the same routine used by the orthodox or official authorities. They mention "armchair exobiologist" and "amateurs" giving the FALSE IMPRESSION Mars has been investigated only by Nasa experts & the other ones, the morons of the Earth...and then the name Hoagland is quoted. I said in "Cydonia" thread AND REPEAT now: that's a mistake, Hoagland is not the only one and Arthur Clark was not an amateur either, Carl Sagan showed dubious & hypocrite role with one foot backing up Hoagland and other foot with officialism.
The whole issue -classified "good" by one of the members here- is just a superficial point of view...not even reaching the category of "analysis". Now, everyone has a point of view....like everyone has a butt. Some even two, one behind and other in the place of the head