New Mars Forums

According to Arthur C. Clarke, the most prominent failures in the history of predictions about science and technology have involved "a failure of nerve".
    Most 'experts' tend to underestimate the pace of development and err significantly on the pessimistic side - often to their eventual embarrassment.
                                             

Thanks, Atomoid, for that interesting evaluation.
    I have no background in geology but it's hard to imagine anything but water being responsible for such smooth swirling shapes.
    Your idea that the area may have been part of an estuary or marshland certainly adds up, at least to my mind. The intricacy of the swirl pattern intrigues me; would water meander more in 0.38g than on an equally slight gradient in Earth's gravity? Or are there examples of similarly convoluted formations here?

    As to the dust filled craters, it occurred to me that maybe they're not craters but sinkholes. Have a look at http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/sinkhole]THIS SITE, where it says:-

    Suppose Hellas was once an 'inland sea'. Then suppose much of the water dried up, leaving various low-lying marshy areas where the last of the surface water flowed sluggishly, leaving the weird sedimentary 'fossil streams' in this image. Perhaps, when the last of the surface water was gone, subsurface water carved underground caves in the limestone (if it is limestone), later leading to the collapsed caves which are seen from the surface as multiple sinkholes, now nearly filled with sand and dust.

    As usual with martian geology, I'm making it all up as I go along!    But does the idea that those circular features are sinkholes fit into your scenario better than craters, Atomoid?
    If so, does it enable you to say anything more about what we're looking at here? (You obviously know more about geology than I do - which isn't much of a compliment, believe me! )
                                               

Peace to you, too, Bill.   

    Maybe what I've said about media bias is a 'claim', perhaps an 'assertion', or even an 'opinion'. What's the diff .. I said it and I hoped the meaning would be clear. Maybe I'm not all that good at expressing myself because I don't think I get the meaning across every time.
    But Cindy is right that I am sincere in my 'claims' and there's no doubt in my mind that you, Bill, are sincere in yours.
    As for proof of my claims, I confess that's difficult. I see a T.V. program and hear the way situations in Iraq are described, the way they're portrayed visually, and I form an opinion. I go into a coffee shop, drink coffee and read their newspaper, and notice the emphasis they place on different aspects of Iraq and the Palestinian question. I get a pretty good 'feel' for the way it's all being presented and I make judgments based on these presentations using standards of credibility I've built up over 49 years of living. I admit it's a subjective thing - I can't deny it.
    In order to give you 'proof' of what I'm saying, I suppose I could send you a VHS tape of the news programs, with an annotation describing how I interpret what's being shown. Or I could tear pieces out of the newspaper and post them off to you, again with notes in the margin. But it isn't very practical to do any of this.
    Bill, you often make comments of your own, based on information you've gathered, and don't always include 'proof'. That's O.K.  We understand where you're coming from and accept that. And, even if we differ, we know you're telling it the way you see it.

    Without wishing to rehash all this again, but realising you and DonPanic and Clark found my 'claims' to be unacceptable for various reasons, I will simply say I expressed my opinion that Arab media, and certainly much of the Australian media, are strongly disapproving of the invasion of Iraq and allow that feeling to come through very clearly in their work.
    I even made a prediction. I suggested that we'll hear much more in coming weeks about that marine shooting a "defenceless" insurgent than we will about the ongoing and deliberate murders of Iraqi citizens by terrorist suicide bombers and the slaughter of blacks by Islamic forces in Darfur. The publicity will be relentless and the details will be given priority by many media outlets. So, in a very real way, I've left myself wide open to falsification of my hypothesis - a very scientific means of disproving what I 'claimed', even if I can't prove what I 'claimed'.

    That's it, really. The rest is just details and rhetoric and differing opinions. And we'll soon find out if I'm talking right-wing cr*p because we'll be able to see for ourselves as the days go by. I stand ready to be shown that the media will treat day-to-day extremist Islamic atrocities around the world with the same zeal and attention to detail as they treat the marine-shoots-helpless-insurgent incident. And, when they do, I'll have no recourse but to withdraw my 'claim' and apologise for having wasted your time.
    Is that fair enough?

    O.K.  So that's that, then.   

    ========

    Incidentally, I think that Barak Obama is looking good! I honestly loved that speech he gave - even more so if he wrote it himself. Stirring stuff; almost Kennedy-esque in its power.
    I've heard he's a possible Presidential candidate for 2012 or maybe 2016 (?) and, unless somebody shoots him beforehand, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see him in the Whitehouse (assuming I live that long! ).

    America has a lot going for it and I'm optimistic about its underlying unity, its staying power, and its positive global role in the future.

    I'm not going to argue that last point or produce 'proof'. It's just an opinion, O.K.? .. not a 'claim'. 

    Peace to you and yours.

If I ever heard of 'Lutefisk', I certainly don't remember it; I had to look it up.
    It is dried cod, isn't it?
    I hope it's more appetising than it sounds!   

::Edit::  I'm still waiting for that elusive macroscopic fossil to turn up in Spirit or Oppy's viewfinder!  :;):

I read somewhere today that it's late northern summer now on Mars - doesn't time fly when you're enjoying yourself!?

    I know global dust storms arise most frequently in the southern spring/summer because of the coincidence of southern summer with Mars' perihelion. So, does that mean we have only a few months until the dust storm season really gets under way? And will Opportunity get to Victoria crater in time to do some useful science before anything happens?
                                           ???

    Time for Oppy to pick up her skirts and move it along! 

Well, Atomoid, your new desktop has some of the weirdest terrain I've ever seen! 

Thanks for reviving my interest in the possibility of water at the Opportunity site, CM.
    Your analysis of the ground at Burns Cliff is what we should be getting from the NASA geologists, but aren't!  :hm:

    I agree we should be looking a bit more carefully at those sand dunes at the bottom of the crater but I suppose the chances of getting bogged down are just too great. It's so frustrating when an astronaut could simply stride over to it and dig a hole!
    I still have a nagging 'conspiracy theory' notion that NASA's intention is purely to look for signs of water from many millions or billions of years ago, which is fine. But I can't help but think they don't particularly want to find evidence of recent water activity; i.e. from years or even months ago, say. Not yet. Too many established reputations rest on a bone-dry, sterile, unchanging martian surface, so we may have to wait a few years until other ideas are allowed to be aired. I'm confident it will happen but not for a while - not until some more of the tenured older scientists retire.
    I suspect Dr. Chris McKay will be one of the first of the 'new paradigm' scientists to talk openly about a different Mars, when the present restraints are eased.
                                                   

I can't believe you just wrote me that condescending moralistic lecture, Dickbill. Please read my post of Nov 17 2004, 19:41
    I understand the ramifications of that marine's actions and they will have to be investigated. But my point was that there are other things much more worthy of your outrage, and the outrage of the press!

    What's wrong with you people?
    Hello .. hello .. am I getting through?   :bars:

DonPanic, I suppose I must make allowance for language difficulties - especially since your English is so much better than my French.    - but it can be tiresome to go over the obvious!
    However, if needs must.

    When Bill writes about the Arab media, he writes of a group of people who know about events all over the world, not just in Iraq. But what upsets them depends very much on who is doing the upsetting. Get the point? O.K. Now go back to my last post and re-read it carefully. It contains a list of things which don't really upset the Arab media very much at all.
    My contention is that much of the Western media have very similar selective sensibilities about what upsets them. We know what to expect from Arab media outlets but our journalists profess to be objective reporters - which they often are not.

    They'll "get over it" because it's not genuine outrage, it's pure anti-Western political bluff and bluster. If they had any real sense of the outrageous, that list of things in my last post would drive them crazy .. but it doesn't.

    Thankyou, DonPanic, for pointing out the glaringly obvious once more with regard to Yasser Arafat. We're all perfectly well aware that the Palestinian people aren't rich enough to be the target of large-scale theft. That's because Mr. Arafat intercepted their foreign aid money and put it in his bank account. He didn't steal from them directly - he didn't have to. He got their money before they ever saw it. 

    I never said female genital mutilation was an exclusively Arabic or Muslim practice but you don't tend to see nearly as much of it in Western countries as you do in Muslim countries.
    For example, a little googling revealed that the percentage of Muslims in the following countries is about:-
  Djibouti               94%
  Sierra Leone        80%
  Somalia              100%
  Sudan (northern)  85%
    It's estimated that 90% of the females in these places have been mutilated.
    The percentage of Muslims in the next group is:-
  Chad             85%
  Egypt            94%
  Gambia          87%
  Guinea           95%
  Guinea Bissau  80%
  Mali               90%
  Nigeria           75%
    50% of the females in these countries are estimated to have been mutilated.
    The Arab media, which became "outraged" at the torture of terrorist prisoners in Iraq by the brutal Americans (and I agree that episode was thoroughly reprehensible), most probably know about the tens of millions of Muslim women who have been subjected to this barbarity. If I know it, and I'm not even Muslim, wouldn't you think they would know it too?
    Yet, strangely, this heinous practice, usually inflicted on girls too young to object, causes the arab media no outrage at all. Doesn't that water down the impact of Arab media outrage just a little bit? It does for me. Especially when you put it together with all the other little things on my list!
    Am I getting through to you here? Are we absorbing any of this? (Have I checked up on enough facts for you yet?)

    If you find my argument is still all mixed up and you think I am "aware of nothing precise", then I can only blame the language barrier once more and wish you Bon nuit.
                                             

Thanks, Cindy, for registering your opinion in favour of the substance of my post. 

    Bill, this is bigger than Bush v. Kerry.
    Bill, I'm not a Bush fan.
    Bill, if you want to WIN the war against terrorism, you have to control media who deliberately and malevolently present the Coalition efforts in Iraq in the worst possible light. Even through your Democratic Party 'Blue Haze', even through your undisguised and blinding hatred for President Bush, I'm confident your innate intelligence must surely enable you to see and understand this point.

    Again I say it; we're in Iraq now. You and I are both  ostensibly in agreement that the job needs to be finished and finished well. All I did was to point out something in the behaviour of the press which should concern you as much as it does me.

    Your somewhat emotional attack on me for it leads me to think your stated position and your actual position may in fact be two different things.

    I could be quite wrong but I don't know what else to think, old pal.   ???

I don't think Dickbill was referring to the death of that terrorist. I think he was talking about the slaughter of Margaret Hassan, the much-loved Dublin-born charity worker.
    I, too, am almost too disgusted to talk about it.

    I very much hope the world's crazy left-wing press will raise its game a little and not do what it usually does, which is to seize on any little thing it can find to discredit the Coalition and undermine its efforts to bring democracy to Iraq.
    Unfortunately, however, I'm sure my hope is a forlorn one. That U.S. soldier was shot in the face the day before the incident, so I've read, and was fighting in an environment where terrorists feigning death were known to suddenly fire on Coalition troops. It looks to me like he made a mistake. You or I may well have made the same mistake under similar circumstances - I could easily imagine myself being just as jumpy in the same situation.

    But will the press see it that way? Most likely not. While tens of thousands of blacks are exterminated by genocidal Islamics in Sudan, and while a beautiful, caring charity worker is executed by Islamic murderers in Iraq, the loony left-wing press will concentrate its attention on one U.S. soldier who cracked under pressure and shot a terrorist.

    Think about that when you're reading all the bulldust about 'the shame of it all' in your newspaper. Stand back, look at the bigger picture, and ask yourself what these media weasels are really trying to achieve.
                                                     ???

Thanks, Gennaro.
    I stand corrected regarding the 19th Century bible commentators you refer to; you are obviously far better read in this area than I'll ever be.  I accept your interpretation that many of them were probably at least impartial, if not actually anti-Christian.
    Perhaps I'm the biased observer here - since I find it much easier to believe the Gospels are a deliberately distorted account of a Jewish revolutionary than that Jesus was God!
    On that 'doubting Thomas note', I'll withdraw.