Fossil fish found on Mars!

Wait, not really. I should change that headline to “Pareidolia found on Mars!”, but then you’d all shrug your shoulders and say, “so what else is new?” I’ve got to do something to suck you in.

Anyway, there’s this whole weird subculture that’s been around since at least the 90s — I recall spending some time arguing with Mark Carlotto, an “expert in image processing”, at a lecture in Philadelphia some years ago, and these people were off-the-wall even then. The fudging and cheating he was doing to turn Mars Orbiter photos into vistas of ancient ruined Barsoomian cities was disgraceful. But even he showed some integrity with to the tools of image enhancement (not much, some) compared to the other bozos who spend hours staring at photos from Mars and imagining all kinds of weird and amazing things. For example, here’s one that’s supposed to be a “complete side view of a fossilized fish”. Look upon it, and believe!

martianfishFishLined

Oh, I better explain. The photo in the middle is an actual fossilized fish, from Earth. The picture at the top is a Martian mesa which someone thought looks like a fish, kinda like how this cloud outside my window right now looks like a woman’s breasts. In case you are unconvinced by the resemblance, the bottom picture is the same as the top one, with the fish drawn in by hand. That should persuade you, right?

Conveniently, they tell you what photo it’s taken from: it’s Mars Global Surveyor M0807345. Here’s a higher resolution photo of the same feature. The fishiness is even less apparent.

m0807345

NASA also provides the scale for the image. That mesa is about 750 meters long! Somehow I don’t think it’s a fossil fish, unless they grew really big on Mars.

But there’s more! Here’s a feature that looks like a sculpted Olmec head, if you squint so hard your eyes are closed.

OlmecFishOlmecHead

Those of you who didn’t quite close your eyes might have noticed something else: this is the very same feature that was called a fossil fish above. One orientation, fish; rotate it 90°, it becomes a stylized human head.

Shouldn’t someone have stopped at this point and realized that the similarities are entirely in the viewer’s head? But no, that’s no fun, not when you imagine you’re on the track of Martians. So let’s get weirder.

Here’s a picture of the Martian landscape; you can see the “fish” near the top. The rest looks like a jumble, so we’ve got to fix that with some sophistimacated image processing techniques. See the red line? They’re going to take everything on the right side of that line, and duplicate its mirror image to the left side, because apparently that’s how Martian brains work.

Demarcation2

And when you add a plane of mirror symmetry, MAGIC!

tiger

It’s a tiger! Don’t you see it? It’s obvious!

You know, this is what our brain does all the time. Add a hint of bilateral symmetry (or cheat blatantly and artificially create the bilateral symmetry), and our brains fill in the details and impose an interpretation on it.

I’m sorry, Martian fan-guy, but all your photos show are rough-hewn mesas and barren fields strewn with rubble.

Y’all know what the beads mean

I received a package from New Orleans the other day (thanks, O Sender!) which contained this happy purple octopus and an assortment of bead necklaces.

Nawlinsgear

I am aware of the custom, and I know what I’m obligated to do upon receiving a handful of necklaces…I must expose my breasts. I’m not one to flout tradition, so I gulped down some Southern Comfort (also part of the custom, right?) and have taken the obligate photo. I’ll put it below the fold to spare the sensitive.

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The twisted logic of the anti-gay marriage movement

The Minnesota senate will be debating our gay marriage bill this afternoon; if it passes there, we have a done deal, because our governor Dayton has promised to sign it into law as soon as it hits his desk. This has thrown the Christians into this state in a frenzy (and make no mistake, the opposition is zealously Christian — every argument calls on their god to justify their hatred), and we’re getting email and mailed flyers and phone calls at home all the time. They don’t seem to have very good organization, either. You think they’d learn from the contemptuous sneer and slammed phones they get from me that they should write me off as a lost cause.

But their arguments are just getting weirder and more desperate. Take this from @MnForMarriage:

Yesterday, millions of Minnesotans celebrated the Lord’s day. Today, should the gay “marriage” bill pass, those who believe in the Lord’s design for marriage will become “bigots” under our laws.

Yep, that’s their major argument right now. It’s OK to discriminate against gay people, but suggesting that people who want to deny others their civil rights are “bigots” is unfair and oppressive!

Don’t worry, @MnForMarriage, you’re already bigots, so the law will change nothing in that regard. It’ll just mean you don’t get to practice your bigotry against gay people under the cover of law. But I’m sure you’ll still be the same nasty, hateful, mean-spirited, narrow-minded jebus-shaggers you’ve always been.

Do you need another reason to despise Facebook?

Here’s one. Mark Zuckerberg is pushing for more oil drilling and pipelines.

Two major tech leaders have resigned from Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, FWD.us, in protest of the organization’s controversial decision to bankroll ads supporting Keystone XL and drilling in the Arctic National Refuge.

The Zuckerberg group publicly says its top priority is immigration reform. But through two subsidiary organizations it has quietly spent millions on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes. The ads were created in support of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Mark Begich (D-AK), and although neither ad mentions the issue, both support immigration reform.

I can understand the importance of political compromise and coalition building, but sleeping with the devil is just going too far.

Schrödinger’s Theist

Sye Ten Bruggencate, the obnoxious presuppositionalist, has been on a spammin’ rampage lately — he’s got some new video he’s plugging, and I suspect it’s the usual tripe — you can’t disprove god, and the True Atheist has to set aside some tiny bit of provisional doubt for his premise, therefore… ☆ ☆ JESUS ☆ ☆.

The True Pooka describes how to deal with this nonsense.

I’ve been sharing the same message for years — in fact, just last night I did a podcast on The Place with Dr. Michael W. Jones (I’ll include a link once it’s available) in which I discussed the Christian bait-and-switch of announcing they have evidence for “god”, which is usually some natural feature which is evidence for the existence of our universe, not their zombie-onna-stick. I don’t share this trait with Jerry Coyne, who reserves some remote possibility that a god exists; I’m willing to go on the record and state with complete finality that no god exists. That’s not because I have complete knowledge of everything in the universe, but because the believers are utterly incapable of telling me exactly what their god is — it seems to be quantum jello, oscillating at an impossibly high frequency with an amplitude that spans galaxies.

So let them get specific. Let them describe their god with sufficient detail that I can actually test its existence; so far, the only consistent detail they’re willing to offer is that it is invisible and untestable (which leaves one wondering how they know about it). It puts them in an interesting state, in which our lack of knowledge is the only thing that allows them to make extraordinary claims about nonexistent beings, but committing to any one detail collapses the whole vibrating edifice and makes it testable — and then the whole lie unravels.

And don’t let the “scientific” skeptics fool you: wobbling in a state of pointless vagueness is not somehow an epistemically superior condition to having specific testable claims, it’s far, far worse. It’s a state of being not even wrong.

Aquatic apes and puddin’ elephants

Oh, no. I had just begun to absorb the astounding implications of the Space Ape Theory, when along comes Henry Gee to blow my mind with a new theory of proboscidean evolution.

Q: Why do elephants paint the soles of their feet yellow?

A: So they can hide upside down in bowls of custard.

So, all you need to do is find elephants with yellow feet, and the fun can begin. Elephants have trunks, obviously, which they can use as snorkels while so submerged, and also as navigational aids – the tip of the trunk is very sensitive to touch, which is useful in an opaque medium such as custard. Their thick, leathery skin is quite plainly an adaptation against the heat of the custard. Tusks are devices for forcing an elephant’s way through custard that has started to congeal.

I am sure you can think of more.

You may laugh, but think about it: the whole story hangs together perfectly. Every feature of the elephant can be explained in the context of this theory. Furthermore, it’s predictive and guides future research: as an example, the greater diversity of proboscideans in the past implies that there may have been a more diverse array of puddings available in the Miocene-Pliocene, and different species may have specialized to hide in tapioca or spotted dick. Further, there may have been co-evolution; dare I suggest that perhaps the currants in some puddings evolved to feed the elephants and encourage them to hide in their bowls?

That “I am sure you can think of more” is typical British understatement, but bodes well for the productive future of this powerful theory.

Are Australians militaristic fascists now, too?

Catherine Deveny, that wonderful godless Australian comedian, was kicked of out of a hotel tonight — but not for being a god-hating militant atheist. She was ejected for being a pacifist who has been criticizing our eternal state of war.

The Grand cancelled my booking after pro war trolls objected to my anti war stance. The Grand cancelled my booking on the ground I damaged their brand. Tellingly The Grand was very happy to take a booking from Today Tonight trolls to harass me, other customers and Mildura residents. Today Tonight exists solely to make dumb and hateful people dumber and more hateful. You choose. Every time you spend a dollar you vote on how you would like the world to be.

I just asked them on their facebook page ‘If a comedian with anti war opinions damages your brand, what is your brand and what do you stand for?"

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Quality-Hotel-Mildura-Grand/245077038846605

She may have left that comment on their site earlier, but it’s gone now.

What really pissed off a lot of people is that she dared to criticize ANZAC Day, that sacred commemoration of the perpetrators and victims of war.

As you might expect, many of the furious patriots defending their national honor from an uppity woman responded with rape threats. I don’t think they know what honor means.

If they use guns, it’s not terrorism

One or a few people shot up a Mothers’ Day Parade in New Orleans — nobody was killed, but 17 were injured.

It’s strangely quiet out there. The news has been non-stop “Boston terrorism!”, “Lone wolf terrorism!”, “Oh, woe, what shall we do about terrorism?” for the last few weeks, but guns blasting a parade, and…hush. I don’t know whether they’re waiting to see if the gunmen were foreigners (in which case it will be more non-stop wailing), or whether they’d rather not tag raging use of guns for their designed purpose, lest someone criticize home-grown gun culture again.