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 comets explain everything

Planets

People are always sending me links — sometimes it’s to a cogent rebuttal of lunacy, sometimes it’s something advocating lunacy, and sometimes…it takes me a while to tell. For instance, here’s this site called “The Truth of Genesis”. I read this and thought for a moment that it was a site debunking creationism.

The biggest laugh comes from the “young Earth” teachers, who try to convince others that the Earth is only 6 000 to 10,000 years old. This is in direct conflict with scientific reality, and the true reading of Genesis. It’s embarrassing to see them try to add up the years from Adam (who they think only lived 930 years), on down to Jesus, who was born in 7 BC. They deny the existence of humanity before Adam and Eve, which were formed from the dust of the Earth. So where do they put Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthals? They claim that there was “no death before Adam”, but that is not found in scripture.

Those fools at Answers in Genesis who think the earth is only 6,000 years old! How ridicuolus! All those inconsistencies and their absurd methodology of toting up the ages of the patriarchs…but then I read on.

Adam was formed in about 7200 BC. The modern animals, along with the birds, were made in about 7100 BC, and Eve came along in about 7000 BC. I’m guessing that the animals lived in and out of the Garden, and Adam probably took Eve out on sight-seeing trips to lands surrounding the Garden. They did this for 2,733 years., until Eve ate of the evil tree in 4267 BC. It is then that the years of Adam’s age begins to be counted, because that is when he “began to die”. So from 7200 BC, till 3337 BC, when Adam died, Adam had lived for 3,863 years.

The reason the sequence of events in Genesis chapter one, do not agree with those in Genesis chapter two, is because Moses was writing about two different time periods. So actually, Genesis is declaring the existence of pre-historic man, which lived more than 60 million years before God made Adam and Eve. The world of science won’t admit to mankind being on Earth any earlier than 10 million years ago., which shows how misinformed they are. Or is it that they are in denial?

I don’t know about you, but I’m always impressed with the specificity of their dates, all derived from the land of making-crap-up.

It’s good to know we’ve now found the one correct creationist, rather than all those other wrong creationists. Also a brave creationist, because he’s going to reveal the truth to us at last.

Now, let us talk about the world of science. They are insane, because they would rather lie to the public, than to admit that there is a Creator. Yes, they lie, and they know it, because they have been withholding evidence from the public in order to not have to explain certain ‘phenomena”.

What is this evidence? You will be dazzled by it, but I’m afraid that as a mere biologist I am not qualified to even contemplate the author’s vision. This one is for the physicists out there. Have at it:

Science refuses to come clean about comets, especially Shoemaker-Levy 9. They know good and well that comet was never “captured” by Jupiter. Captures of comets and satellites never occur, because their paths (orbits) obey the command of God. That is why the moon Metis, of Jupiter, does not crash into the planet, even though it is only 79,800 miles from Jupiter. Science calls it a “gravitational lock”. There is no such thing.

Also, science tells the public that the nine planets of our solar system revolve around our Sun, because of the Sun’s “gravitational pull” and centrifugal force on the planets (the same excuse for why our Moon doesn’t “fall”). But that too is not the truth. If they came clean, their theory of stellar evolution, namely the origin of our solar system, would become suspect. Our planets are not really just orbiting the Sun. The Sun is actually following the planets, as they spiral around the Sun, as they all orbit the center point of our galaxy, the Milky Way, as the galaxy spirals around the center point of our “local group” of about ten galaxies. All of the stars (suns) that you see in our galaxy are moving with the rotation of our galaxy.

So when Halley’s Comet orbits around the Sun, how does the comet know where our Sun will be 75 years later, since the comet leaves the solar system in the opposite direction of the Sun’s orbital path (around the galaxy)? Where does it go? What causes it to come back? Certainly not gravity. How did comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 know where Jupiter would be two years later, when Jupiter had moved over 500 million miles since the comet’s previous orbit of the planet? Its apojove was 32,313,600 miles, so again, gravity was not a factor. For more than 4 billion years, it obeyed the command of God, until its (Divinely) staged crash into Jupiter.

Well all righty then, I guess that’s all settled now.

What I taught today: toroids!

Hox 11/13 expression in an echinoderm blastula

It was the last day of classes for us. I brought donuts.

Dammit, I just realized I missed a golden opportunity. I should have talked to them about Thrive and Pivar and Fleury and Andrulis. Crackpot fringe developmental biologists all seem to have a thing for donuts.

Rats. Well, I’ll just send all my students an email and tell them they have to come back. They don’t even realize the importance of our little snack together.

IRON MAN 3! WOOHOO!

The Morris movie theater is going all out and having a midnight premier of the new Iron Man 3 movie, and I was mildly disappointed that I was going to have to postpone seeing it because I’ll be at the Orange County Freethought Alliance convention. But now I am greatly disappointed, because I have seen the trailer, and it blows my mind.

Awesome. So awesome. I hope I’m not disappointed when I finally see the whole movie, because this sets expectations phenomenally high.

I’d watch it

But only to laugh at it. Some new pseudoscientific ‘documentary’ has been released this week, titled Sirius, which apparently has everything in it: conspiracy theories galore, ancient astronauts, zero point energy, pyramids, UFOs, antigravity, war, top secret government agencies, and aliens. One alien at least; the big feature proving the existence of aliens from outer space is dessicated, tiny little corpse of an “alien” found in the Atacama desert.

I saw that and knew immediately what it was. It’s human. It’s simply a mummified fetus, in which the plates of the skull (still quite distinct) have collapsed on themselves as the flesh dried out.

Here are a few shots of the obvious.

"Alien" mummy from Chile

"Alien" mummy from Chile

Apparently, the UFOlogists are all surprised now because they had a lab run some simple tests, and they returned the information that it was human — and an indigenous Chilean native, at that. Whoop-te-doo. Anyone other than a deluded fanatic could see that by just looking at the sad little thing.

I did find out one useful bit of information, though: a site with a skeptical summary of all the purported alien corpses that have turned up over the years, from shaved monkeys to deformed children to fake alien mannequins. I have to say that I rather liked the Siberian alien made out of bread crumbs and chicken skin. There’s some real artistic talent there.