Hi Dr. Plait, thank you for answering. I'm glad you agree that it can be important to retract a misleading press release, even when the retraction can be expected to bolster some Bad Astronomy.
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Originally Posted by The Bad Astronomer
Now, as to the first part: I am not entirely convinced the image was processed in a way as to reduce its "faciness". It doesn't look like a face in either the raw or the processed data.
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To me, subjectively, the raw image shows only about 10% as much "faciness" as the Viking images. But the processed image shows only about 1%, so this would be a tenfold decrease in "faciness."
Of course we can't have a reasonable debate about "faciness percentages;" it's much too subjective.
How about this: for the sake of discussion, we could agree to assume that the image has 0% "faciness," both before and after processing.
I would argue that even if the raw image has no "faciness" at all, it still is Bad Astronomy to "flatten" a landform, and the processed image still should have been retracted.
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It would be interesting to find out exactly how it was processed, and reproduce it.
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I would very much like to have an opportunity to convince you that I have indeed identified the exact algorithm, and reproduced it.
It would be extremely helpful if you could see the convolution animation at 100% scale, rather than 22%. Can I e-mail it to you? It's a 3 megabyte GIF file.