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Originally Posted by Jim
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Originally Posted by Bad. Guardian
What I meant by "aggressively suppressed" is that these large-scale variations in brightness ... were _selectively_ eliminated from the image. ...
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This sounds a lot like a conspiracy claim. Is that what you are saying? |
No, that isn't a conspiracy claim. Like Dr. Plait, I have no idea what they were thinking when they did the processing. I don't know whether it was accidental or deliberate.
But I do suspect that a bad decision must have been made, a day or two later. If you'll forgive some pure speculation, here's one possible version of the discussion that might have taken place:
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"Hey guys, did you see this one? Done by somebody named Parker. He has that 'face' thing sitting on a sort of a mesa, like the old Viking pics, instead of sitting on flat ground, like the one we did." "Did he fake it?" "Naw, he's not a nut, he's JPL." "Then how did he get that mesa? Who did our enhancement?" "That was the new guy, Larry. He's not in today." "Hey Mike, make me a new pic of that 'face' thing, stat. No fancy filters, no nothing. Just get rid of the streaks and make it so I can see it." (5 minutes later) "Hey boss, look at this, that thing really is sitting way up on a kind of a mesa. I guess Larry blew it. I wonder what the heck he did. I'll get this new enhancement ready for a new press release." "Are you kidding? You know what the crackpots will do with this? They'll eat us for lunch. We might even have Carson and Letterman working us over. No, no press release. No nothing. Let's just get back to work."
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Originally Posted by Jim
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Originally Posted by Bad. Guardian
This is mainly a question of ethics.
Dr. Plait, how would you handle the following hypothetical scenario? ...
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I sincerely hope this is a rhetorical quesion and not some veiled questioning of the BA's ethics. If you've spent any time reading Phil's blog, you should be very aware that he readily and openly admits when he has posted inaccurate information. Heck, he even leaves the inaccurate statement there for all to read. |
No, nothing veiled. It's just what it looks like: a hypothetical question that I hoped would start a discussion about the question of whether it could ever be OK to fight Bad Astronomy with more Bad Astronomy. Jerry and Dr. Plait gave very good answers.