That is why I would be impressed . . .

Fixed your link.

Attachment 7831

Mostly classic JPEG artifacts in a subsequently rotated photo. A number of the artifacts appear to have been copied and pasted, Plus some of artifact areas appear to be superimposed over areas of higher resolution.

Did you find this from that pathetic YouTube "Evidence of Mars Civilisation" video?

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I wouldn't. I'd know he just took MRO photos and claimed they were his own.

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Never been to You Tube. "Mars Anomalys Research". After seeing this picture I had a friend of mine take the ESA (from ESA) photo that Joseph Skipper used and treat it the same way the owner of the site (Skipper) said he did to get those results. His was similar but a bit fuzzier. It wasn't very involved, it just appeared quite easily. No paste, no funny business, no fuss. There are hundreds more.

Ah, "Mars Anomaly Research", there you go. Photo "treatment", there you go. Credibility of results, there you go!

For another sample of their often hilarious stuff, check this out.

Can we say "pareidolia"?

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I did see that. But it wasn't on that site first. I beleive it was in the news. I haven't the slightest idea what that thing is but Skipper wasn't the first to expose it. As far as my favorite photo goes, it is just a matter of rotation and color changes to get the result. If that is treatment than it is what it is. If my friend can replicate the procedure, anyone with the right program can probably do the same. If it is compression artifacts than I would like to see someone show me a similar outcome. I make no claims other than that is my favorite martian picture.

Almost certainly JPEG compression artifacts (Wikipedia).

See Wikipedia Discrete cosine transform (DCT):

And ponder two-dimensional DCT frequencies:


Somebody was either very sloppy or very deceitful with that Mars image.

Partake of Bad Astronomer: Are There Artifacts on Mars?

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I am somewhat on the fence here. However, with all due respect, saying that somebody is very sloppy or deceitful with the image doesn't really prove anything. How are they sloppy and how are they deceitful? Why can it be replicated with little ado by my friend who is merely a graphics draftsman? Something just isn't right here. I looked that picture over with a magnifying glass. There is nothing random about that picture. It seems artificial and utile in some way. I would like to see someone show me any compression artifact that even closely resembles that picture. Thank you for the info. I will seriously study it. I have scanned the "worm" segment and was impressed. The "woo woo's" won't drag me off easily. (I hate your name, were your parents like, mathematicians or something??)

Do an ASCII translation, you might change your mind.

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I am sure I might if I knew what the heck that means. You're not talking to Jay here sport. I am the self admitted least informed member of the forum and proud of it. It gives me the right to ask dumb questions without getting my butt kicked. No ego here in "Joe's Little World" . . . I is what I is (thanks for fixing my link, that was my first try, where did I go wrong!!)

"Skipper" used this Mars Express HRSC image http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...leCrater_H.jpg (1.2 MB). Don't try to look for it on "Mars anomaly research" - I got a virus from that site this morning.

It's not suprisingly that there are compression artifacts in that image. It is a composite e of three colour channels and the nadir panchromatic image, compressed to be internet friendly, and then draped over a DEM and rotated to an oblique view. They are easy to see if you fiddle with the contrats in any image editor.

"Skipper" not picking this up must come under the title of willful ignorance.

Jon

Hm, I see. I find it rather curious that the artifacts look so much like buildings of some sort with possibly windows here and there or for all I know they are launching outlets for winged martians. Little roadway looking things that seem to be set up with some planning as opposed to random vertical or horizontal lines. Above where you would not expect to see any structures there are none. Rocky craggy areas devoid of anything but rock. Why are there no artifacts there?

I am well aware that some people will go to extreme lengths to make their point, even if it is based on a falsehood. This Skipper has devoted eight years of his life to this project. He is neither dumb nor ignorant. If these compression artifacts are so easily debunked, I don't see why he would continue. He only recently has accepted advertisments so he hasn't been in it for the doe. He is writing a book, I guess I would too if I had invested eight years of my life on a project. I just don't know Jon. I would really like to see a compression artifact from another planet or the moon that looks anything like the one in question. The examples I have seen to date don't cut it. I have seen other photos of his that seem just as remarkable and I just do not understand why the artifacts that appear to be structures, dams, plant life are always where you would expect them to be and if they are indeed just artifacts why aren't the rough and rocky areas where you would not expect to build anything look so normal, barren and free of artifacts?

There are hundreds of these photos and Skipper is not the only one making them available. As Jay told me earlier it is Skipper's obligation to prove his claims. He is correct, but Skipper doesn't feel he has anything to prove. He explains his opinions at length and then some and I have never heard or read anyone say anything other then they are just compression artifacts. Also, wouldn't compression artifacts tend to look alike. I have seen what has been depicted as lakes, islands on lakes, big tubes, little tubes, hundreds of miles of some kind of tubular life form or geology maybe, going over and under one another and converging on central areas that seem to be structures or something. I am not saying anything is what it appears to be but the variety of different images presented by Skipper and others is very interesting to say the least. I tend to beleive there is something to these photos. If I am wrong I will be the first to admit it. Maybe I just lack the scientific expertise to make the right call. If they are just artifacts I want to see them on the moon, in the Sahara Desert and in the dried up oceans on mars. If there are artifact here, there should be artifacts there . . .

I can't help what they look like to you but the look like typical rectangular jpeg artefacts to me. And the arefacts are there on the "craggy areas" (the central uplift of Hale crater), they are just harder to see because they have been distored by being draped over the DEM. As a result they are not longer rectangular.

I never said that "Skipper" was dumb. I said he is wilfully ignorant. If you can come up with another better description of a person who thinks that there are fires and large open water bodies on Mars thus ignoring what we have known about atmospheric composition and pressure and temperature for more than 40 yers, then I would be glad to find it. Nobody who has spent as much time looking at Mars as he must have done has any excuse to not knowing that the martian aatmosphere has essentially no oxygen and thus cannot sustain fire and is too cold and of too low pressure.

As for persisting is making easily debunked claims, after many years experience in dealing with young earthers, hoaglandites and moon hoaxers I can assure you that people will continue to make rediculous claims even after they have been repeatedly shown to be false. The archives of this board illustrate this very well.[/QUOTE]


I attach a clip from a Google Earth image of Sturts Stony Desert in Australia. I zoomed in, converted it to panchromatic, rotated and saved many times. There is a distinct nested angular pattern in it that is very similar to what "Skipper" would all either evidence of a Martian cvilisation or else evidence of NASA/ESA cover up.

I can't address claims of "structures", "dams", "plant life", etc. unless you point to specific examples and explain why they are "where you would expect them to be". How about you do this?

Actually it is NASA and ESA who make these images available, not "Skipper". People like "Skipper" just put them onto their web sites have put their own interpretation on them

That's his opinion. It is the opinion of others, like myself, who are quite knowledgeable about Mars, or imaging processing, and related disciplines that his claims are baseless. Our claims are base on testable science and are constrained by consistency with what we know. His claims are based on his opinions that are inconsistent with what we know.

You need to read for widely. "Skipper" is an enthusiast for the "glass tubes" on Mars. They have been discussed at length in this forum (look for them) and are in fact mis-interpreted valleys with dunes.

Please provide specific examples of "lakes", "islands on lakes", "big tubes", "little tubes", and "hundreds of miles of some kind of tubular life form" with links the original images.

Provide liks to specific images and we can discuss them.

There is a whole pack of people out there who think they an see alien technology in compression artefacts. lens flares, film defects etc. on the Moon.

As for Earth, using a standard image tool like Microsoft photo editor you can create artefacts to your heart's content using Google Earth. Attached (I hope!) is a Google Earth image from near Olympic Dam In South Australia. It has been converted to pancromatic scale, rotated several times, reduced, enlarged, and had brightness and contrast enhanced. As a result there is a nested rectinlinear pattern that, if seen in an image of Mars, someone like Hoogland or "Skipper" would interpret as an ancient street pattern, or whatever. Th left hand image is the original, the right hand is the "processed".

You can do the same.

Jon

Attached Thumbnails

   

You spent some time on this. Interesting. Time for me to shut up and study. I do see a similarity to a degree in that right image to some of the photos I have seen. Just for the record I know where Skipper gets his photos. I'm not quite as uninformed as I appear at times. Thanks for taking the time to help Jon. Also, I have listened to Hoagland many times. The likes of him, John Lear and many others are verifiable nuts. My list of nuts grows, but I take my time--tnx again--joe

By the way Jon, I am not too good at the link thing here. One try and I muffed it. I would have been glad to present more examples, not as a challenge of course, but as a tool to make things easier for you to examine. Sorry about that, I should have backed up my statements with some photos but was afraid I would shut down the entire forum with my errors--joe

Hi Joe

The system bites us all from time to time!

Just cut and paste the link and say which features in it you find interesting and what discussed, and we can go from there.

Good luck!

Jon

Hi Joe

Yep, anyone who has an interest professional or amateur (like me) in Mars tends to study up on the fringe, if for no other reason than self defence .

"Skipper" is a puzzle. On one hand he knows the image archive very well and has brought my attention to many wonderful images I would not otherwise have seen. On the other he thinks he sees things that are clearly impossible - like fires (and on inspection are obviously not) - that there seems to be an almost complete disconnect between what is in his head and what is known about Mars. Then there is constrant allegations of cover up. Not only is this contrary to evidence it is completely unreasonable. There is no real difference in methods between Hoagland and "Skipper" except the details that "Skipper" seems to know his way round the images better and does not seem to be in it for the notoriety and the money.

Jon

Jon

I wouldn't say Skipper isn't in it for the notoreity. Just because he isn't as well connected as Richard Hoagland doesn't mean attention isn't what he seeks.

"The government has been deceiving us, and I alone have the knowledge to reveal this," is a well-used theme in pseudoscience. On its face that sets up a remarkably high burden of proof, and Skipper simply hasn't met it. Claims of highly evolved infrastructure on Mars are fantastic and require much more than "kinda looks like" lines of reasoning, especially when the material looks very much to trained experts like ordinary digital photo artifacts.

In addition to JPEG (i.e., DCT) compression effects, there are also error-diffusion effects visible. Error diffusion is a method of spreading quantization errors over the spatial frequency domain in order to minimize their effects -- in a word: dithering.

Returning images by radio from space means reducing the number of bits needed to express each image. Home computer users understand a similar problem by setting up their displays to 16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit color. They see that the smaller numbers of bits (per pixel) can produce visible banding and other effects. Quantization of incoming analog information is always problematic, but being able to diffuse the "error" in such a system over more than one pixel helps.

In the error-diffusion method, the "error" (i.e, the difference between the pixel's true intensity in the camera and the closest intensity available in the bit representation) propagates to nearby pixels, often preferentially down and to the right -- in scan order. Stated differently, the measured intensity of a pixel is combined with the errors in adjacent pixels, which often pushes the represented intensity up or down to the next value. The outcome is that the total error for some patch of pixels tends to average to zero.

But there are still discontinuities in the data. Error-diffusion methods produced discontinuous boundaries that are not rectangular or checkerboarded, as DCT discontinuity boundaries often are. They can be completely random because they depend solely on the whims of the incoming analog intensity.

The problem with Skipper's method doesn't really depend on how the discontinuities come about. We mention the different sources because each one leaves its signature on the quantized data. Skipper's error is made when he artificially expands the contrast between adjacent zones of quantization, and the draws conclusions and makes interpretations that require the arbitrarily-manipulated degree of contrast to be the natural degree. You can't argue there's a shadow there when you created the shadow. The most important thing to realize when using image-processing tools is when your effect has been revealed by the tool versus created.

So Skipper invents a purely conjectural scenario in which his haphazard manipulation of the contrast slider has "undone" some unknown, unevidenced concealment strategy he speculates was introduced by "The Government" to hide the detail. And because most readers don't understand how digital imaging works, they don't recognize or appreciate the far more parsimonious and evident conclusion that Skipper -- like so many other charlatans -- is simply exposing the ordinary properties of digital photography. Those artifacts are supposed to be there.

The inventors of those digital photographic techniques did not intend for them to survive gross molestation in Photoshop. JPEG compression and error diffision work because they ordinarily produce very tiny discontinuities that escape unaided observation. Expanding those to absurd and easily-noticed proportions does not all of a sudden create farm fields and factories any more than electron microscopy actually turns the surface of a compact disc into a waste treatment plant.

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Drat, he's back and caught me fussing about that mars thing again and making sense I might add . . .

There is nothing random about that picture. It seems artificial and utile in some way.

"In some way" is not sufficient to establish that they are artificially constructed. Image-processing artifacts appear because the minute differences in contrast are artificially exaggerated.

They appear regular because they are magnified to the degree where the necessarily-regular spatial quantization becomes significant.

They appear regular in idiosynchratic ways because the processes of producing them lend themselves to certain characteristic and recognizable patterns of regularity.

What to a layman seems to be a jumble of pipes might to a petrochemical engineer be a fractional distillation apparatus. Unfortunately that means the layman lacks the knowledge required to distinguish a truly meaningless jumble of pipes from an actually useful apparatus. The layman can't say that something must be an oil refinery because it's a jumble of pipes, and to him all oil refineries look like jumbles of pipes. To call it an oil refinery requires having enough knowledge of the candidate identification to be able to identify actual functional components of it, such as identifying which components of the jumble perform which task, with a high degree of completeness.

It is unfortunate that DCT and error-diffusion artifacts resemble tracts of farmland when artificially enlarged and made to contrast greater. That doesn't mean they are farmland, especially when the farmland identification also requires evidence of a process actually undertaken by which the farmland pictures were made invisible such that the "enhancement" process revealed them, and the fantastic and improbable implications of farmland on Mars. It's more parsimonious to conclude that the artifacts are appropriate and natural to the photograph that was used as the color map for the 3D terrain plot, and that the "enhancement" process made them visible.

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When you look at what appears to be checkered farmland with a magnifying glass that illusion disappears. It appears more like little buildings, roads, pipes or something along those lines. When you have time some day just take a quick magnified look. Maybe I'm all wet here Jay. I was certain as can be that it wasn't crops. It looks industrial or something. Thanks for the reply Jay--joe

Like refineries!

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Not enough pipes . . .

A fractional distillation apparatus, then?

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When you look at what appears to be checkered farmland with a magnifying glass that illusion disappears.

What purpose does a magnifying glass serve when examining digital images?

It appears more like little buildings, roads, pipes or something along those lines.

"Something along those lines." That's the indication of a weakly inferred identification.

The "identification" of cityscapes, industrial assemblies, or similar types of artificial construction passes through very broad goalposts because we are accustomed to a high degree of incomprehensible complexity and substantial variation in them. A lot of shapes qualify as a "building," and a lot of collections of lines qualify as "road system." There's even a screen-saver for Linux that generates what many people take for aerial city plans, but which is just a simple set of rendering algorithms that generate essentially Cubist tonal patterns and lines.

The question to ask yourself is not whether what you're looking at is "something along the lines" of industrial installations, but what test you could devise to prove it's not industry. That is, if the data had to remain the way they are, and you had to make a case for its not being industrial equipment, what examinations or interpretations of the data would you make? This is the "falsifiability" test of the hypothesis. If you can't figure out how your interpretation could be disproven, then you can't really hold it as a good explanation. That's where "looks like some kind of industry" shoots you in the foot: it's too general to be disproven, so it's too general to hold as a defensible interpretation.

The next problem is magnification. Whether you use optical magnification or simply make the pixels bigger in software, magnification removes context. It accentuates the abstract nature of the data, allowing you to "fit" more interpretations to it without your brain yelling at you.

And you're forgetting that these buildings and roads and oil refineries you see are not apparent in the original data. You have to artificially change the data in order for these figures to appear. That means you (or Skipper) bears the burden of proof to show that the manipulation reveals information instead of creates it as an accident of mathematics. Or stated differently, you bear the burden to prove that the contrast-amplified image is the proper state of the data. You can't get so excited with your magnifying glass that you forget that you grossly manipulated the picture.

Skipper simply supposes that "The Government" started with the data he sees in his manipulated versions, and then themselves changed it to give the data he downloads from the catalogue. His only evidence of any such process is the blatantly circular line of reasoning: since he "uncovered" these "artificial" constructs, then the government "must" have covered them up. Skipper's cheating; that's not valid reasoning.

I was certain as can be that it wasn't crops.

I was unclear; I meant that as a general example. When you photograph farmland from very high altitude it can look very abstract, almost like image compression artifacts. Because we see abstract patterns in regular photography, we don't feel that it's wrong to interpret abstract, regular shapes from other sources as "some kind" of artificial object (say, farmland).

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Well! Either you are all wet or I am. Gee, I wonder how this is going to turn out? Hey, someone out there got a towel, I am sensing some moisture here . . .
(point well taken Jay, I finally get it--too much logic and fact--I concede--the woo woo's will have to try to capture me another day--the forum folk have saved me again--tnx all for the effort--joe (as punishment for my stubborness I shall change my avatar to reflect my shame for two days)

Still im surprised by the symetry of the cydonia "face", especially in the borders , you can assume that is heavely erosioned , but you can't denie that it have some kind of symmetry

Only if you're claiming some sort of artificial symmetry and ignore later pix taken with better equipment.

BTW, do know your .sig contains ad hominems?

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http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/...roc_50perc.gif

Pretty symmetric, if u ask me, of course the right side is heavely erosioned, as the whole "thing"

BTW, do know your .sig contains ad hominems?

Do u have a problem with my old angry ladies???