You are wrong. The picture this object came from was never published on the NASA site. It is here http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spi...0P2575L2M1.JPG

ES

Not at all. We are able to distinguish between "it is like A" and "it is A", which means that if it is A, we say"it is A" [-X

You do not see tail, you do not see bones...
You do not see. Work on it :P

extrasense, you're making things up. You're seeing shapes in rocks and think the shape proves it is the item. You are wrong.

For starters, you only have one view of the items in question. It is difficult to show the true shape of a three dimensional object from just one view. What does the other side look like? Is the geometry really the way it looks, or is it an illusion of perspective? Are the shapes real, or just patterns that resemble the shapes, like shapes in clouds.

Let's look at your stingray. I will concede the shape bears a resemblance to a stingray. I will concede the dirt path looks like a tail. However, your stingray shape is faulty. First, this is the shape of a Manta ray.

http://www.big.or.jp/~ishigaki/manta/E_galleryB.html

Notice how the "wings" flair out much farther than the points on the rock you show. Notice how the shape is soft flesh, not bone. That wouldn't fossilize very well, and certainly wouldn't be smooth.

But even more important, look at the shape of your outline. Look closely at the left edge, and note how you have traced a shape by ignoring part of the rock you are pointing out. You just draw a line in the correct shape and ignore the part that doesn't conform to your expectation.

It is even more clear in the original.

The rock does not cut neatly from the top corner to the near wingtip, but bulges outward off the corner of the page. Oops. The part you call the tail and tail shadow are in fact just the windswept ground that is evident across that image. Also, the surface texture of the feature is that of rock. It is bumpy and pitted in just the way to expect of rock. In short, it is just a rock that from this angle bears some resemblance to a stingray.

The rest of your images bear similar problems. Some of them are not even recognizable even after you tell us what they are supposed to be. For instance, there is nothing resembling a lamb in your lamb picture. What you call a Martian outpost is a rock - it doesn't even have contouring or symmetry to suggest it is artificial. Your animal skull with teeth is just an obscure blur of dark and light texture from what appears to be an IR image of a rock. With your markings and highlights it bears a slight resemblance to an X-ray of some deformed jaw and teeth, but it's really just blurring at the resolution limit.

Your website has more of the same. I can't even tell what is supposed to make up the pregnant antelope.

I do commend you for linking to the NASA originals. That is a good way to show if the images you outline are truly in the originals, and not some photoshop jobs. Unfortunately, there just isn't anything to the shapes you point out. They are nothing but visual patterns that resemble objects to you.

The Rorschach Test is a controversial and discredited technique in psychology that relies on interpreting the patterns seen in inkblots or other amorphous shapes. It is not about seeing a particular set of patterns, but about interpreting the patterns the observer describes. Rorschach is supposed to be about seeing the inner workings of a person's mind by seeing how they interpret unstructured images. You tell the psychiatrist what you see, and he decides from what you say, not from the the inkblot, how that relates to your mental state, internal assumptions, and psychological foibles. There are no right or wrong answers, no predefined shapes you're supposed to identify. It's controversial, not reliable, and there's no evidence supporting that it really provides any insight to the patient.

http://skepdic.com/inkblot.html

The Rorschach Test applies in this case as a shorthand for subjective interpretation of vague shapes and patterns. You say what you see.

Most of the time, people are able to distinguish between real objects and subjective shapes. Most of the time, we focus on the real, the concrete, and the illusory shapes don't register. But sometimes conditions do trigger the mind. That is the cause of many illusions. Children in their beds at night seeing shapes in shadows in the dark, getting frightened by the monster that is their jacket on the coatrack. When a person takes photos and starts looking at them to find shapes, it is easy to start finding shapes. That is explicitly engaging the pattern recognition feature of the brain. The trouble is distinguishing the shapes that represent actual features from the shapes that are illusions caused by the particular pattern on the pictures.

That is just not true. Sure, when one looks at a bank of clouds and makes out shapes, one knows the shapes aren't real objects, but visual patterns. But it becomes more difficult when the source of the patterns is not clouds in the sky, but dark and light spots on a picture. Shadows and texture and coloration all blend together, and you have to determine if the shape has real structure in the image, or if it is just a random collection of lines and shading your mind it stitching together. Or even if the object is real, but the shape is just coincidental - like "skull rock" photos. There are really rocks there with some bumps and shadows, but they are not really alien skulls, just funny shaped rocks.

As for your statistics, that's just a load of gibberish. Your assumptions are invalid, and your figures are all assumptions. That's not the basis for conclusive math.

The irony of this statement is amusing.

manta ray or sting ray - it is just a placeholder for an nonexistent name of martian animal of somewhat similar shape.
The tail is what is interesting and importent...
Lighten up a bit :P

The exact same photo is on the NASA website here:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...0P2575L2M1.JPG

Along with a whole bunch of others of the same thing, apparently with every available filter on both pancams.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

D'oh! #-o

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h00!

Well, I am glad there is no argument about the authenticity :P

So, do you see a tail and its shadow there?

Nope. I see a ridge.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

The argument against your assertions does not center on the improbability of a rock looking like a "stingray with tail". If you think it does, then you have totally missed the point.

The argument against you assertions centers on the probability of a rock looking like something familiar! That is why people have given you examples of other people doing just that.

Daniel Fox

More dragons in the clouds? Or are we back to that danged Face on Mars kind of deal?

I don't care what it LOOKS like, unless some more definitive testing of the material says to us, "Organic composition, biological origin probable", then its just another rock and shadow deal.

At least with the "microbes" on the meteor a few years back, there was a bit of actual testing done that indicated an outside chance it was organic, if not alive. This is just an inkblot exercise.

So, you may move on to other images, where you see what I claim they are. Like berries or mushrooms

My site shows the whole Mars biosphere and noosphere.

ES

It becomes popular by being subjected to repeated investigation and experimentation. Neurobiologists as well as AI researchers are keenly interested in learning how the brain 'sees' things.

If you think about this example you will find it demonstrates exactly the opposite of what you claim. A person standing in the middle of a highway would be roadkill if it weren't for the brain's innate ability to take the raw information provided by the eyes and instantly attempt to decompose the scene into objects with known characteristics (e.g. "that red blob of light in front of you is a car, the grey blob of light below you is a highway, cars move rapidly on highways and are dangerous, move!").

We don't see arbitrary objects under ordinary conditions because the system works very well. But when the information provided by the eyes is ambiguous, that's when we tend to see things that aren't there. This mental mechanism is so fundamental that one can't just voluntarily turn it off. A normal person does not comprehend what he sees with his eyes as a spatial array of colors and intensities (the way a digital camera sees the world), from which the conscious mind decides what's there.

Some still do not care to believe in evolution either.

Evolution has evidence to support it.

Your constant laughing does comes across as very disrespectful.

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

Again, you personally might have this problem. Seek attention than. Normal people do not have it.

ES

Exactly. And people do not believe in it. The same thing with stingray tail and civilization on Mars

Extrasense, I believe that Omypelt is refering to pareidolia. The human mind has a curious tendency to see patterns where there aren't any.

A good example of this is the (in)famous "Jesus in a tortilla" incident. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in grimy windows, splotches of paint shaped like busts of Ho Chi Min, etc. are also examples of pareidolia.

Another example: this Mandelbrot fractal looks so much like the seated Buddha that it and similar fractals are often called "Buddhabrots".

Edit: Also, your "jokes" are not very funny, and are in fact somewhat offensive...

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

If you enlarge the photo and look at the rock you can see that it extends under the soil under the ridge, what you call the tail, to a length almost equal to the portion of the rock above the soil. You can see how the ground slopes in front of the "tail" indicating the shape of the underground portion.