Nice way to remember it, but the flaw is that's using logic...something I'm oft incapable of (okay, so I consider myself to be fairly logical....but not usually before I've had my morning coffee, which I completely skipped today).

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Ooops, shotgun post...I should probably pause and make sure my brain's done chugg'n before I hit the post button but...

...wrt "congradulations", I kinda knew it was wrong when I typed it, I just didn't really care to correct it (sorry!). But it felt wrong when I was typing it. Which is why I'm bothering to say that.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Where when you spell/mistype a word, you know because your finger movement didn't "feel" right, more than you do because you recognize the error in the text. In reality, it's your brain recognizing that your fingers didn't make the right pattern for the right word, but it's kinda weird to think of it as your fingers feeling that you spelled something wrong. The weird part is I can oft "feel" that I spelled something wrong, even when I go back and don't know the correct spelling.

Anyway kinda a rambling tangent...hope it made some sibilance of sense.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Yes, it whispered sibilantly. And incidentally incited envy: I type with two index fingers only, usually. Mavis Beacon hates me.

Just for fun, could somebody make an overlay of the two pictures like the Vader/Afgan Girl one?

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

(psst---are you texting from school?)

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*

Hah, yeah I'm blaming that one on spell check. "Semblance" was the target word there.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Me? No, I'm home now.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

"A sibilance of sense"... is that one of those collective phrases, like "a gaggle of geese"? If not... I like it.

"I used to hold to some strange ideas, until my friend whispered a sibilance of sense in my ear."

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Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

The FOX report is probably the reason I have trouble accessing the Bad Astronomers blog.

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Join the Illuminati

Oh great, now every UFO enthusist is going to have a field day.

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Fields of Space

LOGIC, n.
The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

In the Year 2525.

"One small step for (a) man. One giant leap for mankind".

If an astronaut doesn't need good grammar, niether does you.

Host of Seraphim

Why does a pretty rock get a load of coverage and the actual science being done by Mars rovers gets comparatively little? The discovery of recently flowing water is surely more interesting than the discovery of a rock that looks like a garden gnome?

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"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive." - Carl Sagan, 1995

Seems obvious to me that it's just a rock. I don't see why people get so worked up.

If it is a person, then they like holding their arm out while they're walking, they wear a dress, and their legs are a lot wider compared to the rest of their body (look at how the light shines on the dress where the leg is).

I couldn't agree more. It's just a reflection of the majority of our 'pop idol' watching society.

Because people are both amazingly horrible and horribly amazing.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

The BA Blog: Emily, Bigfoot, and awesomeness informs us that Emily Lakdawalla in the Planetary Society Weblog: Teeny little Bigfoot on Mars takes on the little Mars rock that isn't bigfoot:

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

Does anybody know how long it takes to switch filters and take a subsequent exposure with the pancam on the MER? Because if it's more than a few milliseconds, that's one stiff Martian. She doesn't move that extended arm a skinch over the four images.

ETA: Ah, I see that Emily made the same point even more strongly. The same feature was captured by the navcam three sols earlier. Very stiff indeed.

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Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

wow, great image, a statue, or clay sculpture, or a rock design, or some one waiting on the stone! interesting image, really amazing and surprising.

The problem is that the people who "find" this stuff and make a big deal out of it don't care to research any deeper than looking at photos they find on the internet. They don't bother to learn the process of obtaining those photos. They don't bother to research whether the photos are original or altered (in this case, false-colored and skewed to sew together the panorama). They don't bother to find references to give depth, size, relative positions, etc. All they care about is finding something that "looks like" something they're expecting to see. They think that constitutes as research.

There's multiple problems there--like this case, where the rock is only a few inches big (but admittedly, who says aliens can't be a few inches tall?), but when unskewed it "looks like" nothing more than a rock. And then you have the rest of the details like the time of the multiple exposures.

I won't even get into Pareidolia (coincidentally, Phil's site is the first one google brings up if you search the phrase "seeing faces in random patterns"...I couldn't remember how to spell Pareidolia ), but as with faces, we're good at identifying humanoid figures that aren't really there.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

I notice in this (large) image:

http://www.planetary.org/image/A1366...alley_half.jpg

that there are rover tracks (I think) right up to, and beyond the little rock. It looks like the rock is not much taller than the width of the track. I wonder if it's standing up like that simply because the rover ran over it.

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"Probably the last sound heard before the universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying 'What happens if I do this?'"

"Have you ever tried going mad without power? It's boring. Nobody listens to you."

ah, NASA, as a practical joke, put a Michael Valentine Smith action figure in the probe, and it fell out!

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info