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Comment by hentrep | Hacker News Reader

A grainy 80-year old photograph of a woman's back seems hardly compelling. The other pieces of evidence they cite seem equally unconvincing. Maybe I've turned cynical given the current mainstream media circus, but this appears to be more of an advertising piece for the mentioned History channel special. It is glossed over in the article, but I'd be more interested in learning about who took the picture, and why he/she did not report seeing Earhart.

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Seems a lot like when the History Channel continuously plugged that they had found "new information" on the DB Cooper case and made a special about it and the new information didn't actually help at all or really provide anything compelling. Did they air it anyway with continuous teasers? You better believe it.

There is an interesting comment on reddit by someone who claims to be the widdow of DB Cooper / Duane Weber. https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/3sdg9u... I was so amazed when I found this down the rabbit hole :)

And an image comparison: http://cbsnews2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2000/08/22/ca3bd939-a...

Seems like every 5 or 10 years we have a big burst of Amelia Earhart interest and nostalgia. Guess I don't understand - there's pretty conclusive evidence of her crashing and the circumstances of that.

Just grist for someone's mills I guess.

There's no "conclusive" evidence of anything other than her not being familiar with radio and her being off course. There are several strong possibilities of what happened. It's most likely she crashed at sea, but that's not known for sure...there are other accounts that say she didn't. Nothing wrong with a little mystery.

> Seems like every 5 or 10 years we have a big burst of Amelia Earhart interest and nostalgia.

It's the 80th anniversary of her death. I assume the Amelia Earhart specials that run every five years need some new speculative angle to get people to watch.

(Also, can I note that it's actually kind of sad that Amelia Earhart had all of these astonishing accomplishments over her life... And yet the only thing we commemorate -- and the only thing most people seem to know about her -- is the accident of her death.)

there's pretty conclusive evidence of her crashing and the circumstances of that.

"Conclusive evidence" would be plane wreckage, fragments of her personal belongings (or those of other occupants) and the like. Or even statements from witnesses about a plane going down that matched the Electra's description.

But we have none of that. The only thing we have "conclusive" evidence for is that at some point she dropped out of radio contact, and was probably low on fuel.

I agree this photo is silly but that’s not quite true - we have partial plane wreckage, of either the same or similar model of plane, and a woman’s bones (now lost).

It’s likely she crashed, and likely died on an island. The evidence is extremely suggestive. Not conclusive by any means but more than simply conjecture.

a woman’s bones (now lost).

I thought the consensus was that they turned out to be a man's bones (and not even matching Earhart's proportions). Which may explain why they ended up getting "lost".

That leaves us with just that patch of aluminum, of unconfirmed origin. I would call that kind of an indication "mildly" rather than "extremely" suggestive.

No, that was the initial conclusion but later analysis (of the measurements) put it within the (non typical) range of her.. remember- it was partial remains too.

They also found a woman’s shoe and a sextant with a serial in the range that would have been issued to her.

It’s not conclusive at all, I agree, but it’s got vastly more evidence (that is otherwise not easily explainable) than any other theory.

Agree on the pic, but when I saw it I was thinking would some deep learning analysis add any value at all? Maybe just for academic or conspiracist reasons. Like say the analysis determines that there was a 50% chance that the person in the pic is Earhart, but also 50% chance that the person in the pic was John Lennon. I know the analysis would catch an incongruous time period, but just sayin'...

>would some deep learning analysis add any value at all?

"Machine learning is like a deep-fat fryer. If you’ve never deep-fried something before, you think to yourself: 'This is amazing! I bet this would work on anything!'”

Source: http://idlewords.com/talks/deep_fried_data.htm

Not to veer too far off-topic - but what does deep-frying not work on? (ice cream, veggies, sweets, sea-food, beef/any meats... all delicious when deep-fried). Maybe fruit is the one exception? I have never tried but may give it a go. It seems like a poor comparison, as almost all foods are delectable when deep-fried. I know very little about machine learning though, I will concede. I also cannot open the link (blocked at work).

I say this mostly for the humor, but also for the truth: deep-frying is the best. And I deep-fry food quite often. In fact, I am headed home to deep-fry some Won-Tons soon.

I think the connection is the overuse/desire to apply deep-frying/machine learning constantly and to everything. While there are certainly (delicious) benefits, there are also drawbacks that make the non-stop use a net loss.

I had a similar thought as I typed - having more than one or two deep-fried dishes a week is unappealing, and having too many deep-fried courses together is unappealing (at least to me). And then potential health issues. When I get home, and after eating my fried won-tons, I'll check out the link.

Plus there's the whole 'burn your house down trying to make Thanksgiving Dinner' angle.

You've probably had deep-fried bananas. I've had deep-fried watermelon. Like most deep-fried foods, neither is particularly memorable except for the kitsch, even if they do taste good.

Which I think supports the original point: you can deep-fry anything and enjoy tasty results, but that _still_ doesn't mean there's anything substantial in the sense of untapped value.

Food is highly sensitive to cultural and social context. Even with deep-fried fruits, the part that stuck with you the most was the "kitsch" rather than the flavor, texture, aroma, size, cost, or any other objective fact about the food item.

My observation offers no lessons on deep learning image recognition, but as long as we are already on a tangent...

I'm a Texan and can confirm that most of my experiments support this hypothesis.

Deep-fried battered pineapple rings were a staple of trips to the local chip shop when I was a child. Drizzled with syrup they make an excellent dessert when you've been running around outside all day.

Not what you'd call delicate or refined, though.

Maybe if you used tempura batter instead of chip shop batter.

I've had cheesecake in spring roll skin deep fried before. Maybe not everything has to be battered but instead can be encased in some form of pastry.

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