Hacker News Reader

Comment by sam-2727 | Hacker News Reader

The first author has had questionable publications in the past: "Quantum Physics of God: How Consciousness Became the Universe and Created Itself" (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344906681_Quantum_P...) and "Quantum Entanglement with the Future: Lincoln Dreams of His Assassination" (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344907026_Quantum_E...). Other coauthors have past evidence for fringe publications (the last author is an astrophysicist who doesn't believe black holes exist). Given the publication records, I would be very skeptical of this paper, even if it seems convincing at face value.

View on HN

http://brainmind.com/images/JosephGalaxy.jpg

His personal website is a certified 100% pure gem as well

That leads to a 403 error for me.

Looks like an oldschool referrer-based restriction. Copy-pasting it works.

Copy the link to your browser's address bar and load it directly. The site denies hotlinking by 403-ing a link with a referrer.

Apologies, will test for that if I direct link an image again. You can see said gem scrolling down this page some ways

http://brainmind.com/publications.html

his chest hair's got some sparkly brilliance reflective index out of this world

don't ctrl+f "as for girls" on that page lmao

An old trick for situations like these was to simply add a ? At the end of the URL and it seems as though it still works!

Focus the address bar and click enter, so it becomes its own referrer. In case it doesn't work, it's a galactic cool man made with Paint or something similar.

His website also lists at least 10 older papers about life or fungi on Mars since 2016.

Reminds me of TimeCube

https://timecube.2enp.com/

Why do these people all try to fit it on one page? It seems to be a bit of a hallmark in this genre.

Yeah I've always wondered what the hell is with that. Like, 1990s level web design taken to some crazy maximalist level. rense.com is like that (eesh i dont even want to make a clickable link to that)

my other favorite crazy person website must be https://arngren.net/ -- see if you can find the hoverpod

I don't like pathologizing behavior over the internet, but I think certain traits (or symptoms) like hypergraphia[1] influence such websites, giving them an unintentional horror vacui[2] aesthetic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraphia

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui

Reminds me of the stellar Lings Cars https://www.lingscars.com/ :P

Thank you for that, it made my day. His publications page is well worth the scroll.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200707161759/http://brainmind....

First author definitely creative with his titles.

This kind of papers are testament to the amount of data that we are bringing from Mars: multiple rovers with progressively better and better resolution cameras, and the orbiters.

As the amount of data coming from Mars will increase over the years we will see more such "creative" attempts to pick convenient subsets of this data and try to reach for conclusion.

But over time, I think, the wind will blow away the chaff and reveal real results, just like the marsian wind moves the sand around hiding and revealing pebbles at its surface.

Totally agree. It's easy, as an unexperienced individual, to get tied up into mysterious patterns present in martian imagery and immediately jump to the conclusion of life if you don't know of the underlying physical processes. Everybody wants to find life on Mars, so when you look at the images long enough, you start seeing it. This is nothing new: back in the 19th century, people speculated that there were canals on mars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canal).

It's like.... https://www.cnet.com/pictures/weird-objects-on-mars-pictures...

http://cosmology.com/

lmao @ website & valuation up top

funny thing to want to get rid of, you'd think the truth would be more valuable than that!

Errrmmm…

https://youtu.be/_9ZGcKA_Vk4

Pretty confident to write this one off to be honest.

You can't call someone questionable just based on the fact that his/her publications are different or his coauthor doesn't believe in X thing which is widely accepted. Science needs people to think out of the box and in an unorthodox way, and history is full of people who have done it and shed light on things we take for granted. I am also not saying that the author is credible, just saying you need more than that to call a persons work questionable.

> You can't call someone questionable just based the fact that his publications are questionable

Still struggling with this...

The primary and secondary authors are crackpots with a long history of pseudo-scientific, deceptive publication practices [1]. The first author also makes numerous claims that one of the reasons NASA fails to take him seriously is because NASA is full of Jews who can't believe in extraterrestrial life for religious reasons.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9ZGcKA_Vk4

Oh, my. I guess this is why this story fell off the front page so fast.

(come to think of it though, how does a story fall off of HN this quickly since there's no way to downvote?)

Flagging is, in effect, a way to downvote stories.

I agree the proponent seems rather strange, but this fungus claim is pretty fairly modest and falsifiable.

My immediate hunch is that it might be some sort of liquid condensation which then freezes and merely resembles fungi (ie tiny hailstones) but even if wrong it's interesting.

I wouldn't say that claiming Mars is teeming with complex life closely resembling Earth puffballs is "fairly modest".

Sure it is. It's a narrowly-tailored hypothesis for the observed phenomena that as I mentioned is easily falsifiable. It's probably wrong, but makes an apparent good faith effort to consider alternatives (calcified mineral deposits on the ground or salt corrosion on rover surfaces). It's not like elaborate fantasies of alien civilizations building a giant monument of a human face.

I don't know anything about these authors, and I don't care.

Can we discuss the merits of his claims instead?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com