That's not some irrelevant religious belief. That's a chunk of unscientific nonsense at the very core of his claims. Pointing out that it is in fact nonsense is not somehow "cherry picking."
Zoom in all the way, scroll up and to the right as far as possible, then scroll down just a tiny bit and look at the rock. That rock has a face on it? Definitely a WTF from me.
I am so tired of seeing visual evidence dismissed by people who refuse to even consider it if it's not endorsed by some large "respectable" institution. You mean to say this rock is just a naturally occuring anomaly? Really?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
Yes, that rock is almost certainly just a naturally occurring anomaly. People are built to find faces, even in things that aren't actually faces.
We've known for a long time that we are hardwired to recognize faces in sets of items that are definitely not faces, so why is it so hard to believe that you're falling prey to the same thing?
- Install Gimp
- Download the original Nasa image linked here: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00184/mcam/0184...
- Open the picture with Gimp. Crop out the face. Under the image tab, choose scale image. Scale the image to 300 percent of original size. There is an interpolation option when scaling the image. You have to choose Sinc Lancoz 3 because that is the interpolation option that will preserve the data in the jpeg pixels. If you choose cubic or linear it will be lost.
- Under the colors tab, open curves. NASA obscured this image by destroying it's dynamic content, so you will need to expand what is there by pulling the line to perfectly match the top and bottom of the image data. This will render the jpeg blocks and show you the image data they contain.
- Under the filters tab, mouse over enhance and choose the last option "Unsharp mask". Apply unsharp mask twice with the default settings. The picture will become clear enough to show.
Also, suppose he did come back with a rawer image that still showed the features. Is that going to convince you to say "oh wow maybe it was carved, it couldn't have naturally occurred!"? (http://lesswrong.com/lw/wj/is_that_your_true_rejection/)
For anyone not versed in this stuff, JPEG works by breaking the image up into 8x8 squares (possibly 16x16, or 8x16, or 16x8, but 8x8 is standard). For each square, the encoder then transforms the pixel data into the frequency domain using the discrete cosine transform. The frequency data is then what is ultimately losslessly compressed and encoded in the actual JPEG data.
Now, here's a zoomed-in screenshot of the rock in question, taken from the original JPEG with no alterations whatsoever:
http://mikeash.com/tmp/screenshot_F574A0FB-5919-4E2C-AEA3-C3...
The 8x8 grid stands out like a sore thumb at this zoom level. You can clearly see that the vertical separation of the "teeth" are just macroblock boundaries. There is clearly an actual horizontal dark streak in there, but the division of the areas above and below into separate vertical "teeth" is, to me, blindingly obviously a JPEG encoding artifact and nothing more.
Would I be convinced if the raw images showed these features as well? Probably not. But that doesn't invalidate my point. If somebody showed a picture of Bigfoot, and I noticed that their supposed Bigfoot is wearing a digital watch, it would be perfectly reasonable to point that out. Explaining away the watch would not silence my doubts, but it's still a completely reasonable thing to point out when someone shows a picture of Bigfoot and he's wearing a digital watch.
Do I know how to obtain a raw image? Nope. I wish I did. I briefly searched around for one, but with no success. My point is simply that JPEG images cannot be relied upon for fine detail, and if one is going to make claims about Mars rovers finding alien statues, the evidence needs to be clearly not due to JPEG artifacts, preferably by finding the original, uncompressed data. Scientists don't use JPEG-compressed photos for analysis, and this is why. The fact that a raw image is difficult to obtain is unfortunate, but completely not my fault, and doesn't alter the facts that 1) you really need a raw image to say anything about this photo and 2) the "teeth" in this photo are really, really, really clearly JPEG macroblocks.
If you really want to go deep into this, try some of the other cameras around that time, maybe you'll see it from a different perspective.
1: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=184&camera=MA...
2: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00184/mcam/0184...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(region_of_Mars)#.22Fac...
Upon further investigations they found large numbers of them throughout northern Africa, they described all kinds of megalithic structures: dolmens, menhirs, cairns, cup stones, and sacrificial altars.
Speculation was that this was a previously undiscovered Neolithic civilization, in describing the Senams, Cowper wrote "there had been originally no less than eighteen or twenty megalithic trilithons, in a line, each with its massive altar placed before it." Amazingly each altar had an obvious drain trench where blood from the sacrifices flowed. Cowper even speculated at one point that the builders of these cyclopean structures were involved in the raising of Stonehenge.
They were all well-respected, H.S. Cowper had done some early significant work identifying and describing megalithic structures in the UK, so obviously he knew what he was talking about.
A book with the findings was published to great anticipation. Unfortunately as the book was going to press, an article was written by J. L. Myers, Arthur Evans, and W. Gowland who actually knew what those structures were.
They were Roman-era oil presses.
For a brief period of time, Cowper denied this was possible pointing to Berbers that referred to the structures as idols, but for anyone who knew anything about Roman oil presses, these were fairly commonplace.
That's the long way of saying that the human mind has a tendency to find patterns and to try to explain those patterns based on their expectations.
But sometimes a cyclopean altar is just an oil press.
That image looks like a rock and zooming in makes it look like a distorted rock. Coloring and manipulating the image is in my opinion getting farther from convincing there's something uncanny about that rock.
We know that humans and many other animals recognize faces in a heavily biased way. It's the evolutionary reason why some butterflies and fish have eye markings. Their potential predators tend to see faces and may be intimidated by the implied size of the creature with those eyes or mistake the direction that the prey is headed.
Just from our own subjective experiences, we all see faces where we shouldn't: In clouds, in rock formations, in foliage, and even in burnt grilled cheese sandwiches:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6511148/ns/us_news-weird_news/t/vi...
As human beings who want to do Science, we have to recognize the limitations and biases of our own hardware or we're doomed to fail at evaluating reality.
Of course it is. That's by far the most likely conclusion.
Consider: Curiosity alone sends back between ten and 100 images every day that each contain thousands of objects (mostly rocks). So let's say there are 10,000 objects a day that people can look at (many more if you consider the tiny size of the "face" in this compressed image.)
I can't find any actual data on apophenia and pareidolia (finding patterns and faces in randomness, respectively) but given what we know about it the incidence is unlikely to be less than 0.1%, which means we'd expect to see ten objects per day in Curiosity images that look something like a face or other recognizable object, so if a fraction of one percent of those instances are fairly realistic we would expect to see something "very face like" a few times a year.
Those numbers are a bit hand-wavy, but they aren't out by orders of magnitude, and from them we can conclude that it would be pretty surprising if we didn't see something pretty facelike now and then in Curiosity imaging. If we didn't, it would be a major surprise. That we do... well, it's what we expect, so we dismiss it as evidence that what we see is of artificial origin. To do anything else would be to ignore what we know about human perception.
I saw a really good one the other day when I was looking unfocused at the floor and caught two patches of ground with either eye that resolved themselves really nicely into a stereoscopic image of a cartoon dog.