Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Pareidolia strikes again!

        On May 8th Mike Bara posted this picture of a rock on Mars, on the official Dark Mission blog, with a brief comment ending..

"Now I don't know what the heck it is, but it sure looks like something that used to be alive. What do you think?"

        Considering that he directly solicited the ideas of his blog-readers, it's particularly strange that he refused to allow my comment to appear:

I think it's a breccia. Humanoid skulls don't have nasal bones anything like that.

Cheers.

        By May 11th, Mike had apparently seen the light of pareidolia, although it did not improve his spelling in any noticeable way. He wrote:

"I definetly think this is a skull, fossilized or not."

        He didn't say — probably didn't even think — what a skull might be doing in a landscape barren of any other sign of paleo-life. What does he think this ur-creature used for food? But that's the luxury of Hoagland/Bara style anti-science. What you confidently declare doesn't have to actually make sense.

        Just like Hoagland's confident declaration (Coast to Coast AM, March 16th) that the Shuttle Hubble-fixit mission would be canceled. The flight successfully launched yesterday, dead on time. D'oh!