I’ve been informed by Spirobranchus that a preprint of Rhawn Joseph’s latest ravings is available. How could you? I have baby spiders that require tending, and you serve up this colossal distraction?
At least it’s exactly what I predicted: page after page of color glossy photos with circles and arrows. Unfortunately, he missed the mark on making a homage to Alice’s Restaurant, though, because it’s not 28 photos…it’s FORTY ONE PAGES OF NASA PHOTOS. 41. He really thinks mind-numbing repetition will make his point.
Here’s an example from page 15. Can you find the tube worms?
I know I can’t. Even the red circles don’t help. So let’s look at page 20, where the red rectangle will help us focus on the really important features in the photograph.
Hey, man, have you ever like really looked at dirt? It’ll like blow your mind, man.
You know what else is really annoying? None of these images have legends or captions, they don’t even have figure numbers. The body text mentions that the results are summarized in Table 3, but there are no tables in the preprint. The text also references figures 5, 7, and XX, and that’s it — how do you justify 41 pages of figures without even mentioning their existence? This is particularly galling because I tell my students, who have to write simple little lab reports, that every figure must have an explanatory caption, they must all be numbered, and each figure has to be referenced in the body text. If it isn’t cited or explained, I get to just rip it out and ignore it. I have failed student work that commits even a fraction of the sins in this work that the author thinks is ready for peer review. This paper is a very, very bad rough draft by an exceptionally lazy and undisciplined author, with essentially no thought about the data, and no real analysis.
Further, the paper has 40 references listed; 22 of them are by Rhawn Joseph. Let’s add that the author is lazy, undisciplined, and exceptionally vain.
Are you ready for the conclusion?
If the specimens identified in this report are alive, fossilized, mineralized, or dormant is unknown. That they are biological is obvious. Thus, the specimens presented in this report serve as further evidence that there is and was life on Mars.
Jesus. None of the photos show anything that is biological, obvious or otherwise. This thing is an unprofessional mess that wouldn’t even pass muster in an introductory high school biology class.
Sorry, I won’t accept anything as photographic evidence unless it has a red ellipse with nonzero eccentricity around it.
Irrefutable evidence that Elvis is living on Mars, and that he shot JFK.
Just think what he might find in a cupful of coffee grounds: an entire unknown alien biology.
The pictures also don’t seem to be color or glossy. Is there any aerial photography?
Ray@4- You can get anything you want.
It’s all science when the lights go out. Prove me wrong.
mandrake, when the lights go out, it’s dark.
So, you think science is darkness? ;)
John Morales@7,
Well I know you Antipodeans do things differently, but in my house, the lights go out when it gets light, and we switch them off! ;-)
Light comes in, lights go out…
Pareidolia isn’t just seeing the Virgin Mary’s face on a sheet of used bogpaper, it’s misusing our all- too- efficient pattern matching faculty to confirm a preconception. I was peripherally involved in an archaeological survey twenty years ago, One of the first recorded railways in the world (1604) was near Nottingham. Fact, but no one knows where it ran. Some of the other participants were stretching the evidence- using just maps and aerial photographs- not only to “identify” the route, but topopulate the whole landscape with a network of otherwise unrecorded lines of similar date. All fevered imagination, like ley lines, pyramids pointing to the planet Zog,, 90% of stone circle “alignments”, and a lot more.
A few of the images have blue arrows or other squiggles instead of, or in addition to, red arrows / squiggles. Therefore, science !
There is no explanation for the different colouring I could find. Or for the arrows and squiggles at all, albeit by then I was giggling too much. I also wondered why there as a reference to Table 3, as poopyhead noted, but no references to any other tables (e.g., 1 & 2). Of course, there are no tables at all (that I noticed in-between fits of giggles) anywhere. Every(?) image has a code beneath it, which I have no idea how to decipher, or what the point is, as many(? perhaps all?) images have the same indecipherable code underneath.
I “can’t wait” until teh loon starts analysing images from the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, and “finds” say, vast colonies, complete with mermartins waving at the helicopter as it flies overhead.