Starship Asterisk*

BMAONE23 wrote:

aristarchusinexile wrote:

BMAONE23 wrote:do you mean like this


Try here http://www.clipartof.com/details/emoticon/299.html

Excellent! Can you include some in the litle selection to the right of our reply boxes .. so those of us with restricted computer skills can acccess them as easily as you advanced geeks?

My geek method
1) find the emoticon I like
2) right click on it
3) select "Properties" at the bottom of the right clicked dialogue box
4) Drag over and copy the "Address (url)"
5) paste the copied address url between (img) (/img) at the desired place in the post a reply box
note do not use "(" and ")" use "[" and ']' instead if I did it the right way, this is what you would have seen

aristarchusinexile wrote:

BMAONE23 wrote:do you mean like this


Try here http://www.clipartof.com/details/emoticon/299.html

Excellent! Can you include some in the litle selection to the right of our reply boxes .. so those of us with restricted computer skills can acccess them as easily as you advanced geeks?

BMAONE23 wrote:do you mean like this


Try here http://www.clipartof.com/details/emoticon/299.html

gbaileyc17 wrote:I enjoy looking at the “Astronomy Picture of The Day” site, which I understand that you co Arthur and edit.

After looking at the photo posted on February 22, 2009 “Orion Nebula: The Hubble View”, I was fascinated by the shapes that the dust and gases produce.

I have been fascinated with all the nebulas’ that have been presented here, but in this one, I swear that I can make out an individual. Either I have come to understand and appreciate the work of Picasso, or possibly one of the astronomers cast a reflection in his telescope, or they caught a divine moment.

I admit, I believe in God and I do pray to him, but I am not considered fanatical in any sense of the word toward religion or anything else for that matter.

I laid out what I saw, on a powerpoint slide. If you would be so gracious to take a look, it would be appreciated.

I sent this to a few of my close friends, and a few state that they can see him as well, while others can not.

BMAONE23 wrote:

neufer wrote:

BMAONE23 wrote:Gee Art, I am aware that it is nothing more than a random alignment of differing cloud densities that create the appearance of the face in the image; though it still looks painted. The eyes have iris's, the ears have depth and there is even a hair line that shows dramatic recession not to mention a very prominent chin. I still wonder who could have painted such an image waaaaaaaaaaaaay over there.

You're weird, BMAONE23!

http://s189.photobucket.com/albums/z159 ... 2_crop.jpg


Here is the face I see

bongman wrote:Am I the only one who sees Vladimir Lenin as the face in the picture??

neufer wrote:

BMAONE23 wrote:Gee Art, I am aware that it is nothing more than a random alignment of differing cloud densities that create the appearance of the face in the image; though it still looks painted. The eyes have iris's, the ears have depth and there is even a hair line that shows dramatic recession not to mention a very prominent chin. I still wonder who could have painted such an image waaaaaaaaaaaaay over there.

You're weird, BMAONE23!

gbaileyc17 wrote:I laid out what I saw, on a powerpoint slide. If you would be so gracious to take a look, it would be appreciated.

BMAONE23 wrote:Because you're too weird to be called weird

aristarchusinexile wrote:

bystander wrote:

neufer wrote:You're weird, BMAONE23!

He's weird??? Seems to me to be a case of the pot and the kettle!

How come I haven't been called weird for awhile? Why should I be left out? This is discrimination!

bystander wrote:

neufer wrote:You're weird, BMAONE23!

He's weird??? Seems to me to be a case of the pot and the kettle!

BMAONE23 wrote:Gee Art, I am aware that it is nothing more than a random alignment of differing cloud densities that create the appearance of the face in the image; though it still looks painted. The eyes have iris's, the ears have depth and there is even a hair line that shows dramatic recession not to mention a very prominent chin. I still wonder who could have painted such an image waaaaaaaaaaaaay over there.

badabbit wrote: Has any body noticed the face: Top left of centre, on todays picture of the day?

neufer wrote:You're weird, BMAONE23!

BMAONE23 wrote:Gee Art, I am aware that it is nothing more than a random alignment of differing cloud densities that create the appearance of the face in the image; though it still looks painted. The eyes have iris's, the ears have depth and there is even a hair line that shows dramatic recession not to mention a very prominent chin. I still wonder who could have painted such an image waaaaaaaaaaaaay over there.

BMAONE23 wrote:Now I wonder who could paint that older balding man so well???? Quite an artist!

Michael Shermer wrote:<<Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.


Traditionally, scientists have treated patternicity as an error in cognition. A type I error, or a false positive, is believing something is real when it is not (finding a nonexistent pattern). A type II error, or a false negative, is not believing something is real when it is (not recognizing a real pattern — call it “apatternicity”). In my 2000 book How We Believe, I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved patternrecognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not. When it is, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the descendants of those most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning and it is fundamental to all animal behavior, from the humble worm C. elegans to H. sapiens.

Unfortunately, we did not evolve a Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus, the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.) But such erroneous cognition is not likely to remove us from the gene pool and would therefore not have been selected against by evolution.

In a September 2008 paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “The Evolution of Superstitious and Superstition-like Behaviour,” Harvard University biologist Kevin R. Foster and University of Helsinki biologist Hanna Kokko test my theory through evolutionary modeling and demonstrate that whenever the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor patternicity. They begin with the formula pb > c, where a belief may be held when the cost (c) of doing so is less than the probability (p) of the benefit (b). For example, believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind doesn’t cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.

The problem is that we are very poor at estimating such probabilities, so the cost of believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind is relatively low compared with the opposite. Thus, there would have been a beneficial selection for believing that most patterns are real. Through a series of complex formulas that include additional stimuli (wind in the trees) and prior events (past experience with predators and wind) the authors conclude that “the inability of individuals — human or otherwise — to assign causal probabilities to all sets of events that occur around them will often force them to lump causal associations with non-causal ones. From here, the evolutionary rationale for superstition is clear: natural selection will favour strategies that make many incorrect causal associations in order to establish those that are essential for survival and reproduction.”

In support of a genetic selection model, Foster and Kokko note that “predators only avoid nonpoisonous snakes that mimic a poisonous species in areas where the poisonous species is common,” and that even such simple organisms as “Escherichia coli cells will swim towards physiologically inert methylated aspartate presumably owing to an adaptation to favour true aspartate.”

Such patternicities, then, mean that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.>>

badabbit wrote: Has any body noticed the face: Top left of centre, on todays picture of the day?

orin stepanek wrote:http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090222.html

I'm wondering if scientists actually can see any changes occur in this amazing nebula over time? Is noticeable in photography?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin%E2%80%93Helmholtz_instability wrote:<<Kelvin–Helmholtz instability can occur when velocity shear is present within a continuous fluid or, when there is sufficient velocity difference across the interface between two fluids. One example is a wind blowing over a water surface, where the wind causes the relative motion between the stratified layers (i.e. water and air.) The instability will manifest itself in the form of waves being generated on the water surface. The theory can be used to predict the onset of instability and transition to turbulent flow in fluids of different densities moving at various speeds. Hermann von Helmholtz studied the dynamics of two fluids of different densities when a small disturbance such as a wave is introduced at the boundary connecting the fluids.>>