Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
That's Some Camera Phone!
I know it's Halloween, but this one is just silly as hell.
A civil engineer from Boston named Christopher Ogden had his dad take a picture of him in a high-contrast outdoor setting with a low-power CMOS-based camera phone. A typical camera phone, in other words. The resulting image seems to show a second, eerily spooky man in the light and shadow areas of the tree trunk behind Ogden.
This is not the surprising part, or the silly part. Low-resolution digital images often include artifacts due to the poor quality of the lenses on a camera phone, and also due to the low-power-consumption CMOS technology that enables a digital camera to be shoehorned into a tiny little cell phone. Whereas your typical "real" digital cameras allow a great deal of control over such things as exposure and focus at the moment the picture is taken, camera phones usually only have one control: "take a picture".
In other words, there's a hell of a lot more to quality digital imaging than simply increasing the number of megapixels in the camera's image sensor. Camera phones take muddy, distorted, pixelated pictures full of odd digital artifacts. That, my civil engineering friend Christian Ogden, is what we like to call a "fact".
The other not-silly part of this story is the fact that humans are pattern-seeking animals. We see human faces and figures everywhere - in tortillas, on plate glass windows, or in the pattern of a water stain seeping from the wall of an underpass. So, again this isn't so surprising.
What is silly is the engineer's assertion that digital cameras have the ability to capture images of supernatural things.
[link] "I’ve never really believed in apparitions," Ogden said. "I believe in an afterlife and all that, but I've heard a lot of stories about similar things occurring with digital cameras' spectral system picking up what the typical eye can’t see."
Ah. I see. Well, I suppose that as long as he's not one of those nasty, dirty, stinking, immoral, uppity atheists, then we should believe him. I mean after all, he's a civil engineer. Why, that's practically almost a real scientist!
Personally, I prefer this ghost. 
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Bonfire Pope
On a somewhat related note, did you happen to see the "Pope of Fire" picture?
And Bill Maher did a pretty funny bit about the bonfire Pope pictures too.
Yikes!
Wow! Your pic IS much more frightening!
I took a couple o' pics of "Jesus", as his face is on a couple of the trees off the parking lot at work. He keeps asking me to post them, but, well, I just tellin' him that I'm not that crazy.
Jeez...
Happy Halloween ya atheist rabble rousers, you!
;-}
ugh.
electronics reliability engineer, here.
welp, i guess this just more proof that there's a reason why we (mechanical engineers) always made fun of them...
why is it always the shitty cameras that pick up the "otherwordly"? don't they ever think about that? is there some sort of magical quality of camera shittiness that allows it to capture stuff that good cameras can't?
don't go over any bridges this guy made.
also: i am scientist, dammit. :|
I suppose this could go...
I suppose this comment could go in either this post or in Dirk's about UFOs, but I thought I'd put it here because of the image. From a piece I wrote for my blog back in the spring, about the possibility of stellar engineering:
Pretty picture, and very coolly taps into our tendency to read too much into images.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
Crafts from Jesus Camp?
Looks like a cosmic god's eye to me.
--
"Ponies are atheists, you know, technically."
- Me
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