I heard one of the most demented things of all times on NPR today. Some group of scientists (i guess they were scientists, maybe they were businessmen? and I only heard about a fraction of the clip) suggested something like this.  Put a big reflector in orbit around Mars and melt the ice caps.  What…  !!  we destroy earth, and now we set out to destroy Mars.  Is humanity so egocentric that it thinks that any hairbrained idea it gets should be brought to bear, even though it sounds like the plan of a toddler who tears apart things but can’t put them back together.

There are many posts on melting ice on Mars…

This was understood way back in “star trek” time… ha ha…. it was the PRIME DIRECTIVE

I love wikipedia, use it all the time, and appreciate the countless billions of hours that volunteers and staff spend to create this resource.  However, today, researching images for a presentation (that a friend will give) on Ronald A. Fisher, I happened upon two images of RA Fisher, one listed in wikipedia as 1912, the other a year later, 1913. There is LITTLE PROBABILITY THAT these were taken at different times… ha ha…. maybe someone photoshopped the image….  the face is identical, but the medal on his lapel is not there on one, and the collar and shoulder are differnet, no question, in the 1912 images…. BUT THE FACE is identical… view the two images, the highlights in the hair are a perfect match….  The shading is different…. thats an easy photoshop trick. …

It is ironic that the probability of two images that have such identical expressions and highlights in the hair is pretty remote — and i know it stirred up my suspicion right away. I dont have the desire or skills to figure out the “odds” of this happening in the real world.  ha ha…  but it would have been an easy manipulation with todays imaging tools.

Below see three images and those images on the right and left of center are the 1912 photos (or labeled as such) and the image in the center is the 1913 images.  Pay particular attention to the highlights in the hair, the shadow of the glasses…  the position of the mouth.  Ha ha… too funny.  I will say, that his eyes are just slightly different in the two images but this could be to shadows added in photoshop….  (of course the obvious change is the direction of the V of the necktie and collar…