Nefertiti's Family

Emanuel,

I appreciate your letter and I shall consider it carefully before I reply to it, maybe like Mark says, after the holidays.

regards,

Neil

Mark, I just saw your suggestion to let this ride for awhile, and I agree. But there are a couple of points that need to be clarifed first:

A couple of points:

In the first message of this topic I had included the link to the source jpg for the original M03 and E05 images at the MSSS site. I just went back and edited it, and replaced that url with the link to the actual site for each of these two strips, so that viewers immediately have access to the gif, the context image, and the Ancillary data.

On the subject of public request images R07 and R12, I never said that I thought they were tampered with. Neil even made it clear that I didn't choose to "go there". What I did say, in no uncertain terms, was that as Public Request images I found them to be useless. They added nothing to our knowledge of the scene. I even used a somewhat overdramatic "marketing meeting" analogy to make clear what I thought the real world would think of such images. Plus, I made it clear that if it was up to me, I would make it a general rule that if a request is granted, the new images should be of the highest quality. I stand by that.

I think part of what confused the issue on that subject was that when Tom came back from being away, his first comment was something to the effect that we novices didn't know what we were doing when we posted those contrast and brightness adjusted R07 images. As it was shown later, they really couldn't be improved upon.

As to what I said, when I posted R07, here's a direct quote:

"In the upper right are two variations of contrast and brightness on this new R07 image, and in the upper left is our smoothed M03 PI image and Neils Key for M03."

And:

"If you compare all of the new images with the M03 image, the first thing you see is that there appear to be way more bright shiny spots, and that you can't see any of the other surface features that we see in the M03 strip."

Since we seem to have gone far astray, here's a reminder in cyan:

{Image deleted temporarily} e0501429%20family%20of%203%20high%20contrast%20color%20test%20cyan1.jpg


rd

rd,

I admit I didn't realize that your contrast/brightness enhanced images were of the R7 and R12 strips. It appears you did clearly say so. I accept full responsibility for this misunderstanding.

Emanuel

Emanuel writes: "I admit I didn't realize that your contrast/brightness enhanced images were of the R7 and R12 strips."

In the interest of accuracy; Rich posted the R07 enhancements, along with the other images he just mentioned, on Page 4 (18.14), and again at the top of Page 6. Tom's attempt to enhance R07 is found at the bottom of Page 5. The only attempt to enhance R12 (made by Rich), is in the middle of Page 6 (14.44), which was also a failure.

Although I should repeat here that I don't consider the enhancements of R07 to be complete failures because you can see an outline of the "Girl's" face, highlighted mostly in bright spots. I considered this a confirmation of the PI's existence if nothing else. This was also one of the criteria that Tom listed off to jrich when asked what it would take to falsify the hypothesis that these images were really there (paraphrasing).

The exact exchange was as follows:
Jrich: What would disprove the artificiality of these features?
Tom: If new images from a different viewing perspective, or new images with different lighting, made the impressions we have go away (as it does for faces in clouds and landscapes on Earth), most of us would agree that artificiality is falsified. (03 26 06, 23.13)


Neil

Now I understand something I hadn't before:

Because of this statement of Tom's...

"If new images from a different viewing perspective, or new images with different lighting, made the impressions we have go away (as it does for faces in clouds and landscapes on Earth), most of us would agree that artificiality is falsified."

...Rich and Neil felt it was important to clarify whether or not the R07 and R12 strips contained any semblence of the original impression. I never understood this before now, and it explains why Rich kept asking me to try adjusting R12 and post my results. It also explains why he kept saying that the faint impression that *does* still exist in R07 and R12, "proved the existence" of the original impressions. I was confused by that. I couldn't quite figure out why it was so important to Rich to prove the existence of the Nefertiti impressions, because to me we all already knew that they were there in the other strips. It honestly never occurred to me that R07 and R12 were being considered as a kind of litmus test for artificiality (whether or not the impressions were visible anywhere in them). To me there were always lots of possible explanations as to why the impressions were less visible (clouds in the way, dust storms, different lighting, etc), explanations that I felt had no bearing on the artificiality question.

For example, I said it before and I'll say again: I *do* see an outline of Nefertiti's hat in the brightness-adjusted R12 image. To Neil and Rich, this was significant (and maybe it *is* because of Tom's quote), but at the time I didn't think so, and so I didn't understand why a big deal was being made about it. To Neil and Rich also it probably seemed inconsistent for me to be saying this when I was arguing against artificiality in general. I understand this now, and I can see why it may have come across as though I was intentional "confounding" the issue. But to clarify, all I was responding to was the claim that R07 and R12 were tampered with (something I no longer believed after Tom clarified for me that the the strips were not messed up after all). In other words, I was merely trying to provide possible explanations for the lower contrast, explanations that would rule out tampering, but didn't bear on the artificiality question.

This, I think, is a major part of the confusion and misunderstanding, and perhaps part of the reason why Neil and Rich felt that I was intentionally confusing the issue. We were simply on different levels, focusing on different implications. Neil's post above clarifies this for me, and helps me better understand the basis of your suspicions.

Emanuel

Still a little confused about who said what, but hey that was close enough. After 10 pages of this stuff who wouldn't be confused? But essentially that was a pretty accurate recap of what happened.

So let's let bygones be bygones; besides, I've kind of taken a liken' to yas. But not jrich. He still scares me.

Neil