Posted on 02/10/2011 3:51:02 PM PST by djf
A truly spectacular find. This will probably re-write history as we know it. See link for details.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
You and blam. :’)
Not buying it...
BTW & FWIW, I spend at least half my time doing cartography and overhead imagery analysis for archaeology...
There are more lines, roads, artifacts ? about 150 miles due east of that.
Can’t you come up something smarter than posting a two year-old news article like its hot?
But which half?
The half in which I’m not working on kicking RINORicky Perry’s @$$...
Wouldn’t that be alien subduction?
So that would be the front half? ;-]
Well, I’ve been trying to come up with smart things to say since Oct, 1998.
How bout U??
Don’t bother.
I’m not going to fight an intellectual battle with an unarmed opponent.
There ARE more...
34 13’04.74” N
15 36’12.53” W
Might not be roads, per se.
Might be walls.
Or dikes to keep the ocean out.
Who knows?
No matter what, I’m pretty confident that if it’s not a defect in the mapping imagery, it’s certainly not a natural structure.
And that would turn the world on it’s edge with the implications.
Another excellent point!
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Sorry, but, based on knowledge of the post-processing that is applied to Google Earth data, I am very confident that those are minor differences (faint lines resulting from combining vessel scans with other data) that were enhanced by the "shadowing" filter used to give the image a 3-D appearance.
First of all, side-scan sonar looks out to the sides - always leaving a "dead zone" line directly under the track where the instrument was towed. This website explains and illustrates the phenomenon -- and explains how closely-spaced scan tracks can be used to fill in the data gap.
If the "gap-filling" (by scan overlap or digital interpolation) is imperfect, faint lines remain in the resulting digital image.
Rather than embark on a (even more) pedantic discussion of gradient convolution matrix math, I did a little demo:
I created two identical pairs of orthogonal lines which were only faintly different in brightness from the background. Then I applied a shadowing algorithm (like used by Google Earth) to the pair at lower right. Voila!
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FWIW, such algorithms are quite useful for analyzing overhead imagery. My son bought a big stack of WWII (grayscale) BDA (Bomb Damage Assessment) photos of German targets at a flea market. On one photo of a bombed-out German airfield, I noticed faint lines in some adjacent grassy fields.
Application of a similar "shadowing convolution" algorithm turned those faint lines into clearly-visible pairs of "ruts" leading to seventeen (clearly visible due to their "shadows") aircraft that had taxiied out into the woods -- and escaped the bombing of the airfield...
As to modern applications for such algorithms, "deponent further sayeth naught"... '-)
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But you were correct re the Google Earth pattern:"it’s certainly not a natural structure."...
Guess so... '-) But in between halves, I occasionally enjoy using logic and knowledge of image interpretation to squelch fanciful misinterpretations of imagery (as in # 58, here -- or as in a UPS MD-11 contrail misinterpreted as "a missile launch off California"... '-)
As I said, I’m still not convinved one way or the udder!
But thanks for the very technical explanation.
I personally have written some image compression software used to process images stored in PCL format. And it is true that a wide variety of effects can be created, especially if you try to do compression and decide you can tolerate a bit of loss.
It is interesting!
One thing worth noting, though, is that the lines are not precisely vertical or horizontal, which is usually how these anomalies show up.
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