January 13, 2010

"Am I the only one completely repulsed by this? Seriously, I can barely look at it!"

A photo, supposedly of Mars...

"C'mon, you're kidding us, right? That's actually a closeup of a dish of strawberry ice cream with Oreo™ crumbles, right?"

"So, as I see from the comments, I'm not the only one confused about the fronds sticking up from the dunes. What are those?"

"Eyelashes. Rue the day Mars wakes up."

39 comments:

AllenS said...

Women are from Venus, men are from Mars. So, it's probably a close-up of a very private part of a man.

kjbe said...

I may have missed it, but it'd be nice to have some kind of scale to measure this against.

Dave said...

CO2 - Discover has an article:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/01/11/another-dose-of-martian-awesome/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiscoverMag+%28Discover+Magazine%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

URL is long...

Unknown said...

Looks like a mountainscape with pink snow.

Titus?

SteveR said...

The "explanation" for the eyelash looking thingies only confuses things. You shouldn't need to delve into an indepth discussion.

The Crack Emcee said...

I think it's gorgeous, but then I'm one to want to see other planets. And it certainly puts the imaginations of NewAgers and Sci-Fi movie people (like James Cameron) to shame. Surely, if we find life out there, somewhere, it's not going to look like anything we've encountered before and will probably blow our minds.

Absolutely beautiful.

AllenS said...

Do you have any pictures of Uranus?

The Crack Emcee said...

Speaking of James Cameron, I wonder if anyone's going to look at this - an actual other planet - and get suicidal.

Really, this puts people, and their goofy ideas about "reality", in some perspective. If anything, it's they that are depressing, not the society that's been created for us. Or the Earth. I mean, come on, can anyone look at this, compared to our awesome blue ball, and think we're somehow losing out on the deal?

The Crack Emcee said...

AllenS,

Look in a mirror.

LOL (Just funning with you, guy)

muddimo said...

Apparently Mars needs to get a sharper razor.

traditionalguy said...

Are you sure that another Austin pic didn't get mixed into the post? Seriously, that is beautiful. Now imagine 200 billion gallaxies each containg hundreds of billions of stars that all started from on moment in time from nothing except a force of some kind that "designed" this universe and later made us to observe it on a Blog using our two billion parts of coded DNA with complex on off sequences inside each of our cells inside our very indivdual bodies. And Happy Birthday again Professor. You are one in a million yourself.

Christy said...

Yeah, I thought it was a cartoon upon first viewing.

My brain has trouble putting something so alien into perspective as real, even if I do understand the science of how it happens.

I like the sensation of having my expectations turned topsy turvy. Gives me hope of new vistas for the human experience.

AllenS said...

Crack, if I looked into a mirror, I wouldn't see Uranus.

john said...

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred million stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

And you ask why those thingies stick up.

MadisonMan said...

k*thy, there is a description at the link about scale. See the smudge of blurriness just above the center of the third set of bristles up from the bottom just left of center? (There's a clear description :) )

It's several meters across.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Where's Chip when we need him?

David said...

It is trees.

Once again the CIA, Bush, the Jews, the KKK, Obama, Sarah Palin, the Tea Baggers, the Swift Boaters, NASA and Titus are conspiring to hide the truth.

They make it ugly so you won't look at it and see the trees.

DaddyO said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
vbspurs said...

Maybe the recently discovered Strawberry Crab is really a MARTIAN!

DaddyO said...

Parts of Mars need waxing. You all can see that but you're too polite to mention it, aren't you? Pussies.

So to speak.

traditionalguy said...

Vbspurs....And what does a strawberry crab have to do with Frozen CO2 on Mars? Your imagination is very interesting today.

vbspurs said...

You're just crabby, TradGuy. :)

vbspurs said...

Fun with comemnts! From BoingBoing, followed by Edutcher:

Am I the only one completely repulsed by this? Seriously, I can barely look at it!

Titus?

Sokmnkee said...

Yeah, Ann, I thought it was gross looking too. I didn't now what in the thunder it was supposed to be, but I suspected it was something put under a lab microscope and I was supposed to be looking for dust mites, etc. YUCK

vbspurs said...

YUCK

You know what it looks like? Like someone put in a part of a piste in Stowe, Vermont into the washer with red underwear.

Steve M. Galbraith said...

Kinda' looks like a close up photo of the right side of Tommy Lee Jones' face.

Terrific actor, but some bad skin there.

Bonus - Who was Jones's college roommate?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Yuck?

Mars looks a hell of a lot better than this.

vbspurs said...

Bonus - Who was Jones's college roommate?

Lockbox Al.

LordSomber said...

Looks just like Angry Red Planet. Except no giant amoeba thingie.

Big Mike said...

They don't stick up -- it's an optical delusion.

Go here for an explanation.

Unknown said...

vbspurs said...

You're just crabby, TradGuy. :)

As they say at Joe's Crab Shack, "American by birth, crabby by choice".

These days, it's anybody over forty.

WV "zoidit" What the aliens always did to the guy in the red jersey after the second commercial on "Star Trek".

Synova said...

I think it's beautiful too. I don't know why someone would find it repulsive. It's very *alien*, but that's different, isn't it?

The optical illusion that makes the CO2 rivulets look like trees is bizarre.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

I find it totally disgusting to look at. Like some sort of parasitic invasion on skin. Lesions with spikey things

I know it's an optical illusion, but even so, it is still yucky.

GeorgeH said...

It's the sour cream container I forgot in the back of the fridge.

traditionalguy said...

Vspurs...I am crabby today. I lost a contact lens down the sink last night, and when I called my longtime eye doctor's office to order a replacement this morning they reminded me that since last year they have instituted a rule that I must come in and pay for a full Doctor's exam after one year from the last exam if I want a replacement lens. So it has been 50 weeks since the last exam. But they said that was so close to one year that I needed special permission to order the lens without the next eye exam paid for. This office now does lots of medicare/medicaide patients, and I expect that they are minimally paid for these and as a full paying patient that I have to pay More to make up for that. The squeeze is on everywhere folks.

Synova said...

My husband tried to buy new glasses because he broke his and ran into the same thing. Everyone claimed that he could not get prescription glasses if his prescription was over a year old. Not even if he was paying for them himself instead of using insurance.

No doubt some do-gooder passed a law.

And people wonder why health care costs so much. People aren't even free to determine for themselves if their prescription needs updating or not.

I wonder if it's at all related to the stupidity (and outstanding medical bill we have to pay) from when he had a melanoma on his lip. Instead of just removing it "just in case" it was cancerous, and then testing it, he had to get the tiny spot *biopsied* and then go back and get it removed. The cut for removal wasn't any larger, hardly, than the biopsy was. The *bandaid* sure wasn't any larger. But I suppose two trips to the doctor are better than one and the insurance company wouldn't pay for "just in case", but they would pay (at least part) of two separate procedures.

It's insane.

Methadras said...

I liked this article better: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/24/footage-from-the-fir.html

William M. Klimon said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Steve M. Galbraith said...

Solution of the day: eyepatch.

Hey, when things are tough you have to make do.

Make do? Sheesh, I sound like a Senate Majority Leader.

What's Negro slang for eyepatch?