Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

Yet another one on the series of videos showing a truly vast cosmic perspective.

It’s full of falling stars! But wait a minute. There are even more videos from this same user. Does he waste every night looking at the sky? Does he goes through hundreds of hours of videos searching for meteors? Is this a hoax?

No, he just uses a fantastic piece of software that automates mostly everything: the UFOCaptureV2! It’s joined by the UFOAnalyzer and the UFOOrbit. The whole package automates the process of detecting unusual phenomena in the sky, and even attempts to automatically classify and analyze it.

Check the samples of videos captured by the software: meteors, birds et al and, what I was quite skeptical when I first saw it, even sprites, elves and jets! Of course, it wouldn’t be worth its name if it didn’t also capture UFOs.

The software is free for use for 30 days, and the price is more than worth it, as the developer actively adds features and corrects bugs, being also available in support forums. For less than U$5,000 one would be able to set up a system, and that’s from scratch: the most expensive parts would be the high-sensitivity night camera and associated optics, and the dedicated PC.

I’m completely flabbergasted and excited by this piece of software and its results. This may look like a paid advertising post, but it’s in fact simple candid enthusiasm.

You see, it took science, and those brave real scientists, a lot of effort to even prove and accept that meteors exist – rocks do fall from the sky. Then, sprites, elves and jets were only confirmed scientifically – by accident – less than twenty years ago. It involved special research equipment and even the the Space Shuttle. This is really new, advanced stuff.

But now, you can confirm the existence of these phenomena literally at the comfort of your own home, giving a new meaning to armchair research. Check unusual sky phenomena just like you would check your email.

The resulting data will also make robust physical evidence, as the setup automatically records time, you wouldn’t be changing places much often, and it even automatically tries to estimate various data such as angular sizes from a built in star map system. If several people aim at the same area of the sky, it would make amazing physical evidence. Just like the Japanese are already doing to track meteors, lightning and all.

I’m really excited about it, and plan to promote and setup a system here in Brazil, a hotspot for lightnings and, local ufologists claim, UFOs.

Not convinced yet? Take a look at this (and the video). Did you know meteors could do that? More images and videos can be seen here.

There’s more UFO software suggested by the French folks of RR0, and my personal discovery of this gem came yesterday thanks to Odin from Ufofu.

In another news item, we are informed that a “US company claims it is ready to build a microwave ray gun able to beam sounds directly into people’s heads”.

The US military has been playing already with directed acoustic weapons, along with electromagnetic radiation weapons. But this new one would come full circle on the long and bizarre relation between paranoid madness, the strange and the very, very real.

One of the first detailed clinical descriptions of madness was the one of James Tilly Matthews delusions with an influencing machine. The poor fellow believed a sinister gang controlled his mind with an “Air Loom”. Mike Jay wrote in detail about the case, and it’s more than worth reading. Besides the peculiar craziness of Matthews, there’s the twist that he probably was, afterall, victim of a conspiracy. Just because he was paranoid it didn’t mean they weren’t after him.

Paranoia is widespread in ufology in particular, and some claim it was seminal in the first years of the controversy, as the Shaver Mystery flourished in the (crazy) people’s minds. That doesn’t mean every UFO buff is crazy and foaming, but as they say, the truth is out there, trust no one. The theme of aliens and/or the government controlling people’s minds, either with disinformation or more directly, with implants and abductions, is pervasive.

But let’s go back to the electromagnetic guns beaming sounds, and on to the title of this post. For years some observers have noted that in rare occasions it was possible to hear meteors. And not because they were coming over their heads, but at a distance, at the same time they were seen very high in the sky. That’s outrageously absurd – just like lightning and thunder, there should be a significant delay between sight and sound. So those observers usually kept those crazy things to themselves.

The only thing is, this phenomenon has been recorded, and there’s a proposed physical explanation for it. It involves meteors emitting low frequency electromagnetic waves that are transduced into sound near the observers by things like glasses or, possibly… tin foil! Oh, the irony. By the way, that’s similar, though not identical, to the proposed way that new weapon would work.

If it all sounds crazy still, there’s a NASA webpage on the subject. Fort would love this.

Disgust. At least when it comes to the muscles on our faces, and according to a study by Joshua Susskind from the University of Toronto. As Ed Yong reports, “Susskind demonstrated the polar nature of fear and disgust by taking images of Japanese and Caucasian facial expressions from a large library. He plugged them into a well-known computer model that averaged out their features to create standard faces that epitomised different emotions. The model also worked out how the shape of these standard faces, and the way they reflect light, changes along their surface. It used this information to create the polar opposites of certain expressions - a set of ‘anti-faces’.”

That’s interesting enough, but finding that fear and disgust involve “opposite" facial expressions also suggested that what they do to our senses is opposite too. And sure enough, Susskind also found that fear "is very much about expanding features like the eyes, nostrils and mouth, while [disgust] involves scrunching these up."

One chap named Darwin, more than a century ago, had already suggested that our emotional expressions may have had a function.

Read the full post on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

This video is from 1981. The interview is also the subject of Feynman’s book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

“I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s some times taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, "look how beautiful it is," and I’ll agree, I think. And he says, "you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing." And I think he’s kind of nutty.

First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is. But I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.

At the same time, I see much more about the flower that he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter: there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure… also the processes.

The fact that the colors in the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting - it means that insects can see the color.

It adds a question - does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms that are… why is it aesthetic, all kinds of interesting questions which a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower.

It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

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