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I was thinking the same thing while reading it. We do have a way to go before consumer camera technology is good enough to capture moving spaceships (or even

I was thinking the same thing while reading it. We do have a way to go before consumer camera technology is good enough to capture moving spaceships (or even jet liners at night). Cameras are not very good at catching sharp movement of low lit objects. Just to photograph sports clearly requires several thousand dollars in equipment and you can be as close as 50 meters most of the game. That will change a lot over the years as sensor technology continues to improve and eventually your point will be important.

johnchristopher 13y ago
You are both forgetting Suliban and Romulan cloaking devices.
mathattack 13y ago
I thought cameras would be the death of paranormal, but then we have photoshop and facebook to convert a whole new wave of believers. I do like the thought process though - if it's supposedly this common but still unproven, it's less likely to be true. Do we put ghosts in the same category?
- dkersten 13y ago
  I always think about it the other way around: given we have photoshop and similar tools, every bit of photographic and video evidence is suspect. Just look at a movie - if that's what we can do, how could anybody ever believe a photo or video of, say, aliens unless they were there themselves.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    If you see one video of aliens visiting Central Park^, then you can probably be sure that it is fake. If twitter is suddenly flooded with reports about aliens in Central Park^, and dozens to hundreds of people all upload different cellphone videos of it, then something just might actually be happening. There is still potential for mass-fraud, but repeated seemingly uncoordinated reports improves credibility. Maybe they're all Photoshopping the same thing from different angles, but that is less likely than a single person doing it. ^ I mean come on, if you were an alien, where would you go first? I'd totally go to New York. Here is another rule of thumb: if the aliens are doing something boring, like stealing cows or fucking with corn fields, they probably aren't real.
    - kanzure 13y ago
      > There is still potential for mass-fraud, but repeated seemingly uncoordinated reports improves credibility Hmm. That would be an interesting piece of fraud (oops I mean public art) to architect. Make a Blender scene of Central Park, populate the scene with bystanders with phones (yes, this will take time to source realistic models and skeletal animations). Each phone gets to be a camera in the scene. Not all cameras start and stop at the same time, and a few of them will have to capture video before and after the event without the actual event included. Timestamp and tag the videos appropriately, including clock drift, then have fun with avconv/ffmpeg converting the formats to different video formats based on known phone sales and what default formats iOS/Android encodes to (ugh, I actually had to do this once back when zencoder/pandavideo). Create twitter accounts in advance, make them look real by copying other twitter users, and the day of the event just start uploading the youtube videos all at the same time and get your fake tweets flowing. Now, what could this pipeline be useful for? Suppose you know that the videos are fake, but also suppose you can be reasonably sure that others will accept this data as real news. What could you do with that? First idea is some killer marketing stunt..
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        Yeah, as I wrote that I actually began to think that it would be a pretty neat idea. I think maybe you could do it by actually filming in Central Park with some sort of structure with white balls on it, in a certain known arrangement, that you could automate a lot of the video editing from various angles.. I'm not sure about that but I suspect it is feasible. If you get everyone to film different angles at the same basic time then the scene would be the same (just from different angles) and you'd have everyone else filming in the background that would lend credibility.

johnchristopher 13y ago

You are both forgetting Suliban and Romulan cloaking devices.

mathattack 13y ago

I thought cameras would be the death of paranormal, but then we have photoshop and facebook to convert a whole new wave of believers. I do like the thought process though - if it's supposedly this common but still unproven, it's less likely to be true. Do we put ghosts in the same category?

dkersten 13y ago
I always think about it the other way around: given we have photoshop and similar tools, every bit of photographic and video evidence is suspect. Just look at a movie - if that's what we can do, how could anybody ever believe a photo or video of, say, aliens unless they were there themselves.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  If you see one video of aliens visiting Central Park^, then you can probably be sure that it is fake. If twitter is suddenly flooded with reports about aliens in Central Park^, and dozens to hundreds of people all upload different cellphone videos of it, then something just might actually be happening. There is still potential for mass-fraud, but repeated seemingly uncoordinated reports improves credibility. Maybe they're all Photoshopping the same thing from different angles, but that is less likely than a single person doing it. ^ I mean come on, if you were an alien, where would you go first? I'd totally go to New York. Here is another rule of thumb: if the aliens are doing something boring, like stealing cows or fucking with corn fields, they probably aren't real.
  - kanzure 13y ago
    > There is still potential for mass-fraud, but repeated seemingly uncoordinated reports improves credibility Hmm. That would be an interesting piece of fraud (oops I mean public art) to architect. Make a Blender scene of Central Park, populate the scene with bystanders with phones (yes, this will take time to source realistic models and skeletal animations). Each phone gets to be a camera in the scene. Not all cameras start and stop at the same time, and a few of them will have to capture video before and after the event without the actual event included. Timestamp and tag the videos appropriately, including clock drift, then have fun with avconv/ffmpeg converting the formats to different video formats based on known phone sales and what default formats iOS/Android encodes to (ugh, I actually had to do this once back when zencoder/pandavideo). Create twitter accounts in advance, make them look real by copying other twitter users, and the day of the event just start uploading the youtube videos all at the same time and get your fake tweets flowing. Now, what could this pipeline be useful for? Suppose you know that the videos are fake, but also suppose you can be reasonably sure that others will accept this data as real news. What could you do with that? First idea is some killer marketing stunt..
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      Yeah, as I wrote that I actually began to think that it would be a pretty neat idea. I think maybe you could do it by actually filming in Central Park with some sort of structure with white balls on it, in a certain known arrangement, that you could automate a lot of the video editing from various angles.. I'm not sure about that but I suspect it is feasible. If you get everyone to film different angles at the same basic time then the scene would be the same (just from different angles) and you'd have everyone else filming in the background that would lend credibility.