From: gherbert@gw.retro.com 
  
 G. Orme  wrote: 
 >Firstly I don't post at sci.astro or any of these other places, so I am not 
 >extorting anyone. 
  
 And yet you have the google records to prove the traffic is there. 
  
 Make up your mind. 
  
 >Secondly it is clear that you are the kook because you 
 >have not the slightest idea on what you are talking about. 
  
 Actually, my experience with examining Cydonia goes back 
 into the 1980s and direct contact with Richard Hoagland 
 as well as reading his stuff in Analog, a lot of his 
 other articles, the book, etc.  Around 89, a student 
 group I helped run invited Hoagland out for a debate with 
 some NASA remote sensing / planetary science folks, and I 
 spent several hours afterwards with a few other students 
 and him at La Val's Pizza Northside in Berkeley talking to 
 him about it over pizza and beer and cokes. 
  
 Subsequently I have studied photointerpretation and 
 overhead imagery, remote sensing science, etc. 
 I was rather engaged in discussions with pro-artificiality 
 at Cydonia proponents before MGS reached Mars, and helped 
 structure some agreements about what were fair and 
 reasonable predetermined methods and standards for 
 judging whether claims of artificiality based on the 
 Viking data stood up when much better data was available. 
 Those were rather important, because it formed mutually 
 agreeable testable hypothesies, thus transforming 
 aspects of the debate into a reasonable scientific 
 endeavour. 
  
 Subsequent to the MGS imagery passes over Cydonia, 
 the main image processing expert who had believed 
 that the Viking images suggested artificiality agreed 
 that the MGS images conclusively disproved it per 
 our earlier discussions.  Not only was the topology 
 structure as he and Hoagland suggested not present, 
 but the fractal characteristics he believed indicated 
 artificiality were not present at the finer scale, 
 on the main Face mesa or any of the other nearby sites. 
  
 He had admitted beforehand that he was seeking data 
 in what was fundamentally too few bits of Viking data, 
 but he thought he saw signal (and thought his numerical 
 analysis showed some, but still knew that there were 
 too few pixels).  He re-admitted that afterwards and 
 privately told me he'd been fooling himself. 
  
 Nobody with more scientific credentials, be they self 
 study or professional, remained championing artificiality 
 after that.  There were only widespread cries of faked 
 data and conspiracies, the last resort of the kooks. 
  
 Frankly, people who were born when this all started 
 and I started looking at the problem seriously are 
 nearly ready to enter college.   Of all the people to accuse 
 of not knowing what they are talking about, you have 
 just about come to the worst possible one other than 
 Mike Malin.  Worse, perhaps, because I am here on Usenet 
 and care about newsgroups, and I know both the scientific 
 and group-name-technicalities stuff involved. 
  
 >I am only 
 >interested in starting a newsgroup, not in listening to the infantile 
 >irrationality of someone who as a moderator should know better. 
  
 Nice try. 
  
  
 -george william herbert 
 gherbert@retro.com 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
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