As one of the original software developers and first 10 employees of what is now known as the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, I have to ask, what particular brand of crazy believes this? I have to confess to never having heard it.
Oh sure, we had discussions internally to waste time about what the resolution would be if we could point the bird towards earth, for this was the era of Reagan’s Star Wars, which many of us would have been working on if we were not opposed to such weaponry on principle
I say if because it is quite well known, and ought to be obvious with a 6th grade education, that the Hubble must go through great lengths to avoid nearby bright objects coming into view - every picture I have ever seen of the satellite quite clearly shows the door/lens cover. What do people think that is for?
Just this past weekend I was at a shopping center and Some Guy had a telescope set up in the courtyard area for people to look at the moon. It was maybe a 8-10 inch mirror model, pretty big for home use I think, but still 1/10 the diameter of the Hubble. Every now and then I come across such a situation, most recently about 6 weeks prior, and I always make the comment that I worked on a telescope 10 times larger but yours can view objects mine can not, because they are too bright for mine.
Included objects are moon, sun, and yes earth, among others.
I’d love to read about this band of crazies ASAP as I have to make a speech denouncing the behavior of the Christian right regarding Prop 8 tonight, and plenty of the people I denounce will be in the audience. I might work this in if it is good, if not, I will be refining this speech over the next couple of weeks, so I can work it in later…
One of the images linked below is the guard bars that appear at the start, middle and end of UPC and EAN barcodes, the other image is the bars that represent the number 6 when it appears in one half of the code.
Both pieces are enlarged for ease of viewing, but both to the same scale - both are also obviously dissected out of their normal context, but they are not qualitatively altered at all.
(acknowledged already that it doesn’t look the same when it appears on the other side, and acknowledged that chance confluences of two halves of some pairs of digits can also produce a similar pattern).
Anyway… here come the two images - one of these patterns (OK, not exclusively)represents the number six - the other one appears three times in an EAN/UPC.
(It may be worth emphasising at this point that I am NOT arguing that the number 666 appears in barcodes. I do not think that, and I do not think the guard bars actually represent the number 6. They just look a bit like they might - and that is the part that makes it not wholly imaginary. It’s wrong, but it’s not complete fantasy).
not_alice: Sorry, all I know is that it was some variety of Pentecostal. I’m home now, so I’ll ask her for more info, but it’ll be a little late for your talk. You’ll have to be… content with the Fixed Earth crazy.
As for the problem of taking in way too much light, these are people who think Earth is 6k years old. They’ve got a lot bigger issues than not understanding how a telescope works.
(BTW your work on Hubble is much cooler than Reagan’s Star Wars, so kudos.)
I can assure you that we had meetings, when the entire staff could easily fit in a single room where we dreamed and then planned that if we made the right choices, we would hear such compliments 25 and 30 years hence. That would be now.
Thank you, and my pleasure. Your tax dollars at work.
Fantasy just isn’t the right description - it’s a mistake - granted, one seized upon by expectations and preconceptions, but it’s a mistaken interpretation of something seen - something that is tangibly there to be seen, and misunderstood.
It would be appropriate to call it fantasy if there was no similarity between the representation of the number 6 and the guard bars, but there really is (in certain circumstances) similarity.
Interesting that you brought up writing systems - because, yes, it is similar to that - people see things that they think they understand, when they are wrong in that understanding - but that’s not fantasy either - it’s a mistake. We could perhaps describe the guard bars as false cognates.
It is not a mistake when the error was pointed out after the first time and it persists, it is either willful ignorance or fantasy or both. Or something worse.
Seriously, you are defending woo that sees “666” wherever it suits their purposes. Next thing you will be OK with someone saying “they just want you to think PI is irrational, because if you drop all of the digits except for the first 3 sixes, what are you left with? It is the Devil’s number in disguise, that PI and we must avoid circles and especially must never calculate circumferences!”
It is the same argument rhetorically. You don’t buy it and we are not buying it when you are selling it, even if you sell it reluctantly.
The mistake just isn’t pointed out all that much - the idea spreads around the faithful by word of mouth - and by the time any given person has been disabused of it, they will have passed it on to others who are now innocently/ignorantly repeating it. I’m sure there probably are some wilful deniers, but in my experience, they’re less common than those who believe it simply because they have never been corrected, yet
No, I’m not - as I have already explained several times.
No, I won’t. That’s a ridiculous misrepresentation of what I’ve been trying to do here.
I am selling nothing. Once again: I do not believe the guard bars represent the number 6.
I merely wished to point out the fact (and it is a fact) that they superficially resemble the representation of the number 6 when it appears in one part of the code - and I started trying to explain this only because at that time, there were people in the thread who didn’t seem to know what it is that people are seeing and misunderstanding, within barcodes.
Only when others came along and (or so it seems to me) flatly denied that there even is anything to be seen and misunderstood, did I feel the need to try to explain in more detail.
Once (editorial) you have it in your mind that you are looking for “666” everywhere, you have made a conscious decision to not look for rational explanations where they ought to be.
Heck where I live, last summer crowds gathered for a week or more because every nigh an angel appeared for hours and hours on the window of a carpet store.
Eventually, someone, maybe the guy who runs the gas station across the street, noticed that when he closed for the night and turned off his lights the angel went away.
This was pointed out to the crowds.
Still they did not dissipate for several more days despite being shown that the guy across the street could make the angel appear and disappear at will.
This is the level of belief you are asking us to accept as rational and seeking out the best explanation in Occam’s Razor’s best tradition.
Still not buying it
.
OK, then I amend my statement to “You are selling that, but apparently don’t realize it”. Trying hard to give you a graceful way out here
No it is most certainly not. Both are (possibly) willful misunderstandings of how to interpret the scratches of a well established writing system when the actual rules are well known and easily available.
Did you know that there are many writing systems on earth where the shape, size, location and width, and position of each character depends only on other characters immediately adjacent? Arabic is a good example. Bar codes seem to be similar - to read them (or at least this kind) requires an understanding of the context of the adjacent information, even if it is represented by a space, just as in Arabic (but not as in English).
A quick scan through my Unicode book shows many character glyphs, in non-European languages, that could, with imagination, be interpreted as a “6” also. If 3 of them occur consecutively in some text, are we to seriously listen to claims that the Devil put them there?
I say no.
I am not sure what you would say at this point.
But I don’t see the difference between that and the bar code example.
I know, I get it
They do NOT superficially resemble another character in the barcode system unless you try to claim that you can read it without knowing how the system works at all.
Spaghetti looped on my plate looks superficially like “666” too, but I don’t pretend I am reading it. If you come across anyone that claims to be reading something when theyy don’t know the rules of the writing system, then just accept they are NOT reading it, they are making shit up. Which might fly when they speak to others who don’t know the rules either, because the speaker will need to communicate (falsely) what the rules are to make the (false) interpretation.
Again, conveying that message requires either fantasy or willful ignorance on their part (and probably on the part of the listener too).
Well, maybe you read those messages wrong then The first step in any reading is to know the rules of the writing system, and then, the language they represent. You don’t mistake this paragraph for French or Chinese for precisely that reason. Reading barcodes or any foreign language is no different - you have to learn the system to read, and until you are proficient at it, you have to accept that you will make a lot of mistakes, which is far more plausible than the devil put it there and (still editorial) you make no mistakes even as a beginner.
Still, I do confess that this is probably far more common among Americans, who are far more likely to be able to read only one language than elsewhere in the world. It would be second nature otherwise.
I’m only going to quote and respond to this bit for now because it’s 1:30AM and because I think this part cuts right to the heart of what I believe is your misunderstanding or misrepresentation of my intent.
I am not expecting you to seriously listen to any claims about what the devil may or may not have done. Please stop suggesting that this kind of thing has anything to do with what I’m saying. It does not.
I’m not even expecting you to treat seriously the claim that the guard bars in a barcode represent sixes, because I know they do not represent sixes.
I’m not expecting you to accept it as rational. I’m trying to say the existence of the notion is understandable - we can (literally) see what the claim consists of.
The entirety of my point is this: When people talk about barcodes containing three sixes, they are doing so because they think that the guard bars look like the bars representing sixes in the body of the code. **We can look at the code and see the thing they’re saying they understand. **
As we have all said; they’re wrong. But what they are pointing their fingers at does (yes, only if you’re mistaken, or uninformed, as I have laboriously also acknowledged) superficially look as though it’s what they say it is. They’re wrong (I just thought I’d better repeat it at the end, in case you missed me saying it at the beginning).
Barcodes are on almost every product, yet the average person in the street does not understand their symbology, has no particular desire to do so, and in many cases, would not know where to start looking if they were curious.
Unlike unfamiliar human written languages, we are very significantly exposed to barcodes - this, coupled with the fact that they are most often printed with what appears to be a built-in lexicon (the human-readable digits) makes it all the more likely that people are going to think they understand the symbology when they don’t.
And if the failed attempts to disabuse people of their misconceptions about barcodes are generally anything like some of the responses in this thread, I’d say their continued ignorance of barcode symbology is pretty forgivable.
Actually, I’ll respond to this bit too:
That’s actually precisely what ‘superficial’ means, in this context.
