Skip to main content

My Loch Ness Monster photo

I ought to say straight away, to avoid any disappointment, that I don't have a photo of the Loch Ness Monster. Sorry. But I do have a picture that I think exhibits some of the features of many LNM (as we scientific types prefer to call Nessie) snaps.

This is something that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been peering at the picture quite intently. This might seem unlikely, but I happen to have this photo as a desktop background, as a result of which it tends to be in front of my nose quite a lot. And this is the first similarity I suspect with those who find pictures of the LNM (or ghosts or whatever). To do this, people are staring at a picture, in their case hoping to find something.

In my picture (cunningly pretending to be a Polaroid thanks to Picasa) you see a vertical streak of sunlight on the water to the left of the scene. The question is, is there a person in the water, or is that little blob about halfway up the whole image just a rock or an effect of the light? To an LNMologist that might be plenty to report a sighting of the beastie. But what is really there?

In case you think I'm now going to reveal the truth, I haven't a clue. Here's what it looks like in close up and it could well be a person... but it could equally well not be.

For that matter the blob on the left could be another person reclining (though if they are, they either have an enormous head or it's a Sontaran).

I really don't know for certain. And that's the point. Unless it's a fake, the kind of photo that is presented to 'prove' the existence of the LNM (or UFOs) is almost always this kind. One that's easy to interpret as what you want to see. A bit like toast with someone famous's face on it.

So there you have it. My Loch Ness Monster photo. What do you think? Person or not?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope