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Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #4

Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #4 If not Latin, then what? Please see the links at...

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #3

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #3 Plants and the moon. For thousands of years, people...

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #2

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #2 An i for an i ? Not nymphs: women! There are...

Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #1

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #1 Tom, Dick and Harry explain a statistical method. ...

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Patrick LockerbyRSS Feed of this column.

Retired engineer, 73 years young. Computer builder and programmer. Linguist specialising in language acquisition and computational linguistics. Interested in every human endeavour except the scrooge... Read More »

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MH370 - Why Search Teams Ignored Georesonance

As soon as I read about the claims that Georesonance identified an aircraft wreck at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal my bogusness meter went off the scale.  A whois search shows the company is registered to a small private residence.   The company claims to have identified an underwater object using multispectral images.

Quoted words below are from the Georesonance Pty. Ltd. press release posted by Air Traffic Management.net.


Nonsense on stilts
The Dead Mouse Argument

By whatever choice of words it is often argued that because one thing leads to another, adverse consequences must inevitably follow if the opponent's proposed course of action is taken.

By whatever choice of words, the above purely rhetorical "proof" is a complete load of codswallop.
Learning Lessons From Yesterday

It is well said that people who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them.  History can teach many valuable lessons if only we are willing to learn.  Never forget, though, that history started a femtosecond ago.  More realistically we can say that yesterday is now history.
Debris Find - Likely Came From A Caravan

Yet another mystery object turns out to be unrelated to missing flight MH370.

FAIRFAX Media has received photos of the debris found near Augusta which investigators have since confirmed is not linked to the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.

Mat Franklin and his son discovered the debris on Easter Monday four kilometres from Augusta.  

Augusta-Margaret River Mail

Google Earth Mystery Object? - Hardly!

What is it that you can see in this snapshot of Google Earth in the vicinity of Amsterdam Island?


If you think it's a special antenna for transmitting earthquake waves in the general direction of people that a Secret Government AgencyTM hates, or if you just know that it's a secret underwater base you are probably a conspiracy theorist.

If you think it's Atlantis you are probably some kind of new age hippie.

If you think it's an image artifact you are probably very good at image analysis.  But wrong.
Idioscenic Conjecture

I am posting some ideas here to promote discussion of the psychology of conspiracism.

I suggest that the mere fact of knowing that some events have been caused by C may overly influence an observer to look first for C even if an indifferent observer would consider C unlikely in the particular case.