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'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker

bbc.co.uk

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Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker

#31

Post by agd »

prepend wrote: post #24

Off topic, but BBC blocks me because I use iPhone’s Adblock. BBC is government funded with a mission to inform the British people. Why would they require ad viewing and default to not showing news without ads? Seems against their mission. For profit news I understand as the whole “maximize shareholder equity” thing, but when government news sources use these anti-consumer tactics it’s depressing to me.

BBC is free to UK viewers but ad-supported for international viewers. This seems fair to me as UK citizens are the ones funding it.

Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker

#32

Post by tobr »

injb wrote: post #16

But why does the ship appear in that location, and not the water it's sitting on? What's special about the ship?

As far as I can tell, it’s just a lucky coincidence that the distortion “cropped out” the water in this case, causing an exceptionally clean illusion. Compare with other images of fata Morgana[1] and you can see how it tends to look more distorted.

1: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fata+morgana&iax=images&ia=images

Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker

#33

Post by mrighele »

prepend wrote: post #24

Off topic, but BBC blocks me because I use iPhone’s Adblock. BBC is government funded with a mission to inform the British people. Why would they require ad viewing and default to not showing news without ads? Seems against their mission. For profit news I understand as the whole “maximize shareholder equity” thing, but when government news sources use these anti-consumer tactics it’s depressing to me.

I use NoScript, and the page loaded fine: if you don't load any JS there is no code to detect an ad blocker :-). (This doesn't always work of course, but it does for many websites).

Oh, and the website loaded in ~500ms with a 50kb of data downloaded. The "full version" loaded > 5MB of data in 10+ seconds.

Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker

#34

Post by CaptainSwing »

prepend wrote: post #24

Off topic, but BBC blocks me because I use iPhone’s Adblock. BBC is government funded with a mission to inform the British people. Why would they require ad viewing and default to not showing news without ads? Seems against their mission. For profit news I understand as the whole “maximize shareholder equity” thing, but when government news sources use these anti-consumer tactics it’s depressing to me.

Underfunding and neoliberal management. There's a fair chance the government is hollowing it out to undermine public perception of the institution so they cang et away with doing away with it completely.

Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker

#35

Post by cs702 »

I've seen this optical illusion in person, with large container ships, off the US Mid-Atlantic coast, and it's really cool.

The photo in this article is fantastic. It shows an extreme example of the illusion. The ship appears to be, not just hovering over the water, but actually suspended in mid-air.

In my view, it's worth clicking on the link just to see the photo.

Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker

#37

Post by pmontra »

prepend wrote: post #24

Off topic, but BBC blocks me because I use iPhone’s Adblock. BBC is government funded with a mission to inform the British people. Why would they require ad viewing and default to not showing news without ads? Seems against their mission. For profit news I understand as the whole “maximize shareholder equity” thing, but when government news sources use these anti-consumer tactics it’s depressing to me.

uBlock Origin with Firefox on Android. The site loaded fine.

Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker

#39

Post by M2Ys4U »

prepend wrote: post #24

Off topic, but BBC blocks me because I use iPhone’s Adblock. BBC is government funded with a mission to inform the British people. Why would they require ad viewing and default to not showing news without ads? Seems against their mission. For profit news I understand as the whole “maximize shareholder equity” thing, but when government news sources use these anti-consumer tactics it’s depressing to me.

The BBC is not a government news source. It's not even funded by the UK government.[0] It is - by law[1] - required to be completely editorially independent.

The BBC is primarily funded by the TV Licence. The licence is levvied on anyone who watches live TV (any live TV) or uses BBC's SVoD service, BBC iPlayer.

The BBC does operate a commercial subsidiary (BBC Studios), and the main BBC does have other revenue sources like patents owned by BBC R&D and, as you have noted, advertising on bbc.com for people who are outside of the UK.

[0] Well... there are some grants given to the BBC to fund its activities internationally, but those are quite limited in scope and size.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/aboutthebbc/governance/charter

Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker

#40

Post by mprev »

jpcooper wrote: post #25

If anyone wants to learn more about paranormal activity in Cornwall, they can check out a relevant episode of Fortean TV, a fantastic documentary series from the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aEX3Z3mjCk .

But this isn’t paranormal.

Fortean TV was, admittedly, fun but silly fun nonetheless.

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