I've heard of this happening across Lake Erie, people in Canada said they could see the color of the traffic lights all the way across the lake in Erie PA.
'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
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Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#92I live on Lake Erie, and I've seen this effect before. There will be a point between the shore and the horizon at which the water takes on exactly the hue and luminance of the sky, and makes lakers, sailboats, buoys, even a nearby lighthouse, appear to hover. If the point of transition in the color of the water is pretty straight and is parallel with the actual horizon, the effect is convincing.
That’s not the case here. In this case the ship was ‘hovering’ due to an atmospheric effect called Superior Mirage.
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#93The title should be 'Hovering ship', as it is in the BBC article. There is nothing special about a floating ship.
I’m guessing the (current) HN title was the original BBC title, and someone figured this out and changed it (after it was posted here).
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
The TV license is a tax imposed by the government, ergo the BBC is funded by the UK government.
>The TV license is a tax imposed by the government The requirement to hold a licence is a statutory one. Likewise, payment of the fee must, by law, be made to the BBC, and enforcement of the licensing regime must be done by (or on behalf of) the BBC. Thus, it is Parliament, not the government, that imposes the tax. (Yes, I know that all taxes must have a statutory basis, but this is one that is levied outside of the…
Wait, hold up, the Parliament is not the government? That's a very confusing take.
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#95What has the world come to, when a BBC 'journalist' can write an article like this, without even including the words 'fata morgana'? Of course, we know the answer, it is a comprehensive lack of education, and a total failure of any claim to knowledge, by a self-appointed class, which pretends to tell us about the world. I would normally just say caveat emptor, and hope the journalist would be fired, or the news agenc…
Wow, what a toxic attitude you have towards journalists. This is a fluff piece, not a serious piece of investigative journalism. The bar does not not need to be very high for this kind of article.
Even for a fluff piece, this clears a relatively simple yet efficient bar: get the impressions of the photographer, bring in an expert's take to explain the science behind it, and that's it.
Note that apparently the expert didn't need to mention the words "fata morgana" either, so maybe that's a stupid focus point after all which just sounds like elitism at this point.
I know who here "pretends to tell us about the world" and it's not the journalist.
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#96I sort of freaked out the first time I saw something like this. Then Wikipedia held my hand and said everything was OK and this even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana_(mirage)
I've seen it once and I haven't seen an explanation until now. My wife and I were kayaking on a lake in Northern Sweden and far far away we see a boat that is just moving slowly, lifted up in the air. It was completely calm and we could not hear it (very far away), it was ghostly.
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#97Off 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.
What is iPhone's Adblock? Is there some default iOS ad-blocker that I don't know about?
Probably talking about the anti-tracking stuff built into safari. It's not exactly an adblocker but if they're tracking you and can't (a typical but not exclusive adver tactic) then it could certainly be dropping their javascript/cookies so it's functionally blocking their ads. Same goes for Firefox which bills itself as antitracking rather than anti-ads
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
The TV license is a tax imposed by the government, ergo the BBC is funded by the UK government.
>The TV license is a tax imposed by the government The requirement to hold a licence is a statutory one. Likewise, payment of the fee must, by law, be made to the BBC, and enforcement of the licensing regime must be done by (or on behalf of) the BBC. Thus, it is Parliament, not the government, that imposes the tax. (Yes, I know that all taxes must have a statutory basis, but this is one that is levied outside of the…
> Thus, it is Parliament, not the government, that imposes the tax.
I think we're encountering the "two countries separated by a common language" thing here.
"Government" (in the UK sense) refers only to the current Prime Minister and assistants, yes? In the US sense, Congress is considered to be part of the "government".
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comprehensive lack of education? People received an education for ~12 years. In most parts of the world, I would say _caveat emptor_ and the agency would go out of business immediately, but the Brits have a mandatory tax, called the 'TV License' to pay for this bullshit. Would they? This is the first time I heard of this phenomena, so I wouldn't know.
If you are British, you will recognise my italics. It is perfectly acceptable for any member of the public to be ignorant of some unusual phenomenon. It would be fine if this was a blog from the walker who took the photo. But it is not acceptable for a professional 'journalist': either they are a 'science correspondent' and they should know the answer; or they are temp-ing in the science department, and should ask an…
I am not an expert but according to Wikipedia this is a superior mirage just as the article says but not a Fata Morgana [2] which is a subclass of superior mirage that has multiple stacked images. So the uneducated author got it right after all. ;-)
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#100What has the world come to, when a BBC 'journalist' can write an article like this, without even including the words 'fata morgana'? Of course, we know the answer, it is a comprehensive lack of education, and a total failure of any claim to knowledge, by a self-appointed class, which pretends to tell us about the world. I would normally just say caveat emptor, and hope the journalist would be fired, or the news agenc…
Wow, what a toxic attitude you have towards journalists. This is a fluff piece, not a serious piece of investigative journalism. The bar does not not need to be very high for this kind of article.
Well, the bar should be a little higher, and in particular, it should be higher for the taxpayer-funded BBC, which would once have thought it had a reputation to protect, but now seems to have destroyed its integrity in favour of fluff pieces - whatever that is supposed to mean - empty articles for empty people?