The title should be 'Hovering ship', as it is in the BBC article. There is nothing special about a floating ship.
Hey don't diminish human prowess.
'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
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Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#102The Action Lab had a great video about this effect recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrgKUFbwNf0
This is what I came here for. Thank you for the link.
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I don’t look at BBC news much, but now looking at its website, I have to agree with you that there is too much of this kind of content there. Its home page has articles about flying ships, eggs, and pterodactyls.. it does look like they are hitting a pretty low bar across the board, so maybe you’re on to something.
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...The optical phenomenon occurs because rays of light are bent when they pass through air layers of different temperatures in a steep thermal inversion where an atmospheric duct has formed..." To me that's the most Men In Black explanation I've ever heard. Definitely confirms this is aliens.
Basically the layers of air above the water have slight variations (temperature, humidity, pressure) between them in such a way that they each have a small change in refractive index that over a distance bends light upwards. Then you have another group of layers of air further up in the 'marine boundary layer' that bends the light back towards the waters surface. This is called an 'atmospheric duct' and is somewhat s…
Agent D, you're making it worse...
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#105Earlier 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…
Parliament is a part of the government, at least under the en_us understanding of the word.
Government n. 1. the governing body of a nation, state, or community.
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#106The title should be 'Hovering ship', as it is in the BBC article. There is nothing special about a floating ship.
For future reference, the current title on HN is:
> 'Floating ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
And the current title on BBC is:
> 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
Interestingly though, because of the quotation marks I understood “floating” to mean, as intended, that it looked like the ship was in the air and didn’t even think about the possible ambiguity until I read your comment about it.
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#107The title should be 'Hovering ship', as it is in the BBC article. There is nothing special about a floating ship.
Title should be ‘Fata Morgana sighted off Cornish Coast.’
No, it is not a Fata Morgana [1] but a superior mirage [2] as the article says. A Fata Morgana is a subclass of superior mirage that has multiple distorted images. Just learned this because of another comment. Whether calling it a Fata Morgana would be appropriate because it is the common laymen term for mirages in English I can not tell as non-native speaker.
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. ;-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana_(mirage)
Your 5 minutes of googling is already more informative than the article. Did the article say it was not a 'fata morgana'? No. How long did the effect last? We don't know. Did the ship image move, or disappear, or return to the horizon? We don't know. Were there multiple images? We don't know. Did he take just one photo? We don't know...
Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#109What 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…
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Re: 'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker
#110Does anyone else have intermittent problems resolving BBC domains, or is it just me?
Sometimes I can't resolve www.bbc.co.uk, sometimes it works. Same for www.bbc.com. I don't have that problem with any other domain name I have encountered. The intermittency makes it very hard to troubleshoot.