Chinese Moon Photo Doctored, Crater Moved 272
mytrip writes "A controversy over last week's photo of the lunar surface, allegedly from China's lunar spacecraft Chang'e, appears to be resolved. It's real but it isn't. An expert says the photo's resolution shows that it is of recent origin. However, for some inexplicable reason, someone on Earth edited the photo and moved a crater to a different location. 'In the week since the picture was released amid much fanfare in Beijing, there have been widespread rumors that the photo was a fake, copied from an old picture collected by a U.S. space probe. The photo from China's Chang'e 1 orbiter is clearly a higher-resolution view, with sunlight streaming from the northwest rather than the north. The mission's chief scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, told the Beijing News that a new crater had been spotted on the Chang'e imagery — a crater that didn't appear on the US imagery. Lakdawalla determined that the crater in question wasn't exactly new — instead, it appeared to be a crater that had been moved from one spot on the picture to another spot slightly south.'"
Re:maybe just a watermark (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:maybe just a watermark (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:spoiler alert (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well, now... (Score:2, Interesting)
They instill in you the legacy of Confucianism, especially the values of hierarchy and hard work. They send you off to school. You learn that it takes phenomenal feats of memorization to learn the Chinese characters. You become shaped by China's intense human capital policies.
You quickly understand what a visitor understands after dozens of conversations: that today's China is a society obsessed with talent, and that the Chinese ruling elite recruits talent the way the N.B.A. does -- rigorously, ruthless, in a completely elitist manner.
As you rise in school, you see that to get into an elite university, you need to ace the exams given at the end of your senior year. Chinese students have been taking exams like this for more than 1,000 years.
The exams don't reward all mental skills. They reward the ability to work hard and memorize things. Your adolescence is oriented around those exams -- the cram seminars, the hours of preparation.
Roughly nine million students take the tests each year. The top 1 percent will go to the elite universities. Some of the others will go to second-tier schools, at best. These unfortunates will find that, while their career prospects aren't permanently foreclosed, the odds of great success are diminished. Suicide rates at these schools are high, as students come to feel they have failed their parents.
But you succeed. You ace the exams and get into Peking University. You treat your professors like gods and know that if you earn good grades you can join the Communist Party. Westerners think the Communist Party still has something to do with political ideology. You know there is no political philosophy in China except prosperity. The Communist Party is basically a gigantic Skull and Bones. It is one of the social networks its members use to build wealth together.
You are truly a golden child, because you succeed in university as well. You have a number of opportunities. You could get a job at an American multinational, learn capitalist skills and then come back and become an entrepreneur. But you decide to enter government service, which is less risky and gives you chances to get rich (under the table) and serve the nation.
In one sense, your choice doesn't matter. Whether you are in business or government, you will be members of the same corpocracy. In the West, there are tensions between government and business elites. In China, these elites are part of the same social web, cooperating for mutual enrichment.
Your life is governed by the rules of the corpocracy. Teamwork is highly valued. There are no real ideological rivalries, but different social networks compete for power and wealth. And the system does reward talent. The wonderfully named Organization Department selects people who have proven their administrative competence. You work hard. You help administer provinces. You serve as an executive at state-owned enterprises in steel and communications. You rise quickly.
When you talk to Americans, you find that they have all these weird notions about Chinese communism. You try to tell them that China isn't a communist country anymore. It's got a different system: meritocratic paternalism. You joke: Imagine the Ivy League taking over the shell of the Communist Party and deciding not to change the name. Imagine the Harvard Alumni Association with an army.
This is a government of talents, you tell your American friends. It rules society the way a wise father rules the family. There is some consultation with citizens, but mostly members of the guardian class decide for themselves what will serve the greater good.
The meritocratic corpocracy absorbs rival power bases. Once it seemed that economic growth would create an independent middle class, but now it is clear that the affluent parts of society have been assimilated into the state/enterprise
Re:Feng Shui (Score:1, Interesting)
I dont know. I'm a Realtor in Monterrey Park (in LA County) in a predominately asian area. I hate to say this, but I really dislike working with Chinese clients because of their belief in Feng Shui. About 3 out of every 4 of my Chinese clients require a home that is in harmony with "Feng Shui", so that it will help them become richer.
Even MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas had to rebuild its entrance on the strip due to a Feng Shui belief of Chinese Gamblers [wikipedia.org] that the mouth of a Lion is bad luck. Many Chinese entered MGM through its back entrance, while most avoided the MGM altogether.
Re: Coverup! (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a particularly nutty conspiracy theory that says there was a landed UFO parked off to one side of the Apollo 11 landing site, and that the astronauts were being "watched" the whole time.
Given that Luna has no air to speak of, the big round dent it presumably would have left in the moondust should still be visible if Japan/China/India wants to fly over that way and take some hi-res snaps.
China is fascist, not communist (Score:4, Interesting)
see http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=105001682 [opinionjournal.com]
Snippet:
China is not, as is invariably said, in transition from communism to a freer and more democratic state. It is, instead, something we have never seen before: a maturing fascist regime. This new phenomenon is hard to recognize, both because Chinese leaders continue to call themselves communists, and also because the fascist states of the first half of the 20th century were young, governed by charismatic and revolutionary leaders, and destroyed in World War II. China is anything but young, and it is governed by a third or fourth generation of leaders who are anything but charismatic.
The current and past generations of Chinese leaders, from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin, may have scrapped the communist economic system, but they have not embraced capitalism. To be sure, the state no longer owns "the means of production." There is now private property, and, early last June, businessmen were formally admitted to the Communist Party. Profit is no longer taboo; it is actively encouraged at all levels of Chinese society, in public and private sectors. And the state is fully engaged in business enterprise, from the vast corporations owned wholly or in part by the armed forces, to others with top management and large shareholders simultaneously holding government jobs.
This is neither socialism nor capitalism; it is the infamous "third way" of the corporate state, first institutionalized in the 1920s by the founder of fascism, Benito Mussolini, then copied by other fascists in Europe.
Crater pics from NASA... (Score:3, Interesting)
Development [nasa.gov] of the Mars global surveyor: $148 million
Launching [nasa.gov] it into space: $52.6 million
Getting [nasa.gov] it into orbit: $46.4 million
Seeing what the martins really think of us: Priceless.
Re:Feng Shui (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More jokes.... (Score:2, Interesting)