Iran Corona virus dead trenches visible from space!

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Well I will spell it out for you. They are using that statement where it does not apply. It's been 30 years since they could read the license plate on your truck with zoom.
 
Click bait at it's finest. I'm with you on wishing outlets would stop being over sensationalist with their headlines, I hate how marketing has infected everything.

At least the whole article doesn't rest on the sensationalism and is actually fairly informative about the situation in Iran.
 
Those trenches could probably only hold 1,000 people. This assumes 10 people per yard and 100 yards. To get this high you would need to bury them several deep.
 
Beerina said:
And the max speed of planes and ships and tanks is what the Pentagon publishes. In any case, 1 yard granularity is known.
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Max payload capacity is known, to a reasonable certainty. Max optical resolution is calculable, and can be derived from known properties of the largest launch vehicles. Unless there's a global conspiracy to conceal the true payload capacity of heavy lift launch vehicles, I think we can safely assume that we know everything there is to know about the optical resolution of the world's spy satellites.
 
Beerina said:
And the max speed of planes and ships and tanks is what the Pentagon publishes. In any case, 1 yard granularity is known.
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1 yard granularity isn't enough to even detect a license plate let alone read what it says. I didn't take the Pentagon's word on spy satellites.
 
theprestige said:
"Even now."

Some problems can't be solved by increased miniaturization of electronics, nor by economies of scale in mass production.

Optical physics is one of them. Payload mass to LEO by chemical rocketry is another.
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I think that depends on what specific problems you are referring to. Cost of both can certainly be reduced by mass production.
 
Actually, the article says the combined length totals 100 yards, so that's only about 90m. Not a major correction, but still...

Also, it being Iran, I'm guessing that they'd still follow at least the basics of Islamic burial customs. So we wouldn't be talking about the kind of just shovelling bodies in with a bulldozer like in WW2 mass graves. So my estimate would be anywhere between 90 and 180 bodies tops. Quite unimpressive.

Edit: it also says it's in a month.

And another thing that might help with understanding it even better is: cremation is strictly forbidden under Islam. So basically far from being some kind of "OMG, they even have to resort to mass graves", it's rather the normal way to dispose of a rather unimpressive number of bodies, if nobody else wants to claim them and give them a better burial. In the west, if you had 100 corpses in the morgue that nobody wants, you'd just cremate them and nobody would even blink an eye. In Iran that's forbidden, so you have to basically do what these guys did: dig a hole in the ground for them.

It really is THAT non-news.
 
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Trebuchet said:
Why isn't this thread in Conspiracy Theories?
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I suppose it technically doesn't involve a conspiracy. I mean even the article doesn't say that the Iranians are keeping it secret or anything. The locals seem to be rather up-front that yeah, they had to dig more graves than usual because of COVID-19.

(Incidentally, it also doesn't say ALL those people buried there are Corona victims. Basically the city morgue had to bury probably something like 100 people in a whole month -- again, because it's Islam and they can't burn them -- which is apparently more than normal, because some people died of Corona too. But not all of them.)

It gives you just enough partial information to basically give you a spin and point you in the direction of a stupid conclusion, if you were the kind to want a good Corona scare, but it doesn't say there's any conspiracy.
 
Well, to be fair, the main point of the OP doesn't seem to have anything to do with "OMG massive COVID-19 fatalities" nor "OMG using mass graves." It's really about the silliness of using the descriptor "visible from space (using a high-magnification camera/telescope)" to emphasize how big something is, when actually anything the size of a car or larger (and not covered over by something else) is easily visible from space in such commonplace satellite photos.
 
Myriad said:
Well, to be fair, the main point of the OP doesn't seem to have anything to do with "OMG massive COVID-19 fatalities" nor "OMG using mass graves." It's really about the silliness of using the descriptor "visible from space (using a high-magnification camera/telescope)" to emphasize how big something is, when actually anything the size of a car or larger (and not covered over by something else) is easily visible from space in such commonplace satellite photos.
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If anything, we should be arguing over the premise that the mainstream media isn't trying to inform you, it's trying to mess with your head. Or as I like to put it, "the media is not your friend."
 
Myriad said:
Well, to be fair, the main point of the OP doesn't seem to have anything to do with "OMG massive COVID-19 fatalities" nor "OMG using mass graves." It's really about the silliness of using the descriptor "visible from space (using a high-magnification camera/telescope)" to emphasize how big something is, when actually anything the size of a car or larger (and not covered over by something else) is easily visible from space in such commonplace satellite photos.
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The other issue is how you identify if what you are seeing in the imagery is some sort of grave at all. There are a lot of reasons to dig a trench. Even when it’s a country that isn’t always forthright, assuming that every construction project that can bee seen by satellites is a “mass grave” is silly.
 
I'm not sure I'd tar media as a whole with the same brush, but yes, a lot seem to not be above using a bit o' click-bait.
 
HansMustermann said:
I'm not sure I'd tar media as a whole with the same brush, but yes, a lot seem to not be above using a bit o' click-bait.
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Enough of the mainstream media is doing it enough of the time that, combined with Gell-Mann Amnesia, there's no reason to trust or respect them a priori, and no reason to take any of their claims at face value.

Do they get it right a lot of the time? Of course. Do they get it ignorantly or intentionally wrong enough of the time that you have to pay attention and test each one of their claims before accepting it? I think so. Do you have to be especially careful when they're confirming stuff you think you already know? I would say yes, absolutely.

Would we all be better off if more of us were more diligent about calling out clickbait in the mainstream media, and urging a much more skeptical approach to what they tell us? I very much think so.
 
Sort of. It's also worth noting though that at least the major media companies don't outright LIE. If they say someone dug a 90m trench in a cemetery, it is probably true. Even the claim that the grave is visible from space is technically true, at least in the way that even a normal one-person grave is.

What they tend to do (ESPECIALLY the PR companies, actually) is to just give you enough disconnected bits of truth that you can connect yourself to a wrong conclusion. They didn't tell you the falsehood, they just pointed you at the provided dots, and if you happen to connect them yourself, well, nobody can take them to court for libel, can they?

So basically probably THE most useful critical thinking tool you can use when it comes to media is to just be very aware of what they actually said, and what dots you connected yourself. What they actually SAID, it is probably actually true. What conclusion you were guided at, based on curated premises that lack just the right key bits, that is probably worth questioning.

And of course just the title you can probably just discard as clickbait in any case.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Note that the article does say the trenches are in a graveyard.
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Maybe they are building a road, or a ditch or, putting in a water or electrical line, maybe the private company that took the photograph has the location wrong. People tend to think satellites are magic, they are not. There are many things that can go wrong with inferring things from satellite observation. Without context and someone on the ground actually confirming the excavation is specifically for burial I remain skeptical.
 
Do you have some reason to doubt the on the ground confirmation cited in the article? Other sources I trust have cited the director of the morgue as quoted on Iranian state TV as confirming the graves are graves and for coronavirus victims. Do you know of some reason to doubt those claims or is this just oversensitive spidey sense?
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Do you have some reason to doubt the on the ground confirmation cited in the article? Other sources I trust have cited the director of the morgue as quoted on Iranian state TV as confirming the graves are graves and for coronavirus victims. Do you know of some reason to doubt those claims or is this just oversensitive spidey sense?
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If you just go and ask about COVID deaths what exactly is the point of the whole “satellite image shows…” ?

I’m specifically talking about claims dealing with Satellite imagery, and at this point there is a long list of woo-woo claims made about what satellite images do/do not show. I’d think just about everyone should have a healthy does of skepticism over claims “stellate image shows X”
 
This thread has been closed due to its many duplications with other science and medicine threads about Covid-19. Members are directed to a new, single thread HERE. Members may freely quote from this thread and import discussions here into the new catchall science thread. Thank you.
Posted By: Loss Leader
 
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