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Fox Moon Special Response
An anonymous reeader writes "The other day the Fox Network showed an ill-researched program about how the moon landings were hoaxed. Nasa has responded on their front page, here. Since the community here appreciates science, here is a page originally linked to on the NASA site about refuting the illogical arguments of non-believers: badastronomy.com."
One of them has achieved journalistic respect from the masses, the other has received entertainment respect.
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RumorsDaily
If the apollo capsules had just orbited the earth, as the show says, then there's no doubt that the Russians would have noticed that the capsule wasn't going to the moon and surely would have turned it into an unimaginably HUGE political spectacle as they did with the downing of the US U2.
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
FWIW, I grew up during that moon shot era. I had model Saturn V's, LM's, command modules...all the cool stuff. In 1972, my parents took me to Florida to the opening of Disney World. While in FL, we went to visit some friends we had met the prior year.
The father was an engineer for NASA and invited us to visit them in Cocoa Beach. He arranged visits for us to see all sorts of things....many were the common "tours" but he managed to get us up close and personal with a Saturn V as well in the Vertical Assembly building. Let me tell you...those things are huge. And, they were quite real. Originally designed to hurl very big nukes at the Russians...
There was also going to be an Atlas Centaur launch. While I was too young to be in the block house, I was permitted to observe the launch from a location in nearby Cocoa Beach. It was magnificient! My parents and older brother were permitted to view the launch from within a block house. The space program convinced me that I wanted to be a physicist (at least be schooled as one).
Almost thirty years later, my brother actually asked me about the so called "hoax". He pointed out the fact that there were no stars, that there were multiple shadows, etc.
He felt a little foolish when I was able to explain away these things with simple explainations (it's damned bright on the moon..washing out background starlight and sunlight reflecting off the lunar structures would cause multiple shadows if near enough.
But, as somebody else pointed out, our society is to willing to believe that facts don't matter. They all seem to have the desire to rewrite history into their making. Stalin and Lenin thought this was a great idea as did Breznev (remember how Kruzchev was written out of the history books). But, does anyone really think the Russians would let this one go if it weren't true?
But, those that saw the launches, watched the broadcasts, and participated in the recover (my old navy ship actually helped recover one of the Apollo missions...but before my time).
We put men, vehicles, golf clubs, and all sorts of things on the moon. But, isn't it strange that almost 30 years later, we have problems landing a probe on Mars...yet can land one on an asteroid. Could it be the the KISS principle is the best way to launch space vehicles?
So...while national priority has not been focused on NASA, we can all look up in the night sky and, if the orbit is correct, see the ISS whizzing by. Kinda cool...don't you think?
RD
It's not "moral relativism" that causes cynicism, it's being repeatedly lied to again and again. Americans (and most of the rest of the world) have been lied to so often and so thoroughly that they have been trained to believe exactly the opposite of what they are told by mainstream sources.
Inside every cynic, there's a frustrated idealist.
The pictures which have 'missing' crosshairs are pictures that were prepared for print in magazines like Life and National Geographic. The crosshairs were removed to make the pictures look better. The photos in the NASA archives (which are available online) show the appropriate crosshairs. The pictures very much had crosshairs, but they were behind the objects. I belive this was do to overexposure of the white objects, not because of editing. If you saw the show you would have seen that only parts of the crosshairs were missing, not the whole thing, and they were closups of the image that had crosshairs.
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- People are reporting that the "channel" the broadcast occurred on was different. Since it aired on Fox, I know it had to have been on channel 5. Why are people saying they saw it on channels 2,3,4,6,7,etc?
- The people supposedly in the broadcast were reportedly doing other things at the time that the show was being aired. Clearly, if the show actually existed, then the people in the show would have been in the show at that time, instead of at home or out partying.
- I didn't see it, so how could it have happened?
The Elders of Zion must be behind this, I just know it.------------
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As to the noise: isn't sound a vibration in air, and as I recall there is no air on the moon. Things might vibrate but you wouldn't be able to hear them.
development.lombardi.com
They didn't send people, but they sent a bunch of probes. Anyway, if NASA hadn't, the soviets would probably have done it some time during 1970-71. It's a nice article here.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Reminds me of the only guy I know who spoke out on his disbelief of the lunar landing (granted, I never saw the Fox special). He believed that the world was flat, too. Which I suppose is the grander scheme of things, with the lunar landing being a small coverup to him.
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
Rocketry itself advanced from the "blow up on the pad" stage to "almost reliable, maybe." ;^)
Then, there are the less measurable benefits. Surely it helped engineering practice in general to build such a complex device that absolutely, positively, must not fail.
Do you really think that weather, communications and navigation satellites would have progressed as fast as they did without Apollo pushing the state of the art? Yet, we benefit from those 'sats every day. Let's not forget the usual spin-off list: improvements in remote sensing, medical monitoring, materials science, transsonic aeronautics, etc.
What about the educational benefits? Didn't USA's 1960s school science programs get a big kick in the @$$ (and hike in the budget) because of the Space Race?
Sure, the moon program started out as political posturing and misdirection, but that doesn't mean that all we're left with is "a bunch of moon rocks." That's one common misconception I'd like to see die and be forgotten.
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"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
Waves: x(t) = A cos (wt (plus phase shift)) ... well there's also an equation to describe pulse-like waves. My point isn't that I'm so smart, it's that the guy who argued about no waves in a vaccuum is a complete jerk and has no real concern for physics.
I know, on good authority, that the moon landings were hoaxed --but not in the way most people think: NASA built an artificial moon orbiting Mars, and used it to stage the moon landings. Why go to such trouble? NASA is afraid to land on Earth's moon because of the Moon Mole People who live there. The secret power behind the government (the Illuminatti, a.k.a. the American Dental Association) wants to hide the existence of the advanced moon civilization, because Moon Mole People scientists have developed a completely, one-hundred-percent effective anti-cavity rinse.
Anonymous, because I want to live...
Actually, according to the special the largest solar flare in recorded history took place while the astronauts were on the moon. For you space people, was that true?
That FOX would even consider running such a tripe program indicates the sad state of affairs of science education in this country.
max
Teflon was never "invented" for a particular reason. It was a fluke. A guy noticed some white film in the bottom of his test tube after fudging up and adding like 100 times too much of a particular chemical in his experiment. He tested the properties of it and it happened to have an amazing coefficient of friction. Ta-dah! And teflon was used on the shuttle for bearings and things.
I agree that skepticism is good and that there is no one objective TRUTH (at least no objective TRUTH that humans are capable of comprehending). But this does not mean that an explanation of gravity (or quantum mechanics) in terms of the social relationships and emotions of humans is just as valid as a description based on careful experiment, observation, and mathematical analysis. Scientists do get it wrong sometimes, and old theories are updated and replaced by more comprehensive theories, but that does not mean that any theory derived by any method is as valid (and truthful) as any other theory. That is the mistake made by postmodernism. Isaac Newton wasn't wrong with his theory of gravity, he was just incomplete and did not have access to all of the evidence that Einstein had when he formulated general relativity.
You don't think it's a joke?? Um, some choice selections from the faq:
5) Does the "middle corner" prove that 5=6?
Yes.
11) Does this fit in with the Hollow Earth theory?
Yes. Beneath the Earth, or hanging off the edges, is a land populated by either green-skinned women or Nazis. All those claiming to have seen this have misinterpreted it to fit in with the spurious and false Spherical Earth theory.
Sure, it's not a joke...
The conflict is over whether Armstrong's A was swallowed by the radio or he forgot to say it. The tapes have not been edited, they faithfully play back the less sensible version everyone heard and which you quoted accurately.
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They most certainly did! Not with cosmonauts, no, but they landed several robotic explorers which did collect and bring home Moon samples. Not all Moon rocks were collected by the Americans.
- Also Sprach Doktor Merkwurdigliebe
The show the article refutes presumes that any idea is equal to anyother. Given that, the concept of "Dragon's Exist" and the concept of "Dragon's Don't Exist" clearly are equal. However, there are so many facts the support the second idea, it is a much better, more valid idea. Superstitions are based on this concept, and it is why paranoids believe stupid things.
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Yes, I'm trying the Bruce Perens trick of writing something completely mistaken, getting modded up, and then earning more points for responding to the person who corrects me. ;-)
I found this paper (awarded the Driver Award for the Best Paper Presented to the 26th Meeting of the North American Vexillological Association!) which has more information about the moon flag than anyone could possibly want. It's actually very interesting.
Bottom line: you're right but the web site is still missing some information. The horizontal rod was not extended properly, wrinkling the flag and causing the appearance of waving. It looked better that way and later crews intentionally did the same thing.
I still haven't achieved Bruce's specialty of getting a false or heavily unfair story posted and then raking in karma by replying to 25 different flames correcting him. ;-)
May not make good money in Astronomy (unless you are Patrick Moore, but thats thanks to good books and TV exposure..), but you make good Karma, and go on living knowing that you are helping the human race by furthering Knowledge. Knowledge is wisdom...
Astrologers do the exact reverse, they are pushing humanity backwards to the Medivial Ages. One day we will end up with a leadership not beleiving how devastating there nuclear arsenal is...
Candle in the darkness, as Carl Sagan once said. I believe the future could well be very dark, unbless we take action now! Improve education, improve TV. Much easier said than done...Few people care or understand how significant this is...
Ahh, but you have to remember the Soviets where created by the American government as a way of controlling their citizens :)
Didn't you see 1984? The enemy doesn't really have to exist.
They only care about ratings, ergo, they MUST do sloppy investigations to prove their controversial points. The more shocking the facts, the better ratings they get. Who cares if truth gets bended in the process?
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Damn, I bet you searched Google with the same key words as I did! :-) But did you read the whole article? :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I totally agree with you on the telescope deal. Hell, we can build telescopes that can see the different rings on Saturn, we can see the "face" on Mars, I was at the mall the other day and they had home build little telescopes that got VERY close to the moon, you can't tell me that one of those huge ass observatory telescops can't zoom in on the moon and see SOMETHING.
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Armstrong was filmed stepping off the ladder by a camera fixed to the side of the lander.
The Ascent stage lifting off (on Apollo 16 or 17, IIRC) was filmed by a remote controlled camera on the rover.
Sure there is. The answer, though, has to do with "when" and not "where." Assuming the universe started from a singularity that would be the center of the universe.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
We all know that Fox is not exactly known for their balanced view of anything, but anyone who saw this show would know that it didn't have one necessary journalistic aspect: impartiality. I watched the show just for kicks and left feeling that NASA had been given the shaft.
Fox put many so-called experts on camera calling the moon landing a hoax. Occasionally, they would interject a NASA spokesman giving vague rebuttals to the show's allegations. NASA looked even more devious for not responding to specific "proof". It seems that the show's producers either didn't tell the spokesman what he was supposed to be rebutting, or they cut out his specific answers!
By far, though, the most unforgivable thing the show's producers did was to interview Gus Grissom's family. They tried to turn the tragedy of Mr. Grissom's death in a pre-flight training accident into an insinuation that NASA didn't actually go to the moon. Sham on Fox for turning a family's grief to their own use!
To fake a moon landing and cover it up for 30+ years, or
To actually land on the moon.
Any thoughts?
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Username taken, please choose another one.
This one will just fall into the same sleazy category as Beyond Belief, Alien Autopsy, and COPS.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
"People take on the attitudes and values of the society that surrounds them, and what determines this society's values and world view is the whims of the 'intelligentsia' - in this case us, the eloi. "
Nope. I don't buy this. People do take on the attitudes of the society surrounding them, but at the same time they help shape those attitudes. It goes both ways. People create and react to society simultaneously.
Furthermore, I don't think that there's any extra strength or credence given to scientists or other members of the so-called intelligentsia in forming society's views. If anything, they're laughed at and ignored, in favour of the REAL shaper of society: The media.
(important aside here: If I agree with any part of the 'postmodern' argument, it's this one: Many people don't believe scientists because it's currently unhip to believe us. Regardless, all that does is give us less of a chance to make a difference, not more responsibility to make the RIGHT difference)
Anyways, the media is the key shaper of minds, mores, and values nowadays. They are the ones who should have some sense of responsibility and care, but instead they're hell-bent on making money at all costs, and the dumber a society is as a whole, the easier it is for them. So what do we do now?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I wanted to see it, because it seemed somewhat "interesting." However, I missed it because I was hacking up some code and forgot all about it. Damn coding habbits. Damn. Damn. Damn.
; 2b=b;2=1
Oh well.. was it anything like that "Alien Autopsy" thing? I missed that too, so... umm.. was it anything like FOX's real-life car chase shows... umm.. whatever they're called..
Jeez.. I watch TV about one hour a week or so. I'm so out of the loop. Man.
Besides, it was on FOX. Its not like the Discovery channel is broadcasting this shit.
Ok.
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a=b;a^2=ab;a^2-b^2=ab-b^2;(a-b)(a+b)=b(a-b);a+b=b
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
The NSA does have some Hubble-class telescopes designed for imaging the Earth (some of this technology was borrowed for Hubble itself), but even diffraction limited optics on that scale won't quite do the job. Theoretical resolution at lunar distance is still more than a meter, which is not good enough to tell you anything useful.
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Not with telescopes we can't. To see Martian surface features smaller than continents you have to send orbiters.
That being said, another way to put the issue to rest would be to go back. We've gotten very good at remote controlled probes. (Clementine, alas, wasn't quite good enough to image the landing sites either.) Unfortunately, there's an attitude that the moon isn't going to change much since it's geologically dead, so there's no point in sending orbiters which will basically be echoing information we already gathered in the 60's.
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Magic tortoises?
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
If the Hubble can zoom in on galaxies that are millions of light years away i'm sure it resolve a LEM on the moon only a few hundred thousand miles away.
From the FAQ:
Mad Fishmonger theory? At least they could've come up with more respectable names like actual scientists.
--Xantho
Tonight: Humor at Fox:"How we never went to the Moon and why the peanut-butter has no butter". Featuring Bart Simpson, from a not-yet released comedy for MAD-TV.
But if you got to the show in the middle of it, after the 2-seconds disclaimer broadcast, well, you may well think that it was indeed serious.
Do you guys remember Orson Wells and "The War of the Worlds" radio broadcast? If they had put commercials and had kept saying after them ("... and after this marvelous commercial of Chicken Soup Inc., let's now continue with the theatrical version of the book The War of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells...") nothing wrong could have happened.
Is there any law that prohibits broadcasting dubious information ( = Hoaxes) in a news-informational mode?
Regards, opkool
Coincidences do happen; hang around in a casino long enough and you will see a surprisingly large number of them.
2. Tides. Even today the Moon is trading Earth's rotational angular momentum for its own momentum of revolution, getting further away as Earth's day slows down. (See #1.) It takes energy to make the sea go up and down with the tides; this is where that energy comes from.
Since the Moon is smaller than the Earth and had a lot less angular momentum of rotation to lose, its day eventually slowed to become equivalent to its orbital period. This is called "tidal lock."
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The turtle couldn't help us.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Just a nitpick, but you're probably thinking of Heisenberg, of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Further, this only really applies on the quantum scale. You can be pretty sure of what road you're on, even when you look at the speedometer... ;-)
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"Overrated" is "overfuckingused".
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
2. We actually can see more than 50% of the moon's surface from the Earth -- IIRC about 58%. This is because the moon wobbles a bit around its lock point. This wobble is called "libration." As the moon retreats, changing the length of the month, the tides tend to keep the moon's rotation synchronized.
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Whatever happened to individual investigation of another's claims? Is that something that's only restricted to smart masses in colleges and universities? I rarely watch TV these days because all of the quality programming died off in the early '90s. Last decent TV series I remember watching was "Home Improvement". Now with all this crap that the networks are putting out there to get big ratings and to sell more 30-second spots for the commercials that have an obviously better entertainment value than the show they're being aired with, it makes me want to puke. Instead of watching TV, I can be spotted either reading, playing games, studying, or conducting business over the Internet.
If the media keeps this up, our professors, researchers, and all other professionals in society will lose their credibility to some media network conglomerate.
Yeah, that was my point too
;-)
But thinking a little more about it, I could sell this formula to FOX and let them air a whole program showing how 1 equals 2. Their ratings will shoot to the roof and everybody will be really happy, specially if they air it around april 15, tax time
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
2001 Dilbert Desk Calendar
/. :)
Sunday, February 11
Now Scott Adams is not only spying on us at work, he's also reading
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
While the sun is certainly not at the center of the Universe, there is no center of the Universe in current cosmology, such exercises are very good, and I wish people would use them more in school. It certainly aids critical thinking, and a lot of things that we take for granted that in fact may be wrong, may be questioned.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I watched the "moon landing cover up" show last week with some friends and I have to say it was the most asinine underhanded thing ever to be broadcast over the airwaves. The sad thing about this show is that threw clever editing of video and interviews taken out of context it was convincing to people of average intelligence unfamiliar with NASA. So convincing that my friends were buying into this shows conspiracy theory. I was constantly defending NASA threw out the entire program. It made me look like a shell to the government, like I was the crazy one not the guy on the show talking about a giant vacuumless film studio at area 51.
The 2 things that really pissed me off were
1. The use of unrelated video footage. Like footage from WW II of dieing Japanese children with radiation poisoning using that to illustrate what happens in the Van Allan belt.
2. Saying NASA may have deliberately sabotaged Apollo 1 to keep Gus Grissom form blowing the whistle on the moon cover up. The narrator of the show said it was a strange unknown mystery how the fire was started and how it spread so rapidly. That's completely not true there are 1000 of pages documenting how the fire started and spread.
In summery I now hate fox.
They owe every one in the world an apology for airing this turd of a program.
Fuck fox!
I thought the exact same thing - I was staggered when I saw that NASA denial! Hell, it even made mem think for a second that perhaps it WAS fake! ;-)
Unfortunately the other explanation as to why NASA denied it - that they realize 90% of the public are complete idiots - is no doubt the truth.
OK, for the record, I DON'T give a toss for credentials--it's just that the only people I've met who use phrases like "The moral relativism and the relativism in all areas that it promotes..." have been second or maybe third year arts/philosophy students. Before that they don't have the total immersion required, and after that, they get some perspective.
When I said people are stupid, I mean people are stupid. WAY too many people (the large majority) fail to use that grey matter for critical thinking. This doesn't require education, it just requires a willingness to think. Many people don't LIKE to think, and that's stupid behavior.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
People have always been this way and probably always will be. For example, back in the 19th century, belief in fairies (at least in Great Britain) was widespread, even among educated people (I read that Benjamin Disraeli was among the believers, dunno if it's true though). UFOs are like the fairies of the 20th/21st centuries...there's just a bunch of people who need to believe in outlandish stuff like this, their little brains just can't seem to function without a certain degree of mystery in the world, they need to believe in something and for whatever reason religion just doesn't do it for them.
Perhaps relativism and postmodernism are reflections of this mentality. You seem to be suggesting the opposite, that people think like this because of postmodernism, etc. I strongly disagree- there've always been dumb people, and there always will be. I like to believe that on average, people are getting smarter and more rational as the years/decades/centuries go by, but who knows.
That is where the 14m3n355 comes from.
:wq
If it doesn't air on fox again you'd almost definetly be able to get someone in Canada to tape it for you. The space network picks up all the odd sci-fi stuff fox trys out like... harsh realm, millenium, beyond belief, alien autopsy, above and beyond and the like..
snootches
Snootches
"Should we tell them the truth about how all the chimps we sent into space came back super-intelligent?"
"No, I don't think we'll be telling them THAT."
"What if the alien doesn't show up?"
"Then we'll fake it, and sell it to the FOX network."
"Yeah, they'll buy anything!"
"Now son, they do a lot of quality programming, too."
--Pregnant pause--
"Hahahahahahahahahaha!"
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The Flat Earth Society is meeting here today
Telling happy little lies.
and the bright ship humana is sent far away
with grave determination....
and no destination, lie, lie, lie
C'mon, its a Bad Religion song. Sing along...
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Actually Mercury is in the final stages of becoming tidally locked; it has already lost most of its rotational energy and its day is now synchronized to its year in a 2/3 harmony.
Solar tides are less powerful than Earth's lunar tides because, while the Sun is a lot bigger than the Moon, it is one hell of a lot further away.
Most of the moons of the gas giant planets are tidally locked just as Earth's moon is, and for the same reason.
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http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/97/moon.html for the responses.
The one part of the moon landing I couldn't ever figure out was *who* took that picture of Neil Armstrong climbing off the LEM onto the surface. If he was the first man to walk on the moon, who was there to record the image? It just seems a little to photogenic.
I realize this might be considered a troll, and I'm not adding a lot to the discussion, but I have to say that this whole thing has made me sick. I walked in to work the day after this show was aired and found that at least three people in my office now questioned the moon landing, after watching a show who's merits couldn't be defended by it's producers.
When punk rock is outlawed, only outlaws will have punk rock.
There are very, very few examples of societies, regardless of how ancient, that believed the world to be flat. Humans have known the world was round pretty well since they started writing such things down. The idea of people who thought the world was flat was actually circulated during the 19th century, as the result of an ignorant schoolbook publisher.
You don't have to take my word for it. Go to your library and read Jeffrey B. Russell's "Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians"
Post-modernism and moral relativism are at the root of this? That seems rather unlikely given that bizarre belief systems are hardly a recent phenomenon. People have believed in all sorts of utter nonsense for ages: folk-tales, urban legends, conspiracy theories, myths, etc.
This is just a run of the mill conspiracy theory being promoted for profit by an unscrupulous television network. In contemporary America, people like to believe conspiracy theories about government. If television were around in nineteenth century Europe, they'd be broadcasting conspiracy theories about Jews. Nothing modern about it; nothing we need to start blaming on our tired old scapegoats: left-wing academics and the liberal media.
I found a good site that explains in detail why NASA really did land on the moon for real. It is http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/. It also has a page set-up to anwser people's questions about the FOX tv show that was on. It is a very good site, and after reading it you would have to be really stupid to still believe that the Apollo 11 landing was a hoax.
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AIM: dpete455
Yahoo!: dpete455
Jabber: dpete455
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
So here we have a story about debunking silly myths, and you trot out one of your own. Let's look at the facts, shall we?
At 2:15 AM, VNS sent out to all the networks data that showed it was 99.9 percent definite that Gore would lose Florida. VNS founding head and a decision desk analyst for CBS and CNN, Warren Mitofsky, said that "A projection is not made until the chances of making a mistake are at 1 in 200 or less." In other words, their data at the time was showing that the chances of making a mistake in Florida were about 1 in 1000, so it's natural that FOX and the rest would make the call at that point.
Mitofsky even goes on to say, in the February 2001 Brill's Content, "This business about FOX pressuring other people to call, I never made a projection in my life because of some other network. When I heard they put it out there, I was disappointed, because I wanted to do it, but I was in the process of reviewing the counties, one at a time....I wanted to make sure there were no bad numbers. We were about to make the projection.
There ya go, now you have one less conspiracy theory to carp about.
Cheers,
Yeah, I know, I just downloaded it on Napster and gave the lyrics a more careful listen. Oops! I'm embarrassed by that gaff. I also forgot to switch my post from html and lost the proper formatting. Aside from the irony of my displaying ignorance in the middle of a rant against ignorance, I think I made some worthwhile points. Thanks for the reply and the interesting link.
It should be noted that the Trailer Trash demographic also votes, complains to their Congresscritters, and generally questions the U.S.'s spending money on such "extravagances" as Apollo and the space program. NASA has to justify its existence every fiscal year in order to maintain even a skeleton-crew capability for space R&D. They have a terrible time recruiting young talent to work on the GS salary scale, and perhaps the only scientific organization whose credibility has suffered more in the eyes of the public of late is Los Alamos National Laboratory. With a proposed 1.6 trillion dollar tax reduction in the works, I think it is safe to say that scientific agencies in the U.S., including NASA, are in serious jeopardy when next year's budget comes out. Don't just take my word for it--read the Feb. 16 edition of the Wall Street Journal, where it was announced that the Bush Administration plans to chop the science investment to make room for a $1.6 trillion tax cut and rapid deployment of an NMD system.
Given the impending budgetary crisis, it is hard to imagine a worse time for NASA's integrity to be questioned--doubly so if Fox's re-airing of the show this summer opens with a voice-over: "We have learned from hundreds of viewers of our first showing of this documentary that NASA, when confronted with these allegations of fraud and impropriety, refused to comment. Perhaps what we have to say hits too close to home.... We will let you, the viewer, decide."
Heh - yeah - google is great.
I skimmed the article. I bookmarkd it for future reading on a slow day!
Today is just not a good day to post for me.
No, the flag is held to the pole and also suspended from ANOTHER pole running along the top margin of the flag. No springs.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
MrGrendel said: But this does not mean that an explanation of gravity (or quantum mechanics) in terms of the social relationships and emotions of humans is just as valid as a description based on careful experiment, observation, and mathematical analysis.
No, of course not. I don't think that I or anyone was implying that. It is just that the ways that we think and the ways that we see the world are influenced to such a great extent by culture that it is virtually impossible to create a theory that is not influenced by culture. The very things that we find worthy of study and the things that we deem unworthy of study is an example. Experimentation, mathematics and certainly observation are all influenced (some would say dictated) by what our society and therfore influence (dictate?) what we find.
I think that your use of the word validity is a good one and that perhaps we should be more concerned with validity than truth.
Postmodernism does not (at least in my understanding [which is of course influenced by my culture]) say that since there is no TRUTH, then anything goes. It just tells us that the ways we see the world aren't nessessarilly the only way. Now what other ways of seeing the world would look like is virtually impossible as we are so trapped in hegemony (as my peers are fond of saying, "There is no outside to hegemony!") that any attempt to construct an alternative to our society would in all likelyhood be reactionary and only end up in some way being a product of the dominant social system and thus inneffectual.
The beauty of postmodernity is that it includes modernity. We do not have to throw out the baby with the bathwater just because there is no TRUTH (although there are certainly those who want to do that). I am perfectly happy with lots of little truths.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
"The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one." Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), German dictator. Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. 10 (1925)
People will believe what they choose to believe, regardless of what is rational, or demonstrated by the facts.
Of course we went to the moon. To believe otherwise is nonsense.
I know that the following will be considered a troll by some moderators, but I urge you to consider that I mean this, and am not simply searching for a vitriolic response.
As a Christian, I am frequently amazed that people reject the teachings and historical evidence supporting the claims of the historic Christian faith. People simply choose to believe what they decide they want to believe.
Jesus did die so that you could have relationship with God the father. If you would like to know more about this, please contact me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com.
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
> There is such a thing as irrefutable fact, and > we would do well to leave our ivory towers and > preach to the public of its existance, > before they are lost to a medieval belief > system. Please give me an example of an irrefutable fact. (Hint: Read some Kierkegaard first, or at least Plato.)
Fox News is arguably a news channel. This means that in order for people to watch it as a news channel (and not entertainment) it needs to maintain some level of credibility with the public. Every time it airs a story that is erronious or foolish, people have less respect for thier journalistic integrity and will not watch it as news.
Unfortunately, this is not true. If it were, tabloids like "Weekly World News" and "Sun" would have died a long time ago.
People watch television to be entertained. Conspiracy theory is like candy to the masses.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Now, about Vietnam there can be no doubts whatsoever, but there is some truth to what you're saying about the Cuban Crisis...
- Also Sprach Doktor Merkwurdigliebe
"Worth a thought?"
No.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Tang was actually produced for quite a while before the US space program started.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Honestly, get your facts right...
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
It turns out there are some very smart people who believe that the earth is flat because it can mathamatically proved,
Yeah, and I had a calculus prof who wrote very believable-looking proofs that black is white and that two plus two actually equals five. He then went on to show how such mathematically lazy proofs are more common than you think. It may not be that no one has been able to find flaws in the proof, but rather, the people capable of finding them simply couldn't be bothered to play into the games of such kooks.
Anyone who would believe such "mathematical proofs" hardly deserves to be called very smart.
ChodaBoy
ChodaBoy
- The preceding statement is the product of a deranged mind and the sole property of the voices in my head.
So when you write that "the ignorance will just go away on its own", my thoughts are:
1. You're very optimistic, or else you're content with a much longer time scale than I am.
2. The fact that you've given up means the rest of us have to work harder.
First of all, I thank you for your intelligent response- it means a lot to me. You do understand what I'm getting at here, because you recognize the role of the long time scale needed for a misconception to die. I won't argue that, if you apply a little effort, you can educate people about misconceptions. Educating people, however, and making a common misconception go away are two very different things. Yes, it's important to me that my mom knows to not FWD: people urban myth emails.
But my original posting was an appeal to the enlightened soul's urge to evangelize the truth to the unwashed masses, due to the utter gnawing pain that comes from knowing that people are just blindly swallowing things like bad astronomy and other bad conspiracy theories. You know what I'm talking about. It's that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when the talking heads of the local news call Napster a "website", or when your friends come back from the movie "Hackers" and ask you if you can do any of the stuff they saw on the screen. We, as Slashdotters, are so proud that it's usually as important to us that people KNOW we went to the moon, as it is that we actually WENT to the moon.
History shows us that, while it may not happen within a single lifetime, misconceptions like the moon-landing theory simply go away. Perhaps a good prediction would be that our descendents will be able to go to the moon themselves. Much of the doubt about the moon landings centers around disbelief that we could actually GO to the moon. That doubt would not exist in an age where going to the moon is a plane ticket away.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
The phrase is actually nipped it in the bud and the link I provided points to a collection of similar common errors.
OpenSourcerers
Man, now I am shattered. Why did you have to spoil it for me? A lifetime of wandering around aimlessly ruined completely by you! All this time I thought it was those pan dimensional beings known as mice running thier quaint little experiment on us mostly harmless hairless apes.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
The show says that they sent the astronauts up into orbit in a real rocket and just showed some previously recorded footage while they were orbitting the Earth (no doubt flying by Soviet scientific satellites (!)).
This moon thing was for FOX's entertainment channel, with no pretense that it had anything to do with FOX News Channel. Let's see, do you also hold CNN responsible for the same "wacky science" genre stories that TBS shows on "Ripley's Believe It or Not?" Of course not, because even though they're owned by the same company, they're different entities.
Also, I'm not really sure why you would hold CNN up as some highly respectable news organization. Their idea of a hardball interview is sitting across the table from freakin' Larry King. Maybe you didn't hear about all their ethical problems over their Tailwind story?
And you can go on down the line. NBC spiking stories because Tom Brokaw refuses to read them on the air. Using WWII's aniversary more to shill Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation book than for any historical content. ABC spiking already-completed stories about their owner, Disney. CBS using their morning news show to completely hammer that chick from the original Survivor who brough a lawsuit against CBS/Survivor. (Hey, I think she's a yutz, too, but their conduct was completely reprehensible and unethical.) And there's more where that came from...
Cheers,
I grant you a single guess, for both questions.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
um, the simpsons is the reason why Fox doesn't completely suck. That's one of the best tv shows ever.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Considering the amount of misinformation about the Soviet moonn landings in reposnse to your post, here's an overview of the Soview moon program from NASA's own web site:
s sr.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunaru
Notable points include the Soviets crashing Luna-2 into the moon as early as 1959, their unmanned retrival of lunar rocks from missions such as Luna 16 in 1970, and their series of unmanned lunar rovers ("Lunokhods") starting with the Luna 17 mission in 1970.
Why is this important to the discussion? Because postmodernist philosophy isn't just some fringe movement. Name any social science, and you can find postmodernists practicing and influencing it. We now have postmodern psychology, postmodern sociology, and probably postmodern economics. It isn't just the 'stupid public' that has abandoned belief in objective fact, well educated academics are doing it, also. BTW -- most people are not stupid. Very few people actually believe in the kind of nonsence espoused on the show. You should also not equate lack of education (ignorance) with stupidity. Doing so reveals your own social maladjustment.
And just because credentials seem to be so important to your evaluation of any argument, let me give you mine (not that anyone should think this is at all relevant). I currently hold a BA in Philosophy and a BS in Physics. I graduated 4 years ago. I took three philosophy classes from a postmodernist and was able to reproduce the language well enough to get an 'A' in each, although I still don't know what the hell he was really talking about.
There was a spring of some sort in the top of the flag so it wouldn't hang limp in the vacuum. Springs often bounce.
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Username taken, please choose another one.
Perhaps "rant" was the wrong word. I do know how to talk to people, and it wasn't HOW I was saying it, but rather WHAT i was saying. If I had tried getting her into a conversation about it, she would have probably told me flat-out that she didn't care. As Slashdotters, we have a hard time imaginging that non-Slashdotters don't get all riled up about lies spreading.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
People watch television to be entertained. Conspiracy theory is like candy to the masses.
More like soma to the masses.
Does my bum look big in this?
The second reason is the US government had good reasons to want to fake a moon landing, and we've been lied to often enough before. The basic premise of the Hoax Believers, is that the US was 'losing' the 'space race' and needed a victory over the Soviets to bolster capitalism and the American Way.
Agreed. Case in point: The first iteration of the "Star Wars" project... and (arguably) the current iteration as well.
Of course, to me that doesn't give THIS conspiracy theory much credence.... but I'm a skeptic by nature.
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
It'll work even better if it's just after the SSI checks have been dispatched! Try it! It's Science you can do!
And tell the Hateman I told him to fuck himself. He'll love that (but hate me for saying that he'll love it)
so how about this one:
|x| = sqrt(x^2) = (x^2)^0.5 = x^(2*0.5) = x^1 = x
From where comes the l4m3n355???
-- Cure for Cancer instead of SETI! (only w32 yet - mail and beg)
Honestly, get your facts straight...
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
I can't believe this is even up for debate. Fox really showed something claiming it was a hoax? Has the world gone nuts?
This is several levels lower than any of those "ufo sightings" programs, though not as bad I suppose as claiming the Holocaust didn't happen...
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I seem to recall Shakespeare referring to the moon a number of times. Maybe it's another conspiracy, but didn't he die some time before 1950?
Actually, there were 2 major mobile launcher systems.
The one you're thinking of is ICBMs on trains. They tested part of it at Vandenberg AFB, CA. I was stationed there in the AF, and there's still an area with a mess of railroad tracks where the tests were conducted.
The other system was the GLCM (ground launched cruise missile). These were actually operational for 2 years in the 80s at RAF Molesworth, UK. That was my last duty station. There are still huge drive-thru bunkers the launchers were stored in. They were eliminated them with the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1988.
You know what I'm talking about. It's that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when the talking heads of the local news call Napster a "website"... We, as Slashdotters, are so proud that it's usually as important to us that people KNOW we went to the moon, as it is that we actually WENT to the moon.
Your Napster and Hackers examples are small-scale misconceptions, which are easily explained to people. And to the extent that they don't care about or 'need' to know about P2P versus servers for now, then I agree one can be obnoxious in constantly correcting non-techie people like that.
But to me the moon thing is very different. It's not just someone misunderstanding the science of how we got to the moon. It's that people are willing (and even excited) to accept a gigantic conspiracy theory. A conspiracy so large that our government (which couldn't even keep simple secrets, like the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate coverup) has kept the lid on it for 32 years, somehow keeping silent the 100,000+ people in the space program, and the Russians, the press, and the rest of the scientific world.
If you let someone believe Apollo was faked, you are letting them believe this is a world where huge, unbelievable conspiracies are plausible. Then they can't deal rationally with the rest of the world, because a) they've already accepted this faulty style of reasoning, and b) they can probably connect everything else (Saddam Hussein, mad cow disease) to the gigantic government conspiracy network. I don't want us to inch closer toward that kind of irrational world.
History shows us that, while it may not happen within a single lifetime, misconceptions like the moon-landing theory simply go away.
I've only got this one lifetime, my kids will only have one lifetime. If the pool of irrational people grows, I may have to pay for it, in the form of different public policy. My kids should not have to sit through school board-mandated "alternative theories" of the moon landings. Just real science in science class, thank you.
And yes, if we were flying people to the moon every week, belief in the conspiracy would drop. But the reality is that, in terms of tech/politics/money/willpower, we're probably 30 years or more from doing that. I don't need 30 years of moon doubters poisoning the mental environment in the meantime.
The really interesting question not whether or not we went to the moon but what did we find that has caused us not to go back ? ;)
THAT is a fun question !
http://www.iomojo.com/camdemo/
one of these on the moon would be k3wl
bushorchimp
Like "Pigeonhole Principle"?
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Bring up an old controversy and the uneducated arrive in the masses, ready to absorb your advertisements.
Yep - we have the 800-odd pounds of lunar rocks which couldn't have been produced on Earth (no water/oxygen) which are being studied. We also have the reflectors put on the moon which lets us measure by laser its distance from us to within a few inches (IIRC).
Nevermind that the U.S. spent billions on the project and lost the original Apollo 13 crew in that launch test mishap, or the fact that they nearly lost the replacements forever. In any case, we know that we have had the ability to go into orbit - why would it be such a big stretch to believe that we've gone to the moon?
Perhaps these people don't believe that we go into orbit either. Or maybe we made a clone of Neil Armstrong before he launched himself into tiny chunks to show off the "landing". Gimme a break. There's no conspiracy here.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
You couldn't have chosen a worse example for your point than 1+1=2. After all, arithmetic is an artificial system based on symbols (such as numbers), with extremely specific semantic definitions. It's true by definition, much the same way that G\"{o}delian [in]completeness theory held even before G\"{o}del. Accept the defintions, and the theorems follow. Reject the definitions, and your views on their veracity are no more meaningful since you have now essentialy decided to read them as if they were in a different language, namely incorrectly.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I saw an excellent parody of "It's a Wonderful Life" on "Fry and Laurie" on BBC America. They replaced the Jimmy Stewart character with Rupert Murdoch (played by Hugh Laurie). Stephen Fry was the angel.
The angel takes Rupert all around London to show him what life would be like without him. All the houses have antennae installed (instead of dishes for SkyTV). "Hey, there are no tits on page 6!" Rupert said, as he opened a newspaper. Finally, there were people of all ethnicities and races getting along with one another in a pub.
The angel takes Rupert back to the bridge he was about to jump off and re-caps what the world would be like without Rupert Murdoch. The angel pauses...and throws Rupert off the bridge himself!
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
From their web page:
"A cash reward of $100,000 has been offered to anyone who can send us, by e-mail, conclusive physical evidence of the existence of the moon. This reward remains unclaimed. "
Hmm, if ANYONE can send conclusive PHYSICAL evidence of ANYTHING over email, by golly I'll give them $100,000 myself (Canadian though, so that's bout 2$ USD).
Seriously, folks--don't you think that if there was any proof that we didn't land on the moon that the Soviets would have brought it up a long time ago?
The Apollo missions are among the greatest triumphs that mankind has ever achieved.
Please don't let the conspiracy wackos persuade you otherwise.
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check out http://colotto.com
Didn't they fake the manned Mars landing a few years back?
Yes, they actually landed on Jupiter... shhhhhh, the public must never know.
OK, the cameras weren't standard Hasselblad issue, NASA made some mods. Others have addressed the crosshair thing. It was also probably necessary to change some of the lubricants and mechanical stuff for proper operation in a vacuum.
BTW you can see the cameras in many of the moon images. They were not custom-designed from the ground up, they look just like the ones used to shoot Vogue.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Some of the photos show the Sun in front of the camera (behind the astronaut or LEM or other focal object) meaning that if it is the only source of light, the photos would show dark silhoettes. Instead, they show bright objects inside of shadows like there was a light source illuminating them. Therefore, there MUST be a different light source. The Earth's reflection isn't visible in the photos because it is behind the camera reflecting light onto the objects. The reflection of the Moon's surface is also a source of light.
But you're right about the multiple shadows if there were more than one light source. I think the different shadow angles is the slope of land like you said.
There must be multiple sources of light in the photos where the Sun is in the background or when a visible object is deep inside a shadow, but those sources don't have to be strong enough to cast shadows (or maybe the angle of light is straight up so that shadows won't exist from them).
I don't know the exact details of lighting for photos or reflective power of Earth or anything, but I do know that we went to the Moon and that the show wasn't a very well researched case for a conspiracy.
IANAL, but I play one on
You're correct that we can't see the crap we left on the moon--but we also left reflectors, which have been used by astronomers since. I'd love to know how they got there if we didn't. =)
We have gone from being a people for whom even a rock band (The Byrds, Eight Miles High) could get airplay making poetry and music inspired by the achievements and human ingenuity of the American space program to a being a bunch of morons entertained by degenerate ignorance from Fox. By no means do I think of myself as being some kind of genious. As a matter of fact I consider myself to be a fairly average guy. But damn if I don't have to continually dumb my conversation down, lest I say something too complicated, controversial, or too non-superficial! It's as if the American culture has collectively put complacency and ignorance on a pedestal. If you find someone who honestly believes that a man never set foot on the moon, I guarantee that you have found someone who is proud of their ignorance. Sadly, the Fox special is not a cause of ignorance, but rather a reflection and justification of it. Don't take this to mean that I think people were any more or less ignorant thirty years ago than they are now. But I think that a scarcity mentality and jealousy towards the intelligent and learned members of society has grown over the years as some kind of backlash. Out of laziness, contempt, peer pressure, or whatever other reason, people now seem to believe that it is better to tear down people of intellectual achievement than it is to learn or achieve themselves or simply respect someone for their hard work and ability. That is why you have terms in our language like "Computer Geek", and fat people who smoke and then attack the credentials of the medical establishment, it's doctors, and scientific studies rather than listen, learn, and quit smoking and eating themselves into an early grave. Finally, that is why there are people who would watch this crap from Fox and buy into it. The only way to even start reversing this trend is to send our children to schools where they are educated and not warehoused. That and get involved in our childrens education as parents and mentors. How to make that happen on more than an individual level seems far more complicated than putting a man on the moon. I can only hope that our society wakes up before it's too late and gets it's priorities straight. "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." --Bertrand Russel END RANT
Fox executives probably have been following the "creation-science" controversies popping up all over the US, and figured that if millions of Americans are stupid enough to fall for "creation-science" fairy-tales, then they are probably stupid enough to fall for a really lame "moon-landing-hoax" pseudo-documentary.
Just remember that old RoboCop line, "good business is where you find it".
And in the US, "good business" isn't about educating the gullible and stupid (that's a lost cause), it's about taking their money.
This URL seems to address all of the stupidities of the 'Apollo Hoax' nutters. Take a look.
I find it worrying that 4% of the population of the "Last Superpower" don't just believe in UFOs, they beleive they've been abducted by one.
People used to think the world was flat. As it turned out, the best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them that if you kept sailing, you wouldn't fall off.
You are right that showing people something is a definite proof to them but it is not as easy as that. We are dealing with historical events here.
I grew up in the UK and got taught the standard UK History syllabus. However, when I was older I visited schools in other countries, including Russia and the Middle East. It suprised me to find that there were differences in what they were taught in history to what we were taught in the UK. My inital reaction was, "Of course, they're commies, what do you expect?" However, I have since come to look at some of our own history as somewhat dubious.
During the Gulf War I was a member of the R.A.F. In the officers mess we used to get fax bullitins every day about the events in the Gulf. The faxes would state, what actually happenned in the Gulf and what the press were told. The stories weren't always the same. I used to watch the evening new knowing that what was being said was a half truth. Guess which version goes down in the history books?
I am not saying that the moon landings were a hoax. I am just saying that we shouldn't take everything we read or get taught, for granted. It would have been easy for NASA to exaggerate and distort the happennings.
It is the people who win the war...that write the history!
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
The moral relativism and the relativism in all areas that it promotes, where anything will go, is at the root of these various groups alternative synthesises of the Universe, be it UFO freaks or people claiming that the moon landings never occurred.
'Facts' are no longer believed in, and people think they can come up with all sorts of idiotic ideas. In this case we have the usual conspiracy theorising and reliance on big bad men with lots of power and a desire to hoodwink the public.
Why have we become like this? Carl Jung postulated that there is a 'Collective Unconscious' which is common to all of us, and when we dream, individually and as a society, we are similar.
Hence modern UFO sightings, he said, where the ancient 'Mandala' is interpreted by our SF crazy modern public as a UFO. In earlier times it may have been interpreted as an angel, or as the Virgin Mary.
I think that postmodernism is undermining our belief in objective truth and fact, and is promoting these kind of crazy ideas. We shall have to be wary, and guard against it. There is such a thing as irrefutable fact, and we would do well to leave our ivory towers and preach to the public of its existance, before they are lost to a medieval belief system.
--
Clarity does not require the absence of impurities,
/* And you'll never guess what the dog had */
/* in its mouth... */
--Larry Wall in stab.c from perl
Now now, there no need to be so gentle ;-)) Kidding aside, isn't this an excellent argument against the hoaxers? One of 'm claimed that NASA actually killed the Apollo 1 crew to shut them up, and that they arranged the deaths of others who where about to go public. Apart from being highly slanderous, wouldn't the person claiming this to be true be placed on top of the hit-list if it where true? I guess where gonna find out ;-)
- Also Sprach Doktor Merkwurdigliebe
Hey! Don't dis soma!
(see sig)
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
"Has sensational journalism gone too far? Find out at eleven!"
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
"I'm slowly learning to just live [with] stuff like this. ... [T]he best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them... The ignorance will just go away on its own"
I disagree. The conspiratorial mind can refute any set of facts and explanatory theories, because the conspiratorial mind does not use tools of critical thinking (e.g., Occam's Razor). Rather the reverse; it adds conspiracy on top of conspiracy to patch together a spaghetti-code interpretation of the world.
Conspiracy theorists did this after Greek geometers offered proofs that the world is round. And I expect they did it for years after Columbus' trips, too. There is no natural law guaranteeing people will eventually choose to be rational. The challenge needs to be met head on with every generation, because there are psychological benefits to believing what you already know, or what seems natural (flat earth), or what seems exciting ("Columbus faked his trips!").
You cannot beat conspiracy theorists only by presenting the facts! You need to teach people critical thinking skills, logic, and enough background so that they can spot flaws for themselves.
For example, whenever someone cc's me on an urban legend email, I mail them back (after some research) and try to do a bit of education on why the story is implausible, and point them to a resource like snopes.com. People have told me I've helped them become better at spotting fake stories.
So when you write that "the ignorance will just go away on its own", my thoughts are:
1. You're very optimistic, or else you're content with a much longer time scale than I am.
2. The fact that you've given up means the rest of us have to work harder.
I agree with you it can be frustrating to deal with these situations. But helping people to think more clearly not only gives them freedom from illogic and the agendas of others, but to the extent that it removes bogus memes from dominating the culture, it gives me more freedom, too. I think it's one of the most important jobs we can do as modern people.
What did humanity get out of it... A few moon rocks and the non-stick frying pan. It was just an excuse for a phallocentric president like Kennedy to get off on his Mooon 'shot'. The Apollo program was just a secret subsidy to US aeronautics industry. It's no accident that it was built up during the reigns of the most corrupt Presidents that the US ever had, Nixon and LBJ. A hell of lot of goldbricking went on. And it served as distraction from the Vietnam War.
Nobody (except a scarce few) believes the world is flat anymore
This seems like a good time to bring up the flat earth society. It turns out there are some very smart people who believe that the earth is flat because it can mathamatically proved, and I don't think that anyone had been able to find flaws in the mathamatical proof. Check it out, I don't think that it is a joke but definitly interesting.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
It was terrible, they made a huge effort to put holes in the pictures shot on the moon and saying there were two light sources (therefore one had to be artificial). All the pictures they showed, though, could be easily explained by the fact that on the moon the Earth is a decent source of light if the Sun is shining on it (which it was in the pictures). They said that NASA didn't send ANY artificial light sources up there; I don't know for a fact, but I'm pretty sure they would have had to send SOME up there. They also played on the fact that some of the pictures had similar backgrounds, but totally different foregrounds. This was just ignorant in my opinion because when they superimposed pictures with different foregrounds (ie the LEM at it's landing site, and then one without it) the back ground was still the "same" mountain structure, but shifted or a resized. Can't that be explained be being a different distance away? Yes.
I also never really saw any interviews with ex-NASA employees or anyone with any real connection to the space program (now or at the time), but just with photographers and conspiracy theorists (not many scientists). I didn't see the entire program, though, so I could be wrong. I just couldn't stand to watch it because it was so awful.
IANAL, but I play one on
Personally I'm going back to Antarica to go down that there hole out of which all the UFOs are flying!!!!!
See my journal, I write things there
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Down to what?
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
Fox airing such a piece of drive, or
Real scientists bothering to refute it. They make it more credible that way.
Like how about we teach creation theory above evolution in schools. Hey if the moon isn't 4billion years old the bible is correct right! my flamebate and proud
Hear Ye! Well put.
(Yes, this is just a 'me too' post. Oh well!)
**>>BELCH
Right. Nearside has been facing the Earth for at least a billion years. (There were figures on this in Rare Earth but I don't have them handy.) From now on, as the moon spirals outward and the month gets longer, the tides will tend to slow its rotation down too so nearside continues to face the Earth.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Argument #2: if the moon landings had been faked, the Soviets would have known, just like they knew most of the USA's major secrets at the time (and vice versa of course). You think they would have kept quiet about it? Of course not! The best they did was to land a rover on the moon (which is still nothing to sneeze at) - if the human landing had been a fake they would have loved to let the world know about it.
I caught a few minutes of this program when it was on and my first thought was "Oh look, a sequel to "Alien Autopsy: Truth or Hoax?". Because that's basically all it was. You can get an "expert" on just about anything to go on camera all bearded and expert-looking and say whatever you want. Too bad the general public doesn't quite get that concept yet... :^(
Freedom: "I won't!"
What got me was some of the advertisers. Gateway? Sprint PCS? Would any of these companies even exist without the space program? What hypocrisy!
Seriously, does anyone have a list of advertisers during the show? I only saw the last 20 minutes or so, but I remember Gateway, Sprint, and Dodge. Perhaps we should write the advertisers and let them know their support for this dreck sucks. Fox dislikes criticism like masochists dislike whipping. They'll probably send a thank you note to NASA and badastronomy.com for the free publicity...
I'd rather trust a man who doesn't shout what he's found. -- Genesis
Nah, the whole Elton John thing was just a brain-fart that I realized just as I hit the submit button. Yeah, you're right that I was probably thinking of Rocket man. It's cool of you to not kick a man when he's down.
His comment was actually "Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky". Interesting story, actually.
props to all dead homiez
Why is moonlight so implausible? The surface of the moon reflects light the same as any other lightly colored object.
Light reflects off of snow and ice as well as sand on the beach or the desert. Why should the Moon be any different? Is this light somehow disqualified from behaving as a mild source of illumination simply because it doesn't 'make sense' to you?
**>>BELCH
I missed the show too and even though I'm 99.999% (attribute the .001% to paranoia) sure we landed on the moon I'm curious about the show. Has anyone posted it on a website? If so I'd like to know the link, thanks.
-picoears
You'd be suprised (ok, maybe not) at how many people (including math-type people... no.. make that ESPECIALLY math-type people) who don't understand what it's really a proof of (eg. why you can't divide by zero).
; 2b=b;2=1
ugh.
:)
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a=b;a^2=ab;a^2-b^2=ab-b^2;(a-b)(a+b)=b(a-b);a+b=b
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/
/., though I wish it did.
Note that adding "target = _blank" to your HTML tag will not work on
It has a little bit to do with what you say, but this is also the same kind of thing as religions. People believe whatever it makes them the happiest to believe, and it's as simple as that. All those people who don't believe we went to the moon are also general conspiracy theorists. They like pretending that there is some elaborate plot cause it makes them feel special to think that they know something no one else does. That's all there is to it.
I'll say it again. People will believe whatever it makes them the happiest to believe in spite of everything. Logic, reason, fact, evidence... bah! I could make some evil parallels to some religious groups, but I won't...
Justin Dubs
I'm waiting for Murdoch to green light the Fox special "The Great Holocaust Hoax" and "The Great Spherical Earth Hoax."
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
If Fox thinks it's lost a some viewing audience perminently because of irresponsible programming, perhaps they'll put up a retraction.
(Certainly I wouldn't want to be (if there is such a thing) the science reporter on the Fox News Network. I'm sure they'll get great cooperation from NASA on the future flights.) Even better, let's find out who the advertisers were for this show and REALLY punish THEM. Democracy in action...
It's pretty bad when the most believible show on your network is the Simpsons.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
I really don't know why conspiracy theories like this appeal to people. They bore the devil out of me. Even fiction based on conspiracy theory puts me to sleep.
So what is the attraction? Does it make believers feel special to be one of the few "in the know?" Is it really a kind of self-flattery? To think that they are amongst the handful of people that haven't been hoodwinked by the powers that be?
Or does it just make life seem more interesting when you believe that there is all this cloak-and-dagger stuff going on behind your back?
So what do you expect from them? (They hired a Bush family member who announced the amazing discovery)
Integrity?
Honesty?
Dream on. Fox is the US broadcast media outlet of Rupert Murdoch who never has had any compunction about trying to deliver elections for political allies in the UK or Australia. He'd sell alien autopsies to the American public in all seriousness, and a live alien to the public as Prime Minister or President if it brought him 10 extra pounds/dollars.
Get ready for a Fox News Special that proves George W. is the 2nd cousin of the Saxe-Coburg rulers of Great Britain thus the rightful heir of the America Colonies.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
Are you the real Heidi Wall?
Cause if you are, you're a total babe.
Wanna get a cup of coffee some time?
--Shoeboy
We may laugh this off, but this kind of nonsense has a corrosive effect. Even if I tell you that I'm going to tell you a lie, a false statement I make to you has been shown to influence your thinking and judgement later. Multiply that effect by several hundred million and who knows what happens? How much funding is NASA going to lose because of the false impressions this kind of show creates? The only thing I can see doing about this sort of thing is to express your outrage. If you subscribe to cable, unsubscribe and let them know why. When it comes to the dangers of media, this is the kind of stuff politicians should worry about.
This page shows that Jupiter's moon Amalthea is tidally locked.
This page discusses the case of Mercury, which as I said isn't yet tidally locked but does have a day tidally related to its year. "Although Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun, its rotational period is tidally coupled to its orbital period. Mercury rotates one and a half times during each orbit."
This page states that all four of Jupiter's Galilean moons are tidally locked.
That took about 5 minutes. Altavista found a total of 499 pages containing the phrase "tidally locked."
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Remember this next time you see them report "news", particularly when they're bashing Bill Clinton.
why all the liberal conspiracy stuff? i don't get it.
Rock on NASA, Rock on!
Fox News is arguably a news channel. This means that in order for people to watch it as a news channel (and not entertainment) it needs to maintain some level of credibility with the public. Every time it airs a story that is erronious or foolish, people have less respect for thier journalistic integrity and will not watch it as news. You, for example, may think less of it. As their demographic changes from a news wanting audience to an entertainment wanting audience they'll move farther and farther into the trash that you decry. That's what their audience will demand and that's what they'll have to provide.
Now, channels like CNN want to remain a news based channel and they mostly act accordingly. You respect them for their news and even though they are commerically driven they're fairly respectable.
It's all just a question of news versus entertainment. It seems that Fox News is heading more down the "A Current Affair" entertainment route. Don't decry it for that.
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RumorsDaily
All of your slashdot sid's were planted here by the government in the event the discussion came up they'd have low believeable slashdot uid's backing them up, cuz you know if you have a low uid you get respect right?
If successful, expect the follow up 5th installment of the series, "The Holocaust: Fact or Fiction?" with expert commentary by David Duke and John Ashcroft. And please, don't embarass yourself by pointing to one of the oft-referenced Holocaust-denial websites.
"!=" does not mean "did not come from"
you are retufing a statement no one made.
I'm slowly learning to just live stuff like this. The badastronomy.org link has beeen on Slashdot before, so I have checked it out. When I saw a commercial for the Fox special, I went on a 2-minute explanation to my girlfriend about how most of the evidence that we DIDN'T go to the moon is, in fact, better applied to the argument that we DID. Her eyes literally glazed over. I was in protracted-rant mode; clearly hellbent on showing the world how ignorant it really is, incited by things I read on Slashdot.
:)
I'm sick of making peoples' eyes glaze over. This stuff is definitely News for Nerds. It's definitely Stuff that Matters. But honestly, the world is very fickle about what it chooses to believe. There will always be people who say the landings were faked, as long as it's one person's word against another's.
People used to think the world was flat. As it turned out, the best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them that if you kept sailing, you wouldn't fall off. Nobody (except a scarce few) believes the world is flat anymore. The downside to this process is that nobody really gets the satisfaction of saying "I convinced the world they were wrong." The upside is, the ignorance is eventually conquered.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't let this, nor the misuse of the word "hacker," or anything else make you feel like we need a grass-roots movement to end the stupidity. The ignorance will just go away on its own, to be replaced by more sophisticated ignorance
Intercarve Networks, LLC
Why not just look at the original landing site with a pair of binocs? Oh, look, the American flag on the moon. Guess I was wrong about that whole 'fqake' thing... Unless the MOON is a fake! That's it! It's made of paper mache, anchored in New Jersey. That's why nobody wants to go there!
Just to be interesting, I'd like anyone who watched the show to include that when they say the show was trash...I'll admit a couple of the "experts" they had just seemed a bit crazy.
I watched the show to laugh at it. I wanted to see if it would just be plain silly. While watching it however, some of the people raised some good questions and points. I am not very familiar with space, as I've never been that interested in it. So I was wondering if some Slashdot people could refute some of the evidence presented.
The nasa guy on the show commonly said that their arguements did not make sense, but he never actually said why. He never gave any explanation for their arguements, just a general, that guys crazy.
The ones I found the most interesting were:
1. The lack of any dust on the landing feet of the lunar lander. (It would seem to me a landing like that would kick up quite a bit of dust, some of which would setttle on the landing feet)
2. The cameras the astronauts had crosshairs permanantly in the frames. In some moon photos the crosshairs are BEHIND objects on the moon.
3. The lack of a blast crater. (This one was partial explained, an expert said that the lander didn't need much actual blast force to land... however i would have thought in the lower gravity of space, it would have made an indentation because of how the entire surface seemed to be just a dust or sand.)
4. There is no engine noise on the tape during the landing. Wouldn't there be a lot of engine noise?
So, can anyone explain to me why these things happened? Or explain any of the other evidence in the show?
Overall I found the show interesting and entertianing, and it left me puzzled due to my lack of knowledge on the subject.
That's good, since judging by your message, you don't have a very good grasp of the issues you're discussing.
You're completely ignoring the idea that we can actually evaluate different assumptions or beliefs based on evidence, logic, and tests, which leaves you lumping together belief in gods with our understanding of mathematics.
You're also seriously confusing facts, interpretation of evidence, hypotheses, theories, and beliefs. Unless you're going to take things to the point of saying "this could all be a dream", all sorts of essentially "irrefutable" facts do exist. When it comes to logical, mathematical and scientific knowledge, we also have the ability in many cases to categorically determine whether a hypothesis is or isn't valid. In other areas, we aren't able to be so definitive, but we can be sure of the accuracy of a successful theory to a degree equal to our ability to test it.
An example might be Newton vs. Einstein: Einstein's special relativity replaced Newton's theories of motion, and general relativity replaced Newton's theory of gravitation, but in both cases, even though Einstein's theories have enormous conceptual consequences, the quantitative effect was relatively small and only affects extreme situations. While Newton's theories held force, they could be demonstrated to hold true under any circumstance which could be devised to test them. Once testing became more sophisticated, i.e. the evidence available to us changed, it became clear that the theory, while accurate to a point, didn't account for all cases, and more refined theories had to be developed.
The history of science has been characterized by this process: as we gather more evidence about the world around us, so we are able to develop better theories about how that world works. Galileo came to his understanding about the solar system based on his use of a telescope, a tool not previously available. In the early history of science, there were many cases in which large assumptions were made due to the limitations on the evidence available at the time. Theories about the Earth or the Sun being at the center of the universe were such theories: they were based not so much on evidence as on belief. As such, it's not completely accurate to characterize these beliefs as "science".
The point of all this is that when it comes to "hard" scientific knowledge, it is possible to assess the facts and theories we rely on as to the degree of "truth" they contain. Rather than talk in black and white terms, it is better to talk about degrees of certainty. On many subjects, we come close enough to 100% certainty to be able to talk about "irrefutable" facts. On other subjects, such as quantum physics, we're acutely aware of the shortcomings in existing theories, and are actively looking for ways to improve or replace those theories.
This process has been in progress for a few thousand years now - the process of gathering evidence, interpreting it, and developing theories to account for it. On many fronts, we're asymptotically approaching an "irrefutable" position, and the only reason postmodernists don't recognize that is because they haven't spent the time to understand it. It's certainly true that if one believes a theory is false, and refuses to consider the evidence that it is true, it will remain false, for you, even as you fall to your death over a cliff in an arc described by Newton's laws.
Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that even the physical laws of our universe only apply locally. And as I understand it, quantum physics tells us that nothing is impossible, just very very very unlikely.
It's silly to talk about such things when you clearly don't understand them. In what way do "the physical laws of our universe only apply locally"? What relativity says is simply that measurements necessarily apply to a reference frame. It's actually one of the most intuitive theories in existence today, and can be derived from first principles on a piece of paper, using simple thought experiments. It certainly doesn't create any uncertainty about the laws of physics throughout the universe. As for quantum mechanics, your understanding doesn't match that of the scientific community. It's true that any individual particle, while undergoing some change or interaction, has the potential to do all sorts of strange things, with some of the stranger ones constrained only by being statistically very unlikely. However, the mathematics of the quantum wave function, which is one of the most well-tested formulae in existence, shows that every interaction which a particle undergoes with its environment reduces the possibilities available to it, so that impossible things remain impossible, and you don't come home to find your sofa hanging three feet above the floor.
Having said all that, it certainly isn't possible or wise to ignore the social construction issues and linguistic/conceptual constraints which we all, as non-omnipotent beings, face. But that doesn't mean that all beliefs are created equal. I agree with you that skepticism is important, but never more so than when evaluating the application of postmodernist relativism to hard science.
The softer sciences, of course, are another story entirely, but that's largely because of the issue I've already mentioned: solid evidence is harder to come by, which necessitates much assumption. But we know this, and if we're being honest, we can assign a lesser degree of certainty to our theories about anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.
I was truly wondering if someone was going to be up at arms at this "show".....
Karnal
But sometimes I think of Apollo as having done more harm than good for the space program, not in the sense of having been expensive and useless (which it wasn't IMO), but of having desensitized the public while not going far enough.
The point is, Apollo's goal never was to do good science, setting up an outpost and/or preparing to colonize the Moon; a lot remains to be done there. But now, in the eyes of the public, going to the Moon "has already been done", is expensive, etc.
So maybe we should tell them all it was a hoax, perhaps they'll be more supportive of new Moon landings?
With TV specials like this, shows like Survivor and Boston Public, and movies by the likes of Adam Sandler and Tom Green, one has to wonder when the entertainment industry in America will come up with something so rediculously stupid and obnoxious that nobody will watch it. We won't stop seeing entertainment like this until people stop buying it.
Part of it is the way Hollywood opperates. It's a lot more difficult to find and recognize talent with those who write the scripts than it is to find hot bodies to read the scripts. Why bother with clever scripts in the first place when hot bodies sell more consistantly?
Nothing is going to stop this downward slide until people stop settling for this kind of entertainment. There really aren't any signs that this is going to happen anytime soon, but it is already clear that Hollywood is already seeing the potential threats that the internet and other technologies will pose to their monopoly. Where now it is rather difficult for an unknown filmmaker to get their films in theaters and find audiences and rather impossible to get a TV show without extensive connections, the proliferation of broadband and video compression technologies like divx are just waiting to be exploited by intelligent people with something to say and nowhere to say it. That is why they want to keep control of the manufacture of DVDs.
Anyway, what I find more offensive is that US taxpayers money is spent on garbage like astronomy, when it has been widely debunked. The idea that my future depends on the position of uranus when I was born disgusts me, and quite frankly I find it hard to take this idiots seriously.
I worked for Grumman Aerospace 10 years after the Luner Module (LEM) project, with Grumman had done. After seeing and working with the engineers there, I was convinced that they would not be capable of making a functional lunar module.
The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
doh! you mean I wasted 30 minutes putting this into a script thinking it was microsoft's latest cryptographic function designed to replace double ROT13?
/dev/null > /dev/brain
cat
C'mon, you think a poorly produced Fox special is going to rock NASA, the MASTERS of the conspiracy? No Way!
"Moon Rocks" BAH! right... Next thing they'll tell us is that Rita Mcneil is NOT fat and the crazy orange dye in cheetos is totaly safe .
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
__________________
The reality is that NASA faked that footage using a rocket made out of tinfoil and old toilet roll tubes, and intercut it with footage of a few people they dragged in off the street.
hmm...sounds like the ideal Doctor Who production.
I can see it now on Fox: Moon landing was really footage lifted off of Doctor Who from the late 1960's! Why hasn't anybody noticed? The vast majority of Doctor Who of the late 1960's was destroyed in the mid 70's! Hmmmmm...a new conspiracy theory special? It has about as much going for it as the original did! Bleh....
No message. OT: Why can't you post no body and just put (nm) in your subject to save people the trouble of opening it. Lots of folks do this on webboards everywhere, but not on slashdot.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
You know, the moon astronauts left a reflector on the moon. Anyone can get the co-ordinance from NASA and shoot a laser up there to check the distance between the earth and the moon.
Is that proof enough for ya?
But I digress. The real problem here is, well, I can't believe you Yanks would let anyone, let alone a national network like FOX, broadcast such lies regarding the greatest accomplishment of the United States of America.
I mean, one of the few times that not just a nation, but an entire world came together when a human being left the earth and stood on another island in the stars. He looked back and blotted out the Earth with his thumb.
Human kind would never be the same again.
Until about 30 years later when we all forget about it, don't care, and we crassly sell cheap cable TV shows debunking one of the few times in our horrible war torn history when humans stopped slaughtering each other for a few months.
Thanks FOX executives. I hope a meteor falls on your heads.
______
jeff13
See title. But, props for being informed about the history of space flight :-)
Freedom: "I won't!"
How about conclusive physical evidence that your email account works?
This is a bowel disruptor, and you are just full of shit. - Spider Jerusalem
After reading the post, there were a couple of followups where teachers asked this question on some tests:
Test Questions 1
Test Questions 2
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
If anyone spends more than 15 seconds seriously doubting the fact that we have been to the moon they are at least one of the following: - a combination of stupid and gullible - delusional - worst of all, cynical to the point that they are more entertained by the notion that we might have faked it than they are by the idea that we have actually been to the moon. All three types of persons deserve our compassion. As far as Fox goes, how money grubbing can you get. Sheesh. Let's not put them in charge of anything important.
I Want to believe.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Does anyone have a good site(s) supporting the idea that the moon landing *didn't* happen? I'd like to see what some people have to say.
And will soon lead to the destruction of same! Buwahahaha!!!!!
__________________
'nuff said. :)
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
1. In the Midrashim (Jewish legends from
0 through 300 AD) there's a story of a rabbi
who joins an Arab on the trade routes and
reaches the place where the earth meets the sky.
This should be no surprise, as Jewish cosmology
started out derived from Babylonian cosmology,
with a Heaven, Earth, and Sheol.
2. Herodotos discusses a Phoenician ship
that circled Africa (clockwise)
in the heydey of the
Persian empire. The Phoenicians come back
after 2 years and report that at one
point during their journey the sun rose
and set to starboard. (This would be
at the Cape of Good Hope.) Herodotos,
being a flat earther, says he does not believe them. This is how we know the trip
actually took place.
The FOX TV network has cancelled plans for a "Vietnam: Was it a Hoax?" shockumentary, as well as a "Cuban Missile Crisis: JFK's Popularity Stunt" miniseries...
47.5% Slashdot Pure(52.5% Corrupt)
Not only was the moon landing a hoax..so was the Soviet Union! In a vast government soundstage, these "soviets" were invented as a way of uniting our racial-strife torn people against a common enemy! Oh the lengths the government goes to!
-
These are quite a good (and funny) read.
http://www.primeline-america.com/moon-ldg/
http://www.angelfire.com/ut/aylett/eth69.html
http://batesmotel.8m.com/
http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/97/moon.html
Some people are crazy too, like this guy, who says the MOON is a fake.
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Tonight on Fox: Deadliest Executions Part XVII
..though not a subscriber to these conspiracy theories, I have always wondered: a) The first step on the moon - who/what filmed it? b) Taking off from the moon - who/what filmed that?
Yes, I think that ___-ism is the root cause which undermines our collective belief in ___-ism and post-___-ism. Hence, current society gravitate towards ___-ism with a vengence.
It is sad, perhaps, but such ___-vistic ___-ism is an important facet of our ___-ism beliefs. Hence, our dillemma.
We have reached a stage in our development where facts and beliefs are intertwined in both post-___-ism and pre-___-ism thinking. It is impossible to untangle the Giodion Knot without resort to ___-ism, thus we resigned ourselves to ___-visitic thinking.
(Inspired by the Prof Sokal).
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
If anybody with 3 milligrams of functioning brain matter looked at the "Flat Earth Society" web page for at least 23 seconds they would realize that it is a joke.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Can't somebody just point a strong telescope at the moon and see if the flag is there? That should prove it once and for all, right?
Read my keyboard review.
Heh. They've been trying to shoot this down since 1977, yet people still give them a hard time about it. I'd be annoyed too. Hell, I *am* annoyed. Why do people fall for this kind of crap?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
The cross-hairs were on the cameras, not pre-printed on the film. Things are very bright on the moon, owing to the lack of an atmosphere, and the fact that the earth is around 100x brighter in the sky than the moon is on earth. Very bright light bleeds into dark areas on film. (Have you ever accidentally overexposed a picture?) In pictures of bright objects (well-lit mountains, etc...) where the crosshairs overlap the both bright and dark areas, they appear to slide behind the bright objects because the bright light bled into the (very very narrow) dark area created by the crosshairs.
I didn't see the show, but if the nasa guy said that there were crosshairs on all the pictures, he was mistaken. There were crosshairs on all the *cameras*.
> Your statement is erroneous, I assume you _meant_ to say "prove that the sun is the center of the solar system
;)
> and not the earth".
Nope. I said what I wanted to say. Read the rest of my post.
And it would be a trivial exercise to prove that the Sun is the center of the Solar System; otherwise it'd be called the **Terrestrial** System.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
IIRC, didn't the moon landings leave reflectors behind that Earth based lasers are able to lase and get super acurate distance measurements? I doubt that there is a WORLDWIDE conspiracy involving any agency that's used these reflectors on their own. Jaws
It's just another step on the enormous hoax that some "America" continent exists.
Didn't you notice how they say that these "rockets" were launched from "the United States of America". You know, that place that they previously called Atlantis.
It's obvious that the European kings used this "America" to hide the fact that they were exterminating religious minorities and poor people. Instead they say they migrated to the "New World".
Some try to justify this speaking about some "gold and silver". The kings and the church used this story to hide their experiments with alchemy.
Come on. Has anybody actually seen this America?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
My favorite suggestion from this horrible show is that the astronauts could not possibly have ridden on the Saturn V because the rockets were so loud, the astronauts would never be heard over their radios.
I guess whenever I fly on an Boeing 767 they use sign language to talk to the tower and any conversations I have with other passengers is just my imagination. :)
Please, give us a break, Fox!
CrzyLune
I really wish people would make an effort to educate themselves before making statements like this:
.. how large must that galaxy be!)
.. obviously much larger than any of the artifacts left over by the moon landing!
If the Hubble can zoom in on galaxies that are millions of light years away i'm sure it resolve a LEM on the moon only a few hundred thousand miles away.
Distance is not the issue.
Repeat: Distance is not the issue.
When you're observing an object with a telescope, there are two factors that come into play: brightness (visual magnitude) and apparent size (how large the object appears to be in the sky.) For example, take the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, which is the spiral galaxy M31 (The Great Andromeda Galaxy.) This object lies at a distance of 3 million light-years, but has an apparent size that is larger than that of the full Moon! (Think about that
The usefulness of a telescope is largely a factor of how much light it can collect, not how many times it can magnify an object! When I have my telescope out in the backyard and I'm looking at galaxies tens of millions of light-years away, I typically use an eyepiece that gives me 50X magnification. This is more than sufficient because galaxies are large objects! Even at distances of tens of millions of light-years, 50X is more than enough to see them. Higher resolutions are useful for resolving spiral arms and the like, but ridiculous magnifications are not terribly useful when imaging remote galaxies.
In fact, there is a practical limit to the amount of magnification that a telescope can provide. This usually amounts to 50X per inch of aperture (the diameter of the primary mirror.) So if your telescope has an 8" mirror, the maximum practical magnification you can expect is 400X. (Note that this means that the cheapo Tasco scopes that are sold in department stores that promise "650X" with a 2-inch mirror are complete bullshit.)
But let's look at the Hubble, and your expectation that it should be able to view artifacts from the lunar landings. For a telescope with a circular collecting area of diameter D (2.4 m for Hubble), the smallest feature that one can resolve at wavelength L (550 x 10^-9 m for visible light) is given roughly by:
resolution = 1.4 L/D = 3.2 x 10^-7 radians
This estimate gives the "diffraction limited" resolution, or the resolution based on light's wave-like characteristics. It is difficult to improve upon this limit.
The distance to the Moon is roughly 240,000 miles. Hubble's resolution corresponds to a physical dimension of
size = x = 0.08 miles = 405 feet = 124 meters
This is about the size of a football field
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Later: Is Clinton more evil then Hannibal Lecter?
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
"If Buzz Aldrin accidentally cut off Neil Armstrong's head, you probably won't see that image in a magazine."
Now THAT would have made an awesome Fox special.
I'm pretty sure Armstrong has admitted he flubbed it. Hence the big pause after 'man' where he's thinking to himself 'Shit, I just buggered up the first words on the moon. Oh well, I'd better finish it...'
People are willing to believe it, despite any logic and the complete lack of evidence of what badastronomy call Hoax Believers for two simple reasons: firstly they find it hard enough to picture a working space mission to the moon now, let alone in the late 60s early 70s. Admit it, there is something 'unreal' about the moon. The laws of physics that we are so used to on Earth, only apply in weird ways. Gravity isn't 'right' and all that. People find it hard to get their heads around.
The second reason is the US government had good reasons to want to fake a moon landing, and we've been lied to often enough before. The basic premise of the Hoax Believers, is that the US was 'losing' the 'space race' and needed a victory over the Soviets to bolster capitalism and the American Way. If they stopped there rather than present phony evidence, I might be tempted to have my doubts: it does sound possible. And governments have lied to us so many times in the past. I would say especially the US government but I think that the Russian, British, Israeli, and many others are equally bad. Face it, when they feel the need to individual politicians and governments in general, democratic or otherwise are quite happy to lie through their teeth.
Fair enough I say, but it does give credence to conspiracy theories as whacky as this one.
this signature is a virus, please make me your
I look forward to the expose on the Flat Earth Society. It's time the veil was ripped from their faces as well.
Teflon was not invented for heat shields. (It would perform poorly as one.) It was invented for the Manhattan Project, where it was used to create grease-free seals in the miles of pumps and piping in the Y-12 gaseous diffusion U235 separation plant.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
a=b
/dev/null > /dev/brain
a-b=0
no can / out (a-b)
cat
It's like the story of the watermelon by Mircea Eliade. I don't want to write the whole story but I'll just give the Cliff notes version. There is a farming community where they don't know what watermelons are. The farmers believe they are monsters. When a stranger comes to town, he says it's just a watermelon, eat's a watermelon and is promptly killed by the scared farmers. Then another stranger comes to town, but he teaches the farmers a secret ritual with the watermelons where they partake of the monsters' flesh to gain power over it. Eventually the ritual dies after many generations and the monsters become just watermelons.
You can't go up to a flat-earther, creationist, or conspiracy theorist and say "It's a watermelon!" A more primitive metaphor would be that they essentially want to live in the forest with magic animals and spirits. That is, there can be no compromise for them between belief and science. Belief is paramount and faith requires the rejection of science. The louder you shout "It's a watermelon!" the more they'll cling to their belief. For creationists, the test of faith is the belief the bible is the one true word of God. From their point of view, science threatens that belief.
Logically there is no conflict between religion and science because they occupy different realms. Science will admit that there are things about which it can never know anything. The event horizon (the edge of the unknowable) is where science ends and religion begins. The method when dealing with those who do not want to know the truth is to assuage their fears and to try to teach them in a non-threatening way. It should not be to try to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Frylock: That's not a toy!
Master Shake: You say that about everything you own. You should own toys. They're fun.
That is one Magic light source!
And no, it wasn't the earth. And no, it wasn't studio lighting. Infact it was a huge giant white thing with 1000s of square kilometers of surface area in the direct light of the sun. That's right, the moon was that mysterious secondary light source. If you take a picture on earth of an object in shadow you'll see quite a bit of detail in the shadow. On the moon you'll see far more detail because you'll be able to expose the picture just for the shadow, wheras on earth you'd have to worry about the sky getting too bright. Of couse the other factor that helps is that unlike the earth the moon is almost perfectly white.
The argument on the NASA site is that the rocks they brought back could not have been produced on earth. I find that an oddly weak choice. Plenty of meteorite material have hit earth, and would have the same property.
The best proof I know is the laser reflector that was left there. It's pretty easy to hit it with a laser beam and get a reflection back.
That's right - from last Thursday 2/15 untill next Thursday 2/22 I volunteered to fill out the little tv diary they sent. Since I rarely watch this stuff anymore, it's going to be fun to mail the diary back with almost every day streaked from midnight to midnight with TV OFF X---------.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
How're you supposed to know there's no
atmosphere? Well, one, there's no weather:
the surface is totally unchanging, and
the moon DOES rotate, so if there was atmosphere, you would see something on the surface
changing. Look at Mars with a high-power telescope - its surface does change. Ditto with Venus, Jupiter, etc. Is this a convincing argument? Probably not to a hyperskeptical layman, but to most normal humans, it should be.
Other than that, do the math. You can figure out how big the moon is, since you know the period, therefore you know the distance. You assume it's a sphere (actually, you -know- it's a sphere, since you can see that lighting it from any angle produces a 'light' circle and a 'dark' circle... the only object that can act like that is a sphere) so you know its size. Now, it's composition is a curious question - you don't know what it's made of, so you'll never know its mass, truly. Or will you? If you truly want to convince yourself, get a solar filter, and *measure* the size of the sun, very, very accurately with it: over the course of a month, you'll see the sun grow and shrink in size as we get closer and farther due to 'wobbling' about the Earth-Moon center of mass. With that, you can figure out the ratio of the Earth's mass to the Moon's mass, so you know the Moon's mass. Now that you know the Moon's mass, you know what gasses it CAN hold in, and what gasses it CAN'T hold in - hydrostatic equilibrium, baby. Yup.
Do the math. Work it out. Guess what you'll find? The Moon doesn't have an atmosphere - it can't.
(As per the dust, well, that's common sense. Look at it. You see craters, volcanic flows, etc. How in the world would any of that form without creating rockslides, and very small particles (dust!))
I find it worrying that 4% of the population of the "Last Superpower" don't just believe in UFOs, they beleive they've been abducted by one.
Wonder how long it will be til some politican starts pandering to them? Maybe it will make politics entertaining enough to pay attention to.
Part of the trouble is that we went to the moon and quit. After that we have just gone round and round the Earth with unlimited weightlessness experiments. The trip to Mars is said to take so long that weightlessness will cause a problem. Maybe they should swing a can of water over their head and wonder why the water doesn't come out. Maybe this will answer how to get to Mars with weight.
I believe we went to the moon, but the fact that we stopped going kind of points to the fact that we never went. Kind of like if the only RAM we could make today was in 32K sizes!
- James - [IMAGE]
Why did they stop going? It's very expensive to send people to the moon and they just weren't making the TV ratings anymore.
Why did the flag wave? Well cloth can wave without any kind of breeze e.g. pick up a towel and jiggle it about a bit.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
What's the point? us residents know that the colorado lottery is a joke compared to other lotteries such as powerball, and the big game. what's the point making a page that simply mirrors the original site?
Wait.. what are you trying to argue? That tidal lock is a fallacy? What would that prove? That the moon is a human fabrication? A bit cardboard cutout in the sky? I can see the motivations behind calling the landing a hoax, but I don't see why you'd want to argue that tidal lock is a hoax (as it has nothing to do with the landing, for one..)
There are also reports that some of the atrocities in the recent troubles in Bosnia were faked, but it's too early for a firm conclusion on that.
Keep this history in mind when you hear news about justifications for war in future.
I mean, if NASA were to have pictures taken with a telescope or another orbiter, hoax-believers would just claim that those pictures were faked, too. The only thing that would settle it once and for all for them is if there were some cheap, consumer-affordable way to either look at the moon or fly there... after which they'd just move on to some other conspiracy theory and quietly abandon this one.
you get it ALL wrong!
Please everyone remember this: astonomy is NOT astrology.
Astrology is the silly 'science' which claims that your future depends on the position of planets.
Atronomy is the real science about the space out there and how it all works.
You can make BIG money by telling stupid things to people wanting to believe that and call it astrology. You usually do not make money when researching in astronomy.
Georges
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
There never was any USSR. The whole thing was engineered as a ploy to exert control over the US population after WWII.
Oh, and there are only 26 people on the planet, all the rest are holograms to keep you from discovering the other 25.
I know this because Elvis told me.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
This is a detailed refutation from Michael Shermer, reknowned skeptic and very patient man:
.)
E-SKEPTIC MAGAZINE FOR FEBRUARY 17, 2001
Copyright 2001 Skeptic magazine, Skeptics Society, Michael Shermer
Permission to print or distribute without permission.
For further information go to www.skeptic.com
FOX GOES TO THE MOON, BUT NASA NEVER DID
THE NO-MOONIES CULT STRIKES
By Michael Shermer
For those of you who saw the abysmal Fox program Thursday night, February 15,
"Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?," I hope you did not lose faith
in the network that brings us the finest television show of the last several
years--The Simpsons. I would love to tell you that it the show was a joke,
like the one Fox did a few years ago about machines that take revenge on
their owners--my favorite was the angry car that drove over a cliff; yeah,
that's showing those bad humans who's boss! (Woody Allen has a funny routine
similar to this, where his toaster, the building elevator, and other machines
start making anti-Semitic remarks). Alas, this was a vintage Fox show that
begins with the usual disingenuous disclaimer:
"The following program deals with a controversial subject. The theories
expressed are not the only possible explanation. Viewers are invited to make
a judgment based on all available information."
That information, of course, is not provided. To cover themselves morally
(legally, anyone can say anything in America, no matter how vacuous it may
be) they had a "spokesperson" from NASA who was allegedly there to answer the
claims of the no-moon conspiracy "theorists." (To call this a "theory" or
these tofuheads "theorists" is to so butcher the language of science that I
cannot stomach it. Let's just call them the "no-moonies.") Unfortunately,
this NASA guy had obviously never read any of the conspiracy claims, or the
answers to them, for this is the biggest no-brainer debunking in skeptical
history that anyone who actually knew something about the Apollo space
program could have handled.
What particularly angers me about it is that Fox Family already did a special
on the moon conspiracy--I did it for Exploring the Unknown! And, irony on
irony, our token actor voice was the same Mitch Pileggi from X-Files who
narrated this special. (The docutainment formula by the way, followed by
every one of these type shows on every network designed the same way by every
production company is that you must have a "celebrity" voice for, get this,
"credibility." Yeah, okay, this is America so I guess I understand . . .
Of course, we should not shoot the messenger, for Mitch is an intelligent guy
who happens to read scripts for a living. And for all he knew when he did his
voice over, the slated NASA guy really was going to answer all the conspiracy
claims.
So, let's go through this point by painful point, just in case the statistic
at the top of the show--that 10 percent of the American public believes we
never went to the moon--is accurate. DISCLAIMER (hey, I can have one too):
The Skeptics Society motto from Spinoza--"I have made a ceaseless effort not
to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand
them"--does not apply here. Sorry, this conspiracy theory is so dumb that I
think it best we adopt H.L. Mencken's observation that "one good horse laugh
is worth a thousand syllogisms."
1. CLAIM: The moon landing was faked on a movie set. Proof: there are clearly
two sources of light in the movies and stills taken on the moon. Since there
is only one source of light in the sky (the sun) how can we explain the fact
that even in shadows there is obvious "fill" light that illuminates various
objects that, back lit from the sun, should be in near total darkness. Much
of the show was spent on this point as they showed photo after photo, film
after film, of "filled in" photos. Fill light is exactly what you would see
on a studio set.
ANSWER: Even granting that NASA's rocket scientists were too dumb to have
thought of this and thus tipped their conspiracy hand to the no-moonies who,
apparently, are smarter than rocket scientists, there were actually three
sources of light on the moon: the sun, the earth that reflects the sun's
light, and the moon itself, also reflecting light. The albedo (reflectivity)
of the earth is quite high because of the amount of clouds, so the sun acted
as the light filler via the earth. And the moon was, to say the least, rather
close, and also reflected light.
2. CLAIM: The American flag was "waving" in the allegedly airless environment
of the moon. How can this be? Proof: film footage showing the astronauts
planting the flag, with the flag clearly waving.
ANSWER: Of course the flag was "waving" while the astronaut was fiddling with
it back and forth as he jammed it into the hole. But the moment he let go of
the flag, it mysteriously stopped waving. Umm, coincidence? I don't think so.
3. CLAIM: There was no blast crator beneath the LEM lander. Proof:
photographs of the LEM with no blast crator and a NASA painting made before
the first landing, showing what a NASA artist thought might happen when the
LEM landed (big blast crator).
ANSWER: (1) The LEM engine was variable--the astronauts could control the
thrust and, of course, as they eased their way down to the surface they
throttled back on the engine. (2) There was only a couple of inches of moon
dust on the surface, beneath which was a solid surface that would not be
effected by the blast of the LEM engine. Before Apollo 11 landed, there was
much debate among scientists about the amount of moon dust that would have
accumulated over billions of years. Some speculated that there could be
several feet of dust, into which the LEM and the astronauts would sink.
Others said just a few inches. The latter were right.
4. After the blast crator from the LEM engine was created, all the lunar dust
around the LEM should have been displaced, yet there's Armstrong's footprint
clearly imprinted into the lunar dust just a foot away from the LEM's landing
pad. What gives?
ANSWER: Again, the moon is airless, so the LEM engine blast did indeed send
dust flying, after which it came back down because there is no wind to
scatter it. The blast of dust happened mainly directly underneath the LEM
engine.
5. If there was so much moon dust all over the place, being kicked up by the
LEM engine, by the rover, by the astronauts, why is everything so clean?
ANSWER: It wasn't. Moon dust was a problem because, in fact, it got all over
everything and the astronauts spents hours after their moon walks cleaning
their suits so as not to get the dust all over the interior of the LEM.
6. CLAIM: When the top half of the LEM took off to return the astronauts to
the command module, leaving the lower half sitting there on the moon's
surface, there was no "blast" flame like we see on earth. The LEM just seems
to leap off the base like it was yanked up by cables.
ANSWER: First of all, you can clearly see in the film footage of the launch,
that there IS quite a blast as dust and other particles go flying, even one
piece right toward the camera. Second, there is no air on the moon, so there
can be no blast "flame" like there is on earth. This is why rocket engines in
space have to carry their own oxygen (in liquid form). Unlike jet engines
that suck in air, rockets carry all the chemicals they need and mix them at
the time the "burn" is required. And "burn" is not quite the right term,
since it implies a "flame" should be present. In space there can be no flame
because there is no oxygen to fuel a flame tail coming out of the rocket
nozzle. All that is happening is that chemicals being stored in separate
containers are being released together to cause a reaction, the energy from
which flows out rapidly through a nozzle, after which Newton's law of "equal
and opposite reaction" takes over.
7. On earth, the LEM lander simulator used by the astronauts for practice was
obviously unstable. In fact, shortly before the Apollo 11 flight Neil
Armstrong barely escaped with his life as his simulator crashed and he
ejected just seconds before impact. Imagine how tricky it would have been to
land the actual LEM, with two astronauts shifting around inside and all that
additional weight. Fox even managed to find a physicist named Ralph Rene who
proclaimed that it would have been impossible to land the LEM because of its
inherent instability.
ANSWER: Armstrong did indeed barely escape with his life in the simulator.
But practice makes perfect, and these guys practiced, and practiced, and
practiced until they got it down. A bicycle is also inherently unstable. The
damn thing just falls over standing still, and even moving it topples over
after a few meters of pedaling, UNTIL YOU LEARN HOW TO RIDE IT! Plus, and
these no-moonies never seem to get this, what happens on earth is not the
same as what happens on the moon. Air on earth, no air on the moon. Lots of
gravity on the earth, a lot less gravity on the moon. Things big and heavy on
earth will be big and light on the moon. And we can even calculate exactly
how much different! These NASA scientists were so good they even calculated
the effects of the gravitational pull from large and irregular moon masses as
the LEM flew closely over them.
8. There are no stars in the moon sky, yet when you look up at night from
earth you see lots of stars.
ANSWER: How many stars do you see in photographs taken at night, on earth, of
terrestrial objects? That's right. None. Well, okay, MAYBE you'll see Venus,
but that's not a star. If you want to shoot stars in the night sky you have
to aim your camera and leave the shutter open for at least several seconds.
The astronauts were not there to take pictures of the sky. Also, since it is
very bright on the moon (no air to scatter the sunlight) and the astronauts
were wearing white space suits, the camera F-stop would have been set way
down, and the shutter speed quite fast. Stars are too faint to appear on the
film emulsion.
9. If you run the moon film footage at double speed it looks like it was
filmed on earth, ergo it WAS filmed on earth.
ANSWER: Balderdash! Double speed doesn't look at all like it was filmed on
earth. I might have missed their explanation for this because I was laughing
so hard, but that's what they said.
10. Why are the photographs so nicely framed and in focus, etc.
ANSWER: Because these are the few photographs that we get to see from the
thousands of photographs taken. There is a beautiful book released last year
with some of the very best moon photographs. It is magnificant. One glance
through it makes it clear that these photographs were indeed taken on the
moon which was aptly described by Buzz Aldrin as "magnificant desolation."
11. The Van Allen radiation belts surrounding the Earth would have fried the
astronauts with a lethal dose of radiation.
ANSWER: Wrong. If you blast right through the Van Allen belts it is no
problem, which is what the Apollo astronauts did. X-rays would be lethal too,
if you sat there soaking in them long enough. A very real problem, however,
are cosmic rays. They are not a problem on a short flight like to the moon,
but in long flights that might last years, like to Mars, they could be a
serious problem.
12. NASA murdered Gus Grissom and the other Apollo 1 astronauts, along with a
bunch of other astronauts in assorted other "accidents," because they were
about to go public with the hoax.
ANSWER: The show began by saying that the moon conspiracy was hatched late in
the game when NASA realized they would never make it, yet we are to believe
that years before they had been planning the hoax, Grissom caught on to it
and decided to go public, and then they killed him. But that's not the real
answer here. The real answer is that, like most conspiracy theories, there is
no positive evidence in support, only negative evidence in the form of "they
covered it up." Like the curse of the mummy, anyone who died within 20 years
of the discovery of Tut's tomb, died because of the curse, not because people
die. Let's face it, being a test pilot and an astronaut is not the safest job
in the world. People died because it is an inherently dangerous job.
13. NASA managed to keep all this a secret for all these years with tens of
thousands of people keeping their mouths shut. This from the same NASA folks
who were too stupid to remember to set up the movie set properly so as to
account for the proper light, blast crator, etc.
ANSWER: I once asked G. Gordon Liddy (who should know) about conspiracy
theories. He said three people can keep a secret as long as two of them are
dead. To think that thousands of people would keep their mouths shut is too
ridiculous to consider.
14. NASA STUPIDITY: Going to the moon is very, very hard. Look at all those
rockets that blew up in the 1950s and early 1960s, and all those other
problems to solve. Space travel is an insoluble problem. Ergo, NASA could not
have solved it.
ANSWER: There is no question that NASA, as a gigantic bureaucracy, is capable
of mistakes and flubs, and perhaps even a few cover-ups. But this argument
reminds me of the pyramidiots who think that the Egyptians were too inept to
have built the pyramids. Their reasoning goes like this: "if I can't think of
how they did it then they couldn't have thought of it either, ergo they
didn't do it." It is really an indictment of the claimants own limited
thinking skills.
15. ART IMITATES FICTION: I cannot let this end without one trivial
observation: the Fox show began with footage from a conspiracy movie from
1978 in which the astronauts are asked to fake a landing on the moon because
NASA realized they could never pull it off and if they didn't their budget
would be cut, etc., The film was entitled Capricorn One, and the astronauts
refused to cooperate so NASA tried to have them killed. But I noticed that
Fox was most discrete in not showing the actors playing the astronauts: one
of them was O.J. Simpson who, in the film just like on the football field and
in Brentwood, showed his amazing ability to cut and run . . . .
RATING OF FOX: Two thumbs down to Fox for not providing the above
explanations, for setting up a lame duck as a NASA expert who didn't know the
explanations, and for pretending that this was a balanced show about a real
theory that people allegedly take seriously.
RATING OF NASA: Two thumbs up for solving an insoluble problem. Now, quit
wasting our money growing tomatoes 200 miles up when we should be making
blast crators, leaving footprints, and taking photographs on Mars by now. Ad
astra!!
Conspiracy theorists annoy me more than just about any other group of crazies. Sure the government isn't telling the whole truth about everything. So instead of them lets believe.... some nutcase working out of his basement! Its interesting to see people who claim to be so critical of every fact produced by the "authorities" take on nearly blind faith the writings of major conspiracy theorists. Heres a theory: 99% of all conspiracy theories are either hoaxes, or exist to make money through publishing/television.
Personally I don't believe that our government has the ability to cover up anything larger than individual military research projects. Keeping a stealth secret for a few years is one thing, faking a lunar landing with 1960s technology is quite another. Oh and b.t.w. with a very good telescope you can SEE the lunar landing site.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0077294
perhaps you are thinking of this?
O.J. is in the movie.
Well, I see that I need to study up on grammar and spelling. Pointing out my spelling problems is ok with me as long as you place references to my error. I take those statements of correction as constructive criticism from those whom care about the quality of this board (THANK YOU for the links I booked marked them and will use them in the future). As for the others that just want to troll or flame, 3 fingers towards you.
spambait e-mail
my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop news
please help me make it better
if you see me, smile and say hello.
On this basis, I should like to point readers to prrof positive of the moon landing: the US Customs Form which the Apollo 11 astronauts had to complete on their arrival back on earth.
When ABC airs a show about an open lesbian the Christian coalition goes after the advertisers like rabid dogs. When a art display in new york shows a feces strewn Virgin Mary Catholics are up in arms. However, when a show airs about alien abduction, fake moon landings etc. the response from the tech community is defening silence. Why are there no social action committees for science? We have the power, we have the knowledge, where are our representatives?
-Shieldwolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Ever since the apollo program happened, I have thought it would be cool to point a telescope at the moon and look at the junk we left up there. So I have two questions for the more celestially inclined at Slashdot - 1) what kind of telescope would it take? (I have access to a 20 or 22 incher) and 2) where can I find a map of the landing sites to know where to look to see the landers and flags and rovers? Also, wouldn't this end all the controversy? They landed on the face we see and it was lit by the sun when they landed so it should at least always be facing us. Any ideas anyone.
If you can't teach by example, then you'll have to teach by precept . . . Just don't expect it to work as well.
Come on people. You have to appreciate Fox for what it is. An interupt to the food chain. Think about it, those who watch, enjoy and believe these types of programs are not well off to begin with(on an intellectual level, not $$$). These people cannot be told they have to grow and learn, they're happy enough to eat cheese puffs, drink light beer, and spend every free hour in front of they're TV. These people will never progress in life, and frankly, we shouldn't encourage them to. The informed will get the promotion, the uninformed will be stuck flipping hamburgers. Just think, someday the class system may be based on intellegence instead of how much money you have or who your family is. Bravo, Fox.
o+
What, me worry?
Danno Marx
Q:What do you call someone who's crazy about the moon?
A lunatic
Mmmm.. Donuts
Words fail me to express just how much this kind of thing really pisses me off. Not only were the moon landings America's greatest achievement, but the greatest achievement in world history.
MEN WALKED ON THE MOON
It really pisses me off when loonies, nitwits and nincompoops deny this with some mad story proving that they have long relinquished any grasp on reality that they ever may have had.
A couple of years ago I saw David Percy expound his loony theories at the Fortean Times convention in London. I have seldom heard such outright bollocks, and I'm glad to say that he was resoundedly heckled by the audience.
The thing that really scares me is that, well, it's getting on for thirty years since the last moon landing, and I'm scared programmes like this will lead to future generations accepting these crackpot theories.
I may be invoking Godwin's law, but wasn't it Goebbels who said if a lie is repeated often enough it becomes the truth, or something like that? And he didn't have the benefit of lies repeated on international television!
We need to refute the loony conspiracists at every turn. They Are WRONG and They Are MAD
And I'm really pissed off about this.
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
I would think that by now this Hoax would have died.
Sure, and by now I thought that the "WIN A HOLIDAY", etc. e-mail crap would have died. No such luck. The world is full of morons. Most of them apparently watch the Fox network.
So far so good.....
Then he goes on to prove that he is one of those people who believe in religious mythology, "regardless of what is rational and demonstrated by the facts."
The cognitive dissonance inside a mind like that must be painful.....
-----------------------------------
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
Is anybody besides me just the slightest bit concerned about the raging credulity on T.V. these days? Actually, I guess it's nothing new, I mean I suppose it's always been this way, but it's still agravatiing and alarming.
It's fun to ask "what if" questions, but it's wrong to intentionally mislead people and misrepresent evidence for the sake of ratings. (I know, I know--that you, Captain Obvious.)
Furry cows moo and decompress.
I've read the post that our telescopes are not powerful enough to image the LEM or other junk on the surface of the moon. What about that US Military satellite that went looking for water? It only went to the poles?
Hrm, well, how about the next time we send a probe to an asteroid or something we send it out past the moon and take some damn aerial photographs of all the stuff.
Of course those could be faked too..
What ever happened to the folks that were going to launch telepresence robots to the moon and let people control the buggy and visit the Apollo flag and rover and whatnot?
Richard Hoagland, over at enterprisemission.com / lunaranomalies.com called this special 'Particulary silly', 'Naive' and Absurd'
Having people at NASA call you on your theory is almost a symbol of pride
Having a person who accuses NASA of covering up Tank Turrets on Mars, giant crystal domes on the Moon, and Starwars spaceships in ancient egyptian tombs call you silly is pretty much the kiss of death for anyone.
I think the destructive thing about postmodernism is the thought that there IS no truth, or "right" as opposed to wrong -- that everything is culturally relative or subjective.
At a quantum level, that's relevant, but at larger levels it's more difficult to justify. Is the Western tradition "wrong" to assert that one shouldn't kill a living women when the husband dies, which is common in certain cultures? Or how about ciltoridectomy? What about older people having sex with young teenagers?
I think a more relevant argument to our societal problems is that if there IS an objective truth, we're never destined to know it -- it's the fundamental basis of the human condition. We have the right to choose our actions, without ever knowing what's right or wrong except by historical experimentation -- which is communicated through religion and/or cultural mores. So the whole point of existence is really a journey to converge upon limits of "rightness" as time approaches infinity..
Stu
-Stu
after the show i did some research of my own and looked at nasa's image gallery. i discovered about 4 pictures that have multiple shadows. not just one shadow, not just two but 3 different shadows for the flagpole we put up, along with several other shadows that cross each other in very interesting ways and i saw the same background for pictures about 4 times with completely different foreground (equipment, lander,etc). I also have to say that whatever nasa official they had on the show did nothing to disprove any conspiracy theories. All he had to say was "Thats just crazy" or "He's wrong" with no backup evidence.
One question for those that watched...I gotta say that fox really blew it when they said "the only way to know for sure it to look for the leftover equipment on the moon, but no telescope exists that is powerfull enough". thats gotta be bullshit. The moon ain't that far away. Oh well, i'll just file the moon landing with the jfk assasination and call it a day
In general, a 'few' means 3 or more. You've presented a 'pair', and thus do not refute the claim.
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
> You mentioned The Holocaust twice. Ten bucks says you're Jewish.
Sorry, no one in my family practices Judaism to my knowledge. I was baptized in the Episcopal church as an infant, my wife's Methodist, my father describes himself as a ``weak Methodist", my mother was an Episcopalian, & my step-mother's Catholic.
The reason I mentioned the Holocaust was because I meant to mention an article I read in the February _Esquire_ the other weekend at the barber's. But I found I could make my point without mentioning it & distract everyone by mentioning Hitler.
And look up the history of the word ``Holocaust" -- especially pre-1940. See why it applies to one incident of genocide, & not all.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
We got the right to see how small we were from another perspective. Everytime I look at the picture from the moon to the earth ( earthrise ) I awaken again to note that earth is really small place and I've got to do my best to make it livable. What else did we get. Pride, a human could fly, in a ship and land on a new and prestine place. Now what else was learned for americans and the tech .... who know, I don't but i bet we use some of it every day ( hey TANG the drink of spaceman was that not something of the space program ? )
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Radiation gradually fogs film. There isn't that much radiation in space, if there was the astronauts would have been dead.
Slow film is also less susceptible to radiation than fast film (just as it is less susceptible to light), and the standard for journalism at the time was Kodachrome 25 or 64. As there is plenty of light on the daylit moon I'd be surprised if they used anything else. If you are carrying a camera loaded with K25 and the film gets fogged, you are going to soon be puking your guts out from radiation sickness.
There are cosmic events (especially solar flares) which can increase the level of radiation, and it is higher in certain places. James Michener fictionalizes a disaster based on this in his novel Space.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Shaft!
You're damn right...
Carousel is a lie!
Most of the shows on Fox seem to cater to the Trailer Trash demographic, where I'm sure this one did wonderfully. The fact that NASA felt it necessary to respond to the show speaks volumes about our nation.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.
Isn't the real answer that the flag was made with springs so it would stand out straight on the pole? That's why it's not hanging limply.
We all can't fit on the rocket ...
I saw that show on the last day of drivers ed! The scary thing is like half the kids in the room thought it was plausable that cars are possessed. That definitly confirmed my belief that the minimum driving age should be raised to 18 so kids can mature more.
---- Just another spud server.
I can't believe that no one has realised this! Don't you understand fellow slashdotters? The entire moonie "conspiracy theory" is a conspiracy! It was clearly perpetrated by some rival government in the hopes that it would discredit NASA, thereby reducing the rate at which America is able to launch ion-drive powered vessels into space, so that the rival government can do it first! Then, they will make contact with the Moon People referred to in an earlier post, and the reason that America did not send people back to the moon, and they will obtain the perfect dental mouth-wash, thereby rendering all technology developed by America null, since the entire populace of this rival country will have sparkling white teeth and never have to floss! Who is this evil faction? Please tell me you've worked it out by now -- it's Antarctica of course! That's where all those little flying saucers come from, isn't it?
lol
...that the people that believe shows such as this and "Alien Autopsy" tend to live in the south and vote Republican.
Of course, we know Rupert Murdoch's target audience is these very people.
-
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Let's get all the accusers that were on that particular program, and send them to the moon. And LEAVE THEM THERE!
Nearly all mainstream news organizations have some business tie to low-brow entertainment. CNN and Mad Magazine are both owned by AOL-Time-Warner (you guess which of these is the lowest-brow). Disney owns both ABC Network and Hyperion Press. General Electric (GE) owns NBC Network; I couldn't find any particularly low-brow entertainment owned by them (even though they are one of the largest companies in the world).
Clinton needs to be bashed. More than that, he needs to be arrested, but that's like closing the barn doors after the horses escaped, grew old and died. It is a disgrace that Bill Clinton was even considered for President, much less that he ever was elected. The only people who more deserve punishment than Bill Clinton are those who put him in office.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
There is an interesting page here.
OpenSourcerers
I'm very dissapointed in Mitch Pellagi (and Jonathan Frakes for the alien autopsy business). Even William Shatner only stooped to idiotic commercials, not blatant disinformation.
-m
I must say, I love NASA's short and to-the-point response: "We did." One can easily read that as: "That's all we're going to say. If you're too stupid to believe otherwise, we're not going to waste our breath." They're responding naturally, as if they were an intelligent person who'd just been insulted to his/her face. It occurs to me that more large organizations, whether they be government agencies or big corporations, could produce more convincing rebuttals of accusations if they dropped some or all of their officious manner. Let's say there was a CIA agent found floating in some Bulgarian reservoir or someting, and shloads of conspiracy theories promptly made their way about. From the CIA, one might expect something like "We flatly deny having any involvement in this." Yeah, I'm convinced. Now if they said something like "Right, we left one of our own in there so we could study the side effects of drinking corpse-flavored water. Please," or "Dude, what could we possibly want with *Bulgaria*?" I'd be more inclined to believe them. It's all about the tone, guys.
The coolest voice ever.
-- Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?
I think it truly boggles the mind that anybody would waste their time with shit like this. Of course, if someone would, leave it to Murdoch to give them prime time air. Let's face it, Fox's only good show isn't even a fox production (although why Paramount stoops to fox to air Voyager is totally beyond me).
To me, it seems like the psychological roots of this particular conspiricy theory are pretty straightforward - it is more than apparent that the US government, for all it's ballyhooed glasnost, lies. Often. So some people draw the false conclusion that if the government lies, then everything the government says must be a lie. My question to the loonie folks is, what on or off Earth is the point?
And to Rupert Murdoch, my question is why haven't you jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge yet, you worthless neanderthal piece of scum. Not that I care...
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Have you looked at the facts yourself, or do you simply cast aspursions on those who have?
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
<plug>Over at Skeptic News (a Slash-based site), we discussed this very briefly in Fox Moon Sweeps Week and One False Step for Man.... Not too much information on this one (other than a link or two and some comments), but if you like to follow this type of think from a skeptical point of view, you might consider bookmarking the site and stopping by from time to time.</plug>
---..between the "moon landing hoax" show and X-files is that X-files never claimed to be a reality show.
:)
Non-troglodytes know this, and can seperate a sci-fi show from reality.
http://pebkac.net
hmm but in 1984 the enemy did exist... it was just that the war didn't have any reason apart from destroying the result of the people's work to keep them poor, and giving them some kind of scapegoat to blame for their fate. plus, i guess it could be seen as a test of the effectiveness of the rewriting of history at the ministry of truth, because the constellation (who fights against whom) changed all the time. but the enemy really did exist, while there's no evidence that either "big brother" or emmanuel goldstein did.
Free as in mason.
this evidence is only glossed over by the debunkers.
http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/94/moon.html
The badastronomy site's argument seems to be:
"Listen you stupid retard, shadows will be longer when going downhill, and shorter uphill. You dumbass moron."
However, looking at the actual pictures, not all of the extra shadows are explained, and they don't match the sun's supposed location at the time.
This is in the same category as the folks who believe that the Holocaust was also "faked." Sure, guys -- we rounded up ALLLL those Jews and told them EXACTLY what to say!
It's amazing what nonsense people will believe. Damn Fox -- and damn you too, Mitch Pileggi; I used to have respect for you. Surely you're not that hard up for money?
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HB=Hoax Believer
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Coincidence? I think not.
I actually find it quite amusing that the most paranormal-embracing network is also the home of the most popular skeptical, anti-kook show around..
I would pay cash to be considered a 'weapon for science'!
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
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My father often tells me that Armstrong botched this scripted line, and the official tapes were edited. He continues that the mass media use to joke about it, but have long since given up.
Can anyone confirm this? I guess its another case of repeat the lie long enough, it becomes the truth