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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
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.
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
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
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. ;-)
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.
"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
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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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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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
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
"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.
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"
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."
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.
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.
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?
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
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
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.
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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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.
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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
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.
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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
"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.
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
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.
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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
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
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.
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."
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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
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
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.
Pentaprism viewfinders are available for these cameras as external accessories which mount atop the camera body. This gives you a rear viewfinder as found on most 35mm cameras. Naturally, the Apollo astronauts used the top viewfinder, since holding the camera up to your eye is impractical in a space suit.
And yes, I do know what I am talking about. The main reason I do not own a 'blad myself is that 2 1/4 inch SLR's are very expensive. I do own two Mamiya TLR's in a similar format, and did quite a bit of shopping, pricing, and trying-out back in the 80's when I was into film photography.
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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?
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.
__________________
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.
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jeff13
The moon is geologically stable, dead, as it were. There's little for us to learn there, really, the rock makeup has shown to be fairly uniform, so we wouldn't gain much by a second trip. It's not like anything has changed on the moon in the last few decades. To do anything interesting would involve things like heavy drilling or excavating, and think about the uproar that would cause...
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.
I Want to believe.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
And will soon lead to the destruction of same! Buwahahaha!!!!!
__________________
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)
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
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.
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
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?
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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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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!
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.
Several words: I'm not going to pay $600 for something I know costs $250 in the States.
Danno Marx
Q:What do you call someone who's crazy about the moon?
A lunatic
Mmmm.. Donuts
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
Dust does not "kick up" in a vacuum. It follows the same trajectory as a rock. Dust blown away from the lander during its descent would not land on the lander.
2. The cameras the astronauts had crosshairs permanantly in the frames. In some moon photos the crosshairs are BEHIND objects on the moon.
The astronauts used standard Hasselblad 2-1/4 inch film cameras and TV cameras. These cameras do not put "crosshairs" on the film. Those would have been added later. I haven't seen the show or the pix you are referring to, but I do know that some pix I have seen on the Web have clearly been tampered with -- not by NASA but by someone else out to make "unbelievable" moon photos.
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.)
The moon's surface isn't entirely dust and sand, it is also rock. Again, there is no atmosphere; only particles big enough to be directly moved by the blast force will be moved at all, and they will follow a parabolic trajectory away from the lander. They will hit the ground long before the hatch is opened as there is no atmosphere to suspend them.
4. There is no engine noise on the tape during the landing. Wouldn't there be a lot of engine noise?
Not really. The LEM didn't need a lot of thrust to lift off (1/6 gravity), and there was no atmosphere to carry the blast sound back to the lander. The lander's engine noise might have been comparable to the hiss of gas escaping under pressure from a container -- a high frequency not readily picked up by low-frequency mikes and not readily transmitted through the frame of the lander.
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> I'm waiting for Murdoch to green light the Fox special "The Great Holocaust Hoax" and "The Great Spherical Earth Hoax."
LOL
Years ago when I was in Junior High, I had a Science Teacher who posed a very simple, yet very challenging question:
Prove that the Sun is the center of the Universe, & not the Earth.
(For the sake of the exercise, he ignored the question whether the Sun is in revolution around another point, or that point is in revolution around still another point.)
The point of this exercise was not to convince us that Gallileo & Copernicus was wrong, but to consider facts & draw our own logical conclusions. Most people would have to say that the Earth rotates around the Sun because that's what they were taught in school. And some of these people eventually realize that that not everything they learned in school was correct, & so start questioning other things they were taught.
Such as Evolution. Or the Holocaust. Or whether the Earth is round.
And when someone questions these things, instead of an informed argument, the questioner is greeted with derision & unsympathetic laughter. Very similar to the youthful nerd who asks a difficult question of her/his teacher that shows she/he knows more than the instructor. Or that she/he bothered to do the homework.
Or begins twisting another person away from logical thinking into the land of superstition & faulty thinking. Read the books of L. Ron Hubbard with a critical eye, & you will be amazed what bizarre creations one can create based on urban legend, lazy research & a fevered imagination.
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
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.
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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?
Three of your four questions were answered in the link given in the article.
Another good source was Michael Shermer's "E-Skeptic" email for February 17, 2001. I won't copy and paste it in because I don't know if that's allowed; unfortunately I also can't find it online at the Skeptic magazine website. Oh well...
As Skeptic's writeup commented,
"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."
This is a common trick used by sensationalistic crap TV. They have an "expert" who has not had time to think about debunking the specific issues, and then frame the presentation as if his failure to immediately respond means that all scientists everywhere are similarly dumbfounded. This is not science, it's National Enquirer type entertainment.
The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.
First, the lunar dust is denser than what we think of as dust; it's apparently more like dense sand.
Second, your intuition about how much dust would be "kicked up" is based on your experience in an atmosphere. If you spread out dust and blow straight down into it, the pressure of your breath into the atmosphere will spread around the dust a lot more than your breath alone. You'll see dust curling up and around, and being pushed out, and drifting down slowly, due to the atmosphere.
With a rocket in a vacuum, only those dust particles directly pushed by the rocket exhaust move. An area directly underneath the rocket would be swept clean, but just a few feet away there may be no effect -- or there may be thicker dust because what was under the rocket had to go somewhere.
The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.
It's bleed-over. When the thin black lines appear in front of something light-colored, the exposed film appears to erase the thin black lines. You see this all the time, and it's something photographers have to be aware of.
Besides, what is the claim here? That NASA didn't actually use crosshair cameras in their $30 billion "simulated" moon landing? Is the theory that NASA instead went out of their way to meticulously paint black crosshairs on the background of the photo? Absurd.
The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.
See number 1 above. The crater was there, but more localized than your experience in an atmosphere would expect.
Also, the main point here is the rocket motor which the non-moonie suggests had "30,000 pounds" of thrust. Guess what? It had a throttle. Would the astronauts endanger their lives and mission by roaring down at the surface at maximum velocity so that they had to have the throttle wide-open to land? Of course not.
They did the 30,000-pound burns high above the surface, and by the time they were a few feet above the surface, it was operating at a fraction of its capacity.
I didn't see the show and I don't know what was said about this; this is the only point that isn't addressed at badastronomy.com or in the Skeptic writeup.
I guess the issue is that the LEM lander was doing rocket burns during descent and we should have heard the noise on the tape. I would point out, first, they were not doing continuous burns, I don't know what fraction of the descent time the rocket was actually on. Second, I do not believe the comm link was open the whole time. Third, I would not be at all surprised if the rocket motor caused more vibration than noise inside the LEM. Again, our experience in an atmosphere can be counter-intuitive, and rockets are constructed so that most of the energy, sound and otherwise, goes out the nozzle.
Fourth, given the deceitful way that these charlatans try to convince the gullible, I would not be at all surprised if they distorted the evidence regarding rocket noise.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
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.
The moon is pretty damn far away. Go look at it sometime. About the size of a dime held at arm's length, it is really about the same size as the entire continental United States.
We can in fact detect reflections form the very carefully machined retroreflectors left behind by the astronauts, but even the best telescopes ever built would not be capable of resolving the LEM as a distinct object, much less resolving the other junk left up there by NASA.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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
The guy that worked on the cameras as well as the NASA guy on the program said that they crosshairs were etched into the camera so that they would be on every shot in the same place. They were not put on after they were developed. So the crosshairs would HAVE to be in front of any object.
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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
HB=Hoax Believer
PHB=Pointy Haired Boss
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..