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Nvidia Sinks Moon Landing Hoax Using Virtual Light
schwit1 writes Using its new top-shelf graphics processing unit, Nvidia tackles one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in American history: the veracity of the 1969 to 1972 Apollo moon landings. From the article: "'Global illumination is the hardest task to solve as a game company,' Scott Herkelman, Nvidia's GeForce general manager, said in an interview. 'Virtual point lights don't do a bad job when the environment stays the same, but a game developer has to fake shadows, fake reflections...it's a labor-intensive process.' So when a Nvidia research engineer used the company's new dynamic lighting techniques to show off a side-by-side comparison between an Apollo 11 photo and a GeForce-powered re-creation, the company knew it had a novel demo on its hands. 'We're going to debunk one of the biggest conspiracies in the world,' Herkelman said."
Conspiracy theorists won't care. They will always believe that there is a conspiracy. Debunk one, and they will merely find another. For this, even if you were to fly them up there, they would find some way to disbelieve it.
"But what about the..." is a never-ending argument between conspiracy theorists and debunkers.
Unfortunately, each one that gets knocked down on its face means it's statistically more likely that the debunkers are right and the theorists wrong. We can go to infinity, but after ten or even 5 assertions wiped out with only basic experimentation, the chances of you having been right in the first place go beyond minuscule.
Scientific principle starts with "here's a hypothesis, does it fit the facts?" and goes BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD whenever any element of it is wrong. Conspiracy theorists just keep on pounding ignoring all their previous incorrect assertions until people get bored dealing with them and then "Ah ha! They won't answer!".
If you were wrong about the shadows, and the film, and the radioactivity, and this, that and the other? Chances are you're wrong about all the other minor crap too. And to prove otherwise requires more than just "it's obvious" or flaws are "too numerous to list".
People such as moon landing hoaxers, 9/11 truthers etc. are so far gone that you could methodically tear down each and every one of their assertions, employing evidence, science, logic to beat it to a pulp and they'd still start right up with the first one again.
"But what about the..." is a never-ending argument between conspiracy theorists and debunkers.
Exactly. It's essentially whack-a-mole but with paranoid and stupid people.
Unfortunately moving the goal posts is not unusual for the conspiracists. One of the evidence that counters the hoaxers' claims is that the lunar sites and equipment still exist on the moon and can be seen with probes and telescopes and a laser. To which the hoaxers then claim unmanned spacecraft could have placed them there. So therefore hoaxers claim that NASA created a massive conspiracy in faking manned missions but also maintained a secret side project to place objects using unmanned spacecraft. Of course when confronted with basic logistical quandaries like how NASA would have to build craft massive enough to place a lunar rover as well as place tracks, they have no real answers. To every answer they come up with any possible but unlikely scenario. Occam's Razor does not seem to be a favorite of this group.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I've almost given up on debunking conspiracy theories. Those who believe in them, BELIEVE in them. It's like trying to debunk somebody's religion.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
when your opponent (Soviet Union) agrees, then you did it.
Actually Neil Armstrong never punched anybody he was always known to be a real gentleman and always seemed to live to a very high standard.
Buzz Aldrin is the one that punched the idiot Lunar Loon.
Frankly I am really torn over who, out of the two I admire most.
BTW Adam Curry should never been seen or heard from again in the tech community IMHO.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
To me, the real lede is buried pretty deeply in the article. The light on that particular photo IS anomalous. It sounds as if the conspiracy theorists were right about that, and that's kind of astute.
What's interesting is the resolution of the anomaly: it's light reflected off Neil Armstrong himself. Or rather, his large, bright-white suit. The NVidia guys showed that it reflects enough light to account for the lighting in the picture. If you don't include it, the lighting is off. I think that's pretty cool.
This doesn't, of course, settle anything for the conspiracy nuts, and I fully expect this to prove only that the NASA guys were wily bastards. And that sucks, because it sounds as if the brain power they're applying might well have turned up something more interesting if it weren't fixated on achieving a delusional result.
I see conspiracy theorists as an example of believing in a very unlikely scenario to boost your ego.
Suppose for a second that the Moon landing was faked. The level of conspiracy needed to do this and fool most of the people (including the Russians who would have called us out on it had we obviously been filming on a sound stage) would have been massive. You'd need engineers, scientists, government workers, astronauts, etc. All of them dedicated to pretending that we went to the Moon when we didn't. This would have to be a VERY well organized conspiracy. (Which alone should debunk this theory. Government is too inept to pull something like this off.)
Now, your normal person buys into the "faked Moon landing", but you are special. You are more intelligent and perceptive than they are. You see through the conspiracy and spot the flaws. In fact, you are so brilliant that the flaws seem stupidly obvious to you - which only elevates you more above the sheeple who buy the official story.
Of course, this also makes it nearly impossible to have a conspiracy theorist admit that he's been debunked. To admit this, the conspiracy theorist must lower his mental image of himself from "stands tall above all those stupid masses" to "actually a bit below those masses." This is unacceptable so any proof that the conspiracy theorist is wrong is rationalized away as being a) planted by the conspiracy to trick the foolish, b) irrelevant enough to ignore completely, or c) not proof debunking $MOVED_GOAL_POST.
You could load the conspiracy theorists into a rocket, send them to the moon, and they would still claim it was all faked just to preserve their mental image of themselves.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
“I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.” Neil Armstrong
Good-bye