Slashdot Mirror
Flat Earther Plans New Rocket Launch, Predicts Super Bowl-Sized Ratings (phillyvoice.com)
Self-taught rocket scientist/daredevil "Mad" Mike Hughes will finally launch his homemade rocket in two weeks -- despite "anonymous online haters questioning his every move." An anonymous reader quotes PhillyVoice:
He's found some private land in the "ghost town" of Amboy, California -- complete with a brand-spanking-new road that'll enable him to get his motor home and rocket gear to the site... "It'll be a vertical launch, me strapped into the rocket with 6,000 pounds of thrust, going up about three-eighths of a mile," he said, noting it's a prologue to a major launch this Fourth of July weekend. "It's the ultimate Wile E. Coyote move."
As with the scrubbed mission, this is in part an event which he hopes will get people to investigate the ideology which holds the earth is flat -- despite quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. He said it would've happened back in November if international publicity hadn't prompted government bureaucrats to "cover their asses" by pointing out that his launch site crept 150 feet into federal land. "I could've been arrested so at that point, I just went home and got back to work," he said... "But guess what? It's about to happen again... I should get more viewers than the Super Bowl," said Hughes, adding the launch will be aired on Noize TV [a video-on-demand service].
Noize TV has already posted video of a new interview with Hughes, touting his upcoming launch at 3 p.m. on Saturday, February 3, the day before the Super Bowl (which Hughes calls "nothing but bullshit.")
Hughes says he's also filing to run for Governor of California.
As with the scrubbed mission, this is in part an event which he hopes will get people to investigate the ideology which holds the earth is flat -- despite quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. He said it would've happened back in November if international publicity hadn't prompted government bureaucrats to "cover their asses" by pointing out that his launch site crept 150 feet into federal land. "I could've been arrested so at that point, I just went home and got back to work," he said... "But guess what? It's about to happen again... I should get more viewers than the Super Bowl," said Hughes, adding the launch will be aired on Noize TV [a video-on-demand service].
Noize TV has already posted video of a new interview with Hughes, touting his upcoming launch at 3 p.m. on Saturday, February 3, the day before the Super Bowl (which Hughes calls "nothing but bullshit.")
Hughes says he's also filing to run for Governor of California.
Is this what Slashdot has come to?
This is like something that Q would teleport Picard off the bridge to watch just to WASTE HIS TIME.
Of course, it will be like the stunt rider who was told that the crowd wasn't there to watch him jump thirteen buses. They were there to watch him jump twelve-and-a-half.
This guy doesn't seem to be a flat earther. The clowns funding him might be, but not necessarily even that many of them are.
I think the flat earth part is mostly just a gimmick to get extra media coverage.
Nowadays when we’re at the point that even a casual investigation by a grade school student can locate definitive evidence that the earth is round... it takes a special breed of delusional imbecile to hold onto the belief that the earth is flat.
Here’s to you, Mike Hughes!
#DeleteChrome
Nuff said.
Flat Earther Plans New Rocket Launch, Predicts Super Bowl-Sized Crater
FTFY.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
90% of flat-hearters are trolls.
9% are ten-year-old kids who believe anything they see on youtube.
The one percent remaining are con-artists trying to make a buck, and succeeding.
He probably doesn't understand anything more than very simple cause and effect. Deducing indirect effects is beyond this fellow's ken.
Truculent ignorance is often self-resolving, especially when high energies and risks are involved.
Who are you calling flat? He's not flat... yet!
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
Do you think if I started a Kickstarter campaign to sponsor his live stream with a mental health "get help" campaign that I could hit a million dollars in 24 hours?
Wasn't there already a non-government extra-terrestrial live video event where we could see the curvature of the Earth from above? Or is this one of those things where anybody who produces evidence we don't like is clearly in-on-it and part of the big-as-we-need-it-to-be conspiracy?
Wouldn't just using hot air balloons be much easier and affordable? Unless flat Earthers have a "scientific theory" on how a camera mounted on a balloon will affect imaging.
If you had any doubt.
Until now, I *literally* thought that flat-earthers were a straw-man argument that snowflakes used to point out how intellectually superior they are by making fun of them.
I didn't think there would actually be a real one out there somewhere.
Who...probably really isn't, but loves publicity, and just like the people on facebook who drink hot sauce or pour vinegar into their eyeballs in front of a camera for attention, here's a fellow who queued into something to attention whore.
It'll be the most watched suicide attempt in history...Who wants popcorn?
Is this why Sydney, Australia is undergoing the the most extreme heat wave on record?
He says he'll go up 3/8ths of a mile, that's just under 2,000ft. A commercial airline flight goes higher than that, as well as some cheap high altitude balloons. Of course the point of this isn't to prove anything except that this is a publicity stunt.
This needs to be live viewing feed (for about 5 minutes) because it will only happen once and you want to make sure it's not censored by the crazy round planet people. He needs to get a circus monkey to push the launch button just to compliment the entertainment value. We'll get to see the first human firework that celebrates his own Darwin Award. Even if he survives, he won't see much at 2000 feet that you can't see from a skyscraper (Burj Khalifa is more than 1/2 a mile tall).
Ironically, it is the flat-earther crowd that uses the snowflake term the most. Evangelicals. What can you do?
Yes. You notice your Sun at sunset and sunrise is pretty powerful? Well, here in winterful northern latitudes, it is the opposite, but has already about a month of strengthening since winter solstice.
That shouldn't happen on the globe. There is no explanation for it.
"Stop making stupid people famous" comes to mind...
What is the fucking point? This person could gather more evidence of the earth being round or flat by spending a few hundred on a commercial airline flight and looking out the fucking window at 5.5-6 miles up
Yes. You notice your Sun at sunset and sunrise is pretty powerful? Well, here in winterful northern latitudes, it is the opposite, but has already about a month of strengthening since winter solstice.
That shouldn't happen on the globe. There is no explanation for it.
Pythagoras has a bridge in Greece he'd love to sell you.
because the angle changes. FYI, the atmosphere is not uniformly distributed. It bulges out at the equator and this thinner at the poles. Which is exactly what to expect from a fluid on a spinning sphere-ish object.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Idiots like this one should to everything they can to remove their presence from this world. If they do it in an entertaining fashion, all the better.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Evangelicals are people with no morals who pretend to have morals. The people who use that term are typically a different breed: People who have no morals and don't pretend to.
No, the angle at sunrise is zero.
The angle does NOT change just because it rises from a more southern point. That is the trick they put in your mind.
You can go look up the 'bulge' of the atmosphere on wikipedia. It is insufficient at the equator to have any effect on a sunrise/sunset in the moderate northern latitudes.
That was the elevation change for my 10 mile hike.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Flat earthers are a different breed altogether. With your typical conspiracy (9-11 inside job, fake the moon landing, vaccines cause autism, etc.), all it takes is a combination of a good story, not understood or misunderstood science, and a belief that you know something special that most people don't. It also becomes more popular as time gets further and further away from the initial event. But a key element is the inability for everyone or the average person to recreate the original variables surrounding the conspiracy. (We cannot recreate 9-11, we cannot recreate a moon landing limiting our technology and knowledge to what we had in 1968, etc.
But with flat earthers? There are literally hundreds of ways today the average human can observe that the Earth is round. There's no depth of science to it. One can ask themselves the question, "Why can't I see the Rocky Mountains from my house?" Or, one can go find a straight road (perhaps on the salt flats or on ND Hwy 46), get a pair of binoculars or a good telescoping lens on a tripod, watch a car drive by, and watch it disappear over the horizon, then ask the question, "Would the car disappear if the Earth was flat?" Or just go onto YouTube and watch all the videos made floating weather balloons up to the stratosphere, where the camera can capture the curvature of the Earth. Or talk to an airplane pilot. Or control tower personnel whose equations they use to calculate distances, vectors, and flight plans would fail miserably if they were to use Euclidian Geometry instead of Spherical Geometry. Or duplicate Eratosthenes' experiment. (Yes, that one's far more complicated than watching video's on YouTube, but if it worked for some dead white Greek dude over two thousand years ago, who didn't have the internet or Google, then it can work for anyone today as well.)
Most conspiracy theories choose to ignore expert opinions because they're incapable of understanding the science themselves. Flat-earthers are fully capable of understanding the science; they just refuse to understand.
I would strongly urge Mike Hughes to postpone filing until after the launch... just sayin'
Go eat a Tide pod.
and on the internet in general do no seem to understand what flat-earther movement is aimed at. It is supposed to be there to help you engage your critical thinking first and not immediately deride everything you have been told is true by laughing at it.
Wouldn't a ship, an inertial navigation recorder, and some sailing around in the Southern Hemisphere be an easier and safer way to test the flat earth bit? The distances and angles between stuff would have to be fairly different between round and flat. Of course acknowledging that would require flat-earthers to explain why everyone involved moving ships and planes around down there haven't said anything.
Right there is an imbecile folks.
When I lay the world map down on the table it's flat, how can you argue with that?
They can have a helicopter film it from above his whole light path.
If the earth is a flat surface, then it has an edge (unless the earth is infinite in area).
Why doesn't Mike Hughes walk to the edge of the earth, point to it, and say, "There's the edge of the flat earth"?
And then proceed to die horribly, knowing he was wrong.
Flat earth'ers are insane and the fact he wants to fly up on a home made rocket instead of sending a camera or something like that, just help proving that fact.
Wouldn't it be cheaper for him to just fly a basic Cesna - he's certainly get higher - 10,000 feet vs 2,000.
..........FULL STOP.
If the earth is flat how thick is it? I know, its shaped like a lens, a galaxy if you will. It's actually kind of fun to think up possible explanations why the earth is flat. You know, come to think about it, if the earth is spinning on an axis and gravity is acting toward the center, I guess it would want to flatten out to some extent at the poles due to centripetal force. I could run some calculations and..nah.
So why is the winter Sun weak and yellower than the summer sun at the same altitude in the sky?
Based on your ignorance, you must be from the American South. I grew up in the far North, and can tell you that the sun is not any more yellow during winter at high latitudes; if anything it is more white.
At least at latitudes where there is a little bit of sun during winter. Where I started out at 70 degrees North, there are weeks with no sun, and the day the sun would finally peek up above the ocean to the South is celebrated. That was yesterday, this year, in my mother's town.
Explain how that happens with a flat earth...
The sunshine is slightly weaker during winter, but that is in part due to the temperature: a colder atmosphere is quite a bit denser.
And in part because the Earth is not a sphere, it's slightly pear shaped, so when the sun is closer to the South, it traverses more atmosphere than when it's closer to the East or West.
If he doesn't chicken out, he's likely to be evenly distributed across a pretty large area.
pity he's using steam instead of a liquid fueled rocket.
Yeah, he can probably beat the superbowl. The Fookin` Kneelers destroyed the ratings.
They gonna launch, gonna fail and gonna blame on NASA, I guarantee you that.
Let me know if you can spot the North start from Australia.
Better yet, describe the equation that relates linear distance from the equator with the angular elevation of the North Star
Good luck, flat earth moron.
He will never launch. Launching will put the lie to his flat-eartherism. It can never happen.
kill your self
You get a whole bunch of idiots thinking they can do shit that will get them killed. Fucking seppos. leave the science to the non-shithole countries.
Find me one thing US science has done without help from other countries.
YOU CAN'T.
fucking retarded seppos
I have gotten to this point regarding the Trump "presidency": Just tell me when it's over.
This is also how I feel about this guy. Slashdot, would you PLEASE stop posting stories about this schmuck until he either successfully launches himself high enough to be able to say, upon landing, "oops, looks like I was wrong, it is round after all," or he launches himself into the side of something really big, hard, and generally resistant to rockets, in which case, I will very much like to hear about it. Once. One more time. Then no more about him.
So to be clear, Slashposters and Slasheditors, please let me know when this moron/attention-whore either somehow manages to get some homemade POS to fly, learns what the saner among us already know, or inters himself using a homemade rapid-burial system, and until then, can you PLEASE stop posting each and every bullshit promise he makes about what he's ALLEGEDLY going to do until he has actually DONE it?
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
"Come on down and receive this wonderful trophy" ... "Oh ummm he's dead is he?"
Given past presidential history in the U.S., he might have a fair chance. Or... scratch it. Why not run for president right away? Chances there are better, I've heard.
Looks like "Real Men of Genius" might have a comeback.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And risk missing the opportunity to witness a Darwin Award getting won on live TV ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The new road will be good. I've heard the slightest bump causes parts to fall off the rocket. It even broke before getting it out of the driveway.
You've never been on an airplane, have you?
Dumbass.
This guy's not going to launch - again. He's just doing this for the momentary celebrity (and thus sponsors), and to voice his ideology for a moment. He didn't intend to launch and he still doesn't.
....ROTFMFAO! Ooh, I pee'd a little!
I hope he'll have enough time to draw a map of the flat Earth, including the obligatory "Here be dragons" note.
#DeleteFacebook
#DeleteFacebook
Could it be that this guy has some serious psychological issues that could get him, or others, hurt or killed?
Been so thick.
Didn't Evel Kenevil already sort of do this test?
Anyhow I have a new conspiracy theory I want to float for the first time here on slashdot.
I think this so=called flat earther is really part of the conspiracy to convince us the earth is not flat. See he's only pretending to be a flat earther so when he goes up and say "golly the earth isn't flat" we'll all be convinced and the Round-Earth Conspiracy wins!
It makes sense too. What's amazing really is that with all the space faring nations and corprorations and people launching their own balloon, the Round Earth Conspiracy is having to constantly get new people on board. It's hard work to keep a lid on the secret the earth is flat. It would there fore be much more likely that this guy is part of the con then not part of it. So how can we trust him not to be in on. It would make a lot more sense if he was in on it too.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is why they took lead out of paint
I've noticed that the Sun is the same all year round. It is traveling through more air at sunrise and sunset, so it is less intense, not more.
So, another unscrupulous narcissist hijacks clickbait farms to attract attention to a pointlessly-idiotic stunt.
In what universe is this even arguably "News for Nerds?"
Is there any "nerd" anywhere who takes flat-eartherism seriously?
Seriously?
This attention whore was never a flat-earth advocate - until he figured out that they're dumb enough to be willing to bankroll his stupid, steam-powered suicide machine. Now he's suddenly a passionate proponent of an idea so fundamentally idiotic, so stubbornly anti-scientific, so willfully blind to all the scientific evidence since at least as early as the 13th century that only aggressive dimwits like Atlanta rapper B o B take it seriously?
I'm not even going to facepalm or shake my metaphorical finger at /.'s so-called "editors" over this non-story, because all the evidence to date leads to the inescapable conclusion that such reactions only encourage them to post still more of this kind of horseshit. I am going to say that such blatant manipulation of the click-hungry meda - including /. - becomes progressively more tiresome with each iteration.
Downvoting crap like this is exactly what meta-moderation is for, folks ...
Check out my novel.
If he sees the curvature of the Earth heâ(TM)ll just claim it âoeproofâ of a Flat Earth since heâ(TM)ll view it as the edge of a disk
Best thing is for his landing to go awry and pull a Wile E Coyote in the literal sense to rid this planet of at least one ignorant fucktard
No, on your first sentence. Start your observations today.
Yes, on your second.
If the atmosphere was the cause, it would turn the sun redder, not just dimmer. And if you check the figures, it can't be the atmosphere. It doesn't thicken at anywhere close to the rate that would be required to have an effect.
The Earth is not pear shaped to any degree significant enough to cause an effect. But of course, that is a hypothetical argument, as it isn't a sphere at all.
You've got the most important detail right: the sun is weaker. Unfortunately, you're so far north that you don't have a year-round reference to do the comparison. As to how this works on the flat Earth? Amazingly simple: the heavens are not the Earth. They follow their own laws.
Check out the eclipses I linked. You'll be surprised.
It must feel great knowing so many people will be tuning in to watch you fall on your face!
Is this why Sydney, Australia is undergoing the the most extreme heat wave on record?
Well, duh, of course it is - the Sun if off orbiting close to Australia during the winter, and orbits close to America during the summer so of course it's cold in Australia then.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Based on the history of rocket development I'm guessing he will.
Gotta STOP making stupid people famous.
But without Hollywood or news shows, what would people watch?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Parent post shouldn't have been voted down, it is probably pretty accurate. I think that most flat-earthers are either doing it for attention or money. I suppose a few might have genuine mental health problems. But it is pretty hard to swallow that someone who is sane would actually think that the Earth is flat. in the face of modern technology and the evidence it presents.
Of course this guy is a troll. He has the technical acumen to construct a primitive rocket, but yet it has not occurred to him to just put a camera on a small model rocket to 'prove' his theory rather than risk his life on an expensive and complicated stunt? Weather balloons are super cheap compared to rocketry, and those can go to the edges of space. He has a number of options to test his theories with little effort.
He isn't trying to prove anything, he just wants attention.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
We were enjoying a fine discussion without bring up bitcoin.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Perhaps he could just book a ticket to Singapore, hop a plane over to Europe, and then come back to LAX? For a couple thousand bucks he could see that nobody is clinging to the edge of the world... just saying?!
> If the atmosphere was the cause, it would turn the sun redder,
It does. We get sunrises and sunsets where the clouds are turned red. This happens (as well as the sun appearing to be yellow when it is actually white) because the nitrogen in the air scatters blue light. This scattering makes the sky blue, when otherwise it would be black. The more air that the sunlight travels through, the more blue is scattered and the deeper into the spectrum the scattering affects. At sunrise and sunset the sunlight has to travel through more air, 'sideways' as it were, than it does when overhead. The redness is seen when the sun goes close to the horizon, or below it, and shines on the underside of the clouds.
But, of course, the 'flat earth' doesn't have horizon, or sunrise or sunset, the sun is _always_ 4,000 miles up in the sky and thus must _always_ be more than 20 degrees or so 'up'. It must be my imagination that I see a sunset every day and a sunrise every morning, those couldn't _possibly_ happen.
From my point on Earth, 45 degrees south, the 'flat earth' sunrise should be in the North-East, or even further North. At this time of the year (summer) we get sunrise somewhat south of east and sunset somewhat south of west. Even casual observations disprove your 'flat earth' and consign to the ignorance of Biblical fundamentalism.
Because Australia isn't real and we are all actors perpetuating the myth. Hi from 'Melbourne'.
The rocket was built by ACME.
I mean, I always love a good fireworks show. Also love watching Darwin in action too.
I'm pretty sure the AC here is married to the Timecube guy.
Paint, drying.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"