Hey, after owning it for 10 months, my 3GS now only gets about 3 hours of battery power, and that's it just sitting there, 3G-only. So I can't do any worse.
Well, RCA did create NBC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC), to make content for their devices (in a 1920s kind of way). So that's actually an exact parallel to the Apple situation we're discussing (which is nuts in and of itself, but that's for a different thread)
What everyone is ignoring is the fact that this will be geo-targeted to the U.S. only - I guarantee it. (I can say that with confidence because the place I work pays Comedy Central good money for the online rights to South Park in our country.)
And no way this will go on any peer-to-peer network, or be downloadable without DRM. Content owners are still eager to divide up their rights (TV, broadband, mobile, whatever) by geographic location.
You don't think these NBC shows will be available outside of the U.S., do you? Remember, NBC buys the rights for its TV shows from the Hollywood studios, licensed for the U.S. only. Those studios then sell the TV (and now sometimes broadband/mobile) rights to Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
It's got nothing to do with the CRTC. The CRTC could vanish tomorrow and you'd still have the same restrictions. It's about contracts and territories. Most content holders make waaaay more money selling off rights country-by-country; it's almost unheard of to buy international rights. Why pay all that extra money when you can't make it back? What advertiser in the U.S. wants to buy eyeballs in Dubai?
Reminds me of the recently announced Photosynth from Microsoft that seems to do something similar, but focuses on stitching images together rather than replacing parts of existing ones.
Any Internet venture is exempt from CRTC regulation, since a 1999 ruling by the commission. It's a very broad exemption too, that's been applied to mobile TV on cell phones, and interactive television. And there's no sign the exemption is going anywhere any time soon. So no Canadian content regulations, and no approval needed to launch an Internet radio station.
Actually, since it's 164M lines (not people) that really means 164M households. In Canada, there are 12M households, but 30M people. I would wager worldwide the ratio is more like 6:1 than 2.5:1, so let's say roughly that out of 1 billion households 164M have broadband.
I think that's pretty good when you consider half of those households must be in India, China and Africa.
It's about the only PIM I've seen that can handle things like 'tomorrow', 'a week Friday' or 'next Thursday' in a date field and figure it out for you. Makes entering appointments and tasks quicker and more intuitive for me.
I just had my Bell Canada landline cancelled today (I live in mid-town Toronto).
The CRTC (government regulator) ordered Bell to do what it promised last year by the end of March 2005, and they did. Bell is "soft-launching" it for now (i.e., you have to call and ask, they aren't advertising it on their website, for the obvious reason that they are rolling out their own VoIP in Ontario/Quebec this year)
But now I have Sympatico Hi-Speed (2mb/s) and Vonage VoIP (500min/month for $20CDN), with no landline (which beats $35/month for a landline with just Call Display)
I've had XM Radio in my car in Toronto since the spring, and it works great. The only time I lose the signal is when I go behind a tall building or underneath an overpass, and it's only for a few seconds.
I bought the Delphi Roady kit online from a place in Brooklyn. I signed up for XM with my Canadian credit card, and used a relative's home in Florida as the billing address. But from what I've read online, you could pick any U.S. address at random - they don't send you anything you need (just a welcome guide).
I'm going out east to Nova Scotia in September, and I fully expect to have a signal the whole way. Don't forget, a lot of the population of Canada lives south of states like Minnesota or Maine. And since both XM and Sirius have applied to the CRTC for the right to sell their service in Canada, they must know their signal covers 90% of Canada's population - they sure wouldn't use more satellites just for lil old us.
That's what I like about the Digisette MP3 Player I have - it just pops in my car's old-fashioned cassette deck. There's a bit of hiss during playback, just like a real tape, but tolerable.
I've just turned in my last SA3000 set-top, finally making the switch completely to HD, and now have two SA 3100HD terminals. I believe my cableco (Rogers in Toronto, CA) is testing a SA PVR now.
However, I fear that all the cableco PVRs are standard-def only, which either (a) leaves me out in the cold, or (b) means I'd have to stack set-tops and pay for a 3rd box.
Is anyone using, or know of, a Hi-def PVR coming from Scientic Atlanta? (Or even Motorola, which would put pressure on SA)
Unless you loan the pen to someone who has the special paper, that won't work.
Anoto uses paper with grey dots on it, aligned in a grid, that (for some reason or another) is part of a larger 60,000,000-sq-km unique grid (so no two pieces of paper are the same). The 'pen' has a camera in it, that captures the grey dots as you write, and stores the coordinates. This must use very little memory, but does force you to use more expensive (and likely harder-to-find) paper.
Still, I've preordered mine at amazon.com for $199. It's supposed to be available Nov 8.
I don't think many people realize this, but Betacam was to some extent based on Betamax technology. I remember when I started in TV in the mid-80s, you could (in a pinch) buy a retail Betamax L-750 cassette and stick it in a Betacam recorder. The cassettes were the same size, the tape the same width and the transport mechanism was essentially the same. The difference was that a L-750 cassette in a Betamax player could record 4.5 hrs; in a Betacam recorder, you got 30 minutes. (The tape had to move much faster to record a higher-resolution broadcast image.)
Today, we've got Betacam SP (metal), Betacam SX (compressed digital) and D-Beta (digital). They still use the same Betamax-size cassettes in portable Betacam units, but there is a wider cassette used inside facilities that can record 90-100 minutes.
Our little group at work (currently outside the firewall, behind a web server director) is just about to start installing some 802.11 stuff, for tablet and iPaq access in the building. Trouble is we are soon moving into new offices after being purchased, and we'd like to bring our 802.11 things with us. We'll be in a DMZ between two firewalls, but is there anything we can do to make the IT guys less jittery about hooking this up?
This is a detailed refutation from Michael Shermer, reknowned skeptic and very patient man:
E-SKEPTIC MAGAZINE FOR FEBRUARY 17, 2001
Copyright 2001 Skeptic magazine, Skeptics Society, Michael Shermer
Permission to print or distribute without permission.
For further information go to www.skeptic.com
FOX GOES TO THE MOON, BUT NASA NEVER DID
THE NO-MOONIES CULT STRIKES
By Michael Shermer
For those of you who saw the abysmal Fox program Thursday night, February 15,
"Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?," I hope you did not lose faith
in the network that brings us the finest television show of the last several
years--The Simpsons. I would love to tell you that it the show was a joke,
like the one Fox did a few years ago about machines that take revenge on
their owners--my favorite was the angry car that drove over a cliff; yeah,
that's showing those bad humans who's boss! (Woody Allen has a funny routine
similar to this, where his toaster, the building elevator, and other machines
start making anti-Semitic remarks). Alas, this was a vintage Fox show that
begins with the usual disingenuous disclaimer:
"The following program deals with a controversial subject. The theories
expressed are not the only possible explanation. Viewers are invited to make
a judgment based on all available information."
That information, of course, is not provided. To cover themselves morally
(legally, anyone can say anything in America, no matter how vacuous it may
be) they had a "spokesperson" from NASA who was allegedly there to answer the
claims of the no-moon conspiracy "theorists." (To call this a "theory" or
these tofuheads "theorists" is to so butcher the language of science that I
cannot stomach it. Let's just call them the "no-moonies.") Unfortunately,
this NASA guy had obviously never read any of the conspiracy claims, or the
answers to them, for this is the biggest no-brainer debunking in skeptical
history that anyone who actually knew something about the Apollo space
program could have handled.
What particularly angers me about it is that Fox Family already did a special
on the moon conspiracy--I did it for Exploring the Unknown! And, irony on
irony, our token actor voice was the same Mitch Pileggi from X-Files who
narrated this special. (The docutainment formula by the way, followed by
every one of these type shows on every network designed the same way by every
production company is that you must have a "celebrity" voice for, get this,
"credibility." Yeah, okay, this is America so I guess I understand . . ..)
Of course, we should not shoot the messenger, for Mitch is an intelligent guy
who happens to read scripts for a living. And for all he knew when he did his
voice over, the slated NASA guy really was going to answer all the conspiracy
claims.
So, let's go through this point by painful point, just in case the statistic
at the top of the show--that 10 percent of the American public believes we
never went to the moon--is accurate. DISCLAIMER (hey, I can have one too):
The Skeptics Society motto from Spinoza--"I have made a ceaseless effort not
to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand
them"--does not apply here. Sorry, this conspiracy theory is so dumb that I
think it best we adopt H.L. Mencken's observation that "one good horse laugh
is worth a thousand syllogisms."
1. CLAIM: The moon landing was faked on a movie set. Proof: there are clearly
two sources of light in the movies and stills taken on the moon. Since there
is only one source of light in the sky (the sun) how can we explain the fact
that even in shadows there is obvious "fill" light that illuminates various
objects that, back lit from the sun, should be in near total darkness. Much
of the show was spent on this point as they showed photo after photo, film
after film, of "filled in" photos. Fill light is exactly what you would see
on a studio set.
ANSWER: Even granting that NASA's rocket scientists were too dumb to have
thought of this and thus tipped their conspiracy hand to the no-moonies who,
apparently, are smarter than rocket scientists, there were actually three
sources of light on the moon: the sun, the earth that reflects the sun's
light, and the moon itself, also reflecting light. The albedo (reflectivity)
of the earth is quite high because of the amount of clouds, so the sun acted
as the light filler via the earth. And the moon was, to say the least, rather
close, and also reflected light.
2. CLAIM: The American flag was "waving" in the allegedly airless environment
of the moon. How can this be? Proof: film footage showing the astronauts
planting the flag, with the flag clearly waving.
ANSWER: Of course the flag was "waving" while the astronaut was fiddling with
it back and forth as he jammed it into the hole. But the moment he let go of
the flag, it mysteriously stopped waving. Umm, coincidence? I don't think so.
3. CLAIM: There was no blast crator beneath the LEM lander. Proof:
photographs of the LEM with no blast crator and a NASA painting made before
the first landing, showing what a NASA artist thought might happen when the
LEM landed (big blast crator).
ANSWER: (1) The LEM engine was variable--the astronauts could control the
thrust and, of course, as they eased their way down to the surface they
throttled back on the engine. (2) There was only a couple of inches of moon
dust on the surface, beneath which was a solid surface that would not be
effected by the blast of the LEM engine. Before Apollo 11 landed, there was
much debate among scientists about the amount of moon dust that would have
accumulated over billions of years. Some speculated that there could be
several feet of dust, into which the LEM and the astronauts would sink.
Others said just a few inches. The latter were right.
4. After the blast crator from the LEM engine was created, all the lunar dust
around the LEM should have been displaced, yet there's Armstrong's footprint
clearly imprinted into the lunar dust just a foot away from the LEM's landing
pad. What gives?
ANSWER: Again, the moon is airless, so the LEM engine blast did indeed send
dust flying, after which it came back down because there is no wind to
scatter it. The blast of dust happened mainly directly underneath the LEM
engine.
5. If there was so much moon dust all over the place, being kicked up by the
LEM engine, by the rover, by the astronauts, why is everything so clean?
ANSWER: It wasn't. Moon dust was a problem because, in fact, it got all over
everything and the astronauts spents hours after their moon walks cleaning
their suits so as not to get the dust all over the interior of the LEM.
6. CLAIM: When the top half of the LEM took off to return the astronauts to
the command module, leaving the lower half sitting there on the moon's
surface, there was no "blast" flame like we see on earth. The LEM just seems
to leap off the base like it was yanked up by cables.
ANSWER: First of all, you can clearly see in the film footage of the launch,
that there IS quite a blast as dust and other particles go flying, even one
piece right toward the camera. Second, there is no air on the moon, so there
can be no blast "flame" like there is on earth. This is why rocket engines in
space have to carry their own oxygen (in liquid form). Unlike jet engines
that suck in air, rockets carry all the chemicals they need and mix them at
the time the "burn" is required. And "burn" is not quite the right term,
since it implies a "flame" should be present. In space there can be no flame
because there is no oxygen to fuel a flame tail coming out of the rocket
nozzle. All that is happening is that chemicals being stored in separate
containers are being released together to cause a reaction, the energy from
which flows out rapidly through a nozzle, after which Newton's law of "equal
and opposite reaction" takes over.
7. On earth, the LEM lander simulator used by the astronauts for practice was
obviously unstable. In fact, shortly before the Apollo 11 flight Neil
Armstrong barely escaped with his life as his simulator crashed and he
ejected just seconds before impact. Imagine how tricky it would have been to
land the actual LEM, with two astronauts shifting around inside and all that
additional weight. Fox even managed to find a physicist named Ralph Rene who
proclaimed that it would have been impossible to land the LEM because of its
inherent instability.
ANSWER: Armstrong did indeed barely escape with his life in the simulator.
But practice makes perfect, and these guys practiced, and practiced, and
practiced until they got it down. A bicycle is also inherently unstable. The
damn thing just falls over standing still, and even moving it topples over
after a few meters of pedaling, UNTIL YOU LEARN HOW TO RIDE IT! Plus, and
these no-moonies never seem to get this, what happens on earth is not the
same as what happens on the moon. Air on earth, no air on the moon. Lots of
gravity on the earth, a lot less gravity on the moon. Things big and heavy on
earth will be big and light on the moon. And we can even calculate exactly
how much different! These NASA scientists were so good they even calculated
the effects of the gravitational pull from large and irregular moon masses as
the LEM flew closely over them.
8. There are no stars in the moon sky, yet when you look up at night from
earth you see lots of stars.
ANSWER: How many stars do you see in photographs taken at night, on earth, of
terrestrial objects? That's right. None. Well, okay, MAYBE you'll see Venus,
but that's not a star. If you want to shoot stars in the night sky you have
to aim your camera and leave the shutter open for at least several seconds.
The astronauts were not there to take pictures of the sky. Also, since it is
very bright on the moon (no air to scatter the sunlight) and the astronauts
were wearing white space suits, the camera F-stop would have been set way
down, and the shutter speed quite fast. Stars are too faint to appear on the
film emulsion.
9. If you run the moon film footage at double speed it looks like it was
filmed on earth, ergo it WAS filmed on earth.
ANSWER: Balderdash! Double speed doesn't look at all like it was filmed on
earth. I might have missed their explanation for this because I was laughing
so hard, but that's what they said.
10. Why are the photographs so nicely framed and in focus, etc.
ANSWER: Because these are the few photographs that we get to see from the
thousands of photographs taken. There is a beautiful book released last year
with some of the very best moon photographs. It is magnificant. One glance
through it makes it clear that these photographs were indeed taken on the
moon which was aptly described by Buzz Aldrin as "magnificant desolation."
11. The Van Allen radiation belts surrounding the Earth would have fried the
astronauts with a lethal dose of radiation.
ANSWER: Wrong. If you blast right through the Van Allen belts it is no
problem, which is what the Apollo astronauts did. X-rays would be lethal too,
if you sat there soaking in them long enough. A very real problem, however,
are cosmic rays. They are not a problem on a short flight like to the moon,
but in long flights that might last years, like to Mars, they could be a
serious problem.
12. NASA murdered Gus Grissom and the other Apollo 1 astronauts, along with a
bunch of other astronauts in assorted other "accidents," because they were
about to go public with the hoax.
ANSWER: The show began by saying that the moon conspiracy was hatched late in
the game when NASA realized they would never make it, yet we are to believe
that years before they had been planning the hoax, Grissom caught on to it
and decided to go public, and then they killed him. But that's not the real
answer here. The real answer is that, like most conspiracy theories, there is
no positive evidence in support, only negative evidence in the form of "they
covered it up." Like the curse of the mummy, anyone who died within 20 years
of the discovery of Tut's tomb, died because of the curse, not because people
die. Let's face it, being a test pilot and an astronaut is not the safest job
in the world. People died because it is an inherently dangerous job.
13. NASA managed to keep all this a secret for all these years with tens of
thousands of people keeping their mouths shut. This from the same NASA folks
who were too stupid to remember to set up the movie set properly so as to
account for the proper light, blast crator, etc.
ANSWER: I once asked G. Gordon Liddy (who should know) about conspiracy
theories. He said three people can keep a secret as long as two of them are
dead. To think that thousands of people would keep their mouths shut is too
ridiculous to consider.
14. NASA STUPIDITY: Going to the moon is very, very hard. Look at all those
rockets that blew up in the 1950s and early 1960s, and all those other
problems to solve. Space travel is an insoluble problem. Ergo, NASA could not
have solved it.
ANSWER: There is no question that NASA, as a gigantic bureaucracy, is capable
of mistakes and flubs, and perhaps even a few cover-ups. But this argument
reminds me of the pyramidiots who think that the Egyptians were too inept to
have built the pyramids. Their reasoning goes like this: "if I can't think of
how they did it then they couldn't have thought of it either, ergo they
didn't do it." It is really an indictment of the claimants own limited
thinking skills.
15. ART IMITATES FICTION: I cannot let this end without one trivial
observation: the Fox show began with footage from a conspiracy movie from
1978 in which the astronauts are asked to fake a landing on the moon because
NASA realized they could never pull it off and if they didn't their budget
would be cut, etc., The film was entitled Capricorn One, and the astronauts
refused to cooperate so NASA tried to have them killed. But I noticed that
Fox was most discrete in not showing the actors playing the astronauts: one
of them was O.J. Simpson who, in the film just like on the football field and
in Brentwood, showed his amazing ability to cut and run . . . .
RATING OF FOX: Two thumbs down to Fox for not providing the above
explanations, for setting up a lame duck as a NASA expert who didn't know the
explanations, and for pretending that this was a balanced show about a real
theory that people allegedly take seriously.
RATING OF NASA: Two thumbs up for solving an insoluble problem. Now, quit
wasting our money growing tomatoes 200 miles up when we should be making
blast crators, leaving footprints, and taking photographs on Mars by now. Ad
astra!!
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, 1.5% -- it's a 1 in 8 chance *over* 8 years
Hey, after owning it for 10 months, my 3GS now only gets about 3 hours of battery power, and that's it just sitting there, 3G-only. So I can't do any worse.
Well, RCA did create NBC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC), to make content for their devices (in a 1920s kind of way). So that's actually an exact parallel to the Apple situation we're discussing (which is nuts in and of itself, but that's for a different thread)
I thought it was just me - my Karma's in good standing, but I haven't been offered the chance to moderate for a couple of years
Actually he does - it's in the linked article, on the first page:
"Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men."
I'm in Toronto, and I'm not paying any dry-loop fee - just my monthly Sympatico charge.
What everyone is ignoring is the fact that this will be geo-targeted to the U.S. only - I guarantee it. (I can say that with confidence because the place I work pays Comedy Central good money for the online rights to South Park in our country.)
And no way this will go on any peer-to-peer network, or be downloadable without DRM. Content owners are still eager to divide up their rights (TV, broadband, mobile, whatever) by geographic location.
You don't think these NBC shows will be available outside of the U.S., do you? Remember, NBC buys the rights for its TV shows from the Hollywood studios, licensed for the U.S. only. Those studios then sell the TV (and now sometimes broadband/mobile) rights to Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
It's got nothing to do with the CRTC. The CRTC could vanish tomorrow and you'd still have the same restrictions. It's about contracts and territories. Most content holders make waaaay more money selling off rights country-by-country; it's almost unheard of to buy international rights. Why pay all that extra money when you can't make it back? What advertiser in the U.S. wants to buy eyeballs in Dubai?
Reminds me of the recently announced Photosynth from Microsoft that seems to do something similar, but focuses on stitching images together rather than replacing parts of existing ones.
Any Internet venture is exempt from CRTC regulation, since a 1999 ruling by the commission. It's a very broad exemption too, that's been applied to mobile TV on cell phones, and interactive television. And there's no sign the exemption is going anywhere any time soon. So no Canadian content regulations, and no approval needed to launch an Internet radio station.
Actually, since it's 164M lines (not people) that really means 164M households. In Canada, there are 12M households, but 30M people. I would wager worldwide the ratio is more like 6:1 than 2.5:1, so let's say roughly that out of 1 billion households 164M have broadband.
I think that's pretty good when you consider half of those households must be in India, China and Africa.
It's about the only PIM I've seen that can handle things like 'tomorrow', 'a week Friday' or 'next Thursday' in a date field and figure it out for you. Makes entering appointments and tasks quicker and more intuitive for me.
I just had my Bell Canada landline cancelled today (I live in mid-town Toronto).
The CRTC (government regulator) ordered Bell to do what it promised last year by the end of March 2005, and they did. Bell is "soft-launching" it for now (i.e., you have to call and ask, they aren't advertising it on their website, for the obvious reason that they are rolling out their own VoIP in Ontario/Quebec this year)
But now I have Sympatico Hi-Speed (2mb/s) and Vonage VoIP (500min/month for $20CDN), with no landline (which beats $35/month for a landline with just Call Display)
I've had XM Radio in my car in Toronto since the spring, and it works great. The only time I lose the signal is when I go behind a tall building or underneath an overpass, and it's only for a few seconds.
I bought the Delphi Roady kit online from a place in Brooklyn. I signed up for XM with my Canadian credit card, and used a relative's home in Florida as the billing address. But from what I've read online, you could pick any U.S. address at random - they don't send you anything you need (just a welcome guide).
I'm going out east to Nova Scotia in September, and I fully expect to have a signal the whole way. Don't forget, a lot of the population of Canada lives south of states like Minnesota or Maine. And since both XM and Sirius have applied to the CRTC for the right to sell their service in Canada, they must know their signal covers 90% of Canada's population - they sure wouldn't use more satellites just for lil old us.
That's what I like about the Digisette MP3 Player I have - it just pops in my car's old-fashioned cassette deck. There's a bit of hiss during playback, just like a real tape, but tolerable.
p
http://www.digisette.com/en/products/DUOseries.as
I've just turned in my last SA3000 set-top, finally making the switch completely to HD, and now have two SA 3100HD terminals. I believe my cableco (Rogers in Toronto, CA) is testing a SA PVR now.
However, I fear that all the cableco PVRs are standard-def only, which either (a) leaves me out in the cold, or (b) means I'd have to stack set-tops and pay for a 3rd box.
Is anyone using, or know of, a Hi-def PVR coming from Scientic Atlanta? (Or even Motorola, which would put pressure on SA)
Unless you loan the pen to someone who has the special paper, that won't work.
Anoto uses paper with grey dots on it, aligned in a grid, that (for some reason or another) is part of a larger 60,000,000-sq-km unique grid (so no two pieces of paper are the same). The 'pen' has a camera in it, that captures the grey dots as you write, and stores the coordinates. This must use very little memory, but does force you to use more expensive (and likely harder-to-find) paper.
Still, I've preordered mine at amazon.com for $199. It's supposed to be available Nov 8.
It has ink in it, so that (a) you can see what you are writing on the special dotted paper, and (b) use it on old-fashioned 20th-century paper.
I don't think many people realize this, but Betacam was to some extent based on Betamax technology. I remember when I started in TV in the mid-80s, you could (in a pinch) buy a retail Betamax L-750 cassette and stick it in a Betacam recorder. The cassettes were the same size, the tape the same width and the transport mechanism was essentially the same. The difference was that a L-750 cassette in a Betamax player could record 4.5 hrs; in a Betacam recorder, you got 30 minutes. (The tape had to move much faster to record a higher-resolution broadcast image.)
Today, we've got Betacam SP (metal), Betacam SX (compressed digital) and D-Beta (digital). They still use the same Betamax-size cassettes in portable Betacam units, but there is a wider cassette used inside facilities that can record 90-100 minutes.
Our little group at work (currently outside the firewall, behind a web server director) is just about to start installing some 802.11 stuff, for tablet and iPaq access in the building. Trouble is we are soon moving into new offices after being purchased, and we'd like to bring our 802.11 things with us. We'll be in a DMZ between two firewalls, but is there anything we can do to make the IT guys less jittery about hooking this up?
This is a detailed refutation from Michael Shermer, reknowned skeptic and very patient man:
.)
E-SKEPTIC MAGAZINE FOR FEBRUARY 17, 2001
Copyright 2001 Skeptic magazine, Skeptics Society, Michael Shermer
Permission to print or distribute without permission.
For further information go to www.skeptic.com
FOX GOES TO THE MOON, BUT NASA NEVER DID
THE NO-MOONIES CULT STRIKES
By Michael Shermer
For those of you who saw the abysmal Fox program Thursday night, February 15,
"Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?," I hope you did not lose faith
in the network that brings us the finest television show of the last several
years--The Simpsons. I would love to tell you that it the show was a joke,
like the one Fox did a few years ago about machines that take revenge on
their owners--my favorite was the angry car that drove over a cliff; yeah,
that's showing those bad humans who's boss! (Woody Allen has a funny routine
similar to this, where his toaster, the building elevator, and other machines
start making anti-Semitic remarks). Alas, this was a vintage Fox show that
begins with the usual disingenuous disclaimer:
"The following program deals with a controversial subject. The theories
expressed are not the only possible explanation. Viewers are invited to make
a judgment based on all available information."
That information, of course, is not provided. To cover themselves morally
(legally, anyone can say anything in America, no matter how vacuous it may
be) they had a "spokesperson" from NASA who was allegedly there to answer the
claims of the no-moon conspiracy "theorists." (To call this a "theory" or
these tofuheads "theorists" is to so butcher the language of science that I
cannot stomach it. Let's just call them the "no-moonies.") Unfortunately,
this NASA guy had obviously never read any of the conspiracy claims, or the
answers to them, for this is the biggest no-brainer debunking in skeptical
history that anyone who actually knew something about the Apollo space
program could have handled.
What particularly angers me about it is that Fox Family already did a special
on the moon conspiracy--I did it for Exploring the Unknown! And, irony on
irony, our token actor voice was the same Mitch Pileggi from X-Files who
narrated this special. (The docutainment formula by the way, followed by
every one of these type shows on every network designed the same way by every
production company is that you must have a "celebrity" voice for, get this,
"credibility." Yeah, okay, this is America so I guess I understand . . .
Of course, we should not shoot the messenger, for Mitch is an intelligent guy
who happens to read scripts for a living. And for all he knew when he did his
voice over, the slated NASA guy really was going to answer all the conspiracy
claims.
So, let's go through this point by painful point, just in case the statistic
at the top of the show--that 10 percent of the American public believes we
never went to the moon--is accurate. DISCLAIMER (hey, I can have one too):
The Skeptics Society motto from Spinoza--"I have made a ceaseless effort not
to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand
them"--does not apply here. Sorry, this conspiracy theory is so dumb that I
think it best we adopt H.L. Mencken's observation that "one good horse laugh
is worth a thousand syllogisms."
1. CLAIM: The moon landing was faked on a movie set. Proof: there are clearly
two sources of light in the movies and stills taken on the moon. Since there
is only one source of light in the sky (the sun) how can we explain the fact
that even in shadows there is obvious "fill" light that illuminates various
objects that, back lit from the sun, should be in near total darkness. Much
of the show was spent on this point as they showed photo after photo, film
after film, of "filled in" photos. Fill light is exactly what you would see
on a studio set.
ANSWER: Even granting that NASA's rocket scientists were too dumb to have
thought of this and thus tipped their conspiracy hand to the no-moonies who,
apparently, are smarter than rocket scientists, there were actually three
sources of light on the moon: the sun, the earth that reflects the sun's
light, and the moon itself, also reflecting light. The albedo (reflectivity)
of the earth is quite high because of the amount of clouds, so the sun acted
as the light filler via the earth. And the moon was, to say the least, rather
close, and also reflected light.
2. CLAIM: The American flag was "waving" in the allegedly airless environment
of the moon. How can this be? Proof: film footage showing the astronauts
planting the flag, with the flag clearly waving.
ANSWER: Of course the flag was "waving" while the astronaut was fiddling with
it back and forth as he jammed it into the hole. But the moment he let go of
the flag, it mysteriously stopped waving. Umm, coincidence? I don't think so.
3. CLAIM: There was no blast crator beneath the LEM lander. Proof:
photographs of the LEM with no blast crator and a NASA painting made before
the first landing, showing what a NASA artist thought might happen when the
LEM landed (big blast crator).
ANSWER: (1) The LEM engine was variable--the astronauts could control the
thrust and, of course, as they eased their way down to the surface they
throttled back on the engine. (2) There was only a couple of inches of moon
dust on the surface, beneath which was a solid surface that would not be
effected by the blast of the LEM engine. Before Apollo 11 landed, there was
much debate among scientists about the amount of moon dust that would have
accumulated over billions of years. Some speculated that there could be
several feet of dust, into which the LEM and the astronauts would sink.
Others said just a few inches. The latter were right.
4. After the blast crator from the LEM engine was created, all the lunar dust
around the LEM should have been displaced, yet there's Armstrong's footprint
clearly imprinted into the lunar dust just a foot away from the LEM's landing
pad. What gives?
ANSWER: Again, the moon is airless, so the LEM engine blast did indeed send
dust flying, after which it came back down because there is no wind to
scatter it. The blast of dust happened mainly directly underneath the LEM
engine.
5. If there was so much moon dust all over the place, being kicked up by the
LEM engine, by the rover, by the astronauts, why is everything so clean?
ANSWER: It wasn't. Moon dust was a problem because, in fact, it got all over
everything and the astronauts spents hours after their moon walks cleaning
their suits so as not to get the dust all over the interior of the LEM.
6. CLAIM: When the top half of the LEM took off to return the astronauts to
the command module, leaving the lower half sitting there on the moon's
surface, there was no "blast" flame like we see on earth. The LEM just seems
to leap off the base like it was yanked up by cables.
ANSWER: First of all, you can clearly see in the film footage of the launch,
that there IS quite a blast as dust and other particles go flying, even one
piece right toward the camera. Second, there is no air on the moon, so there
can be no blast "flame" like there is on earth. This is why rocket engines in
space have to carry their own oxygen (in liquid form). Unlike jet engines
that suck in air, rockets carry all the chemicals they need and mix them at
the time the "burn" is required. And "burn" is not quite the right term,
since it implies a "flame" should be present. In space there can be no flame
because there is no oxygen to fuel a flame tail coming out of the rocket
nozzle. All that is happening is that chemicals being stored in separate
containers are being released together to cause a reaction, the energy from
which flows out rapidly through a nozzle, after which Newton's law of "equal
and opposite reaction" takes over.
7. On earth, the LEM lander simulator used by the astronauts for practice was
obviously unstable. In fact, shortly before the Apollo 11 flight Neil
Armstrong barely escaped with his life as his simulator crashed and he
ejected just seconds before impact. Imagine how tricky it would have been to
land the actual LEM, with two astronauts shifting around inside and all that
additional weight. Fox even managed to find a physicist named Ralph Rene who
proclaimed that it would have been impossible to land the LEM because of its
inherent instability.
ANSWER: Armstrong did indeed barely escape with his life in the simulator.
But practice makes perfect, and these guys practiced, and practiced, and
practiced until they got it down. A bicycle is also inherently unstable. The
damn thing just falls over standing still, and even moving it topples over
after a few meters of pedaling, UNTIL YOU LEARN HOW TO RIDE IT! Plus, and
these no-moonies never seem to get this, what happens on earth is not the
same as what happens on the moon. Air on earth, no air on the moon. Lots of
gravity on the earth, a lot less gravity on the moon. Things big and heavy on
earth will be big and light on the moon. And we can even calculate exactly
how much different! These NASA scientists were so good they even calculated
the effects of the gravitational pull from large and irregular moon masses as
the LEM flew closely over them.
8. There are no stars in the moon sky, yet when you look up at night from
earth you see lots of stars.
ANSWER: How many stars do you see in photographs taken at night, on earth, of
terrestrial objects? That's right. None. Well, okay, MAYBE you'll see Venus,
but that's not a star. If you want to shoot stars in the night sky you have
to aim your camera and leave the shutter open for at least several seconds.
The astronauts were not there to take pictures of the sky. Also, since it is
very bright on the moon (no air to scatter the sunlight) and the astronauts
were wearing white space suits, the camera F-stop would have been set way
down, and the shutter speed quite fast. Stars are too faint to appear on the
film emulsion.
9. If you run the moon film footage at double speed it looks like it was
filmed on earth, ergo it WAS filmed on earth.
ANSWER: Balderdash! Double speed doesn't look at all like it was filmed on
earth. I might have missed their explanation for this because I was laughing
so hard, but that's what they said.
10. Why are the photographs so nicely framed and in focus, etc.
ANSWER: Because these are the few photographs that we get to see from the
thousands of photographs taken. There is a beautiful book released last year
with some of the very best moon photographs. It is magnificant. One glance
through it makes it clear that these photographs were indeed taken on the
moon which was aptly described by Buzz Aldrin as "magnificant desolation."
11. The Van Allen radiation belts surrounding the Earth would have fried the
astronauts with a lethal dose of radiation.
ANSWER: Wrong. If you blast right through the Van Allen belts it is no
problem, which is what the Apollo astronauts did. X-rays would be lethal too,
if you sat there soaking in them long enough. A very real problem, however,
are cosmic rays. They are not a problem on a short flight like to the moon,
but in long flights that might last years, like to Mars, they could be a
serious problem.
12. NASA murdered Gus Grissom and the other Apollo 1 astronauts, along with a
bunch of other astronauts in assorted other "accidents," because they were
about to go public with the hoax.
ANSWER: The show began by saying that the moon conspiracy was hatched late in
the game when NASA realized they would never make it, yet we are to believe
that years before they had been planning the hoax, Grissom caught on to it
and decided to go public, and then they killed him. But that's not the real
answer here. The real answer is that, like most conspiracy theories, there is
no positive evidence in support, only negative evidence in the form of "they
covered it up." Like the curse of the mummy, anyone who died within 20 years
of the discovery of Tut's tomb, died because of the curse, not because people
die. Let's face it, being a test pilot and an astronaut is not the safest job
in the world. People died because it is an inherently dangerous job.
13. NASA managed to keep all this a secret for all these years with tens of
thousands of people keeping their mouths shut. This from the same NASA folks
who were too stupid to remember to set up the movie set properly so as to
account for the proper light, blast crator, etc.
ANSWER: I once asked G. Gordon Liddy (who should know) about conspiracy
theories. He said three people can keep a secret as long as two of them are
dead. To think that thousands of people would keep their mouths shut is too
ridiculous to consider.
14. NASA STUPIDITY: Going to the moon is very, very hard. Look at all those
rockets that blew up in the 1950s and early 1960s, and all those other
problems to solve. Space travel is an insoluble problem. Ergo, NASA could not
have solved it.
ANSWER: There is no question that NASA, as a gigantic bureaucracy, is capable
of mistakes and flubs, and perhaps even a few cover-ups. But this argument
reminds me of the pyramidiots who think that the Egyptians were too inept to
have built the pyramids. Their reasoning goes like this: "if I can't think of
how they did it then they couldn't have thought of it either, ergo they
didn't do it." It is really an indictment of the claimants own limited
thinking skills.
15. ART IMITATES FICTION: I cannot let this end without one trivial
observation: the Fox show began with footage from a conspiracy movie from
1978 in which the astronauts are asked to fake a landing on the moon because
NASA realized they could never pull it off and if they didn't their budget
would be cut, etc., The film was entitled Capricorn One, and the astronauts
refused to cooperate so NASA tried to have them killed. But I noticed that
Fox was most discrete in not showing the actors playing the astronauts: one
of them was O.J. Simpson who, in the film just like on the football field and
in Brentwood, showed his amazing ability to cut and run . . . .
RATING OF FOX: Two thumbs down to Fox for not providing the above
explanations, for setting up a lame duck as a NASA expert who didn't know the
explanations, and for pretending that this was a balanced show about a real
theory that people allegedly take seriously.
RATING OF NASA: Two thumbs up for solving an insoluble problem. Now, quit
wasting our money growing tomatoes 200 miles up when we should be making
blast crators, leaving footprints, and taking photographs on Mars by now. Ad
astra!!