ApolloHoax.net
Apollo Discussions => The Hoax Theory => Topic started by: Zakalwe on May 06, 2013, 03:13:24 PM
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Michael Shermer doing what he does best
This should be mandatory watching for all HBs.....
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Michael Shermer might just be one of my heroes. HBs, take note: when a professional skeptic is telling you that you're full of crap, you might consider listening, yanno?
BTW, from what I read, the hardcore CT mob just absolutely hate this guy.
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Michael Shermer might just be one of my heroes. HBs, take note: when a professional skeptic is telling you that you're full of crap, you might consider listening, yanno?
BTW, from what I read, the hardcore CT mob just absolutely hate this guy.
I'm not surprised, but what did you read?
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Michael Shermer might just be one of my heroes. HBs, take note: when a professional skeptic is telling you that you're full of crap, you might consider listening, yanno?
BTW, from what I read, the hardcore CT mob just absolutely hate this guy.
I'm not surprised, but what did you read?
Comments on YT videos, various blogs - there was a Wall Street Journal article about his book "The Believing Brain" that started off:
Michael Shermer, the founder and editor of Skeptic magazine, has never received so many angry letters as when he wrote a column for Scientific American debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. Mr. Shermer found himself vilified, often in CAPITAL LETTERS, as a patsy of the sinister Zionist cabal that deliberately destroyed the twin towers and blew a hole in the Pentagon while secretly killing off the passengers of the flights that disappeared, just to make the thing look more plausible.
Almost anything that comes up if you Google 'Michael Shermer Conspiracy Theories'.
Oh, and of course Hunchbacked's video "Debunking Michael Shermer".
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Just to clarify, hunchbacked is the guy who, after telling me I had absolutely no expertise in TV, proceeded to make a debunk video of footage that had nothing to do with what I had described, despite having been given specific timecode points.
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Just to clarify, hunchbacked is the guy who, after telling me I had absolutely no expertise in TV, proceeded to make a debunk video of footage that had nothing to do with what I had described, despite having been given specific timecode points.
That's the one. He also stated recently that "There are no real aerospace engineers on Apollohoax.net".
Oh, and just today he asked if I could caculate an orbital speed for a spacecraft orbiting the moon - I said that yes, given the periapsis and apoapsis, I certainly could. He replied:
Except that a satellite orbiting the moon does not need to have an as elliptical orbit as a satellite orbiting the earth; there are no magnetic poles on the moon.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? :o
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The best thing is, he is convinced he is so right. I wonder why he didn't take into account that you would be using a flux capacitor?
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Oh, and just today he asked if I could caculate an orbital speed for a spacecraft orbiting the moon - I said that yes, given the periapsis and apoapsis, I certainly could. He replied:
Except that a satellite orbiting the moon does not need to have an as elliptical orbit as a satellite orbiting the earth; there are no magnetic poles on the moon.
Oh, please, please pop over to JREF and nominate that for May's Stundie Awards
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Hunchbacked is one of the more hopeless cases of being "reality challenged but still able to write a coherent sentence" ever seen.
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I'll take that over "reality challenged and not able to write a coherent sentence," personally.
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I'll take that over "reality challenged and not able to write a coherent sentence," personally.
Yes, but it's puzzling - one would figure that if you are able to understand words enough to be able to string them into sentences that are grammatically correct and that, on their surface, appear to make some sort of sense, you would then have enough intelligence to be able to verify that they had anything to do with reality.
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I've run into several "The Moon has no gravity because it has no magnetic field" folks lately.
I'm intrigued by where it is coming from. I don't think they are being influenced by the Electric Universe people, not directly. My best guess is they just have a very poor recollection of grade school science, and have confused magnetism with gravity.
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Oh, and just today he asked if I could caculate an orbital speed for a spacecraft orbiting the moon - I said that yes, given the periapsis and apoapsis, I certainly could. He replied:
Except that a satellite orbiting the moon does not need to have an as elliptical orbit as a satellite orbiting the earth; there are no magnetic poles on the moon.
Oh, please, please pop over to JREF and nominate that for May's Stundie Awards
I may. Hunchy is practically a walking Stundie - makes it hard to pick one.
ETA: When I asked what the magnetic poles of a planet had to do with an orbit being elliptical, he answered:
They may have to do if the satellite contains fragile electronic equipment which fears a magnetic field.
See what I mean?
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I'll take that over "reality challenged and not able to write a coherent sentence," personally.
Yes, but it's puzzling - one would figure that if you are able to understand words enough to be able to string them into sentences that are grammatically correct and that, on their surface, appear to make some sort of sense, you would then have enough intelligence to be able to verify that they had anything to do with reality.
Hmm. That may tie into the assumption certain people make that, if you're a reasonably intelligent person, you obviously know the basics of their field--whatever their field is and however specialized it may be. I believe that constructing a coherent sentence is actually quite easy--certainly easier than orbital mechanics--and even I am frequently proven wrong.
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. . . there are no magnetic poles on the moon.
Not true! Karel Kowalski was on the ill-fated Apollo 18 flight, and he's certainly been magnetized by the solar wind by this time!
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Not true! Karel Kowalski was on the ill-fated Apollo 18 flight, and he's certainly been magnetized by the solar wind by this time!
Who?
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CMP of Apollo 18, the magnetic Pole.
Okay, maybe it's not as funny as I thought.
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CMP of Apollo 18, the magnetic Pole.
Okay, maybe it's not as funny as I thought.
The CMP of Apollo 18 was to have been Vance D. Brand (an American) and he was actually CMP on Apollo-Soyuz
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I was following some completely unrelated stuff (or so I thought!) and I ran into this:
Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.
Which was in a discussion about -- at least according to one paper -- some 30-40% of incoming freshmen could not learn to program and would never learn to program. As in, the history of CS classes seemed to show there was a sizable population that was simply unteachable.
Now I'm a huge believer in plasticity. Heck, good lines of evidence are showing that perfect pitch is not as innate as we thought it was. But it does seem possible that there is a basic division in how one constructs certain sorts of thoughts. One group has as part of its worldview a habit of manipulating symbolic logic in the terms required by the computer. The other has a different set of associations and habits and is forced to unlearn as much as they learn in order to grasp the subject.
But this is one paper, which I haven't even read; I'm mindlessly speculating at this point; I'm following a process no more rigorous than that of the typical hoax believer. That given; interesting thought or no?
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The CMP of Apollo 18 was to have been Vance D. Brand (an American) and he was actually CMP on Apollo-Soyuz
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1772240/
http://apollo18movie.net/
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CMP of Apollo 18, the magnetic Pole.
Okay, maybe it's not as funny as I thought.
It took me a few seconds, but it was funny.
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It took me a few seconds, but it was funny.
The joke or the movie?....or both??
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It took me a few seconds, but it was funny.
The joke or the movie?....or both??
The movie was a joke, but it wasn't funny.
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I was following some completely unrelated stuff (or so I thought!) and I ran into this:
Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.
Which was in a discussion about -- at least according to one paper -- some 30-40% of incoming freshmen could not learn to program and would never learn to program. As in, the history of CS classes seemed to show there was a sizable population that was simply unteachable.
Now I'm a huge believer in plasticity. Heck, good lines of evidence are showing that perfect pitch is not as innate as we thought it was. But it does seem possible that there is a basic division in how one constructs certain sorts of thoughts. One group has as part of its worldview a habit of manipulating symbolic logic in the terms required by the computer. The other has a different set of associations and habits and is forced to unlearn as much as they learn in order to grasp the subject.
But this is one paper, which I haven't even read; I'm mindlessly speculating at this point; I'm following a process no more rigorous than that of the typical hoax believer. That given; interesting thought or no?
It's been a long lime, and I don't remember the exact book, but I remember a line in a programming manual long ago that went something like: "Since the elusive 'do-what-I-meant' logic has still not been invented, for now we are stuck with 'do-what-I-said logic'".
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Heh!
It's been a bit on my mind recently, as I've been trying to introduce my 9-year old niece to programming. Not helped by the fact that I'm self taught, new to most of it, and only on a good day can get 20 lines of bog-standard C to compile correctly. I am very far from being able to think about problems in the terms a decent programmer can.
And also struggling with a novel where a rationalist is confronted by the supernatural in such a way as to produce a whole bunch of "How do we know what we know" kinds of situations/lectures.
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That doesn't sound like a novel. It sounds like a thinly disguised tract.