ApolloHoax.net
Apollo Discussions => The Hoax Theory => Topic started by: mako88sb on August 02, 2014, 08:03:09 AM
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Not sure if anybody is aware of the latest nonsense uploaded by the blunder from down-under about how lethal the VAB's are but here's a response that handles it quite thoroughly. Colophon has a note at about 3:40 to be careful when converting to Grays. In the original video, Jarrah multiplied instead of divided to get his result
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Nicely done. It will be interesting to see how he responds, if at all.
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In the original video, Jarrah multiplied instead of divided to get his result
Which was his professor's fault, not Jarrah's. I spotted the Gray problem immediately. The bigger problem is the use of the data, and is nicely highlighted in this video. The chart Jarrah uses shows fluxes for electron energy with E > 0.5 MeV. Jarrah assumes energies of 10 MeV in his calculations, rather than a distribution of energies from 0.5 MeV. He has shown again that he cannot handle the data, nor does he have an idea of the real world and integrated doses. The concept that VAB electrons have a distribution of energies was raised at the IMDb and I have raised it with him several times, yet he still will not embrace this fact.
His bremsstrahlung assumptions are shocking and he lacks a complete understanding of the bremsstrahlung concept. He uses an equation to calculate the fraction of energy lost by bremsstrahlung when electrons are stopped (his source's terms, not mine) by the CM hull. He does not understand that this equation applies to an electron that has been completely stopped. This does not prevent him double counting the energy received from bremsstrahlung radiation and the kinetic energy of the electron. ??? Even worse, he assumes that the bremsstrahlung energy he calculated is attributed to a single photon, i.e. a single bremsstrahlung interaction. :o Finally he makes an enormous leap, the bremsstrahlung produced by VAB electrons falls into the hard x-ray region. One only has to examine bremsstrahlung and characteristic x-ray data for the common elements to realise that this assumption is incorrect. Furthermore, he takes no account of the CM being constructed of composite of materials, most of which are low Z. ::)
I feel sorry for the boy, I really do. I doubt he'll back down and listen, he never does. It would appear in his mind at least that he has validated his theories through credible study, and now he has numbers for his smoking gun. I really do think the BSc is a response to the criticism of Ralph, Bill et al, and how they lacked proper credentials.
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Which was his professor's fault, not Jarrah's.
I'm still not buying that explanation. Given his myriad conceptual errors, I still think it's a "dog ate my homework" excuse.
He has shown again that he cannot handle the data, nor does he have an idea of the real world and integrated doses.
That's probably the kindest, most succinct way to put it. "Dumb as a post" comes to my mind. But to be specific, he simply lacks the understanding of how the physics concepts are embodied in various formulations. Hence he doesn't know how to adjust the formulas to meet the problem.
The concept that VAB electrons have a distribution of energies was raised at the IMDb and I have raised it with him several times, yet he still will not embrace this fact.
I remember trying to lead him to that socratically at IMDb without success. After a week or so of practically wiping his nose with it, it occurred to me that Jarrah simply doesn't know calculus. And by that I don't mean that he doesn't know how to do calculus; I mean that he has no concept of what calculus is and what it accomplishes in science. To claim any sort of astrophysics expertise without a working understanding of calculus is like trying to call yourself a baker and not being able to tell flour from painter's plaster.
His bremsstrahlung assumptions are shocking...
As I said, dumb as a post. And undoubtedly the real reason he doesn't want to present these findings to actual qualified scientists we arranged for him in his hometown.
I feel sorry for the boy, I really do.
I don't. Not one single bit. He volunteers to do this, and he does it in order to keep a name for himself. He can stop at any time and pursue a legitimate career. But he continues fooling himself into thinking he's a brilliant scientist, and thus currying a following at his chosen venue. And he does this at the expense of the reputations of real, hard-working scientists and engineers whose accomplishments he denigrates in order to reinforce his own ego. Every bit of mockery he receives for his blatant incompetence is well earned.
...and now he has numbers for his smoking gun.
Except that Van Allen himself, personally, took the gun away. Referring specifically to this and similar pseudo-formulations, he looked right at them and called them nonsense.
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I remember trying to lead him to that socratically at IMDb without success. After a week or so of practically wiping his nose with it, it occurred to me that Jarrah simply doesn't know calculus. And by that I don't mean that he doesn't know how to do calculus; I mean that he has no concept of what calculus is and what it accomplishes in science. To claim any sort of astrophysics expertise without a working understanding of calculus is like trying to call yourself a baker and not being able to tell flour from painter's plaster.
That may officially make him worse at it than I am. I don't know calculus. I've never taken calculus. I would have failed if I had. But I do know that you can't do physics without it, not properly. (I took physics, in fact, but I would not really say I learned much in the class. Our teacher had a heart attack in November, and our substitute for the next few months had a doctorate--in theatre.) If you don't know the math, you don't speak the right language.
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I'm still not buying that explanation.
Neither do I.
Hence he doesn't know how to adjust the formulas to meet the problem.
He certainly does not. He produced some rubbish about moon rocks being scattered with 216 times more force than Earth rocks. What he failed to understand was how he introduced two degrees of freedom into his work, and hence he compared unlike rocks. I tried to explain this to him, and to this day he thinks that I claimed one can change the density of rocks arbitrarily. He cannot handle equations, and when one points out his errors by changing the mathematical equations he still fails to grasp his errors.
After a week or so of practically wiping his nose with it, it occurred to me that Jarrah simply doesn't know calculus. And by that I don't mean that he doesn't know how to do calculus; I mean that he has no concept of what calculus is and what it accomplishes in science.
I don't believe he does, and for this reason I would be curious to speak to his professor to understand the assignment objectives and marking criteria. I am sure his professor does know calculus, and I expect his assignment was a foundation exercise that explored some basic principles which did not require calculus. I've taught physics to 1st and 2nd year undergraduates, and at that stage they are developing models and concepts, not analysing real world problems. The latter happens much later, and cannot happen until they achieved the former.
Jarrah has shown (again) what happens when one has a little knowledge but no real practical understanding. I don't wish to sound like I am blowing my own trumpet, but as a physicist with 25 years experience I have a deep understanding of solar physics, space radiation and particle interactions with matter, and can hold my own in this particular debate. I leave the design of space vehicles to engineers as that is their expertise.
As I said, dumb as a post. And undoubtedly the real reason he doesn't want to present these findings to actual qualified scientists we arranged for him in his hometown.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. He's been banging his drum long enough. It is time for him to defend his work. There must come a point where he puts up or shuts up. Over to you Jarrah, write up your work and have a set of experts review your thesis.
And he does this at the expense of the reputations of real, hard-working scientists and engineers whose accomplishments he denigrates in order to reinforce his own ego.
Fair point and one I agree with. To clarify, I feel sorry for him as I think something has clearly gone wrong in his life given the emotional investment he has with two relative strangers such as Ralph Rene and Bill Kaysing. If he were a relative of mine, this alone would give me cause for concern.
Except that Van Allen himself, personally, took the gun away. Referring specifically to this and similar pseudo-formulations, he looked right at them and called them nonsense.
Dismissed out of hand by Jarrah at the beginning of his video by 'if we are to believe this letter is true', as he shows the correspondence between yourself and James van Allen. He poured arsenic down that particular water supply before presenting his calculations.
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He cannot handle equations, and when one points out his errors by changing the mathematical equations he still fails to grasp his errors.
The difference between the practitioner and the beginning student is that the former seamlessly shifts between a conceptual knowledge of the problem and the formulation of the problem quantitatively.
For example, the computation of energy lost to braking and the kinetic energy of a particle have quantitative formulations that describe the relationships among all the quantities. But the conceptual understanding is the knowledge that braking subtracts from kinetic energy because that's what it means in the natural world for something to have -- and lose -- kinetic energy. A knowledgeable practitioner understands why you divide in a particular case, or subtract, or do whatever algebra is required to embody, represent, and comprehend the actual behavior. Students who never develop that third-eye clarity of why the formulas work to describe the actual observable behavior never become competent practitioners.
In layman's terms, this is what we mean when we say something has "clicked." The comprehensive gestalt understanding of any body of knowledge and its various representations simultaneously seems to occur most often as an epiphany. Off topic, but I think one of the best examples is that moment when you finally realize how the eccentric works in a Wankel rotary engine.
I've taught physics to 1st and 2nd year undergraduates, and at that stage they are developing models and concepts, not analysing real world problems. The latter happens much later, and cannot happen until they achieved the former.
I too have taught physics without calculus and it's much harder to convey appropriate concepts. Still, you want to start people as early as possible in their intellectual development with, as you say, the models and concepts. But the notion of integrating flux over time or integrating energy over a distribution of wavelengths is an important basic concept. Seeing those patterns in the formulations and realizing that it corresponds to a somewhat abstract concept in the underlying behavior: It has to happen at some time before the student graduates to practice.
Jarrah has shown (again) what happens when one has a little knowledge but no real practical understanding.
I.e., when one just Googles but never actually does. That's why, when I ask for a person's background as it becomes relevant, I ask for "adjudicated" training or education in a field. The adjudication is what helps determine whether the person has mastered the topic. Adjudication can be real-world experience if, for example, one's successful mastery of a skill or concept correlates to something important -- say, one's livelihood. As I said, some of the best engineers I've worked with don't have engineering degrees. The one I'm thinking of, however, builds racing engines and competes with them. For the purposes of his (related) employment, that was sufficient to adjudicate his knowledge of mechanics, chemistry, thermodynamics, and all the relevant things you learn in your first few years of engineering school. Trophies and ribbons suggest he really does know how to build high-performance engines basically from scratch.
Academic credentials are also important. They certify a suitable survey of the breadth of the field. And the credential implies the adjudication of knowledge, if only at the propositional level. At least in engineering, a degree exemplifies a fair amount of lab and shop work that should suffice. But obviously the best knowledge comes from suitable rigor in both the propositional understanding and the practical execution.
I don't wish to sound like I am blowing my own trumpet, but as a physicist with 25 years experience I have a deep understanding...
That's a tune worth tooting. What Jarrah and other conspiracy theorists fail to understand is how easy, comfortable, and downright familiar these concepts can be to the people who use them daily and must succeed at them by mastery. I gather the typical conspiracist, fumbling his way through the problems as Jarrah does, genuinely believes what he's attempting is as hard for everyone else as it is for him, and that the uncertainties he encounters and the simplifications he applies are status quo for the field. The conspiracist never grasps how intuitive the accurate and true behavior of the universe appears to those with appropriate practical understanding, and thus how abysmally naive and wrong their efforts actually appear to the trained practitioner. In the worst case he may actually believe that his bumbling foray is no worse for wear than any other treatise in the field -- i.e., that he can simply throw a lot of mud and handwaving against the wall and that "somehow" it will still amount to a serviceable conclusion.
He's been banging his drum long enough. It is time for him to defend his work.
I agree, but for obvious reasons he won't. He has set himself up in strong opposition to the mainstream. So his rhetoric is and must be that the mainstream will do whatever it takes to unseat him. He doesn't need to face the mainstream in order to keep his fans, so he has no incentive. In other words, he treads a path calculated to achieve the benefit of the doubt among his fans that he is some sort of Wunderkind, whereas an actual adjudication would obviously resolve the doubt rather forcefully.
Fair point and one I agree with.
To be sure, he has called out me, Phil Plait, and others by name. For now his antics simply amuse my clients. But at a certain point, whether abstractly or concretely considered, his actions impugning another's reputation must be shown to have a factual basis. He is not entitled to build his reputation dishonestly forever at the expense of others, but there is a threshold below which any formal censure is impractical. I suspect he intends to fly just under the radar indefinitely.
To clarify, I feel sorry for him as I think something has clearly gone wrong in his life given the emotional investment he has with two relative strangers such as Ralph Rene and Bill Kaysing. If he were a relative of mine, this alone would give me cause for concern.
Yes, there's that. All his rhetoric aside, there is enough visible in his life to argue that his choo-choo jumped the track in a pitiable way. His fanatical fixation on Rene and Kaysing as mentors, and his equally fanatical fixation on me and others as enemies, his foul mouth and uncontrolled temper. I would retreat a bit and agree these are likely signs of something possibly beyond his immediate control.
However it is difficult at times to separate what may be an unfortunate condition in his life from aspects that are clearly contrived and deliberate, such as his constant misrepresentation of factually discernible things. It is one thing to act out for some reason that makes sense to him. It is quite another thing to look directly into the face of a fact and deny it, or to take other actions more likely explicable as deliberate attempts to gain or save face.
[Van Allen's opinion] [d]ismissed out of hand by Jarrah at the beginning of his video...
Case in point. Jarrah knew of and had ample opportunity to verify the quote himself with Dr. Van Allen. However, attempts to suggest the quote was fabricated didn't arise until after Van Allen died. I view that as specifically and deliberately disingenuous. It's not the action of a troubled mind, but rather than of a deviously misdirected mind. Ditto Wade Frazier and Brian O'Leary -- Jarrah was directly challenged to confirm with Frazier the nature of our group correspondence over which he quibbled, but he expressly refused to do it. He had to have suspected the strong likelihood that Frazier would confirm my evaluation, and thus Jarrah devolved into the sort of ham-fisted tap-dancing that characterizes his unwillingness to face facts.
There is, in my experience, a vast difference between the obfuscatory rhetoric of someone laboring under a valid delusion, and that of someone simply looking to deceive. The former prevarications are well-honed and considerably airtight, while the latter are especially ham-fisted and clumsy. I believe most of Jarrah's awkward evasions of verifiable fact are explained by deliberation, not by delusion.
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But I do know that you can't do physics without it, not properly.
Absolutely. When I began my 16-18 education (A-levels in the UK), I had to study A-level physics and A-level maths because I needed the language of maths to study physics properly. By the time I was studying for my degree I was taking courses in mathematics run by the physics and mathematics departments alongside those studying maths degrees. This was to support 2nd and 3rd year study in physics. I carried on studying applied math deep into my third year because my physics options were in theoretical areas. This applies equally to engineering. You can't really study and 'do' engineering without having a deep understanding of applied maths.
It is not just a simple case of plugging numbers into equations either. As Jay so aptly describes, adapting and applying the equations to a situation shows a real understanding of the underlying concepts. There comes a point where knowing an equation is not good enough. A good example is Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics can be understood to a point without calculus, but after that point the richness of Newton's world requires a deeper understanding of calculus. For instance, in the UK, force = mass x acceleration is taught to school students as this enables them to tackle the concepts. Very soon F= m dv/dt is required, along with all the other differential forms that Newton developed. Without this framework physics becomes very limited and access to other sub-fields is soon closed.
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Very soon F= m dv/dt is required, along with all the other differential forms that Newton developed.
...especially in rocketry, where mass also varies over time. ;D
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Very soon F= m dv/dt is required, along with all the other differential forms that Newton developed.
...especially in rocketry, where mass also varies over time. ;D
Exactly, and in Special Relativity where mass varies with velocity ;D. In which case the integral of F dx leads us to E = mc2.
Digressing: Just as you explored Jarrah's understanding of the calculus at the IMDb, I once explored his opinions of Ralph Rene's non-Apollo science, specifically that Ralph had undone Einstein's relativity. I was particularly interested with how he could reconcile two statements from Ralph, namely that Ralph has 'reduced relativity to an absurdity' and 'stars cannot collapse as astronomers say because they would violate Einstein's relativity by travelling faster than light .'
At this conjecture Jarrah explained that Ralph did not agree with the time dilation aspects of relativity. Work that one out if you can? ???
I then realised Jarrah had no understanding of physics at the level he was portraying in his MoonFaker videos, and he would blindly hold on to Ralph's words no matter what. Pretty much how you felt about his understanding of calculus.
I wonder how he will deal with the relativistic aspects of astrophysics and cosmology, such as say... evidence for the big bang. ;D
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I too have taught physics without calculus and it's much harder to convey appropriate concepts. Still, you want to start people as early as possible in their intellectual development with, as you say, the models and concepts. But the notion of integrating flux over time or integrating energy over a distribution of wavelengths is an important basic concept. Seeing those patterns in the formulations and realizing that it corresponds to a somewhat abstract concept in the underlying behavior: It has to happen at some time before the student graduates to practice.
A perfect example of this is black body radiation. This forms part of the staple diet for 1st year undergraduate physics, where the ideas and concepts are taught. It is usually accompanied by a discussion of the ultra violet catastrophe. Planck's quantum leap (excuse the deliberate pun) is not really solidified in the students' minds until their third year as there are other areas of physics that need to be brought together before a full discussion of why the ultraviolet catastrophe was indeed a catastrophe for classical physics. For instance, one needs an understanding of quantum statistical mechanics, but there are other bridges to cross before this can be developed. Once the pieces are all brought together, then the student can truly understand the shape of the curve, why the energy of the photons is described in differential form, how that differential form is used, and physically interpret the outcome of changing variables. The deeper understanding requires a blending of Planck's concepts and the physics that followed during the quantum revolution, with a heavy dose of the mathematical tools. This takes time to develop, but once in place the student can begin to say they are a true practitioner of this sub-field in quantum physics.
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I remember trying to lead him to that socratically at IMDb without success. After a week or so of practically wiping his nose with it, it occurred to me that Jarrah simply doesn't know calculus. And by that I don't mean that he doesn't know how to do calculus; I mean that he has no concept of what calculus is and what it accomplishes in science. To claim any sort of astrophysics expertise without a working understanding of calculus is like trying to call yourself a baker and not being able to tell flour from painter's plaster.
Agreed. I know this is a little off topic, but this raises an interesting question about educational methods. Just how much calculus do you really need to understand the first few years of physics, and how should it be taught?
I took my first calculus course in high school in the early 1970s. Calculators had just appeared, but they weren't programmable so they weren't particularly useful in numerical integrations. We also had occasional access to a minicomputer at a different location so it also wasn't particularly useful for anything but introductory programming. So we were taught calculus the traditional, analytic way. I remember integrating and differentiating pages of complex contrived formulas that I knew I would never see in the real world. I already knew you could get remarkably far in physics with just a few integrals, but our calculus teacher thought them too trivial...
But times have changed. Numerical integration is a backbone of science and engineering because it's useful in the great majority of real-world situations that cannot be solved analytically, at least without too many simplifications. I sometimes find myself writing a quick-and-dirty program even when I suspect I could solve my problem analytically. It's expedient, and I often need only an approximate answer anyway.
So I think there may be merit to using a rudimentary form of numerical integration (vs the classical analytic approach) as you teach, e.g., Newtonian mechanics. If I wanted to explain Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation to someone without an understanding of calculus, I would probably talk about summing up a whole bunch of little periods during which I assume the rocket's thrust and mass remain constant. I would probably avoid the word "integral" even though that's exactly what it is because it has a tendency to shut students off as "too hard". And if you let the computer do the dirty work, you can concentrate on understanding what's "really happening" instead of getting mired in abstract formulas.
Obviously at some point in physics classical calculus is simply unavoidable; I'm just not sure you have to do it right at the start. But I'm an engineer, not a scientist, and I'm sure reasonable people can differ. Comments?
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Which one was Calculus? He the one that that was a boat that turned into a robot or was it the dish washer that turned into a robot? I know all about Calculus, seen the films.
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I think you have him confused with the acting unit on Futurama...
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That would be Calculon...
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No, Tournesal. Tryphon Tournesal (known in the States as Cuthbert Calculus). Had a boat that looked like a fish. (Okay, actually a submarine that looked like a shark), plus a moon rocket that looked like a V2 -- complete with test markings.
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I remember integrating and differentiating pages of complex contrived formulas that I knew I would never see in the real world.
Yeah, not helpful. Today we have mathematics engines that can correctly (if not concisely) integrate practically any integrable function you can express to them.
To instill concepts, I prefer graphs to equations. I'm a visual person anyway, but I've found by experience that the essence of behavior is revealed more readily at first using a picture of some kind. After that happens, then we can go back and derive the mathematics necessary to quantify the behavior and explain how the math does that. Too many people expect students to comprehend behavior at first from the equations. Few beginning students are yet suitably conversant in mathematics.
But times have changed. Numerical integration is a backbone of science and engineering because it's useful in the great majority of real-world situations that cannot be solved analytically, at least without too many simplifications.
Indeed, if you pull a few practical engineering texts off the shelf and see whether the authors jump from foundation concepts to practical solutions, most of the ∫'s are quickly replaced with a Σ.
The advance of terascale computing (Jay takes an elaborate bow) and the techniques that develop to use it practically do not fully eliminate analytical methods, but they tend to force things to a state where you write algorithmically simple programs that can perform a wide variety of integrations.
So I think there may be merit to using a rudimentary form of numerical integration (vs the classical analytic approach) as you teach, e.g., Newtonian mechanics.
That's exactly how I taught it: with straightforward differentiation in the form of "measure the slope of this graph between these two data points" and "find the area of this rectangle" integrals. I don't introduce calculus concepts, other than to say that there exists a mathematical technique they'll learn later as an improvement, invented by lazy mathematicians who got tired of adding up rectangles.
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Yeah, not helpful. Today we have mathematics engines that can correctly (if not concisely) integrate practically any integrable function you can express to them.
Exactly. I found it fairly easy to learn those branches of math for which I could see obvious applications, but I knew very early that I would never become a mathematician. I found high school trigonometry/analytic geometry quite easy. Its utility in electrical engineering was obvious, and I was already doing satellite orbit predictions. But some of the others, including pure calculus, were always a struggle.
Then again, in college I had trouble with differential equations despite their fundamental utility in all of engineering. I think that had to with some poor teachers as well as skipping a semester with advanced placement. That's not always a good idea even when you can qualify.
Part of my problem was that so much emphasis was on manipulating formulas and very little on understanding the underlying concepts and when and how to apply them to solving other problems. I often wondered how many math teachers got into the job precisely because they didn't know how to solve anything in the real world.
Most of my favorite mathematician jokes are based on this image, so I know I'm not the only one in the boat.
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I found it fairly easy to learn those branches of math for which I could see obvious applications,
Well yes, because the application helps you understand the behavior among quantities that the formulation is trying to express. You need conceptual understanding and quantitative rigor, and there's only a modest amount of overlap between them in most presentations.
kipping a semester with advanced placement [is] .. not always a good idea even when you can qualify.
One of my assignments as an advanced student in college was mentoring the "prodigies" -- the high-school and younger students taking college classes in science and engineering. I saw a lot of burn-out. I think you need time-in-rank for some of these bodies of knowledge. It has to gel a bit and become second-nature before you build upon it.
Part of my problem was that so much emphasis was on manipulating formulas and very little on understanding the underlying concepts and when and how to apply them to solving other problems.
They have to go hand in hand. Knowing how to integrate is important because you'll need that to derive something down the road. But at the same time, knowing why kinetic energy looks like the integral of something is essential to knowing how our formulation of the natural world works.
I often wondered how many math teachers got into the job precisely because they didn't know how to solve anything in the real world.
All of them, as near as I can tell. I made a big push to have essential mathematics taught within the engineering department by engineering professors, not farmed out to the mathematics department. I had seen good results with essentials like differential equations and linear algebra taught from a practical perspective. But budgets are what they are, so engineers still get the esoteric, abstract presentation.
It's not really a dig against mathematicians. There's a time and a place for abstract quantitative thought, and many of these advanced concepts like eigenvectors eventually bear much practical fruit even if they seem at first like conceptions for their own sake. But presenting abstract mathematics to people who need a more down-to-earth understanding is like trying to explain woodcarving to someone by extolling the metallurgical virtues of the chisel. Just hit it with a hammer already.
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I think that had to with some poor teachers as well as skipping a semester with advanced placement.
I had a great Calc 2 teacher and an even better TA. I had taken busines calc before so I skipped the pre reqs and Calc 1 because the math I really needed to learn was taught in Calc 2 and matrix algebra. Thank god that was one semester because it kicked my but trying to go back and learn the trig. I still did better than half the class on the first test, less so on the trig centric second test but got a B in the course. I also identified and made friends with some of the smart hard working students. That was another trick that served me well in school.
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It's not really a dig against mathematicians. There's a time and a place for abstract quantitative thought, and many of these advanced concepts like eigenvectors eventually bear much practical fruit even if they seem at first like conceptions for their own sake. But presenting abstract mathematics to people who need a more down-to-earth understanding is like trying to explain woodcarving to someone by extolling the metallurgical virtues of the chisel. Just hit it with a hammer already.
Funny you should mention eigenvectors, because that's another subject I struggled with. Even today I'm not sure I really understand them.
So I have to tell my favorite mathematician joke. Like all such jokes, it comes in three parts.
An engineer, physicist and mathematican are attending a conference. Unfortunately for them, a pyromaniac is starting fires in their hotel.
In the middle of the night, the engineer wakes up, smells smoke and sees a fire in his wastepaper basket. He runs to the bathroom, quickly fills the ice bucket with water and rushes it back to put out the fire. Satisfied that the fire is out, he goes back to bed.
The physicist wakes up, smells the smoke and sees the fire. He pauses for a moment. Running to the bathroom he puts just enough water in the bucket to extinguish the fire given its current size, rate of growth and the oxygen distribution within the room. The fire out, he goes back to bed.
The mathematician wakes up, smells the smoke and sees the fire. He thinks for a few seconds and then goes back to sleep confident that there exists a solution to the problem.
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Funny you should mention eigenvectors, because that's another subject I struggled with. Even today I'm not sure I really understand them.
I should sneak up behind you sometime and yell "quaternions!"
So I have to tell my favorite mathematician joke.
Yep, that's mathematics.
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There's a joke based on Zeno's paradox:
A group of boys are lined up on one wall of a dance hall, and an equal number of girls are lined up on the opposite wall. Both groups are then instructed to advance toward each other by one quarter the distance separating them every ten seconds (i.e., if they are distance d apart at time 0, they are d/2 at t=10, d/4 at t=20, d/8 at t=30, and so on.) When do they meet at the center of the dance hall? The mathematician said they would never actually meet because the series is infinite. The physicist said they would meet when time equals infinity. The engineer said that within one minute they would be close enough for all practical purposes.
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Wouldn't that depend on the exact value of 'd'? They'll still be at d/64 at 1 minute.
Oh, it would also depend on just which purposes were considered practical.
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I should sneak up behind you sometime and yell "quaternions!"
Funny you should mention them, I dug into them when I began playing wiith those little accel/gyro/magnetometer sensors for use on a balloon. Everybody says they're more numerically stable.
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Wouldn't that depend on the exact value of 'd'? They'll still be at d/64 at 1 minute.
Oh, it would also depend on just which purposes were considered practical.
Now you are sounding like a physicist ;)
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Hey, engineers have to be precise too, ya know.
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Hey, engineers have to be precise too, ya know.
Actually, talking about being precise, another particular bugbear of mine is the title of each of Jarrah's radiation videos, 'radioactive anomaly.'
This irritates me that he invokes expertise but clearly does not understand the difference between the terms 'radiation' and 'radioactive.' His videos should correctly be titled 'radiation anomaly', not 'radioactive anomaly.' This grates me as he is prepared to denigrate the hard working people that made people a reality, but cannot get the basic correct. I don't know, it just seems such a trivial thing, but it annoys me.
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I don't know, it just seems such a trivial thing, but it annoys me.
It may seem trivial but I think it's the ideological core of the objections to conspiracism. Whether one's interest in some particular body of knowledge is professional or merely passionate, to see it deliberately and arrogantly misused for some selfish purpose is legitimately offensive. Science exists as a systematic approach to knowledge in order to make it better serve humankind. It is ostensibly altruistic. It should be offensive to see it being perverted for one person's individual benefit.
And science is hard. It takes a lot of dedication and sacrifice to become proficient at science and its attendant professions. Roughly 4 out of every 5 people who sit for the professional engineer's license exam do not pass. And these are people who already have baccalaureate degrees in engineering. Pretenders to that throne are indeed odious. Jarrah quite clearly wants to be seen as the "young Australian genius," and wants that perspective to come at the expense of legitimately qualified practitioners. I see absolutely no moral justification in that.
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Well, in a sort of devil's advocacy here...
I am not so sure conspiracy theorists, free-energy mavericks and other "I have overturned all of physics!" types, and the like think of their process as having shortcut the onerous task of actually learning a subject.
My argument comes in two parts; one, that they fail to grasp the effort it takes to even earn a science or engineering degree, much less become an established professional. Nor do they understand the width, depth, or the specificity and applicability of that knowledge. If they think about it at all, they think of it as memorizing a bunch of essentially meaningless gibberish that can be regurgitated on command to win the sheepskin.
In the second part, they think that the work they have done is hard. Because to them, it was. I run into this all the time; they have managed to notice something in a photograph and they think no-one else has mentioned it because they lack the same keen attention to detail. It never crosses their mind that almost everyone who saw that photograph already saw the same thing -- and has already gone through the next necessary mental steps in attempting to understand what it is they saw.
They think they are the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, and they keep crying "Can't you see that glowing basketball-sized object right over our heads!" Instead they are the one-eyed man in the land of those with normal depth perception, who all reply, "What, the Moon? That's far away, not right overhead!"
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I know this is not an original observation, as it's on those "crackpot checklists" I've seen occasionally, but it really does seem quite characteristic of them to persist in using incorrect or idiosyncratic terminology even after the correct and widely understood words have been explained to them.
I recently encountered one guy, who admittedly was so far gone even his fellow hoaxers disowned him, who insisted on using the word "pivot" to describe the moon's motion around the earth, going on to claim that it did not have a day-night cycle. It didn't matter how many times I explained the precise meanings of the accepted and widely used astronomical terms "rotate" and "revolve", or that a pivot is something you find in a mechanical watch, not an astronomical object.
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They think they are the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, and they keep crying "Can't you see that glowing basketball-sized object right over our heads!" Instead they are the one-eyed man in the land of those with normal depth perception, who all reply, "What, the Moon? That's far away, not right overhead!"
To be fair, I think some of them (hunchbacked may be one) do appear to have something going on with their eyesight, as they seem to see things in their videos and images that just are not apparent to others. I have read comments by HB's when they have tried to point out oddities with the LM feet that, no matter how they describe it, I just can't see. Perhaps it is that they cannot interpret shadows correctly,
On the other hand it have at least the following shared personal experience that helped me to understand that even people who consider themselves very rational, skeptical and observant can be fooled by an optical illusion; not immediately understanding that nature of what they are looking at.
However, I can say from personal experience, that it is quite possible for multiple people to all observe something, and to see it as something else... all of them seeing it as the "same" something else.
Back the the 1980's I was with a group of several amateur astronomers; members of the local Astronomical Society, at their observatory in the rural south west of Canterbury, NZ. It was daytime; bright day, cloudless sky, and we were doing some maintenance on one of the out-buildings. Suddenly, our attention was caught by a loud humming sound that seemed to be coming from overhead. We all looked up at about the same time and (as we found out later when we compared our observations) all saw the same thing. It was a black, roughly oval shaped object flying overhead. The object appeared to be about the size of a house, at several hundred feet of altitude and travelling very fast from east to west, disappearing fast over a group of four metre high tree Lucernes about 20m away to our north-west. However, the impression we had of size, height and speed totally collapsed when this "object" landed in one of the tree lucernes. I was first to realise what it was and went straight inside to telephone the nearest apiarist, who soon came down to collect it.
The important thing here is that there were several of us. We were all sceptical types; amateur astronomers, all better than Joe Average when it came to making careful observations, yet we all (incorrectly) observed the same thing, a large, fast moving object at high altitude.
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I think optical illusions and similar phenomena of the senses are specifically excluded from the definition of a "delusion". And that's the word that best describes many of these conspiracy theories.
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I think optical illusions and similar phenomena of the senses are specifically excluded from the definition of a "delusion". And that's the word that best describes many of these conspiracy theories.
I agree. In the case of hunchback et al, their delusions (IMO) can be reinforced by their inability to accurately understand what they are looking at. I recall a particular HB (can't remember whether it was on this forum or JREF) who insisted that the video of the Apollo crew weightless in the CM was shot by filling the CM with water. I looked at that video, and I couldn't understand how they thought it even looked like water.
In the case I posted earlier, it was all over in about 10 seconds. However, we all freely admitted to each other later that we were entertaining some outrageous thoughts for those 10 seconds.
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I recall a particular HB (can't remember whether it was on this forum or JREF) who insisted that the video of the Apollo crew weightless in the CM was shot by filling the CM with water. I looked at that video, and I couldn't understand how they thought it even looked like water.
That was hunchbacked too, wasn't it?
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Yep. That was the one I was thinking of.
Amazingly, he shows that he clearly understands perspective can lead to parallel objects not appearing parallel in a photo...
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98915197/JREF/HB1.png)(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98915197/JREF/HB2.png)
... but cannot make the logical connection that it must also apply to shadows
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... but cannot make the logical connection that it must also apply to shadows
To think the CTs bought that lemon. Oh come on, really! Another bug bear, they cannot concede points when so hopelessly wrong despite clear evidence to the contrary. I can process the radiation argument as being difficult to understand which makes it a compelling argument for the uninitiated, but non-parallel shadows. That's just telling any old story to please an audience. Who is credited with non-parallel shadows, was it David Percy or Marcus Allen?
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... but cannot make the logical connection that it must also apply to shadows
To think the CTs bought that lemon. Oh come one, really! Another bug bear, they cannot concede points when so hopelessly wrong despite clear evidence to the contrary. I can process the radiation argument as being difficult to understand which makes it a compelling argument for the uninitiated, but non-parallel shadows. That's just telling any old story to please an audience. Who is credited with non-parallel shadows, was it David Percy or Marcus Allen?
David Percy
Have a look at hunchbacked's comments in this, a video debunking Percy's non-parallel shadows claim.
He just can't help himself. He claims the debunker is faking the debunk. Truly sad; his level of stupid is such he fails to get something that can be verified just by going outside on a sunny day!
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I just wanted to say: the video in the OP is mine. Yes, the calculations are very "back of envelope" and I deliberately erred on the side of overstating the numbers at each stage. Space and radiation are not my specialist subject but I can figure out basic energy calculations!
I wonder: does Jarrah actually not understand the maths at all, or does he deliberately fiddle the calculations to get the results he wants? It's difficult to work out whether we are up against a devious mind or just a very simple one.
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I just wanted to say: the video in the OP is mine. Yes, the calculations are very "back of envelope" and I deliberately erred on the side of overstating the numbers at each stage. Space and radiation are not my specialist subject but I can figure out basic energy calculations!
I thought it was a fantastic rebuttal, and as you acknowledge it was a 'back of an envelope calculation.' You even deliberately understated or overstated numbers that were not in your favour. The compromises you made with the numbers were one of the rebuttal's redeeming features as it clearly showed you were not trying to hide or fiddle the numbers at all.
There is a long history of trying to lead Jarrah through the physics and math of the radiation problem. Several people have tried to take him a little further than 'it's a sea of killer radiation' and lead him to the idea of particle energy distributions, fluxes and attenuation. He cannot grasp this simple idea.
The IMDb debate (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446557/board/nest/133905495?ref_=tt_bd_1) is worth a read if you have time. This debate was centered on the solar radiation problem which is much more complex than the van Allen belts, but if you take a read Jarrah could not get past first base and the idea of integrated fluxes.
I was going to compile a critique of Jarrah's radiation series about 4 years ago, but I neither had the time nor the inclination to be bothered with him in the end. He's simply not prepared to learn if it means a challenge to his arguments. I'm afraid too much time has been invested in the hoax, and he's now the young (and obsessed) pretender that has taken on the crown of Kaysing and Rene. His ego will not allow him to surrender that crown. You could take him by the hand to each of the landing sites, and he'd still find a reason to deny their existence.
I seriously would not waste your time with the guy, I've been there and done that. I'm UK based, and his anger issues led to police involvement when he doc-dropped someone else in a video believing them to be me. Not bad considering he lives in Sydney.
I quickly realised that I would learn more about Apollo and the science if I spent less time urinating into the wind with the Blunder. The Apollo legacy lives on, and it has given me an incredible amount of joy. I now visit schools once a month as a volunteer, talk about Apollo and get the kids making stomp rockets. They love watching videos of the launches and astronauts on the moon.
I've learned so much about moon rocks and how they have informed the evolution of our planet, the science of retro-reflectors and how they have informed General Relativity, I have a deeper knowledge of solar physics. I have learned about the history of Apollo, the engineering of Apollo, the people that made Apollo possible, I have taken up photography, I have learned about the space programs before Apollo and the politics of the time. Apollo has renewed my interest in other areas of science too. I seriously would not waste too much time with the YouTube hoax crowd. They are a special bunch.
Well done on the video, it was good work.
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The Apollo legacy lives on, and it has given me an incredible amount of joy. I now visit schools once a month as a volunteer, talk about Apollo and get the kids making stomp rockets. They love watching videos of the launches and astronauts on the moon.
I've learned so much about moon rocks and how they have informed the evolution of our planet, the science of retro-reflectors and how they have informed General Relativity, I have a deeper knowledge of solar physics. I have learned about the history of Apollo, the engineering of Apollo, the people that made Apollo possible, I have taken up photography, I have learned about the space programs before Apollo and the politics of the time. Apollo has renewed my interest in other areas of science too.
^^Completely this.
I joined the DIckeHeads to argue against idiots about this subject and it gave me back a fascination with something that thrilled me as child. I've learned loads about the missions I never knew and followed some very interesting side avenues of the topic as a result. My collection of contemporary books and magazines about the missions gets ever larger (my original copy of 'Apollo over the moon: a view from orbit' is on its way from the USA as I type!) and they are much more fun than looking at them on a screen.
The more these idiots try and re-write history by refusing to learn anything, the more knowledge I gain in return.
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I finally got around to watching Jarrah's video. I normally don't watch his stuff, but I made an exception because I was doing research for an article. I don't know why I bothered, but I made a point-by-point list of his errors. It's a long list.
Review of Jarrah White's "Radioactive Anomaly III" (http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/JWhite.htm)
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I finally got around to watching Jarrah's video. I normally don't watch his stuff, but I made an exception because I was doing research for an article. I don't know why I bothered, but I made a point-by-point list of his errors. It's a long list.
Review of Jarrah White's "Radioactive Anomaly III" (http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/JWhite.htm)
Skimmed, excellent, will read in detail later. A lot of the first stuff was what he brought up at IMDb and it went predictably nowhere as he had nothing else once his uninformed suppositions were exposed and laid aside.
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A lot of the first stuff was what he brought up at IMDb and it went predictably nowhere as he had nothing else once his uninformed suppositions were exposed and laid aside.
Do you mean the stuff about Dr. Van Allen? It amazes me that a debate even exists over those quotes. Even if somebody was initially confused, I think it would only take a couple minutes at most to explain the context and the person would be like, "OK, that makes sense." JW is incredibly obtuse if he still doesn't get it.
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Do you mean the stuff about Dr. Van Allen?
Yes, specifically the alleged conflict between his early study of trapped radiation and his later affirmation that Apollo was genuine.
JW is incredibly obtuse if he still doesn't get it.
I don't think he wants to get it. I've come to see that debate with some of the more obtuse-seeming hoax proponents is like science versus law. That is, the scientific pursuit of truth comes from our side. But in return we get "lawyerly" arguments that seek not to uncover truth, but only to trap his opponents in some semblance of meaningless contradiction, failure, or controversy. He approaches Van Allen's later work as if he's cross examining Van Allen and treating his earlier works as some sort of deposition to which he is expected to remain absolutely faithful. This type of conspiracy theorist is only trying to discredit a witness, not study the phenomena and facts.
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It's a long list.
It is indeed, and kudos for having the patience to wade your way through White's treacle trail. I picked up on the Bremsstrahlung assumptions and his misuse of the equation, as well as the soft/hard x-ray conundrum. His double counting of energy is absurd. How he believes he has mastery of knowledge when several people have told him about this is beyond me. Somewhere in Australia a village is missing an idiot.
You've covered a lot of my other objections, particularly the 7-8 g cm -2 for the CM. I am the vandal in his narration. I looked at the CM shielding and arrived at similar values to you, and he dismissed me with a flimsy argument.
I asked him several questions about this video but he ignored me. It appears that when you ask him hard questions that he cannot answer, then you are a troll and he won't deal with you.
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I picked up on the Bremsstrahlung assumptions and his misuse of the equation, as well as the soft/hard x-ray conundrum. His double counting of energy is absurd. How he believes he has mastery of knowledge when several people have told him about this is beyond me. Somewhere in Australia a village is missing an idiot.
I noticed that your first post in this thread (Reply #2) did a really nice job of outlining all of JW's major errors. I don't think there was anything of significance that I picked up on that you didn't already have covered.
You've covered a lot of my other objections, particularly the 7-8 g cm -2 for the CM. I am the vandal in his narration. I looked at the CM shielding and arrived at similar values to you, and he dismissed me with a flimsy argument.
Did anybody point out to him that the metal he identifies as aluminum is really stainless steel? If so, how did he try to weasel out of that one?
I asked him several questions about this video but he ignored me. It appears that when you ask him hard questions that he cannot answer, then you are a troll and he won't deal with you.
I have no intention of trying to engage in any kind of debate with him. The only exception would be if he came here, and we both know that will never happen.
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I don't think he wants to get it. I've come to see that debate with some of the more obtuse-seeming hoax proponents is like science versus law. That is, the scientific pursuit of truth comes from our side. But in return we get "lawyerly" arguments that seek not to uncover truth, but only to trap his opponents in some semblance of meaningless contradiction, failure, or controversy. He approaches Van Allen's later work as if he's cross examining Van Allen and treating his earlier works as some sort of deposition to which he is expected to remain absolutely faithful. This type of conspiracy theorist is only trying to discredit a witness, not study the phenomena and facts.
That's an excellent description.
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It is indeed, and kudos for having the patience to wade your way through White's treacle trail.
I have to concur. Anyone who's willing to sit through lengthy presentations rife with factual and scientific errors, and catalogue them for correction, deserves whatever the skeptic's equivalent of the Nobel prize is. Sometimes it's cathartic to realize just what fools these proponents would make of themselves if they ever tried to present these ideas in a real-world context. Other times it's just painful.
His double counting of energy is absurd.
Not just a clerical error. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what's actually happening in the physical world. The expertise in physics etc. is not the arithmetic in working the equations, but in knowing what the equations mean and knowing what the properties of the physical world really are.
...particularly the 7-8 g cm -2 for the CM. I am the vandal in his narration. I looked at the CM shielding and arrived at similar values to you, and he dismissed me with a flimsy argument.
7 g cm -2 has been the published figure for, well, forever. Given similar shield ratings for other spacecraft and some knowledge of how they're built, that has always seemed a very credible figure for (a) establishing that the shielding was biologically adequate, and (b) establishing that it's the shield rating actually created by the published construction. Bob B. deserves continuing kudos for doing the heavy-lifting analysis to show that the published figure is correct.
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Although JW was making mistake after mistake, at least everything following in a nicely ordered sequence, up until he averaged the 10 MeV and 7 MeV dose rates. At that point I was like, "what does he think he's doing?" I had a really hard time figuring out how to describe his error because it was not only not right, it was not even wrong.
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I finally got around to watching Jarrah's video. I normally don't watch his stuff, but I made an exception because I was doing research for an article. I don't know why I bothered, but I made a point-by-point list of his errors. It's a long list.
Review of Jarrah White's "Radioactive Anomaly III" (http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/JWhite.htm)
Excellent read Bob. I especially liked the analogy with the coins. I was trying to think of a simple way to explain it: you've nailed it with that analogy.
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Yeah, it was a great analogy. I'm totally stealing it for teaching purposes. :)
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I especially liked the analogy with the coins. I was trying to think of a simple way to explain it: you've nailed it with that analogy.
Yeah, it was a great analogy. I'm totally stealing it for teaching purposes. :)
Glad you liked it. I tried a couple other things before I thought that one up. I knew I needed to do something that would demonstrate the folly of JW's computations in a way that anyone could relate to.
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I don't think he wants to get it. I've come to see that debate with some of the more obtuse-seeming hoax proponents is like science versus law. That is, the scientific pursuit of truth comes from our side. But in return we get "lawyerly" arguments that seek not to uncover truth, but only to trap his opponents in some semblance of meaningless contradiction, failure, or controversy.
Yes. The way I put it is that you and I usually use questions to get answers and to learn. Hoax proponents use questions as weapons, not to learn.
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Yes. The way I put it is that you and I usually use questions to get answers and to learn. Hoax proponents use questions as weapons, not to learn.
They ask questions that they know you wont be able to answer because no definitive answer is possible, and to draw you into the answer they want so that they can attack your answer.
I have yet to meet a hoax believer who is interested in learning anything. They arrive with predetermined attitudes. They need to feel that they have the ability to see through the imagined hoax, and believe they and their HB followers are the only ones who are able to do so; to know the truth, and anyone who opposes or does not agree with them must be a sheeple or an ebil gubmint shill.
Sometimes (only sometimes mind you) I really feel sorry for people like the blunder from down under, Awe130, allancw and even JocknDoris and his pitiful disciple. To invest so much of their time living a permanent delusion; to waste so much of their energy and lives trying to prove that the verifiable reality of the Apollo Programme is a hoax.
Its almost tragic! Almost!
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They ask questions that they know you wont be able to answer because no definitive answer is possible, and to draw you into the answer they want so that they can attack your answer.
I've come across this approach many times, where they ask a very specific question knowing (or at least being very sure) that you won't be able to provide something that doesn't exist, so they can have their big "a-ha!" moment.
One example is on a discussion at ATS, where the poster demanded we tell him who took a specific photograph in cislunar space.
The answer "It was one of 3 people" wasn't enough, nor was any of the time and date specific evidence that it was taken exactly where and when it was claimed to be taken. A similar approach from the same guy was "I demand to see photographs of people in the CSM in Apollo 12". The fact that TV and 16mm footage was available wasn't enough, he asked
because he knew he wouldn't get what he was asking for and thus get to do a little victory dance (a photo of a reflected camera lens was dismissed as being of some sort of robot).
It some point the phrase "So you admit..." will enter the fray, because as we all know, information that they believe supports their argument is never given, it is always "admitted".
I summarise the approach as follows:
HB: "I demand evidence"
Sane person: "You mean like this evidence?"
HB: "No, not that evidence, other evidence that doesn't make me like an idiot."
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AKA moving the goal posts.
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It some point the phrase "So you admit..." will enter the fray, because as we all know, information that they believe supports their argument is never given, it is always "admitted".
Apparently just like we all "admitted" the Saturn V documentation was unavailable, when what we really did was explain to him why his question was naive.
I summarise the approach as follows:
HB: "I demand evidence"
Sane person: "You mean like this evidence?"
HB: "No, not that evidence, other evidence that doesn't make me like an idiot."
That's pretty much what David Percy did.
Percy: I've examined the entire Apollo film record and there are no low-gravity feats.
Jay: Right there at the end of Apollo 11, Armstrong jumps five feet in the air.
Percy: That footage was faked.
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I think old Patrick was the most entertaining HB when it came to moving goal posts.
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That's pretty much what David Percy did.
Percy: I've examined the entire Apollo film record and there are no low-gravity feats.
Jay: Right there at the end of Apollo 11, Armstrong jumps five feet in the air.
Percy: That footage was faked.
When he wasn't outright lying, as he would have had to be to make his transparency claim, or when he used an edited version of the Buzz Aldrin portrait with black added over top and part of the bottom chopped off to make his off center crosshairs claim. Worse, he passes it off as the 'true' original. Ooh, and when he claimed to have done the 'necessary calculations' in his video to speed up Apollo video to make it 'back' to Earth gravity.
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It's pretty hard to beat the one that said; "Besides James Van Allen..."
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I think old Patrick was the most entertaining HB when it came to moving goal posts.
The absolute master of goal post grease 'n' go was Solon, earning that title for his virtuoso performance in the Conjunctions thread (http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?128128-Conjunctions). Start with "why didn't they take a picture of a planet" and wind up asking for serial numbers of individual components or some such. He also said he believed Apollo was real, but wound up having to impeach the crews to prop up his story.
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I have two typo corrections. In the section 13:46, the third paragraph should end with the words, "conscious choice", not "conscience choice."
In the section 19:38, it should read "all of this is moot" not "all of this is mute."
Great work.
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I have two typo corrections. In the section 13:46, the third paragraph should end with the words, "conscious choice", not "conscience choice."
In the section 19:38, it should read "all of this is moot" not "all of this is mute."
Great work.
Thanks. Fixed it.
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I think old Patrick was the most entertaining HB when it came to moving goal posts.
The absolute master of goal post grease 'n' go was Solon, earning that title for his virtuoso performance in the Conjunctions thread (http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?128128-Conjunctions). Start with "why didn't they take a picture of a planet" and wind up asking for serial numbers of individual components or some such. He also said he believed Apollo was real, but wound up having to impeach the crews to prop up his story.
Holy Cow!! That's not moving the goal-posts; that's packing up the entire stadium and taking it to another country!!!
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He's posted a rebuttal to the rebuttals (I'm sure there's a Monty Python reference to be made).
He's resorted to quoting van Allen, namely 'that until a practical solution to shielding astronauts is developed then manned spaceflight is not possible unless future spacecraft fly through the polar regions.' [my paraphrase of van Allen in quotes].
I guess the rebuttal of Whitian and Renitian physics has sunk Jarrah, and he can only resort to quote mining.
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They ask questions that they know you wont be able to answer because no definitive answer is possible, and to draw you into the answer they want so that they can attack your answer.
I've come across this approach many times, where they ask a very specific question knowing (or at least being very sure) that you won't be able to provide something that doesn't exist, so they can have their big "a-ha!" moment.
One example is on a discussion at ATS, where the poster demanded we tell him who took a specific photograph in cislunar space.
The answer "It was one of 3 people" wasn't enough, nor was any of the time and date specific evidence that it was taken exactly where and when it was claimed to be taken. A similar approach from the same guy was "I demand to see photographs of people in the CSM in Apollo 12". The fact that TV and 16mm footage was available wasn't enough, he asked
because he knew he wouldn't get what he was asking for and thus get to do a little victory dance (a photo of a reflected camera lens was dismissed as being of some sort of robot).
It some point the phrase "So you admit..." will enter the fray, because as we all know, information that they believe supports their argument is never given, it is always "admitted".
I summarise the approach as follows:
HB: "I demand evidence"
Sane person: "You mean like this evidence?"
HB: "No, not that evidence, other evidence that doesn't make me like an idiot."
I'm not sure if it's a consolation, but I've seen a similar approach from a theologian on a fairly serious forum. The ABC Religion and Ethics page (http://www.abc.net.au/religion/) publishes articles by some fairly high profile authors - priests and academics and the like. In an article a few months ago one such theologian explained why he thought atheism was intellectually defunct: he would ask atheists to define the God they said they didn't believe in. Not one respondent gave a catechismically correct definition of God, meaning that he would cheerfully agree that he didn't believe in that version of God either...
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I guess the rebuttal of Whitian and Renitian physics has sunk Jarrah, and he can only resort to quote mining.
That's all he ever did with Van Allen, except of course for the quote where Van Allen specifically calls his stuff nonsense. They did fly through the polar regions (of the belts), and they did develop suitable shielding, as Bob et al. have shown. If Jarrah wants to actually be a scientist about this, he's not going to get a more engraved invitation than this.
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He's posted a rebuttal to the rebuttals...
I wonder if we'll see a "Radioactive Anomaly IV".
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That's all he ever did with Van Allen, except of course for the quote where Van Allen specifically calls his stuff nonsense.
Agree. It would have been more accurate of me to say he has fully engaged reverse. He offered some maths, it's been picked to pieces and all that is left is his original tried and tested quote mine. In my opinion it is an appeal to his fans. It's a desperate act to seek attention and preserve his ego after another math fail. His latest offering shows he has taken several backward steps and has nothing more than 'but van Allen said...'
I really wouldn't be able to live with myself if I had failed quite so miserably, and so many times.
They did fly through the polar regions (of the belts), and they did develop suitable shielding, as Bob et al. have shown.
Which is the very point he misses.
If Jarrah wants to actually be a scientist about this, he's not going to get a more engraved invitation than this.
Agree. He's not a scientist, which you, I and all those at this board know. That's why he won't write up his work and have it reviewed by experts. That's why he has various videos about the same topic and various video addendum. His errors are highlighted, he skulks off, does a bit more data/quote mining and releases amended versions. In real science, such research is dismissed.
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I wonder if we'll see a "Radioactive Anomaly IV".
Maybe he'll call it A New Hope.
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Ooh, and when he claimed to have done the 'necessary calculations' in his video to speed up Apollo video to make it 'back' to Earth gravity.
And got the wrong number.
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I've come across this approach many times, where they ask a very specific question knowing (or at least being very sure) that you won't be able to provide something that doesn't exist, so they can have their big "a-ha!" moment.
Archetypical example: the missing "master tapes" of Apollo 11.
Never mind that they didn't even know the tapes existed prior to their reading the story of the unsuccessful search for them.
Never mind that they don't know how they were made, why they were made, or that they were never played back, yet everyone still saw the EVA -- which kinda defeats their use of the term "master tapes". A more accurate term would be "backup tapes", as they were made solely in case a scan converter failed. That didn't happen.
Never mind that not even NASA could foresee that new technology would someday make these tapes useful in making a better quality video of the EVA. They're NASA, so they should be able to accurately predict the future for at least 5 decades.
Never mind the extraordinarily abundant record of the Apollo 11 mission, and those that followed, including direct video recordings from the greatly improved TV cameras on those missions (after a much less lossy conversion from field sequential color to NTSC). No, that was all faked. Why? Because it exists. Those tapes -- only those tapes -- contained The Truth. Why? Only because the hoaxers know they know longer exist. No other reason.
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Archetypical example: the missing "master tapes" of Apollo 11.
Never mind that they didn't even know the tapes existed prior to their reading the story of the unsuccessful search for them.
How about that NASA eh!?
Perpetrates the most complex. the most brilliant and the most outrageous hoax of all time, and then intentionally publishes big, obvious clues to what they have done.
Go Figure!
Never mind the extraordinarily abundant record of the Apollo 11 mission, and those that followed, including direct video recordings from the greatly improved TV cameras on those missions (after a much less lossy conversion from field sequential color to NTSC). No, that was all faked. Why? Because it exists. Those tapes -- only those tapes -- contained The Truth. Why? Only because the hoaxers know they know longer exist. No other reason.
And if they were ever to be discovered, you just KNOW what conspritards like the Blunder will say. "Oh, those aren't the actual missing tapes, they are just new ones that have been faked!"
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Perpetrates the most complex. the most brilliant and the most outrageous hoax of all time, and then intentionally publishes big, obvious clues to what they have done.
Big and obvious only to those smart enough to see them. I.e., the hoaxers. Everyone else is blind or a shill.
And if they were ever to be discovered, you just KNOW what conspritards like the Blunder will say. "Oh, those aren't the actual missing tapes, they are just new ones that have been faked!"
The search report seemed pretty confident that the tapes were recycled in the early 1980s. New planetary missions were producing a lot of data, but the fresh tapes NASA had acquired were defective. This forced a choice between sacrificing the Apollo 11 backup tapes or losing a lot of new mission data. And it was still too early to foresee that the information on the Apollo tapes could someday be decoded directly by the average person's PC to display a superior picture to the ubiquitous scan converted NTSC tapes of the event.
It really is a shame. I'm pretty familiar with the LOIRP -- the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project -- that digitized the (still existing) tapes of the raw downlink signals from the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft in the 1960s. The results are vastly superior to the optically printed images that were the only viewable versions for over four decades. They could easily have done the same thing with the Apollo 11 video. I toured their lab last month; they did an amazing amount of work on a shoestring budget. In an old McDonald's, even. (cue rhyme).
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When he wasn't outright lying, as he would have had to be to make his transparency claim, or when he used an edited version of the Buzz Aldrin portrait with black added over top and part of the bottom chopped off to make his off center crosshairs claim. Worse, he passes it off as the 'true' original.
This sounds like our friend Adrian, oops, AWE130. I've talked about what I think was his most outrageous stunt: taking a picture from the ISS, clearly labeled as having been taken at night, and removing that label so he could use it to "prove" that stars should be visible from space in the daytime. That's when I began to call him a dishonest liar to his face.
And of course he's well known for complaining that any new rescans of the original Apollo Hasselblad images are not the "original" images even when the new ones are vastly superior in resolution and dynamic range. He doesn't seem to understand that adding lots of information to an existing image is vastly harder than removing it. Once again, NASA's powers (especially in photo faking) are practically godlike -- except that they can't land on the moon.
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Once again, NASA's powers ... are practically godlike -- except that they can't land on the moon.
This is what the CTs come down to, every time.
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This sounds like our friend Adrian, oops, AWE130. I've talked about what I think was his most outrageous stunt: taking a picture from the ISS, clearly labeled as having been taken at night, and removing that label so he could use it to "prove" that stars should be visible from space in the daytime. That's when I began to call him a dishonest liar to his face.
And of course he's well known for complaining that any new rescans of the original Apollo Hasselblad images are not the "original" images even when the new ones are vastly superior in resolution and dynamic range. He doesn't seem to understand that adding lots of information to an existing image is vastly harder than removing it. Once again, NASA's powers (especially in photo faking) are practically godlike -- except that they can't land on the moon.
And of course the fact that the original images were scans from prints, which does introduce an element of interpretation into the image. Adrian (no apology) quotes the differing positioning of images ie. AS11-40-5903 as proof of the manipulations of NASA. But fails to accept that there is a full history of that image in particular, how it was centralised for PR reasons. He fails to understand that the current image/images in the ALSJ represents a complete scan of the originals, unaltered and complete.
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Once again, NASA's powers ... are practically godlike -- except that they can't land on the moon.
This is what the CTs come down to, every time.
This! Every one of them makes mention of the 'almost unlimited resources' that NASA had to fake it, and none of them can see that this necessarily gives them the same resource to land on the Moon.
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Ooh, and when he claimed to have done the 'necessary calculations' in his video to speed up Apollo video to make it 'back' to Earth gravity.
And got the wrong number.
I am fairly certain he just lied rather than was wrong.
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Every one of them makes mention of the 'almost unlimited resources' that NASA had..
Including the top-secret development of PhotoShop they created in 1968, the source for which NASA didn't hand over to Adobe until the 1980's.
I'd love to take a tour of the computer that ran it. Hopefully they provide golf carts?
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I am fairly certain he just lied rather than was wrong.
So am I. I was just being oblique.
The correct ratio is 1/sqrt(1/6) = sqrt(6) = 2.45 = 245%.
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I am fairly certain he just lied rather than was wrong.
So am I. I was just being oblique.
The correct ratio is 1/sqrt(1/6) = sqrt(6) = 2.45 = 245%.
Which makes non-gravitational motions look like a Yakety Sax sequence from Benny Hill. ;D
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I'd love to take a tour of the computer that ran it. Hopefully they provide golf carts?
Golf carts? Try bullet trains. Houston had a Real Time Computing Complex (RTCC), a big room of IBM mainframes, that as far as I can tell was used just to crunch tracking data and integrate trajectories. Jobs that I can easily now do on a low-end laptop.
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Shades of Clifford Simak's "Limiting Factor."
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Which makes non-gravitational motions look like a Yakety Sax sequence from Benny Hill. ;D
I try to make this point every time some hoaxer waves his hands and claims the Apollo TV footage was faked with slow motion. There are so many properties of that footage that can't be created or explained that way...
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Which makes non-gravitational motions look like a Yakety Sax sequence from Benny Hill. ;D
I try to make this point every time some hoaxer waves his hands and claims the Apollo TV footage was faked with slow motion. There are so many properties of that footage that can't be created or explained that way...
I hate that slow motion myth, I really do.
It's been re-inforced by countless low budget films an TV series replicating lunar gravty by moving slowly, whereas Apollo astronauts move carefully. Except Twinkletoes.
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Why oh why, if the video was slowed down, do the sequential colors appear with the 3 field disk buffer delay, like they should. No HB can ever seem to answer that (let alone have an inkling of an idea of what I am talking about)?
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Why oh why, if the video was slowed down, do the sequential colors appear with the 3 field disk buffer delay, like they should. No HB can ever seem to answer that (let alone have an inkling of an idea of what I am talking about)?
Erm...yeah...erm...I say that too...erm... ???
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Well, see the sequential Tv signal was sent back to earth in its raw form, that is one field of red, one of green, and one of blue, one after the other. These were then put through a matrixer which combined the three seperate colors, by storing the two previous fields while the third came in live. So, say red was coming in live, the disc buffer would combine it with the previous green and blue fields. This then, created a full color image using three not quite aligned seperate color fields from the sequential Tv signal. If this was then slowed down, as the HB camp like to claim, this sequence would be slowed down as well. Say the signal was slowed down by half, then you would see the color artefacting last for two fields instead if one. (like the launch "confetti" video would have the same color streaks repeated over two fields, rather than one).
No HB can ever explain why that is not the case.
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Why oh why, if the video was slowed down, do the sequential colors appear with the 3 field disk buffer delay, like they should. No HB can ever seem to answer that (let alone have an inkling of an idea of what I am talking about)?
Stan told you in a conversation. Do you know what he told you?
Maybe we should invite Jarrah to answer that question.
[mischief mode]
Jarrah, given you are the ideological heir to Bill and Ralph, please make a video answering this question. Oh, I forgot, SG Collins whipped you hard over your understanding of TV, photography and video technology, so that's another subject you know nothing about.
Since he's now managed to publicly embarrass himself with math fail #369, I don't suppose he'll be turning up here in a hurry too soon.
[/mischief mode]
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Stan told me lots of things, but according to Adrian, he didn't tell me what he really wanted to tell me, so Im just as much in the dark as you.
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Stan told me lots of things, but according to Adrian, he didn't tell me what he really wanted to tell me, so Im just as much in the dark as you.
We are both in the dark here, but we should be able to see stars from our blast crater.
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Why oh why, if the video was slowed down, do the sequential colors appear with the 3 field disk buffer delay, like they should.
Well, obviously, the necessary modifications were made to the camera and converter to handle the problem!
See, that was easy!
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Why oh why, if the video was slowed down, do the sequential colors appear with the 3 field disk buffer delay, like they should.
Well, obviously, the necessary modifications were made to the camera and converter to handle the problem!
See, that was easy!
Just as much as NASA had a magic machine to make moon rocks and a magic machine to leave zap pits and a magic machine to cover the rocks in a good old coating of He3. In fact, NASA had all sorts of magic machines to fake the landings yet did not have the capacity to actually do it for real.
I'm utterly incredulous with the idea that thousands of people were involved in a hoax, yet no one has come forward other than a few kids that live in their mother's basement.
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Well, see the sequential Tv signal was sent back to earth in its raw form, that is one field of red, one of green, and one of blue, one after the other. These were then put through a matrixer which combined the three seperate colors, by storing the two previous fields while the third came in live. So, say red was coming in live, the disc buffer would combine it with the previous green and blue fields. This then, created a full color image using three not quite aligned seperate color fields from the sequential Tv signal. If this was then slowed down, as the HB camp like to claim, this sequence would be slowed down as well. Say the signal was slowed down by half, then you would see the color artefacting last for two fields instead if one. (like the launch "confetti" video would have the same color streaks repeated over two fields, rather than one).
No HB can ever explain why that is not the case.
Does this apply to all the TV footage, or just later missions? If the latter, which ones?
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Why oh why, if the video was slowed down, do the sequential colors appear with the 3 field disk buffer delay, like they should.
Well, obviously, the necessary modifications were made to the camera and converter to handle the problem!
See, that was easy!
Yup. Its "Handwaving 101"
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Does this apply to all the TV footage, or just later missions? If the latter, which ones?
It was used on all the color cameras on Apollo. Apollo 11 had a color camera in the CSM, but the LM carried a slow-scan black-and-white camera to the lunar surface. Starting with Apollo 12, the cameras were all of the field-sequential color type, but the one carried to the lunar surface failed shortly after the first EVA began when Alan Bean accidentally pointed it at the sun.
I think about that incident when I see modern CCD imagers looking at the sun without any apparent damage. TV cameras have come a long way.
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So, say red was coming in live, the disc buffer would combine it with the previous green and blue fields. This then, created a full color image using three not quite aligned seperate color fields from the sequential Tv signal.
What did this do to vertical resolution? The camera generated standard interlaced NTSC monochrome, so the color wheel (which was BGRBGR, not RGBRGB) would produce the 6-field sequence
1. Blue/Odd field
2. Green/Even field
3. Red/Odd field
4. Blue/Even field
5. Green/Odd field
6. Red/Even field
(etc).
Let's assume frame 6 has just arrived and you want to build an even NTSC composite color field. You can use the most recent blue and red fields since they're even, but you'd have to use field #2 rather than #5 to get an even green field and this would worsen the confetti problem on moving images.
Or did they just punt and use the most recent field from each color regardless of whether it was even or odd? In modern terms this would effectively make the system 262p/60 rather than 525i/30, halving the vertical resolution of NTSC. Since horizontal resolution was already limited by communications bandwidth, maybe you wouldn't lose much by reducing the vertical resolution in this way. Is this what they did?
It's a shame that recordings of the original monochrome signal didn't survive because we could now display them directly on modern PCs without going through the NTSC step. And we could do all sorts of digital filtering to better remove interference from the voice and telemetry subcarriers.
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They delayed the odd or even field to have it match the other two. A very clever system.
Now playng devils advocate, how did the doubling of frame rate affect the television bandwidth, and why did, say, Bochum, not mention this in their Apollo TV reception tests?
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They delayed the odd or even field to have it match the other two. A very clever system.
So they used the method I described and did not punt? In that case they kept the system as 525i/30 (or 525i/29.97, to be precise).
Now playng devils advocate, how did the doubling of frame rate affect the television bandwidth, and why did, say, Bochum, not mention this in their Apollo TV reception tests?
I'm not sure what you're asking. Converting a 525i/30 system into a 262p/60 system would not affect the signal bandwidth but it would halve the vertical resolution. There would also be some vertical jitter because the camera is still operating in 525i/30.
The horizontal resolution was already severely limited by the presence of the 1.25 NBFM voice subcarrier and the 1.024 MHz telemetry subcarrier. Only in the later missions did they figure out how to notch out these subcarriers so they wouldn't have to just low pass filter the video to 1 MHz, which is very narrow for NTSC. They used demodulation/remodulation with cancellation, a pretty advanced method for its time but fairly common now; it's one of the ways to remove interference in a CDMA (spread spectrum multiple access) system. You demodulate the strongest signal, then subtract it out, then demodulate the next strongest signal and subtract it out, and so on.
Still, had Apollo made high quality TV a requirement earlier in the design of the Unified S-Band system, it could have been designed to handle it much better than it did. Simply moving the video to a dedicated FM transmitter and keeping voice and telemetry on PM (as the CSM did) was one obvious solution, though it would have required extra hardware on the LM and LRV.
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Hi ka9q just so you know, im not having a go at you, just posing thoughts for the HBs. who may be thinking they have it all solved. I need to dig out the disc recorder specs I have somewhere, where it explains t he delay system.
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Oh I see that now, I thought you were referring to the doubled "frame" rate of 60 Hz that would be established if you took each 262.5 line field as a separate frame. Besides, as we all know if you're going to simulate lunar gravity with video shot in earth gravity, the correct ratio is sqrt(6):1, not 2:1. Doing a system with that oddball conversion rate and no obvious artifacts (like occasionally duplicated or dropped frames) would be quite a challenge.
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I just realized that if you try to maintain a "true" 525-line interlaced system in the conversion, you'd have to use the fields out of sequence.
Let's say field #5 has just arrived and you need to make the odd field of a true 525-line frame. You'd combine fields 1 (blue), 3 (red) and 5 (green), all of which were odd.
Then when field #6 arrives, you'd make the even field by combining fields 2 (green), 4 (blue) and 6 (red), all of which are even. But notice that not only are you building each NTSC frame out of fields that span twice as much time, you have sent green field 5 before green field 2! That would make the color confetti problem even weirder.
The whole sequence would be something like this:
blue green red
1 5 3
4 2 6
7 5 3
4 8 6
7 5 9
10 8 6
7 11 9
10 8 12
13 11 9
10 14 12
13 11 15
16 14 12
13 17 15
16 14 18
...
i.e., use three consecutive blue fields, then step one back and use three overlapping consecutive blue fields, etc., with interleaved phasing for the other two colors. What a mess! The only practical way to do this would have been to slow the color wheel down to 30 Hz, i.e., to make a frame-sequential color system. And you'd still have twice the time spread between the individual colors making up each NTSC frame.
So now I understand what you meant. They did turn the interlaced 525-line 30 Hz frame rate camera into effectively a 262-line progressive 60 Hz frame rate camera. And since alternate camera fields start half a line apart, you'd have to delay one by half a line to match the other (I forget whether the odd or even field starts in the middle of the line).
Interlacing probably seemed like such a good idea at the time, eh? Now it's just a major headache...
(Edited to add frame sequence examples)
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All of which brings us to the wonderful depth of knowledge one can acquire by studying the actual facts surrounding Apollo and the Space Race. Conspiracy theorists use conspiracism as a shortcut to erudition. Why not just study the real thing?
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All of which brings us to the wonderful depth of knowledge one can acquire by studying the actual facts surrounding Apollo and the Space Race. Conspiracy theorists use conspiracism as a shortcut to erudition. Why not just study the real thing?
Because to do so would cause one to face up to one's own shortcomings- to admit that others are far smarter and far more capable. By maintaining that there is a hoax, the hoaxie gets a false sense of superiority, a feeling that they hold some special knowledge that even smart people with PHDs can't see.
To get to the level of knowledge that is needed to fully understand some of the concepts that Apollo used requires brains and a lot of hard graft in learning the skills. Hoaxies just aren't prepared 9or capable) to put that much effort in. Plus, for the likes of Jarrah White, acknowledging that others are smarter would be a massive blow to the ego. Thats why he skulks off like a cowardly dog when he tries to use maths to prove his case...he cannot admit his error and falls back to quote-mining.
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Why not just study the real thing?
Because it is like listening to Bartok or Schoenberg, the complexity and density is intriguing but ultimately it gives me a headache.
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Facing up to one's shortcomings is only half the answer, I think. Yes, I agree with your analysis. But I think the conclusion needs some nuance in the sense that it's okay not to be a rocket scientist or an astrophysicist. If your "shortcoming" is that you don't understand some particularly complicated section of human knowledge, then I think you're doing well. I know plenty of rocket scientists who wish they had, for example, the social skills that their less brainy friends have. When we describe this dissonance as a "shortcoming" it sounds like an insult. It's really no more insidious than noting a conspiracist defines for himself what it means to be "great," and a failure to clear that hurdle -- however inappropriately high it's set -- generates shame. It's irrational shame, for the most part.
But narcissism is a factor, I think. If you're just one of many people who believe in what the mainstream believes, then you're not special. I gather many conspiracists fear obscurity far more than they fear being wrong. So when I say conspiracism is a shortcut to erudition, that's only half the opinion. It's a shortcut to erudition for which the proponent expects to be recognized. Unable to gain strong recognition by their own merits, they attach themselves to some noteworthy event -- historical graffiti, as Jim Oberg (or maybe someone else) put it.
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Because it is like listening to Bartok or Schoenberg, the complexity and density is intriguing but ultimately it gives me a headache.
Try performing Bartok. Or Olivier Messaien, if you want to go the full musical migraine route.
Sure, we have performers and musicologists who can dissect technically profound music and gush about it using words I don't really understand, or care to. And perhaps they're seeing something in it that I don't. I recall the organist playing a Messaien piece and overhearing a little girl ask her mother, "Mommy, what's wrong with the organ?" Clearly there's intellectual meat in musical Messaien or literary Joyce or visual Pollack that others enjoy, some despise, and most just choose to leave alone. My approach to Frank Stella is to stand in front of one of his mural-sized works and whisper-yell "Stellaaaa!!!!" while looking vaguely upward. I'm sure wherever the ghost of Tennessee Williams is, he's laughing his butt off at Frank's expense.
But I digress. Most people, regardless of their background, are here because they have some interest in how Apollo worked. Some people can explain it in great depth. Others don't care to absorb the science to that degree, and that's fine because they have an appreciation for it that suits their level of understanding and interest. I just wonder about the mindsets and motivations of people who don't care to see how it's done but by the same token don't believe it could have been done. Meh, here's where the comparison to the arts falls apart. It's okay if you don't like Mahler or Purcell, or if you'd rather look at Warhols than Rembrandts. That's a matter of preference and style. And yes, Messaien sounds like the organist needs to clean his glasses or lay off the sacramental wine, but it's not until you get to criticism that tries to shove it into a pigeonhole that wasn't meant for it that you get to shake your head at the critic.
If you have enough interest in Apollo and enough drive to research the conspiracy end of it to the nth degree, you probably have enough drive to learn about the reality of it and be genuinely erudite.
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If you have enough interest in Apollo and enough drive to research the conspiracy end of it to the nth degree, you probably have enough drive to learn about the reality of it and be genuinely erudite.
I really see it differently.
I could never be a aerospace engineer, because too much of it gives me a headache. Much like Bartok and Schoenberg, the early work is challenging, intriguing, enjoyable and rewarding. Like Verklärte Nacht. As the work progresses the complexity takes over, and again there is the headache and no amount of time spent listening nor close attention paid has ever been able to make it go away. I have only been able to push back the boundaries a small bit. I had a friend/roommate with such a visceral response to Philip Glass that he honestly accused me of sabotaging our friendship when I played some early albums. He saw it as little more than a conspiracy. (Only the fates knows why I can deal with Glass but not Bartok.)
Swindlers are good at what they do, but can only put on a word deep sham of the knowledge of the business they are hyping. Like wise people who see conspiracies do so because they are good at seeing them. Both have their own personal strength and play to it and enough drive to overcome the challenges needed to see it through. Challenges like truth and honesty. Real knowledge of aerospace engineering , I believe, is beyond their scope and even the early work is pain inducing.
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Try performing Bartok. Or Olivier Messaien, if you want to go the full musical migraine route.
Ah, but if I could.......
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I could never be a aerospace engineer, because too much of it gives me a headache. Much like Bartok and Schoenberg, the early work is challenging, intriguing, enjoyable and rewarding. Like Verklärte Nacht. As the work progresses the complexity takes over, and again there is the headache and no amount of time spent listening nor close attention paid has ever been able to make it go away. I have only been able to push back the boundaries a small bit. I had a friend/roommate with such a visceral response to Philip Glass that he honestly accused me of sabotaging our friendship when I played some early albums. He saw it as little more than a conspiracy. (Only the fates knows why I can deal with Glass but not Bartok.)
If you want a REAL musical headache, its difficult to go past Penderecki. One piece of his (I cannot remember the name) involves the playing of a violin above the top nut (for the uninitiated, that is beyond the end of the fingerboard up where the tuning pegs are).
To say that this sounds like a Tomcat having its testicles ripped off would be understating the case!
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I really see it differently.
And your explanation makes perfect sense. Thanks!
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Like wise people who see conspiracies do so because they are good at seeing them.
I hazard a guess that most of us here are good at seeing them, or, more accurately, at predicting them. How often have you seen or heard something and immediately thought to yourself that the conspiracy theorists are going to be all over that. And almost invariably they are. Many of us can probably predict exactly what the conspiracy theorists are going to say even before they say it. Conspiracy theorists aren't necessarily better at seeing conspiracies, they are just better at believing them.
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Only as good at seeing them, and a little poorer at constructing them. Hollywood can do a more precise (emotionally targeted, easily described) conspiracy without hardly trying. Which is why the believers borrow from them so often.
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I really see it differently.
And your explanation makes perfect sense. Thanks!
Yeah, I can listen to Glass, but you guys have no idea how many times I've skipped pages and pages because it's all math.
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I could never be a aerospace engineer, because too much of it gives me a headache. Much like Bartok and Schoenberg, the early work is challenging, intriguing, enjoyable and rewarding. Like Verklärte Nacht. As the work progresses the complexity takes over, and again there is the headache and no amount of time spent listening nor close attention paid has ever been able to make it go away. I have only been able to push back the boundaries a small bit. I had a friend/roommate with such a visceral response to Philip Glass that he honestly accused me of sabotaging our friendship when I played some early albums. He saw it as little more than a conspiracy. (Only the fates knows why I can deal with Glass but not Bartok.)
If you want a REAL musical headache, its difficult to go past Penderecki. One piece of his (I cannot remember the name) involves the playing of a violin above the top nut (for the uninitiated, that is beyond the end of the fingerboard up where the tuning pegs are).
To say that this sounds like a Tomcat having its testicles ripped off would be understating the case!
Are you sure that isn't Nigel from Spinal Tap? ;)
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If you want a REAL musical headache, its difficult to go past Penderecki
For certain a definition of music.
I have a few pieces of Penderecki because the came paired on albums containing music from fellow countryman Witold Lutoslawski. I made an extensive effort to grasp Lutoslawski in the 80's but most of music on those albums now resided only in my digitized backup and on the CDs sitting in a binder on a high shelf.
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Can I ask a practical question? Are we doing Stonehenge tomorrow night?
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The set arrived today. It's in this box.
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[Y]ou guys have no idea how many times I've skipped pages and pages because it's all math.
Sometimes we skim the math too. It's like reading a judge's ruling. Somewhere in there you know there's the nugget of the line of reasoning he uses, and the part where he says what he rules and why. But all those lengthy citations and references have to be in there to give it a proper legal foundation.
Engineering documents have to read the same way. You don't need to grasp all the math necessarily unless you want to debate the correctness of the conclusion. The math is there to give the reasoning a proper mathematical foundation, but a well written paper or post will provide textual descriptions as well.
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Can I ask a practical question? Are we doing Stonehenge tomorrow night?
18" 18'
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Gig's off. The drummer exploded.
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Gig's off. The drummer exploded.
Again???
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Whose vomit was involved this time?
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I thought it was a bizarre gardening accident that the police said, "Better left unsolved."
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I haven't read through all 9 pages of this discussion, so if I'm duplicating someone's link, I apologize.
http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/JWhite.htm
That, combined with Colophon's video are a pretty good start. <gross understatement>
I keep thinking about Colonel Kilroy's line in _Apocalypse Now_, "Don't these people ever give up?" (or something like that)
Oops! Maybe that wasn't such a good example.
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http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/JWhite.htm
That, combined with Colophon's video are a pretty good start. <gross understatement>
Well worth duplicating. I really like the coin analogy that Bob produced, and it is worth mentioning again how good it is.
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Well worth duplicating. I really like the coin analogy that Bob produced, and it is worth mentioning again how good it is.
On Wunder-Blunder's thread on the NVIDIA video, I gave a watered down version of it so that people of YT hoax-nut mentality might get it. For JW's off-the-wall inclusion of 10 MeV and 100 MeV electrons, where he got an average of 55 MeV, I proposed an example of 100 coins consisting of dimes, (10 cents @), and dollars, (100 cents @). I asked, "What's the average value of the coins?" Any halfway logical person would say, "I don't know unless you tell me how many are dimes and how many are dollars."
I went on to say that the average is most definitely not 55 cents if 99 of the coins are dimes and one is a dollar. I could have extended the analogy, but stopped there. To drop the other shoe, I would ask, now what if we're talking about a billion coins where 999,999,990 are pennies, (one cent), 9 are dimes, and one is a dollar? Now what's the average value? Well, the answer is almost exactly one cent. The overwhelming majority of pennies makes both the dimes and dollars virtually meaningless.
As a final kick, I would add that in a fair analogy, there wouldn't be _any_ dollar coins in the first place, and even if there were, they have been declared no longer legal tender and have zero value -- analogous to the fact that 100 MeV electrons would go right through the astronauts, imparting almost no energy to their bodies. (I didn't know that until I read Braeunig's article.)
I wonder if Wunder-Blunder understands this coin concept. Or is your and my history with him a good predictor that he just lacks that kind of mathematical or logical thinking ability?
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I've written a response to JW's response. Scroll to the bottom of the page (you may need to refresh if the page is in your cache).
http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/JWhite.htm
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On Wunder-Blunder's thread on the NVIDIA video, I gave a watered down version of it so that people of YT hoax-nut mentality might get it.
I looked for that but couldn't find it. Can you provide a link?
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I just noticed that I uploaded my review of JW's video on September 24 and his video updates are dated September 25. The only place that I made any public announcement about my review was in this thread.
Hi, Jarrah! How you doing? ;D
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I've written a response to JW's response. Scroll to the bottom of the page (you may need to refresh if the page is in your cache).
http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/JWhite.htm
Ah, you're _that_ Bob B! Glad you're a member here, and it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Excellent refutation of Wunder-Blunder's calculations, (for all I know). I read it twice and learned a lot.
I assume that you and I and probably all the other members here are sitting on the edge of our seats, waiting for his inevitable response. After all, he does seem to assume that he is a supreme authority on space radiation, physics, geology, copyright law, photography, and Anime. Such prodigious intellect compels our attention!
"The blood Rene compels you! The blood of Rene compels you! The blood of Rene compels you! ... Jarrah himself compels you!
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On Wunder-Blunder's thread on the NVIDIA video, I gave a watered down version of it so that people of YT hoax-nut mentality might get it.
I looked for that but couldn't find it. Can you provide a link?
Here's the video.
As of a couple of days ago, his thread was right near the top.
I discovered that I couldn't see it, either. I thought that it was because I was blocked and it carried over to anything he posts, with this new system. I was able to see it using another account. If you are blocked on his channel, that might be why you can't see it.
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it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance.
Same to you.
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Here's the video.
As of a couple of days ago, his thread was right near the top.
I was definitely looking in the wrong place (I was looking here: I don't have time right now but I'll look over those comments latter.
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Regarding his use of the 10-100 MeV data on that NASA-related web page, has anyone tried to contact NASA about this? I don't feel qualified. I'll bet they would fix it within two days.
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I was definitely looking in the wrong place (I was looking here: I don't have time right now but I'll look over those comments latter.
There are a lot of them. Get some popcorn. Most of it has to do with replication of the A11 pictures of Buzz on the ladder.
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Regarding his use of the 10-100 MeV data on that NASA-related web page, has anyone tried to contact NASA about this? I don't feel qualified. I'll bet they would fix it within two days.
Good point. There's a email address on that site, so I'll send them an email tomorrow.
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I just noticed that I uploaded my review of JW's video on September 24 and his video updates are dated September 25. The only place that I made any public announcement about my review was in this thread.
Hi, Jarrah! How you doing? ;D
Rumbled huh!
So the Wunder Blunder spies upon us.
However, he is too gutless to participate in debate here! He'll get his arse handed to him if he tries.
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However, he is too gutless to participate in debate here! He'll get his arse handed to him if he tries.
Don't be disappointed. I'm 9794 miles away from his home right now, and I think I can hear his teeth grinding from here. (It's actually better than listening to him talk.)
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However, he is too gutless to participate in debate here! He'll get his arse handed to him if he tries.
Don't be disappointed. I'm 9794 miles away from his home right now, and I think I can hear his teeth grinding from here. (It's actually better than listening to him talk.)
Spare a thought for me then. He's "just across the pond"....
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98915197/ApolloHoax/ThePond.PNG)
...and that grinding sound is deafening!
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Regarding his use of the 10-100 MeV data on that NASA-related web page...
I just noticed something else about that web page that Jarrah insists is so infallible. It includes the following:
Apollo astronauts, however, were forced to traverse the most intense regions of the Belts in their journey to the Moon. Fortunately, the travel time was only about 30 minutes so their actual radiation exposures inside the Apollo space capsule were not much more than the total dose received by Space Shuttle astronauts.
This fact counters some popular speculations that the moon landings were a hoax because astronauts would have instantly died as they made the travel through the belts. In reality, they may have experienced minor radiation poisoning if they had been in their spacesuits on a spacewalk, but no spacewalk was ever scheduled for these very reasons. The shielding provided by the Apollo space capsule walls was more than enough to shield the astronauts from all but the most energetic, and rare, particles
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I was definitely looking in the wrong place (I was looking here: I don't have time right now but I'll look over those comments latter.
There are a lot of them. Get some popcorn. Most of it has to do with replication of the A11 pictures of Buzz on the ladder.
I skipped over the stuff about the A11 photos; I was just interested in the radiation stuff. I noticed that Jarrah is claiming that his computations are correct because he was graded correctly on the same computations for one of his classes. That may be true because I don't have a problem with his equations and mathematics. My analysis uses the same basic equations. The problem is that his input is all wrong. It doesn't matter if his mathematical execution is correct if he's using the wrong flux and energy. I can see that he might score correctly on a test problem if he were given the right information to start with. However, his Apollo analysis is all wrong because he doesn't understand how to get the right data to plug into the equations.
I don't post to YouTube, but if this issue comes up again, somebody might consider pointing this out to him.
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I was definitely looking in the wrong place (I was looking here: I don't have time right now but I'll look over those comments latter.
There are a lot of them. Get some popcorn. Most of it has to do with replication of the A11 pictures of Buzz on the ladder.
I skipped over the stuff about the A11 photos; I was just interested in the radiation stuff. I noticed that Jarrah is claiming that his computations are correct because he was graded correctly on the same computations for one of his classes. That may be true because I don't have a problem with his equations and mathematics. My analysis uses the same basic equations. The problem is that his input is all wrong. It doesn't matter if his mathematical execution is correct if he's using the wrong flux and energy. I can see that he might score correctly on a test problem if he were given the right information to start with. However, his Apollo analysis is all wrong because he doesn't understand how to get the right data to plug into the equations.
I don't post to YouTube, but if this issue comes up again, somebody might consider pointing this out to him.
I'll do it as soon as you tell me whether or not you want him to know it's from you.
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Spare a thought for me then. He's "just across the pond"....
*snip*
...and that grinding sound is deafening!
Support your local HB ;D
I can't support WunderBlunder, he is too far away: Google Maps showed me 22 hours by flying from Düsseldorf Airport to Sydney.
So my charge would be Adrian. Round about one and a half hour by car from here to Tilburg. Sounds manageable 8)
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I skipped over the stuff about the A11 photos; I was just interested in the radiation stuff. I noticed that Jarrah is claiming that his computations are correct because he was graded correctly on the same computations for one of his classes. That may be true because I don't have a problem with his equations and mathematics. My analysis uses the same basic equations. The problem is that his input is all wrong. It doesn't matter if his mathematical execution is correct if he's using the wrong flux and energy. I can see that he might score correctly on a test problem if he were given the right information to start with. However, his Apollo analysis is all wrong because he doesn't understand how to get the right data to plug into the equations.
I don't post to YouTube, but if this issue comes up again, somebody might consider pointing this out to him.
I'll do it as soon as you tell me whether or not you want him to know it's from you.
You can use my name it you want, but it really doesn't matter to me. I think he's reading this thread so he probably already knows.
Somewhere in that massive thread Jarrah writes, "I'd like to remind you that for calculating the does rates I used these exact same methods that I used in a university assignment in which I calculated the radiation does rates on Europa, and my methods are thoroughly watertight." I think it should be put on record that the dispute is not with his method of computation, it's with his bogus input. Garbage in, garbage out.
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By 'university', is that like when he called his TAFE art teacher a photography and perspective expert? A claim that I questioned here (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread566601/pg29#pid8725706) and then she herself had to correct, as quoted here... (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread566601/pg368#pid10650932) What a putrid little liar he is.
I'm guessing by 'university', he might be *again* referring to TAFE. TAFE (Technical and Further Education) 'colleges' are Oz's highly underfunded adult education system which offers a range of courses ranging from completely un-certified 'special interest' classes up to low-end diplomas. Not University Degrees, and in fact it is quite rare for TAFE 'qualifications' to even count at all towards university coursework... TAFE has been neglected over the years and is definitely not in the same league as a university. Hey, I should know - I used to work for them, teaching quite a range of different topics from computing to astronomy and photography.. so my knowledge is 'in-house', if somewhat self-damning... :D But note that I left TAFE to work for Flinders University, managing a real marine research facility run by a real University...
Anyway, Jarrah, now that you are reading this, I'd love to know which bit of which university you are misrepresenting now... Brave enough to name names, JW? I'd like to talk to your lecturers and ask them what they think of your claims...
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Something else that needs correcting is JW's claim that the average area density of a human body is 80 g/cm2. That is one hell of a fat dude! :o
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Something else that needs correcting is JW's claim that the average area density of a human body is 80 g/cm2. That is one hell of a fat dude! :o
The right number is 1.062 g/cm^3, if I remember right. But I'm confused by your unit (g/cm^2). A typing error? Or is it me, who's totally wrong? ???
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Something else that needs correcting is JW's claim that the average area density of a human body is 80 g/cm2. That is one hell of a fat dude! :o
The right number is 1.062 g/cm^3, if I remember right. But I'm confused by your unit (g/cm^2). A typing error? Or is it me, who's totally wrong? ???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_density
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Something else that needs correcting is JW's claim that the average area density of a human body is 80 g/cm2. That is one hell of a fat dude! :o
The right number is 1.062 g/cm^3, if I remember right. But I'm confused by your unit (g/cm^2). A typing error? Or is it me, who's totally wrong? ???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_density
Yeah, I stand corrected. I mixed body density with area density. Thank you for correcting me, cjames.
Dear HBs, you can clearly see, that admitting to be wrong doesn't hurt. :D
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Something else that needs correcting is JW's claim that the average area density of a human body is 80 g/cm2. That is one hell of a fat dude! :o
The right number is 1.062 g/cm^3, if I remember right. But I'm confused by your unit (g/cm^2). A typing error? Or is it me, who's totally wrong? ???
We're talking about "area density", not "density". Area density is the mass of a material per unit surface area. It is used frequently when talking about shielding. For example, if we have a shield consisting of a 2 cm thick sheet of of aluminum, the area density is 5.4 g/cm2, i.e. 2 cm x 2.7 g/cm3 = 5.4 g/cm2.
(ETA) Too late.
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We're talking about "area density", not "density". Area density is the mass of a material per unit surface area. It is used frequently when talking about shielding. For example, if we have a shield existing of a 2 cm thick sheet of of aluminum, the area density is 5.4 g/cm2, i.e. 2 cm x 2.7 g/cm3 = 5.4 g/cm2.
(ETA) Too late.
Thank you for this demonstrative example. I appreciate this.
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Regarding his use of the 10-100 MeV data on that NASA-related web page, has anyone tried to contact NASA about this? I don't feel qualified. I'll bet they would fix it within two days.
Good point. There's a email address on that site, so I'll send them an email tomorrow.
I just sent them an email. I recommended that the energies ranges be changed to 0.1-5 MeV and 0.1-10 MeV, that "volts" be changed to "electron-volts", and the words "on average" be deleted. I also pointed out that Apollo didn't traverse "the most intense regions of" the radiation belts. We'll see if they agree with me and make the changes.
I also looked for an email on the MAARBLE Project site but couldn't find one.
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I just noticed something else about that web page that Jarrah insists is so infallible.
Heck, I've even found errors in the original Apollo press kits. No source is infallible. Errors in it mean someone made an error, not that there's some vast conspiracy afoot.
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You mean a human was involved..... then by logical deduction (don't know what that means but it sounds authoritative), he is a machine?
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I just noticed something else about that web page that Jarrah insists is so infallible.
Heck, I've even found errors in the original Apollo press kits. No source is infallible. Errors in it mean someone made an error, not that there's some vast conspiracy afoot.
To a hoaxie any tiny mistake is either evidence left by a "whistle-blower" or enough to overthrow a tonne of factual evidence *except" where the mistake is made by a hoaxie. Then it's just ignored or hand-waved away. ::)
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By 'university', is that like when he called his TAFE art teacher a photography and perspective expert? A claim that I questioned here (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread566601/pg29#pid8725706) and then she herself had to correct, as quoted here... (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread566601/pg368#pid10650932) What a putrid little liar he is.
I'm guessing by 'university', he might be *again* referring to TAFE. TAFE (Technical and Further Education) 'colleges' are Oz's highly underfunded adult education system which offers a range of courses ranging from completely un-certified 'special interest' classes up to low-end diplomas. Not University Degrees, and in fact it is quite rare for TAFE 'qualifications' to even count at all towards university coursework... TAFE has been neglected over the years and is definitely not in the same league as a university. Hey, I should know - I used to work for them, teaching quite a range of different topics from computing to astronomy and photography.. so my knowledge is 'in-house', if somewhat self-damning... :D But note that I left TAFE to work for Flinders University, managing a real marine research facility run by a real University...
Anyway, Jarrah, now that you are reading this, I'd love to know which bit of which university you are misrepresenting now... Brave enough to name names, JW? I'd like to talk to your lecturers and ask them what they think of your claims...
I'm told by a friend in Oz that the TAFE funding is being seriously cut back by the current government, so the unnameable one may have to go back to making videos in his spare time.
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I just sent them an email. I recommended that the energies ranges be changed to 0.1-5 MeV and 0.1-10 MeV, that "volts" be changed to "electron-volts", and the words "on average" be deleted. I also pointed out that Apollo didn't traverse "the most intense regions of" the radiation belts. We'll see if they agree with me and make the changes.
I also looked for an email on the MAARBLE Project site but couldn't find one.
I posted this and your other comment. (I'm posting as Dobie Debunx since I can't see the thread from Astrobrant2). Comments are disappearing left and right there. I re-posted three of mine this morning. It is difficult to say whether JW is removing them or if it is just that horrible, apparently random, YouTube removal for spam.
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Spare a thought for me then. He's "just across the pond"....
Ah, so you're in New Zealand. here's what I know about NZ:
1) where it is
2) English-speaking
3) Christchurch: home of a famous UFO story that was painstakingly debunked by the great Philip Klass.
That should put me in about the 99.9th percentile for how much Americans know about New Zealand. Sorry, but I just have to say this: my spell checker flags "Zealand"!
So, okay, I suppose you're entitled to take a shot at the USA now.
BTW, is Argentina still trying to conquer you guys?
;)
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Heck, I've even found errors in the original Apollo press kits. No source is infallible. Errors in it mean someone made an error, not that there's some vast conspiracy afoot.
The sad part in all this is that JW is not the least bit interested in getting these apparent errors sorted out. He just wants to find a source that gives a big enough number to make the math work out in his favor.
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The sad part in all this is that JW is not the least bit interested in getting these apparent errors sorted out. He just wants to find a source that gives a big enough number to make the math work out in his favor.
He can't do math though. Nor can he apply physical laws correctly. Both of these failings prevent him from adapting models according to the situation. I've seen enough Whitian physics to know he's not competent in the field. The evidence is plentiful.
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Something else that needs correcting is JW's claim that the average area density of a human body is 80 g/cm2. That is one hell of a fat dude! :o
I want to elaborate on the above. I apologize if it has already been addressed (I quit reading the YouTube thread).
Jarrah mocked my claim that 55 MeV electrons would pass through an astronaut's body. In response he wrote that a 55 MeV electron could pass through material with an area density of 30 g/cm2 (that part I agree with). He then writes that he computes the area density of the human body to be 80 g/cm2; therefore, he claims, the body will stop 55 MeV electrons.
The Blunder has blundered again - he is off by an order of magnitude on his body area density calculation. Let's use JW's own numbers from his video. He says the mass of an astronaut's body is 75 kg and that it has a frontal area of 0.85 m2. Using simple math we get,
(75 kg x 1000 g/kg) / (0.85 m2 x 1002 cm2/m2) = 8.8 g/cm2
Sorry, Jarrah. You're wrong once again.
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Sorry, Jarrah. You're wrong once again.
Should I be surprised? ;)
Is he going to spend his entire life on this crusade I wonder? Does he honestly believe that the weight of Jarrah White's evidence is going to force NASA to come clean about their alleged swindle. His current record suggests he hasn't got a clue about math and physics, yet he seems to think he can outwit the smartest minds on the planet.
He's tenacious, I'll give him that much credit. Problem, he's as dumb as a post and doesn't really pack any more wattage than an LED when it comes to dealing with numbers. I would have given up the ghost by now, especially after so many abject failures.
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He doesn't care. As long as his adulation continues and as long as he can convince his loyal followers with his dog-ate-my-homework excuses for his repeated errors, there will still be a motive for him to continue. As long as one has fans, one can safely ignore critics.
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As long as his adulation continues and as long as he can convince his loyal followers...
How many loyal followers does he actually have? I noticed a sycophant or two while reading the thread at YouTube but I couldn't tell how widespread it was.
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As long as his adulation continues and as long as he can convince his loyal followers...
How many loyal followers does he actually have? I noticed a sycophant blundershill or two while reading the thread at YouTube but I couldn't tell how widespread it was.
FTFY
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How many loyal followers does he actually have?
Which raises another thought I frequently have. If I was the one producing the videos and saw the quality of comments that my 'followers' made, I might just question the time I was spending on such folly. If he cannot see that he has nothing more than a crank following, then let him get on with it. Let him waste his entire life chasing windmills. I'll sit in the stalls and laugh at his efforts. He's an object of amusement, nothing more.
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I want to point out something else about JW's whining about the 10-100 MeV electron issue. He says it comes from a MAARBLE (Monitoring, Analyzing and Assessing Radiation Belt Loss and Energization) Project web page. The 10-100 figure appears on the MAARBLE Public Outreach (http://www.maarble.eu/outreach/index.php/basic-information) section of their web site. It's a duplication of the same information from the NASA Public Outreach (http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/tour/AAvan.html) site. It appears that MAARBLE simply cut and pasted the information from NASA. It's clear that the NASA site came first because during the cut & paste the creators of the MAARBLE site found and corrected some spelling/grammar errors. For instance, they changed "greater then" to "greater than", and "overlaping" to "overlapping". Of course this cut & paste was no doubt done by a web site developer, not a scientist. So, although they caught the spelling errors, they didn't catch errors such as "volts" instead of "electron-volts", and 10-100 instead of 1-10, or 0.1-10, or whatever it was originally supposed to be. So in summary, the MAARBLE Project is not the source of the data even though it is duplicated on their web site.
The original source appears to be Dr. Sten Odenwald, who is listed on the NASA site (http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/) as the author. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean the error originated with Dr. Odenwald; it's possible somebody else could have incorrectly typed the information into the web page. I've sent an email to both Dr. Odenwald and the NASA official also listed on the web page. So far I haven't received a response. If I don't hear something in a week, I'll try to track down Dr. Odenwald through other channels (I've found that he has his own web page). If I can't get the web page corrected, I'm hoping I can at least get a correction from Dr. Oldenwald.
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I want to point out something else about JW's whining about the 10-100 MeV electron issue. He says it comes from a MAARBLE (Monitoring, Analyzing and Assessing Radiation Belt Loss and Energization) Project web page. The 10-100 figure appears on the MAARBLE Public Outreach (http://www.maarble.eu/outreach/index.php/basic-information) section of their web site. It's a duplication of the same information from the NASA Public Outreach (http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/tour/AAvan.html) site. It appears that MAARBLE simply cut and pasted the information from NASA. It's clear that the NASA site came first because during the cut & paste the creators of the MAARBLE site found and corrected some spelling/grammar errors. For instance, they changed "greater then" to "greater than", and "overlaping" to "overlapping". Of course this cut & paste was no doubt done by a web site developer, not a scientist. So, although they caught the spelling errors, they didn't catch errors such as "volts" instead of "electron-volts", and 10-100 instead of 1-10, or 0.1-10, or whatever it was originally supposed to be. So in summary, the MAARBLE Project is not the source of the data even though it is duplicated on their web site.
The original source appears to be Dr. Sten Odenwald, who is listed on the NASA site (http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/) as the author. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean the error originated with Dr. Odenwald; it's possible somebody else could have incorrectly typed the information into the web page. I've sent an email to both Dr. Odenwald and the NASA official also listed on the web page. So far I haven't received a response. If I don't hear something in a week, I'll try to track down Dr. Odenwald through other channels (I've found that he has his own web page). If I can't get the web page corrected, I'm hoping I can at least get a correction from Dr. Oldenwald.
I emailed him for clarification on 26 September, no reply yet I'm afraid.
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I emailed him for clarification on 26 September, no reply yet I'm afraid.
That's disappointing.
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I emailed him for clarification on 26 September, no reply yet I'm afraid.
I've found two email addresses for Dr. Odenwald, so I'd like to check which one you used. Please check your personal messages.
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Over at YouTube there is a Jarrah fanboy by the name of FakeMoonRocks who keeps posting stuff like the following:
You pro-Apollo nutters are hilarious. Bob Braeunig has a webpage titled, "Apollo 11's Translunar Trajectory and how they avoided the radiation belts." But then he does an entire article underneath that title, referring to NASA information, that shows the Apollo missions did not "avoid", "steer clear" or go "around" the belts...however you want to word it...Apollo missions didn't do any of that. The NASA information shows they went through them. End of story.
He keeps harping on about the subtitle of the page where I said Apollo "avoided" the belts. Of course I didn't mean to imply they avoided them entirely, just that the avoided the most intense and dangerous parts of the belts. This meaning is apparent by the article. It's true the trajectories still went through the belts, but they went through the far weaker parts near the edges.
FakeMoonRocks also continually downplays the significance of the Apollo trajectories in terms of mitigating the radiation hazard. This got me thinking, just what would have been the exposure had Apollo flown through the heart of the belts rather than skirting around the perimeter.
During my analysis of Apollo 11 (http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/VABraddose.htm), I computed the dose that a totally exposed and unprotected astronaut would receive had he passed through the radiation belts following the trajectories of Apollo 11. The total dose came to 180 rem; however there was a significant difference between the outbound and inbound trajectories. The outbound trajectory had an inclination of 31.383o (about 42o to the geomagnetic equator), while the inbound trajectory had an inclination of 39.925o (about 51o to the geomagnetic equator). Since the inbound trajectory was farther out toward the edges of the radiation belts, we would expect a smaller dose. The unshielded dose along the outbound trajectory is 149 rem and that along the inbound trajectory is 31 rem.
Let's now assume a worst case scenario, that is, we pass right through the heart of the belts. In this scenario the plane of the orbit is the same as the plane of the geomagnetic equator, which results in dramatically higher doses. The unshielded doses for the outbound and inbound trajectories are about 3250 rem and 3200 rem respectively. This means that the Apollo 11 trajectories resulted in reductions of 95% and 99% from the potential worst case radiation exposure.
These computations are, or course, those for an exposed and unprotected astronaut. Inside the shielded spacecraft, the actual doses are far less. I estimate that the actual Apollo 11 dose was only about 32 mrem, all coming from protons >100 MeV. For the worst case trajectory through the geomagnetic plane, I estimate that the dose inside the spacecraft could possibly be as high as 5 rem total for both trips.
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I estimate that the actual Apollo 11 dose was only about 32 mrem, all coming from protons >100 MeV.
Seems about right. The actual total measured dose for the complete mission was 180 mrem (1.8 mSv). This is from the Apollo Experience Report "Protection Against Radiation".
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The first lunar radio ham payload is about to be launched, piggybacking on a Chinese mission. Looks like they've included a radiation instrument:
http://moon.luxspace.lu/the-mission/
Don't expect the results to provide any conflict with Apollo, so just waiting for the HBs to explain how becoming a radio ham automatically enrols you as a hoax insider and puts you on the government shill payroll.
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The first lunar radio ham payload is about to be launched, piggybacking on a Chinese mission. Looks like they've included a radiation instrument:
http://moon.luxspace.lu/the-mission/
Don't expect the results to provide any conflict with Apollo, so just waiting for the HBs to explain how becoming a radio ham automatically enrols you as a hoax insider and puts you on the government shill payroll.
Isn't that in the ham radio operators licence? Don't you have to pass a test?
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See the following for the response from Dr. Odenwald regarding the bogus 10-100 MeV electron claim:
http://www.apollohoax.net/forum/index.php?topic=683.0
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He keeps harping on about the subtitle of the page where I said Apollo "avoided" the belts. Of course I didn't mean to imply they avoided them entirely, just that the avoided the most intense and dangerous parts of the belts. This meaning is apparent by the article. This means that the Apollo 11 trajectories resulted in reductions of 95% and 99% from the potential worst case radiation exposure.
I responded to his comment. Yeah, it's pretty dumb for him to make some issue out of that when your whole article explained it in detail.
This means that the Apollo 11 trajectories resulted in reductions of 95% and 99% from the potential worst case radiation exposure.
That's a valuable contribution. If I ever use it I'll try to remember to credit you for it.
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Just a question:- HB's always talk about going out through the belts and how the Apollo Astronauts would get fried. I have yet to see any of them mention the fact that the Astronauts had to return too. I may just of missed it though.
Does anyone know the comparisons in escape velocity speed and return speed and time spent in the belts? The return speed would no doubt been at a greater velocity. Also, where, in relation to the VAB's did the CM SM separate?
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Bob B. discusses that in his excellent article. The departure and return velocities were different but not by much; the bigger effect had to do with the different geomagnetic inclinations of the two trajectories. For Apollo 11, the return had a higher inclination so the dose was considerably less.
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I had wondered about the angle, as the angle of the TLI was a combination of the tilt of the Earth and that the moon has a 5.1o of eccentricity with regard the plane of the ecliptic. So that angle must change over the course of the mission, especially for those of longer duration.
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Just a question:- HB's always talk about going out through the belts and how the Apollo Astronauts would get fried. I have yet to see any of them mention the fact that the Astronauts had to return too. I may just of missed it though.
Jarrah mentions this in his video and doubles his one-way computation to account for it. Of course he just assumes the return trajectory was a mirror image, he doesn't do anything to verify that.
Does anyone know the comparisons in escape velocity speed and return speed and time spent in the belts? The return speed would no doubt been at a greater velocity.
Ka9q has already answered this but I'd like to add to it. The numbers I'm about to give are for Apollo 11. I have not done the computations for other missions, though they are surely similar. The amount of time spent in the belts was much less on the return trip, but this was only slightly due to a higher velocity. For instance, if we compare the velocities at an altitude of 1000 km, the outbound and return trips were 10,333 m/s and 10,355 m/s respectively. The big difference was in the inclinations. The orbital inclinations of the outbound and return trips were 31.383o and 39.925o respectively. These angles are in respect to the geographic equator. In 1969 the difference between the geographic and geomagnetic equators was a little over 11 degrees. Apollo 11 flew in a direction that took full advantage of this difference, obtaining near maximum separation between the spacecraft and the geomagnetic equator. The inclinations with respect to the geomagnetic equator were about 42o and 51o. Since the return trip was farther away from the geomagnetic equator, the fluxes were significantly lower. Furthermore, the radiation belts do not extend outward as far at that latitude, so Apollo 11 could traverse them in less time. The total time spent in the belts was about 219 minutes on the outbound trip and 147 minutes on the return trip (this is to the far outer edge where the flux drops to zero). Taking into account the lower flux and the shorter duration, the dose that an unprotect astronaut would receive was about 5 times greater on the outbound trip vs. the return trip.
Most of the outer belt radiation comes from electrons, and these were completely blocked by the spacecraft hull. The only real concern was protons with energies above about 100 MeV, as these were the only particles with enough energy to actually penetrate the hull. The only time these high-energy protons were encountered was when Apollo skimmed by the inner proton belt. Apollo was in this danger zone for only a matter of minutes; about 8 minutes on the outbound trip and about 4 minutes on the return trip.
Also, where, in relation to the VAB's did the CM SM separate?
On Apollo 11 the SM separated at GET 194:49:12.7. This was at an altitude of about 3300 km and about 14 minutes prior to atmospheric entry. Obviously most of the VAB had already been traversed by the time of separation. However, separation did occur prior to the 4-minute period when Apollo 11 was exposed to the greatest threat from high-energy protons (which was about 10 to 6 minutes prior to entry).
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Thank you Bob, a clear and concise answer. :)
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Also, where, in relation to the VAB's did the CM SM separate?
On Apollo 11 the SM separated at GET 194:49:12.7. This was at an altitude of about 3300 km and about 14 minutes prior to atmospheric entry. Obviously most of the VAB had already been traversed by the time of separation. However, separation did occur prior to the 4-minute period when Apollo 11 was exposed to the greatest threat from high-energy protons (which was about 10 to 6 minutes prior to entry).
Gee, that seems very late. Not a lot of time to do something about it if, for some reason, the separation didn't work as expected.
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I had wondered about the angle, as the angle of the TLI was a combination of the tilt of the Earth and that the moon has a 5.1o of eccentricity with regard the plane of the ecliptic. So that angle must change over the course of the mission, especially for those of longer duration.
The nodal precession of the Moon has a period of 18.6 years, so it's change is insignificant for a short duration mission. During this 18.6-year period the Moon's inclination with respect to Earth's equator varies between 18.3o and 28.6o. It was at its maximum around 1968-69.
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Also, where, in relation to the VAB's did the CM SM separate?
On Apollo 11 the SM separated at GET 194:49:12.7. This was at an altitude of about 3300 km and about 14 minutes prior to atmospheric entry. Obviously most of the VAB had already been traversed by the time of separation. However, separation did occur prior to the 4-minute period when Apollo 11 was exposed to the greatest threat from high-energy protons (which was about 10 to 6 minutes prior to entry).
Gee, that seems very late. Not a lot of time to do something about it if, for some reason, the separation didn't work as expected.
They had limited consumables in the CM - battery power and oxygen. And if the separation failed, I don't know what they would have been able to accomplish even if they had several hours on hand. Going EVA with their equipment would be a very last-ditch effort, since they only would have the two OPS at hand which could sustain two astronauts for 30 minutes. And all the connectors would be hidden between the CM and SM, not really reachable from outside.
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The first lunar radio ham payload is about to be launched...
The mission is now in progress and the radiation levels are reported to be as expected.
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I commented on the NVIDIA thread on youtube, basically to follow the thread using Google+. Is there a way, if you see a thread you want to follow on youtube, to follow the tread, without the need to comment? It's an effective method, but sometimes I feel like I'm just butting in to someone else's argument.