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51
The Hoax Theory / Re: Apollo 16 UV equipment
« Last post by Allan F on May 18, 2025, 05:56:19 PM »
Just a question: Wasn't it a 60mm lens on the EVA Hasselblad? Along with the 250mm. I believe there was an 80mm lens used exclusively in the CM for IVA.
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The Hoax Theory / Apollo 16 UV equipment
« Last post by onebigmonkey on May 16, 2025, 03:56:09 AM »
This could have gone in the 'Reality of Apollo' forum, but it's a query that addresses a hoax claim so...

An article has appeared on Aulis:

https://www.aulis.com/incon16.htm

where the change in angular size of Earth in two photographs is too great for lenses used, ergo fake, blah blah blah.

The superb Dave McKeegan has done an excellent demolition of the claim here:



In a nutshell, the hoax claimant clearly hasn't spotted that a 105mm UV lens was used as well as the usual 80 and 250mm ones, despite this being recorded in the photography index, press kit and other reports.

During several UV sequences, one camera had a UV lens and filter sett attached. UV photographs were taken using the different filters, then the UV film magazine swapped out and a colour one used with the same lens for comparison.

The exception is AS16-118-18889, which does not have a companion UV image set, does not have a distinctive haze around Earth, and is also missing a feature from the photographs (see the red outlined object in the attachment), which appears in all photographs taken with the 105mm lens. The 105mm lens is used again for AS16-118-18890 to 18891. The photography index suggests 18889 was taken with the 105mm lens, but it wouldn't be the first time that such a document was mistaken. The movment of the continents and clouds towards the terminator suggests between around 35 minutes has elapsed between 18888 and 18889. There are no comments from the crew about the process.

The UV photography was carried out through a specific window of the CM, which was redesigned for the purpose so as not to eliminate UV light. All the UV images, and their colour companions, feature this. I think either the 105mm lens was removed for the 10 hours or so between UV photography sessions, or magazine 118 was used in a different camera for that one photograph.

My theory for the feature in the UV lens images is that it is some part of the filter wheel attached to the lens, which is why it is absent from AS16-118-18889. Does anyone have any documentation showing that assembly?

I've made some changes to my page on this part of the mission to incorporate it:

https://onebigmonkey.com/apollo/CATM2/A16/02/a16_day02.html
53
General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency
« Last post by Peter B on May 12, 2025, 07:23:20 PM »
My seat? It's too early to be sure, but our Teal candidate looks like she's won. And as a Teal voter I have to say I'm pretty happy with that result.

Well, dang it. She lost, but it was mighty close: a margin of 350 votes out of about 101,000 votes cast. In other words, she got 49.83% of the vote after preference distribution.
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General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency
« Last post by Allan F on May 11, 2025, 04:30:21 PM »
Most likely, they aren't really caring about religion, as long as they can get their fingers in the cookie jar - either as personal power gains or money in one form or another. I fail to understand how they can't see their future getting destroyed when they hitch their wagon to that train.
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General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency
« Last post by Peter B on May 09, 2025, 07:46:06 PM »
The election of the new Pope has brought home to me once again something I see in Trump supporters and the Trump inner circle that I can't quite put into words, so perhaps someone can distill my muddled thoughts into an organised concept...

A large number of Trump supporters are conservative Protestant Christians who make negative statements about people who don't belong to their specific version of faith; they dislike atheists and Muslims, many hate Jews, and many seem to believe Catholics aren't Christians. Yet many people in the inner circle of Trump supporters and promoters seem to be atheist (or at best cultural Christians who don't go to church) like Trump and Musk, Jewish (Laura Loomer, Ben Shapiro and Jared Kushner) or Catholic (Steve Bannon and JD Vance).

I'm fascinated that these Inner Circle people seem to be able to base their political views on their religious views, without those disparate religious views causing clashes within the circle.

I suppose it's like a concept I've used to discuss historical events with my kids - that religion matters until it doesn't (and doesn't matter until it does). To use a compact example, the Siege of Constantinople in 1453 is often naively presented as a microcosm of Christianity versus Islam: Christian Constantinople defending itself against Muslim Ottoman attack; yet the Ottoman armies included many Christians, such as the Serbian miners who were paid good money to dig under the walls of the city; and the defenders of the city included a cousin of the Ottoman sultan and his retinue. So, the Catholic and Orthodox defenders could snipe at each other about their religion, while ignoring the presence of Muslim fellow-defenders; and Ottoman imams could whip up the majority of the Ottoman army into a religious frenzy, while ignoring the Christian miners chiselling away beneath them.

Trump's supporters seem to include a mix of (a) people who seem genuinely unaware of the different religious persuasions of the people who mobilise them, and (b) a smaller number of people who seem to be aware of these inconsistencies but seem to be able to allow it to not matter to them. It makes me wonder exactly what the religious convictions of the people in group (b) really are: are they pragmatic, cynical, or in awe of the mysterious workings of God?

Occasionally conflicts related to this come to the surface, such as JD Vance being publicly unhappy at Trump supporters saying racist things about his wife. On other occasions the inconsistencies arise over time but people don't seem to notice, such as some Trump supporters cheering the deaths of Jewish people in the original Hamas attack in 2023 and other Trump supporters cheering the subsequent deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Israel. But it never seems to be serious enough to fracture the coalition of his supporters.

This ability to keep this coalition together seems to be Trump's superpower. But I have to say the ability of his supporters to cheer what he says today while forgetting they cheered at him saying the opposite yesterday is giving me serious "1984" vibes.
56
General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency
« Last post by Obviousman on May 04, 2025, 06:31:13 PM »
Well said! And if we are to be fair, you should also say "... that motherfucker Clive Palmer....

That TOP party is nothing but One Nation in a yellow wrapper.

Anyway, it was a resounding rejection of Trump-style politics.
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General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency
« Last post by Peter B on May 03, 2025, 10:53:10 AM »
I wonder whether Trump is the sort of guy who'd take credit for something he's no doubt partly responsible for, but mightn't actually like? In this case, he can take part credit for the Labor Party here in Oz gaining an increased majority and our conservative Coalition parties crashing to their worst result in decades.

1. Quick primer on the nuances of Aussie democracy.

We have a House of Representatives with 151 single-member seats, where the government is formed. Voting is preferential (not FPTP), so a candidate in second place on primary votes can overtake the first place candidate by gaining the preference votes of the less popular candidates.

We have a Senate with 76 seats, 12 for each state and 2 for each territory. Half of the state-based senators are up for election each time, while all the territory-based senators face election each time. Voting is a form of proportional representation, meaning that one or two seats from each state are often taken by minor parties or independents.

This combination of voting systems means that the Australian Parliament provides opportunities for voters to elect candidates who support policy platforms that differ from those of the major parties.

Voting is compulsory, the majority of polling places are primary schools, most schools take advantage of their captive audiences to run fund raising sausage sizzles, and so we all buy democracy sausages.

2. Parties

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is a centre-left party. Its leader is the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, who led the party to a very narrow victory in the 2022 election. As a party of the workers, its colour is red (take note, Yanks!).

The Coalition is a grouping of two conservative parties. The Liberal Party is a party of the centre-right to the right (that is, a party of Classical Liberalism and Free Enterprise). Its leader is Peter Dutton, who is very much of the right wing of the party, and often caricatured as Darth Dutton. Its colour is blue. The National Party is the party of rural Australia; while notionally conservative, farmers never say no to government subsidies.

The Greens are exactly as you'd expect them, to the left of the ALP. They poll about the same as the Nationals but win fewer seats than them as their support is widely and thinly spread.

Pauline Hanson's One Nation is a minor party to the right of the Liberals. It appeals to the same sort of people that Trump appeals to in the USA.

Trumpet of Patriots is a minor party led by businessman Clive Palmer. Palmer had one term in Parliament about a decade ago. He then created the United Australia Party and spent a heap of money in political ads, for a result of zero seats in the 2019 election and one seat in 2022. When the UAP was de-registered, he instead took over TOP. TOP was marketed as a very Trumpian-style party, with Palmer having some definitely Trumpish characteristics such as his litigiousness and his occasional business failures.

3. The Teals

A growing feature of Australian politics has been the Teals. As you might guess from their colour, these are candidates calling for action on climate change, but from the conservative side of politics. At the 2022 election they dragged a swathe of votes from the Liberals and took about six seats in the House of Representatives.

Even more remarkably, in 2022 a Teal won one of the two Senate seats here in the ACT. Since the ACT gained Senate representation in the 1970s, the two seats have been split between the ALP and the Liberals. But in 2022 a Teal beat the Liberals for the second Senate seat.

The result was that while the ALP claimed only a small majority in 2022, the Coalition was a very distant second.

4. The election campaign

Not surprisingly, the major parties ran a bunch of negative ads, although the ALP did a fair bit to remind people of what they have achieved in the last three years. By contrast, the Liberals couldn't decide what they wanted. Policies would be announced one day and then walked back a few days later when they turned out wildly unpopular or impractical, and Dutton himself was often drawn to his own Trumpian dark side.

TOP invited that charming USAnian Putin apologist Mothertucker Carlson to Australia a few months ago, to allow him to gush about Palmer the way he does about Trump and Putin. Their political ads were as frequent as ads by the major parties, and they attacked everyone, even their Pauline Hanson fellow travellers. When I checked out their website, they actually had a couple of half-decent policy ideas, but you'd never have known that if you relied on their advertising as they never mentioned their own policies.

The Greens were invisible. I don't remember seeing a single ad for them.

Here in my electorate, held by a fairly anonymous ALP drone, we had a high-profile campaign by a Teal.

5. The result

The short of it - the ALP has gained about 10 seats and the Coalition has lost about 10 seats. This makes Anthony Albanese the first person to win successive elections since 2004, which says something about how politically unsettled Australia has been in the last two decades. One of the Coalition losers was Opposition Leader Peter Dutton - the first time an Opposition Leader has lost his seat.

The other Coalition loser was the Coalition itself. They consciously presented themselves as parties of the right, rather than shifting towards the centre to try to win back Teal voters, and ended up losing votes on the right anyway, mostly to Pauline Hanson.

The Greens also lost votes. Over the last Parliament they had the opportunity to help the ALP emplace some decent progressive policies. Instead they joined the Coalition to block these policies in the Senate, because they weren't progressive enough. It was a stupid display of ideological purity, all the more stupid because it's not the first time they've done this sort of thing, and the voters seem to have remembered.

My seat? It's too early to be sure, but our Teal candidate looks like she's won. And as a Teal voter I have to say I'm pretty happy with that result.

And TOP? After all that advertising, they got about 2% of the vote. It would seem their trumpets were modelled on Monty Python trumpets.

I wonder if Mothertucker Carlson will have anything to say about his involvement with TOP, or if Trump and his "advisors" will learn anything. At the very least, I hope that sensible USAnians will draw some comfort from the Trump-rejecting results here and in Canada.

6. Conclusion

Okay, sorry about that. I just wanted to get it off my chest. For the first time in months the future looks a little brighter.
58
General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency
« Last post by raven on May 01, 2025, 08:30:51 PM »
So, Canada, after the election, how's your home and native land?

(We have our federal election tomorrow...)
Could be much worse, we didn't end up with Temu Trump as PM, and  but my riding flipped to Con in a situation where less folks voted for the guy who won but not as any kind of united front. Best hopes your end! In many ways, Australia and Canada are alike: we both have a thinly populated interior with lots of wonderful, potentially dangerous  critters and a more populous crust of population, and we both have more of a history of racism than we often like to admit or deal with.
59
General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency
« Last post by Peter B on May 01, 2025, 06:14:55 PM »
So, Canada, after the election, how's your home and native land?

(We have our federal election tomorrow...)
60
Other Conspiracy Theories / Re: HBO Miniseries From the Earth to the Moon
« Last post by Obviousman on April 25, 2025, 05:02:28 PM »
That reminds me of the early days of Star Trek and when they first introduced the Orion slave girls. The actresses were painted a deep green but when the directors viewed the rushes, the colour of the Orions was all washed out. They increased the colour intensity by using brighter skin paint but time and time again when the rushes were viewed, the green skin colour of the Orion slave girls would be washed out.

Finally in frustration, the director asked the film processors if there was anything strange about the film being used. At first he said no but then remarked that they had been having trouble with some of the colours: these dancing girls kept on coming up with a dark green skin colour and they were having a terrible time trying to get rid of the green!
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