why was the usa the only one to go to the moon?

[JayUtah]

No, some hemp advocates argue hemp oil has a curative effect on cancer, not just alleviating the side effects of chemo.

And going further off topic, there are a few copies of Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Salvador Dalí. Sells for something like $12,000.

[Donnie B.]

And going further off topic, there are a few copies of Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Salvador Dalí.

That sounds like a good match, actually.

[JayUtah]

http://www.williambennettgallery.com/artists/dali/portfolios/alice.php

Somewhere someone has scanned the entire set, with the publisher's blessing.

[smartcooky]

No, some hemp advocates argue hemp oil has a curative effect on cancer, not just alleviating the side effects of chemo.

And going further off topic, there are a few copies of Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Salvador Dalí. Sells for something like $12,000.

I'll bet very few fans of Salvador Dali realise that he had a cat...

[ka9q]

I find a similar culture around marijuana proponents.  Seriously, if it cured cancer, don't you think the big pharmaceutical companies wouldn't find a way to package the component chemicals responsible into a pill/injection/what have you and sell it?

I don't see very many people claiming that marijuana cures cancer. What I do see are a lot of people claiming it alleviates anorexia, nausea and vomiting, and various forms of chronic pain. And pharmaceutical companies have in fact identified, packaged and sold at least some of the active ingredients. Marinol (generic: dronabinol) is a pure isomer of the THC found in cannibis. Cesamet (generic: nabilone) is an analog of dronabinol.

[gillianren]

"Not very many" does not equal "none."  The majority of medical marijuana advocates are aware of its limited capabilities.  However, in any large crowd, you get one or two of the loonies.  Talk to Tommy Chong, for example.  And, yes, he's always been odd, but you don't know the people I know personally who believe that garbage.

[twik]

I doubt most of those people claim it cures cancer. What it does do well is alleviate much of the suffering from pain and the side-effects of chemotherapy

Well, there are rational proponents, and not so rational ones.

Even in the media - I remember an article on a study that showed that people who were high had a lesser rate of car accidents than people who were drunk, although both were well above the rate for sober drivers. The reporter and the people quoted in it, seemed to think that this was reason to declare driving while high virtually harmless, even though the data showed it wasn't.

The argument was, "Yeah, well, it's less bad than driving while drunk, so it's OK." It's like arguing that a strep throat should not be considered an illness at all, because it's less serious than tuberculosis.

[Noldi400]

I doubt most of those people claim it cures cancer. What it does do well is alleviate much of the suffering from pain and the side-effects of chemotherapy

Well, there are rational proponents, and not so rational ones.

There's rational and then there's rational, I guess. There have been some legitimate, peer-reviewed studies showing that some of the compounds in marijuana reduce tumor growth and drastically inhibit metastasis in breast cancer:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3410650/

and can actually cause cell death in glioma (a cancer of the glial cells - the cells in the Central Nervous System that support and maintain the neurons) by induced autophagy, i.e., causing the cancer cells to eat themselves:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2673842/ 

There have also been some promising early results in slowing the progress of Alzheimer's, along with quite a few studies demonstrating symptomatic relief in neurological diseases such as ALS (Lou Gehrig's) and multiple sclerosis.

Note, though, that we're not just talking about having patients toke up three times a day (sorry, Tommy); some of the ingredients of cannabis are psychotropic and some aren't. There's just some interesting research going on.

Even in the media - I remember an article on a study that showed that people who were high had a lesser rate of car accidents than people who were drunk, although both were well above the rate for sober drivers. The reporter and the people quoted in it, seemed to think that this was reason to declare driving while high virtually harmless, even though the data showed it wasn't.

The argument was, "Yeah, well, it's less bad than driving while drunk, so it's OK." It's like arguing that a strep throat should not be considered an illness at all, because it's less serious than tuberculosis.

On the social/recreational front, IMO, people shouldn't be driving while under the influence of either cannabis OR alcohol. Medically, though, every study done so far seems to indicate that smoking pot is at least as bad for you as tobacco smoking, but otherwise has relatively low health risks - certainly nothing in the league of alcohol use.

I'm not what you would call a marijuana activist as far as legalizing recreational use, but from a practical POV I surely see a lot of money and law enforcement man-hours put into marijuana enforcement that could be better used elsewhere.

---- BREAK ----

On a totally unrelated question, has anyone here ever asked an HB, "What evidence would it take to convince you of the reality of Apollo?" and gotten a reasonable answer?

[Andromeda]

On a totally unrelated question, has anyone here ever asked an HB, "What evidence would it take to convince you of the reality of Apollo?" and gotten a reasonable answer?

Yes, but then when I present the evidence they asked for the HB has moved the goalposts and made unreasonable demands.

[Echnaton]

---- BREAK ----

Good idea

On a totally unrelated question, has anyone here ever asked an HB, "What evidence would it take to convince you of the reality of Apollo?" and gotten a reasonable answer?

The typical hoax believer who is searching for a smoking gun will never give a reasonable (non-goalpost-shifting) answer because there is always a potentially new and exciting smoking gun to be found around the next corner.

Nor would they ever accept a reasonable response from us as to when we would believe it was a hoax.  An reasonable answer such as "when a more consistent theory is put forward that encompasses what is known about Apollo and the relevant sciences that documents why the missions were not possible, how the hoax was accomplished and how the artifacts have fooled experts in the relevant fields of study."

[nomuse]

Worse -- it's a cross-purposes question.  Almost a non-translatable one.

From our point of view, the reality of Apollo is accepted as being the most probable and logical extrapolation of known facts.  This leaves our areas of interest roughly two; in the technical details that we believe are consistent with that understood reality, and that are interesting in and of themselves; and in the meta-conversation about how belief structures (particularly those that confront ground reality) arise.

From the hoax believer point of view, the conversation is adversarial.  They are on a quest for truth, they have hold of several threads they hope if pulled will unravel the fabric of deception, and they are being contested -- attacked, even -- along the path of their quest.

From their point of view, any questions designed to understand the nature of belief can only be perceived as weapons; as tools used to attack their ideas or them personally.  They literally can not fit into the structure of their views the context in which the topic of why they believe what they believe is a legitimate question.

Nor is it easy for them to entertain even as a mental exercise the necessary a priori assumption that there might be no hoax.  Without that, the question, "What would it take to convince you?" is semantically meaningless.

So when the question is asked, and if responses are made, they simply fly past each other.  They might as well be in different (and mutually incomprehensible) languages.

[Noldi400]

I think there's another factor, too, but I'm not sure just how it fits into the picture.

I was following a thread the other day - trying to put a name to a particular logical fallacy that I don't now remember - when I ran up on this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html?_r=5&

It's about something called the Argumentative Theory of Reasoning, and it postulates that human beings are hard-coded to win arguments rather than to seek the truth. I find this extremely easy to believe.

The converse of that seems to me to be critical thinking, and that is a learned skill. I would be inclined to  bet that most of us here have backgrounds in which we were either taught critical thinking skills formally or had to learn them as an inherent part of our professions.

And HBs notably lack those skills, which is why I agree with the assessment that they probably can't even conceive of the possibility that they might be wrong, which in turn means that convincing evidence just doesn't exist and anything that appears convincing is in itself faked in some way. So I think you're probably right that the question itself is so much gibberish, because it's just a matter of time before the "smoking gun" comes to light.

What would it take to convince me that it was a hoax? Well... a lot.  I wouldn't be too curious about the "why" as much as the "how"; I think I'd like to start with that giant bunker where they've kept the hundreds or thousands of people penned up turning out all the documentation that exists about Apollo - including all the books supposedly written by astronauts - along with an equal or greater number of engineers, fact checkers, and continuity people making sure every document is consistent (but not too consistent - must allow for human error to make it believable, yanno) with every other document. Yeah. That'd be a good start.

---- BREAK ----

Good idea

Sarcasm? Or approval?  Tone-of-voice circuit stopped working.

[smartcooky]

What would it take to convince me that it was a hoax? Well... a lot.  I wouldn't be too curious about the "why" as much as the "how"; I think I'd like to start with that giant bunker where they've kept the hundreds or thousands of people penned up turning out all the documentation that exists about Apollo - including all the books supposedly written by astronauts - along with an equal or greater number of engineers, fact checkers, and continuity people making sure every document is consistent (but not too consistent - must allow for human error to make it believable, yanno) with every other document. Yeah. That'd be a good start.

Well they weren't even even able to achieve that with Watergate, or Iran-Contra.

What on Earth would make anyone believe that something hundreds, perhaps thousands of times more complex (faking the Apollo programme), could be covered up successfully for 44 years.

[gillianren]

Yeah, personally, I don't think a demonstration of "why" the landings were hoaxed would prove a thing.  Questions of motive only mean so much.  Questions of motive can never really be proven.  The landings are a question of fact, and the only rebuttal is to show that the facts are wrong and to show facts that replace them.  That's what it would take to show me that the landings were hoaxed.  A complete demonstration of all the facts of how the hoax was accomplished.

[nomuse]

What would convince me is a Ken Burns documentary.

Not the documentary per se, but the environment in which such a documentary would be made; in which all sorts of material becomes available about the hoax, the process of the hoax, the people who made it possible. 

The documentary would be lots and lots of talking heads of people describing the struggles and travails and improvisations and doubts and small victories.  And all the moments where it looked like the (hoax) project was going to fail, but due to luck or some stroke of genius or a whole bunch of grueling long just-plain-work, the thing got back on track again.

And there would be technical studies and pictures of the equipment and behind-the-scenes of the filming.  And all sorts of surprising esoteric stuff most people would have never thought needed to be part of the hoax, and that took all sorts of clever work to pull off.

And they would be proud, too.  A little sad -- especially sad that it hadn't been possible to go to the Moon -- but aware of their place in history and of what they accomplished in fooling the world.  And they'd want to talk about it.  They wouldn't be frightened, they wouldn't avoid interviews; they'd be pleased to have a chance to finally talk about it, and to get back together again with the men and women who had been involved in that escapade with them.