A rebuttal to Jarrah's latest masterpiece

[Luke Pemberton]

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.

[Bob B.]

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.

[Bob B.]

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.

[JayUtah]

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.

[Bob B.]

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.

[HeadLikeARock]

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"

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.

[JayUtah]

Yeah, it was a great analogy.  I'm totally stealing it for teaching purposes.

[Bob B.]

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.

[ka9q]

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.

[smartcooky]

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!

[onebigmonkey]

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."

[raven]

AKA moving the goal posts.

[JayUtah]

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.

[Dr_Orpheus]

I think old Patrick was the most entertaining HB when it came to moving goal posts.

[raven]

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.