I've always been taught Oh-MIKE-ron. Virtually the whole of the USA says OH-mick-ron. Interesting....
The Emoluments of Mars
Mocking pseudoscience since 2008
Thursday, December 2, 2021
Thursday, January 7, 2021
Time to assess Jerome Corsi's prediction
Jerome Corsi is the author of this, among other worthless pieces of self-published trash:
« It is up to VP Mike Pence today to ... take action to preserve the greatest nation on God’s green earth from a takeover by the CCP division of the Army of Darkness. Pence presides over the joint session of Congress at 1pm Eastern, and has the power and responsibility to declare the fraudulent pre-certification of state electoral college delegates pledged to the #bidencrimefamily invalid. The battleground states must decertify their Biden electors and certify Trump electors.»Shows how much Corsi knows about constitutional law. Trump himself tried the same idea on Pence, and to his credit Pence replied "Sorry squire, no can do" (or an Americanised version thereof).
Corsi was invited to the news segment of C2C-AM last night, as the joint session of Congress was reconvened and debating a trimmed-down list of ridiculous objections to the electoral collge voting. He made no comments about Trump's chances at all, instead wailing that he was being "de-platformed", that there is no freedom of speech, and that this will probably be his last appearance on the radio show because he'll soon be arrested.
« Due to the rampant censorship of the past few hours, our videos have been de-platformed. Because of this, none of the videos on the website currently play. »But wait... this is his own web site, the domain name bought by proxy in June 2018 and not due to expire until 2029. And his vids play perfectly well on the Tube that is You.
Wednesday, January 6, 2021
False information on Coast to Coast AM
It's not exactly hot news that what a few million late-night listeners heard on C2C-AM last night was nonsense. That program's respect for truth is hardly better than that of some of our favorite liars and propagandists—Robert Morningstar, Mike Bara to name but two.
But it's particularly egregious of the producers (Lisa Lyon, Tom Danheiser) to be trotting out Ben Fuchs at a time when the hospital systems of the USA are tottering on the brink of collapse due to the flood of COVID-19 victims. In the Los Angeles area, several hospitals are now turning away ambulances because they have nowhere to put the patients they bring. One hospital in that area has been treating patients in the gift shop. Surely the time for accurate information is now.
Friday, January 1, 2021
Time to assess Mark Richards' February prediction
On February 20th, I wrote the following:
« I promise I'll be back at the end of the year when Mark Richards' prediction can be assessed with certainty. Given that Richards is now serving a life sentence in Vacaville jail, with no special access to sources, I'm very confident that I will be telling him, if he's listening, that he was wrong.»So here I am, as promised, to evaluate the prediction. Here it is in full:
« 100,000 people in China [are] involved in the virus. 30% have died, 30% are infected and 40% are taken off-world by Reptilians assisting China in their drive to eliminate approx. 500 million people ...
Those humans taken off-world, according to Mark, by Reptilians, are sold to other races for food and used as sex slaves. This virus will mutate and other governments are using it to facilitate eliminating some of their populations as well. One-quarter of a million people will die of the virus this year.»
Evaluation:
- At the time of the prediction, 74,588 Chinese were confirmed infected. I can't now retrieve the number of deaths at that time, but 30,000 is undoubtedly wrong.
- As of today 4,782 Chinese have died. The Reptilians have apparently made no significant progress toward 500 million.
- "This virus will mutate". Absolutely correct.
- As I noted in a later comment, it only took until 5th May for the quarter-million deaths to rack up. As of today, 1,822,467 have died world-wide. The USA alone passed the quarter-million mark about a month ago.
- Now USA 346,408 deaths. UK 74,235 deaths
Corsi
I'm not going to be able to resist similarly assessing Jerome Corsi's "Trump will win" prediction. But that will have to wait until 21st January.
Tuesday, December 22, 2020
Here's a surprise, Richard Hoagland was wrong
From this blog, March 14, 2016:
« When Gale crater was first announced as MSL's destination, Richard Hoagland announced on C2C-AM that Sharp Mountain was obviously an artificial construct, and that everyone at JPL knew that. Even President Obama knew it. ..... When Curiosity finally reveals Sharp to be just a mountain, what will he say then? Why, NOTHING, of course. Glad you asked. »
Well, Curiosity has been on the lower slopes of Mt. Sharp for quite a while now and of course Hoagland has been silent on the topic.
Yesterday NASA/JPL/CNES released the largest photo-mosaic of Mt. Sharp yet created. The images were from the ChemCam's Remote Micro-Imager, and the mosaic was created by a team at the University of Nantes, France from 216 overlapping images. Stéphane Le Mouélic provided the detailed explanation in a Marsblog. Here's a screen capture of one part of the huge photo-mosaic, but it's really worth looking at the whole thing.
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Planetary conjunctions
The imminent Great Jupiter/Saturn Conjunction, plus a recent comment on this blog, got me wondering about gravitational forces at conjunctions. When Mars and Jupiter are in conjuction (as happened in 1836-7 and 1979-80, and will recur in 2123, 2170, 2313, and 2456) which of them exerts the greater pull on planet Earth? Mars is 8 times closer but more than 3000 times lighter. Let's find out.
DATA:
G = 6.674 x 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2
Earth mass 5.97 x 1024 kg
Mars mass 6.42 x 1023 kg
Jupiter mass 2.00 x 1027 kg
Earth-Mars av. dist. 78 x 109 m
Earth-Jupiter av. dist 628 x 109 m
FORMULA:
F = Gm1m2/d2
RESULT
Gravitational attraction Earth-Mars: 4.2 x 1016 newtons
Gravitational attraction Earth-Jupiter 202 x 1016 newtons
Eccentricity
The orbit of Mars is sufficiently eccentric (0.09) that its closest approach to Earth is 55 x 109 m. It's possible for a conjunction to coincide with closest approach, but that still wouldn't be enough to overcome Jupiter's dominance.
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Congrats to CNSA (again)
The Chinese National Space Agency is due congratulations for successfully retrieving lunar samples in its Chang'e 5 spacecraft today.
However, unlike CNSA's brilliant achievement of January 2019, when they landed Chang'e 4 on the far side and placed a relay satellite in lunar orbit to talk to it, this was not a First. The Sovs performed this trick three times, with Luna 16 (September 1970), Luna 20 (February 1972) and Luna 24 (August 1976).