Friday, July 13, 2012

Three more critics banished

        I was kicked off the Faceboo-boo pages of both Hoagland & Bara a long, long time ago (obviously). Hoagland is going through a period of not cultivating that particular garden, and the predictable result is that it's now overgrown with the weeds of free-energy loonies, solar-flare Chicken Littles, and flagrantly psychotic flood-posters.

        Bara, however, is being vigilant in his daily patrolling, and I've been amused as hell to see a few more cases of people being abruptly cashiered for the crime of questioning the accuracy of the Bara oeuvre.

        Yesterday Bara began a thread by congratulating himself on his L33T word-smithery:

44,207 words done. One chapter plus an epilogue to go, and we have a draft!

        Neville Parchemin, bless him, posted this:

Any chance of getting this one fact-checked by someone who actually understands basic physcis, Mike? Be a shame to spoil it with stuff like this, from p.214 of 'The Choice': "An annular eclipse means that the Moon and Sun are in perfect alignment, but the Sun is not totally blotted out because the Moon is a little too close to the Earth..."

        Neville very swiftly had his text deleted and his access to the page removed; Bara posted:

Be a shame to go through life as complete douchebag, Neville Parchemin.

My it's pretty ripe being told I don't know "basic physics" by idiots who think 80% of the matter in the universe is out there, it's just invisible. Riiiiiiiight....

        Neville, you may remember, was similarly booted by Hoagland last October because  he correctly pointed out that Hoagland's pseudo-statistical routines "proving" that Elenin was unique could be applied, with equivalent results, to any comet you might wish.

        Next up for the chopper was Conal MacNachtan, responding to a post about the tentative detection of dark matter. Mike's typically unschooled opinion was:

These idiots did not detect "Dark Matter," since there is no such thing in 3 dimensional space. What they detected is the influence of the unacknowledged "5th force" in the Universe, Einstein and Cartan's Metric Tensor Torsion field.

        I never actually saw what MacNachtan posted, he was gone so fast, but he protested on Twitter:

@ConalsCorner Dude, no need to remove my post and block me. Yeah, I disagreed with you, but you called my colleagues idiots!


@mikebara33 Nobody comes on to my Facebook page and attacks me. Maybe if you had suggested my language was too harsh I'd listen 

 
@ConalsCorner May I then start this over by saying I think that calling them "Idiots" was a bit over the top; I work with some of these guys. 

         Add to this saga that @Binaryspellbook was also dismissed from FB and twitter for questioning Mike's understanding of centrifugal force,  and the message is plain: ZERO TOLERANCE FOR DISAGREEMENT WITH MIKEY. It's not even as if he's getting rid of strident or insulting posters—as we know well, the stridence and the insults are flowing very much in the other direction.

28 comments:

Neville Parchemin said...

One of the many ironies here is that I'm not a great fan of Dark Matter either.

Chris Lopes said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Chris Lopes said...

Neville,
The difference here is that your doubt about dark matter is based on actual knowledge of physics. Bara is basing his on a kind of "all your science is wrong!" meme that he picked up from Hoagland. Since he doesn't even seem to understand Newtonian physics (the centrifugal force thing), it would be hard to believe he gave dark matter any thought beyond the "real scientists think it's so, therefore it isn't" variety.

Neville Parchemin said...

Yes, I think I'll ask him to explain the Einstein-Cartan spin-orbit coupling equations.

Oh, wait, I can't, I'm blocked.

Geo said...

I can only imagine what Richard Hoagland's best friend the late Carl Sagan would have had to say about this sad state of affairs.

Binaryspellbook said...

I got banned from both Bara's facebook and twitter. The old centrifugal thing nailed me.

Esteban Navarro said...

Well, Geo you can read Sagan in his own words, a few years before he unfortunately passed away: http://dorkmission.blogspot.com.es/2012/06/frantic-fun-in-facebooklandia.html

FlightSuit said...

Mike Bara really is popular with the ladies:

http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j223/flightsuit/Screenshot2012-07-14at65859PM.jpg

FlightSuit said...

Mike Bara feels Miley Cyrus's artistic shortcomings are balanced by her hot body:

http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j223/flightsuit/Screenshot2012-07-14at65935PM.jpg

FlightSuit said...

Pyramids on Mars are so 2007. Now Mike's into ziggurats on the moon:

http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j223/flightsuit/Screenshot2012-07-14at70127PM.jpg

FlightSuit said...

Mike Bara uses an extraneous apostrophe to capitalize the word "ziggurat."

http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j223/flightsuit/Screenshot2012-07-14at70224PM.jpg

Binaryspellbook said...

I'm still pissing myself at "L33T word-smithery."

Esteban, Steven, mate. I'd LOVE you to unleashyour cartoonist skills on Hoagland and Bara. Then we can make them go viral. Having access to a brattery of several vile children. Going viral via social networking would be a breeze.

As for the "snappy" one-liners that should accompany your work. I would not worry. Expat can probably help there. Not that you are incapable of such yourself mate.

You know these "conferences" they have. Maybe one day I'll win the lottery (unlikely...since I never do it) we can have a conference of our own. A bunch of bitter old farts grumping on about new agey woo-woo. I will insist on playing guitar. You have been warned.

Derek

FlightSuit said...

Sorry, that last post should have read, "Mike Bara uses an extraneous apostrophe to PLURALIZE the word "ziggurat."

Trekker said...

FlightSuit, I suppose it's never occurred to him that the LRO, orbiting the moon since 2009, taking the highest-resolution shots ever, hasn't spotted this ziggurat, strangely enough!

I wonder if any of his fans will ask him for the coordinates, and how he would reply if asked.

Chris Lopes said...

Derek,
There actually is such a thing, it's called TAM (The Amazing Meeting). It's like a Star Trek convention, only for skeptics. The James Randi Educational Foundation puts it on and it features guys like Phil Plait and Brain Dunning. It sounds like a lot of fun, if you have the money (this year's was held in Vegas) for it. It would be interesting to see Hoagland and Bara try to work the crowd at that kind of thing.

jourget said...

Despite being based in Vegas, I doubt Bara made an appearance.

FlightSuit, the Miley Cyrus thing made me have to take a shower. This is what creepy old men are like before they're old men. I wonder if Mike has his leering bench picked out at the local jogging track for twenty years from now.

expat said...

Mike's not Vegas-based, he just drives his swanky BMW there to pick up cougars. He used to have an address in Redondo Beach but he's in the Pacific NW now.

astroguy said...

I'm at TAM now. No way Hoagie nor Bara would survive here. Sometimes there are some believers here, for Phil has been accosted by moon hoax guys in the past. But this isnt something like ComiCon where everyone will go.

And TAM has always been in Vegas, though now at least one has been in Australia.

Chris Lopes said...

astro,
They also had one in London, didn't they?

expat said...

Astroguy has posted an interesting account of TAM and, surprisingly, some factual errors:

http://pseudoastro.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/some-astronomical-errors-at-tam-2012/

Esteban Navarro said...

Hahaha, BS, I love to do, in fact the "D'ho!" strip was an idea of ​​Expat, that I took the liberty of drawing.

Although, from my experience, it is difficult to make a joke or further reduce to absurd something that already is ... How can a cartoon be caricatured? Bara is a joke in itself!It would be a kind of redundancy, as happened to Tina Fey with Sarah Palin in SNL

I'd love to hear that guitar in this hypothetical meeting with a song about Bara & Hoagland amazing scientific findings , Eric Idle style...;)

Jiminy Oddbird said...

Prichard Ceaseum Hougalund
posted to
Dr. Michio Kaku

2 seconds ago

Dear Professor Kaku:

Your colleague, the Science Adviser from Coast to Coast AM needs your support. He has been conducting a series of experiments on torsion physics, during the occurrence of celestial body alignments and laments that he can not obtain peer review for his efforts. Would you please be so kind as to over see his project and perhaps assemble a team of independent researchers to validate the results of his work?

Arigato.

Best regards,

Prichard Ceaseum

http://www.facebook.com/michiokaku

Jiminy Oddbird said...

Michio Kaku's facebutt page has 291,000,000 "likes".

FlightSuit said...

From Bara's Facebook:

Mike Bara
Monday near Auburn, WA

To everybody who's whining about not hearing from me; I'M TRYING TO FINISH A FRACKIN' BOOK!!!!!!

FlightSuit said...

Apparently he may be having some paternity suit type issues:

Mike Bara
July 14
Wow, I just found out I got somebody pregnant & all I did was talk to her. I must be good.

Binaryspellbook said...

I loved this Esteban...

Although, from my experience, it is difficult to make a joke or further reduce to absurd something that already is...

Charles Sokasian said...

HI All-

Great web site. I wanted to leave my two cents here. I tried contacting RCH after hearing him on Coast to Coast in July. He was touting his torsion physics theories, and asked the "Coasties" to kick the tires of his theory to help him work out the bugs. So I sent him the following message. Unfortunately, I never heard back...Maybe you guys can help me understand torsion!

Later,

Charles

Richard:

Heard you on CtoC this week, and read through your eclipse paper at Enterprise.com. I think we have to start asking ourselves some hard questions regarding these torsion experiments.

You stated (paraphrasing) that Kozyrev pointed his telescope at stars and observed changes in the resistance of a tungsten coil which was positioned at the focus of the telescope. Purportedly, this was due to the interaction of the torsion field (Ï®) with the tungsten lattice. I think we need to be really careful here. So far, you have not presented a wave equation for this torsion field that you refer to; i.e. I don't know how it propagates through space-time (however many dimensions you believe this to be), nor do I have its propagation speed. Does it have a nonzero divergence? Since it is a rotational field, it must have a nonzero curl. What is ∇×Ï® = ??

Since you stated that the torsion wave is 100,000 times weaker than an electromagnetic wave, why do you assume that an optical telescope, which operates via paraxial electromagnetic radiation theory, has the capability of detecting and focusing a torsion wave? Furthermore, a torsion wave may not possess transverse properties whatsoever; i.e. what if it's a series of compressions & rarefactions in the ether? Using an optical telescope to probe it would be equivalent to placing one's ear at the telescope's eyepiece in hopes of hearing the swirling winds of Saturn.

I have further questions, but let's please address these before continuing. Thank you!

expat said...

That's excellent, Chas. A wave equation is exactly what's needed, and a specific prediction. We're never going to get it, however.

Thanks for posting here.