Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Review of Mike Bara on 'Higherside Chats' - OH GOD

        Well, dammit—I'm wasting my time here. Mike Bara obviously didn't take the time to listen to my March 12th rebuttal of his hour-long drivelothon on Jammerstream. Yesterday he appeared on yet another pseud-psych internet radio show, Higherside Chats, and blithered all the same stuff. Checklist:

  • The Moon regulates the Earth's magnetic field. This is not accepted by conventional astronomy but is well explained by hyperdimensional physics.
  • (15:00) Mars has a really elliptical orbit.
  • (23:30) Lunar glass is twice as strong as steel.
  • (28:30) Apollo astronauts brought back technology.
  • (35:00) During the Apollo missions, 'Santa Claus' was a code word for UFOs. At one point the astronauts radioed "Pass the word, there is a Santa Claus".
  • (40:00) Orion was at 33° as Apollo 16 landed.
  • (50:00) There's an unmistakable bright red stripe on the rock known as Data's Head
        It gets better. Remember the hilarity over him saying, on Jammerstream, that Von Braun had "snuck into the rocket equation" a secret term accounting for spin energy? He went through that comedy routine again. Here are his exact words, and I can only say that Mike's experience of the world of engineering must have been entirely different from my own.
(43:19) "Basically, you know, if you spin something you get more energy out of the system, and it took them a long time to account for that in figuring out how they could get their spacecraft to actually be able to rendezvous with each other-- or for that matter even get to the Moon. Because... it definitely seems to be like there was a learning curve at NASA through the years. And they finally figured this out, and now I think it's all sort of just built in to the equations. Now, I think without anybody at the lower levels knowing what they're doing, they basically plug in the computer program "How do we go to Mars? Well, OK, this is the perfect time to go". The guys down below have no idea why the decision's been made for that day or that time — it's just a command decision made at the top level, and those are the only guys that really even know are the top five or six guys."

        Of course, I'm an old codger but in my day, if you wanted a decent job in any branch of the engineering profession they wanted you to understand the equations. Thoroughly.

Here are a few notes:

Mike Bara loves to explain anything hand-wavingly by saying "Oh yeah, that's all predicted by HD physics." The problem is, he can never point to where that prediction was written down.

Orbit of Mars: Its eccentricity is a mere 0.09. Put another way, its aphelion is only 20% more than its perihelion. Compare that with the orbit of Pluto, whose eccentricity is 0.25. Pluto's aphelion is 66% more than its perihelion. THAT'S elliptical.

Lunar glass: It's NOT TRUE. See this and this.

Santa Claus: The actual quote was "Be advised there is a Santa Claus". The words were spoken by Jim Lovell, CMP of Apollo 8, the first manned mission to orbit the Moon. The crew had just successfully carried out the Trans-Earth Injection burn — behind the Moon and out of radio contact with Houston. If they had failed, they would have been marooned in lunar orbit for ever. It was Christmas Eve. Geddit, Mike?

Apollo 16 landing: The whole of Orion was below the horizon.

Data's Head: See this. Oh, and several other comprehensive rebuttals over the years I've been writing this bloggery. What's it going to take to get Mike Bara to understand??


18 comments:

Chris Lopes said...

Mike is basically a well trained poodle. He spent years learning the basics of this crap from Hoagland and now he has it memorized to the point of being able to do it in his sleep. Unfortunately, he never expanded on that knowledge base, so he is unable to handle any deviations from it. He'll keep repeating the same nonsense until the heat death of the universe, because that's all he knows how to do.

Anonymous said...

"The Moon regulates the Earth's magnetic field. This is not accepted by conventional astronomy".

I will not listen to the source of that statement so I'm not sure if I interpreted it right but the tidal forces do influence the Earth's magnetic field a bit simply by fluid dynamics.

Here's an example
Why animals respond to the full moon: Magnetic hypothesis
- Bioscience Hypotheses, Volume 2, Issue 6, 2009

Quote: "The geomagnetic field is typically about 50 μT (range 20–90 μT). Geomagnetic activity generally decreases by about 4% for the seven days leading up to a full moon, and increases by about 4% after the full moon, lasting for seven days."

D.

PS this all doesn't affect the potential of the above poodle hypothesis.

expat said...

Very interesting -- maybe he's right. If so, it would appear that HD physics is not in the picture.

expat said...

Here's a paper suggesting that it's the other way round -- Moon is afftected by passing through Earth's magnetotail.

Anonymous said...

Yes the geomagnetic lunar tide as well as magnetotail "charging" of the Moon itself seem both to be accepted science (found a better although older source: Variations of geomagnetic activity with lunar phase Journal of Geophysical Research, Volume 69, Issue 23, 1964).

But where did the HD physics enter? Was intended the relation between the tidal accelaration and angular momentum?

I don't know, I'm perhaps just trying too hard to put a more resonable spin on all the sad looking recycled factoids here. Even a broken clock should be right at least once ... in a blue moon :?)

D.

David S. F. Portree said...

Does the Apollo 16 reference refer to the constellation? I assumed that it meant the LM, which was named Orion. Not that that's especially important.

Binaryspellbook said...

Expat,

As you know I have been a professional engineer for over twenty five years. Consequently I can state categorically that if a spinning system was adding energy to that system from "somewhere" - it WOULD have been noticed.

The idea that WVB, simply "snuck" in a few secret terms to a well known equation is frankly, one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard.

Bara is NOT an engineer, although he claims to be. He is simply an ignoramus, thieving, lying, sexist, homophobic bastard.

Excuse my French.

Cheers
DJE

expat said...

David: In the recent interviews, Mike Bara drew attention to both the name of the LM and the (incorrect) 33° elevation of the constellation. He also mentioned that the date of the landing was Hitler's birthday, 20th April. This, to his mind, indicates a homage to Nazism on the part of senior officials in NASA. He does not, of course, take into account either the fact that the landing was a month later than originally planned or that it was 21st April UTC.

expat said...

DJE: And I'm quite sure you'd agree that Mikey's fantasy of oiks in the trenches "plugging in the computer program" unaware of what it means, is almost equally ludicrous.

Chris Lopes said...

Expat,
That goes along with Hoagland's view of scientists in general. Apparently when scientists are being educated, they simply write down what the teacher says without asking even the most basic of questions. For Hoagland, qualities such as curiosity and skepticism (the driving forces of science) do not exist in the science world. So Bara's view of engineers as automatons who have no need to know why a formula is the way it is (because Von Braun said so, now shut up and get back to work!) is in line with the total misunderstanding of science that he got from Hoagie.

Chris said...

"He is simply an ignoramus, thieving, lying, sexist, homophobic bastard."

And then there are his bad points.

Binaryspellbook said...

I agree Expat. The idea of engineers at NASA simply plugging in data to a computer and cranking the handle, oblivious to all the secret hyperdimensional mathematical terms that were snuck in. PREPOSTEROUS.

DJE

Anonymous said...

"Bara is NOT an engineer, although he claims to be. He is simply an ignoramus, thieving, lying, sexist, homophobic bastard.

Excuse my French"

Say what you really mean, and resist dressing it up to try and break it gently.:-)

Ricky Poole said...

You have to wonder if anyone that has ever interviewed the fellow did any research prior to the actual interview? As a fan of paranormal/UFO type podcasts and talk shows I am amazed at the number of complete and total frauds (some actually convicted) that get time behind a mike. Phil Imbrogno (Not an MIT graduate, not in special forces) Butch Witkowski (google the name and fraud), Erich Anton Paul von Däniken (same same), and the list goes on and on. In Phil's case when the "community" was presented with evidence of his long-term and ongoing fraud concerning his education many brushed it off and rationalized that it didn't reflect on the veracity of his other paranormal claims. Hey, but pointing out obvious lies, misrepresentations, and ignorance of a guest would screw up a good story and ground whatever flight of fantasy the listeners might be on.

expat said...

That's a very good point, T.O. It only takes flipping to page 2 of google results to notice that Mike Bara has been caught lying on multiple occasions. You'd think even pseud-psych radio hosts might make that much effort.

Chris Lopes said...

The audiences of such shows aren't too demanding of reality in general, so I suppose the hosts don't feel to compelled to dig any further. It's a shame too, because one of the things that made Art Bell so interesting was his occasional attempts to question the very premise of the guest's visit. The back and forth made for some entertaining radio and gave you a sense that Art actually had a stake in the truth (or lack there of truth) in what the guest was saying. He understood that a little confrontation could make for some fun listening.

Binaryspellbook said...

American Loons

DJE

FlightSuit said...

All the stupidity is...

I don't even have adequate words for it.