Barrors

        Quite early during Mike Bara's delusional two hours on the woo-woo radio show last Wednesday, he admitted that -- gasp! -- he isn't perfect.

MB: "Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody makes minor errors. I've written -- what? -- five books now, gonna be six next year..."

GN: "You made mistakes? YOU?"

MB: "I actually have made, I think, a couple of errors. A couple of transpositions, a couple of typos. Maybe even an immaterial technical error, in my description of something. It does happen."

        "A couple of typos"???  Pardon me while I fall off my chair laughing. Bara's books are absolutely stuffed with errors both minor and major. After the first edition of Dark Mission, an official list of errata was provided -- 29 items, not too bad for a work of over 500 pages. But second editions are the opportunity to make these good, and in this respect the publisher Adam Parfrey was a dismal failure. There are uncorrected errata on pages 131, 145, 178, 215, 278, 286, 312, 320, 386(2), 430 (all using 2nd edition pagination.) This is inexcusable.

        AAoM2 has, for example, "west and rast" for "west and east" (p.122), "Fortunatley" (p.170), "poured over" for "pored over" (p.183), "side by- ide" (p.186). The latter looks like a copy edit screw-up rather than an author's.

        As I've written before, "typo" is short for "typographical error." Since there are no typographers in modern publishing, a better word for "typo" is "error."

Whoppers
        Well, OK, no author is immune from minor errors. I don't expect Bara's books to be totally free of them, and I assume he wouldn't expect mine to be. However, his estimate of "a couple" in all five books is prevarication in the extreme. Much more serious are the calamitous technical errors that totally mislead the readership. Nor are these just "immaterial technical errors." Let's remind ourselves of some really bad Barrors, just restricting ourselves to one per book:

Dark Mission
 "[O]n the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11 ... [Neil] Armstrong himself had seemed frustrated. He started his highly emotional address by first comparing himself to a parrot--saying only what he had been told to say." (Armstrong actually said the exact opposite.)

The Choice
"Without the Moon's calming influence, the Earth would spin so fast that the centrifugal force would most likely flatten us all like pancakes." (No, other way round.)

AAotM
(Writing of images of Earth from space)  "the clouds are the highest in the atmosphere, meaning that they are reflecting more light back to the camera and at a faster rate. Since they are returning more light, the clouds are the lightest. The surface areas ... are darker, because they are a bit further away from the camera than the clouds and therefore the light has to travel further before it is reflected back. The deep blue oceans are therefore the darkest, because the light has to travel all the way to the ocean floor before it is reflected back to the camera." (Wrong in so many ways that I don't know where to start.)

AAoM1
"Because of its highly "eccentric" ... orbit ... Mars' distance relative to Earth varies a great deal. In fact, Mars' orbit is so elliptical that its distance to the Earth can be as much as 249 million miles at its farthest to as little as about 34 million miles at its theoretical closest approach." (The difference is due to their different orbits, not to eccentricity.)

AAoM2
"Allow me to translate for you. If Phobos is not a captured asteroid ... then it by definition must be an artificial satellite." (There is no such "definition." The consensus is that Phobos was formed by re-accretion of orbital debris.)

Plus, of course, every one of Bara's ridiculous Mars images, purportedly showing "unmistakably artificial" things, is a lie. Moreover, Bara doesn't even have the honesty to cite catalog references so we could go to the NASA sources and find out what they really show.

Disgraceful.

Hoagland: Ghastly in Glendale

        I really hate to subsidize Kerry Cassidy's nutty ventures in any way, but yesterday as the sun failed to appear I thought "wtf, it's only $5" and paid up for the privilege of getting 156 ghastly minutes of Hoagland in a tiny sub-window with atrocious audio.

        This was the Awake & Aware lecture from Glendale last weekend, by all accounts not well attended, so possibly Kerry made a loss on the event, which she had originally planned for the Joshua Tree conference center.

        Hoagland sure does love his SciFi, doesn't he? He spent a full 50 minutes just showing us images of famous works of the genre, from H.G. Wells to the latest Dr Who on BBC tv. In honor of the latter, the lectern was dressed up to look like a Tardis -- I kid you not.

        Just to be sure we all understood we were not here witnessing anything resembling science, he threw in a little numerology. I can give you a flavor of that very easily:

sin 19.47° = 0.3333
0.3333² = 0.1111
0.1111 transforms to 11.11
therefore 11.11 is code for 19.5^{note 1}
Isn't it interesting that 11 different actors have portrayed Dr Who?
The BBC must be hyperdimensional.

        The audio wasn't good enough for me to hear whether anyone in the audience shouted "NO RICHARD, IT'S NOT INTERESTING -- IT'S USELESS TRASH!"

Meaningless spikes
         Well, finally we got to the Accutron traces^{note 2}, which he characterized as "a totally new tool for astrophysics". In a stunning confirmation of my theory that Richard Hoagland is incompetent at mathematics, he told his audience that the frequency of the tuning fork decreases as its inertia increases, in accordance with the Newtonian equation F=ma^{note 3}.

        He went through his "experiments", starting with the 2004 Venus transit during which he actually had the wrong time for 3rd contact (it was really 07:07:33 EDT, not 07:03:53). He showed Teotihuacan, April 2009, again pretending that the first frequency spike coincided with the moment of dawn although it most assuredly did not (it was 6min 25sec later). He showed the "astounding" frequency excursions he recorded at Tikal, also in April 2009 -- the biggest of all his meaningless spikes even though they were recorded at a time when nothing special was happening astronomically.

        I know you're dying to see what he recorded at Chichen Itza last December 19th, before being tossed out by security guards. Hey presto!

        The resolution is way too low to comment  much, except to say that this trace is obviously quite unlike anything he's shown us before. He didn't think that was important enough to explain.

        There's an objection to his reasoning on this which I haven't noted as much as I perhaps should have, in past bloggery on the subject. In addition to the fact that he has published no baselines or controls, and that many of his spikes are off-scale, I mean. It is this: He has written that the torsion field increases (and hence frequency decreases) when the tuning fork is parallel to the spin axis of the planet or star creating the field, but the field decreases (and frequency increases) when the fork is orthogonal to the spin axis. And yet he has never, even once, told us what the orientation of the tuning fork was during any of his "experiments."

        Last week, in e-mail to me, he told me that I had missed the point of Neil Armstrong's speech at the White House and admonished me to "stick to engineering". Well, I think he should stick to science fiction. Come to think of it, I guess that's what he's doing anyway.

=====================================

1. He claims hyperdimensional significance for the number 19.47 because it's the latitude at which three vertices of a tetrahedron appear when the tetrahedron is inscribed in a sphere with the other vertex at a pole.

2. For readers new to the Accutron -- I've written about this many times. There's also a good concise explanation here.

3. Quite likely E=mc² and F=ma are the only two equations Hoagland has ever heard of. Sadly, neither of them is remotely relevant to the frequency of a tuning fork as a function of the properties of its material. The real equation may be found here.

Informed criticism? Yeah — we got that

Mike Bara censored the following post today, disallowing its appearance on the official "Dark Mission" blog in its entirety:

I was recently re-reading your May 1997 essay "Where is the informed criticism of Richard Hoagland?" I note this sentence, toward the end:

"If Hoagland is wrong then let him be proved wrong. Let the critics who doubt the quality of his work repeat the process, and find him in error."

I have now done that, in relation to:

- The mythical anti-gravity boost to Explorer 1. His calculation is totally in error.
- The photo-processing of the rock called "data's head". His processing was found to be fraudulent.
- Neil Armstrong's 25th anniversary speech. Armstrong actually said the OPPOSITE of what Hoagland claims he said. You have conceded this.
- The allegation that Apollo astronauts actually returned artifacts of a lunar civilisation. You have conceded that there is no evidence of that.
- His characterisation of the Brookings Report as "strongly recommending" concealment of evidence of alien life. It did not.


James Oberg has falsified your allegations of sabotage in respect of Mars Observer, Mars Polar Lander, and Mars Climate Orbiter.

Are you now going to withdraw the 1997 essay?