How far away is the horizon?

James Concannon writes...

        The figure depicts an observer at height h on a planet of radius R. The observer's sight line to the horizon is the tangent to the planet, and therefore the distance to the horizon is given by d.

Data:

Say h is the eye level of a very tall man, to make it simple, call it 2 m
For planet Earth, R = 6,365,000 m

Calculation:

By Pythagoras's theorem, d² = (R + h)² - R²

(R + h)² = R² + h² + 2Rh
so  d² = R² + h² + 2Rh - R²
d² = h² + 2Rh
d = sqrt( h² + 2Rh )
h² + 2Rh = 4 + 25,460,000 and √25,460,004 = 5,046 m

So a very tall man on planet Earth sees the horizon at about 5.1 km. Of course that's assuming the planet is a perfect sphere, with no irregularities.

BY THE WAY: Phil Plait blogged this in January 2009, and ended with a table relating d to h for much larger values.

What about Mars?
The radius of Mars is 53% that of Earth, 3389 km or 3,389,000 m

So for Mars h² + 2Rh = 4 + 13,556,000 and √13,556,004 = 3,682 m
The Martian horizon for the same basketball player is  3.682 km away

So the distance of the horizon is not directly proportional to the relative sizes of the planets, but to the square root. In the case of Mars - Earth, √0.53 = 0.728

Why all this fuss?
        I was moved to contemplate this calculation by an egregious example of the modern phenomenon of "Facebook ignorance." I took part in a convo on Robert Morningstar's page, prompted by this excellent panning shot across Gale crater, which ends on a clear view of Sharp Mountain (sadly, Blogspot doesn't allow embedded video but here's the URL.)

        Mr. Morningstar is quite ignorant of astronomy and mathematics, and it seems that his disciples are even more so.  I see no reason to shame the ignoramus so I'll just call him or her "Person A."

Person A: "Excuse me. This is so funny, I have to giggle. Did you know, Mars is a very small planet. and it HAS NO FLAT PANORAMAS at all, having such tight curvature, there is only one flat place at the North Pole for a sprawling building with a parking lot. So all these flat-stereoscopic images are phony as hell."

James Concannon: "The diameter of Mars is 53% that of Earth. Strictly speaking, there are no flat places on either planet. It's just a matter of how far away the horizon is."

 

Person A: "No it isn't. It's less than that of our Moon, yes. However, every single distance and dimension that NASA publishes is a hoaxed, false figure that has no relationship whatever to reality . . . like everything else they do."

        So this is my answer to those who say "Leave Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara alone FGS. Their NASA hatred is harmless." It isn't harmless if it leads to opinions like that.

        However, "Person A" then went on to make me doubt whether he or she was serious. I think perhaps my leg was being pulled.

Person A: "Let me relate to you, what I have been able to find out. No, they didn't go to the Moon in Apollo 11 the way they said; they hitched a ride with an Annunaki cruiser. No, Challenger isn't blow up in 1986; that was hoaxed, and 6 of the 7 crew members are still alive. Now, NASA nuked Jupiter with a spent nuclear engine; they bombed our moon and penetrated its southern water reservoir in 2009. They sent out Rovers to both Mars and Venus without getting an Okay from the people who live there; and so on Mars one Rover crashed a cliffwall and killed a score of people in summer 2007; then we invaded and lost a rescue party, who were held for ransom and died in 2008. The latest Curiosity Rover was met with gunfire and had to be replaced immediately. No, NASA's doctrine that there's nobody out there, and the photoshopping they do of all asteroid, moon and planetary photos doesn't hide the fact of Life. You can laugh at me all you want and wish; but someday you will find out I have been correct about what NASA is up to : the same sort of military aggression that the USSA is up to on Earth : conquest and coercion"

Yet another hour of drivel from Mike Bara

        "I go with my gut feelings... If it feels right, it's probably the truth." That was the delusional Mike Bara, deep into an hour or so of amateurish internet radio yesterday. The show was Freedom of Perception hosted by Monique Lessan. Monique, a private investigator specializing in abductions (but not the alien kind) looks and sounds charming -- she has a pretty face, a tinkling giggle and a foreign accent that can sometimes be hard to decipher. Since she's listed as speaking fluent Farsi it seems likely that she was born in Iran. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld memorably said about something quite different.

        Mike's declaration about his guts (other than his promise, later, to go on a diet) chimes with his philosophy as enunciated in his book Ancient Aliens on Mars II. On page 11 he wrote "This book ... is about truth ... the kind of truth that you can only know in your heart and in your mind." Could there be a plainer warning that what he has to say and write is primarily bullshit?

        Indeed the excrementum tauri piled high as Monique led him down the well-trodden paths of his fantasies about the Moon. Artifacts of a former civilization? Oh yes. "To me it's pretty simple and pretty straightforward," he said. "Rocks have very specific shapes." So anything out of the ordinary has to be an artifact, right? Sure.

 The White Desert of Egypt. Credit: Touropia

        Asked about the Apollo program, Mike repeated the lie that Apollo's mission was to collect artifacts for the purpose of reverse engineering. He has said and written that so many times, but not once has he produced one shred of evidence. Specifically on Apollo 11, the first landing, he thinks Buzz Aldrin's private masonic ceremony^{note 1} was "the main purpose" of the mission. "[M]asons had a tremendous influence on the Apollo program," he said. Well, Mike, not half as much as the actual.. you know, engineers.

Rang like a bell
        Monique had obviously heard the sound bite from geologist Clive Neal, "The Moon rang like a bell," and she asked Mike about it. Mike kindly and patiently explained that when the Apollo 16 LM ascent stage was deliberately crashed into the Moon, seismometers left by previous missions went on reacting for 30 hours. He said that "obviously there are vast caverns.. I think they contain ruins, machinery... that is one of the things that conventional science can't explain." There are a few things adrift there:

- It wasn't Apollo 16, it was 13.
- It wasn't the LM Ascent Stage, it was the SIVB upper rocket stage.
- It was 10 minutes, not 30 hours.
- It did not, and does not, mean that there are caverns. It means the Moon is very dry.
- Conventional science explains it quite well, thank you.

Mars and Sex
        Asked about Mars, Mike came up with a number of fantasies including "If you have liquid water then you have the ingredients for life," and "NASA worked very hard to suppress [Viking biology results]." The first statement is just plain wrong, and this blog has refuted the second at least once.

         Perhaps my favorite quote, though, came at the very beginning. Monique started right out by saying "I'm going to ask you the question I most want to know the answer to." Mike replied "The answer is -- I'm single." Oh, tacky. Monique giggled.

=======================================
[1] Bara interprets it as a masonic ceremony. Actually it was a form of catholic mass, including consumption of tiny amounts of bread and wine. On this occasion, as on many others, Bara asserted that the mass "has its roots in Egyptian Osiris-worship,"  thus tying Aldrin's ritual and the whole mission to a fantasy of a NASA obsession with ancient Egypt. The mass, of course, is a re-enactment of the biblical Last Supper, and has nothing to do with Osiris. The ritual was not in the Flight Plan, and NASA as a whole probably didn't even know Aldrin was planning it, so it can hardly be linked to any NASA "obsession." Bara tells these lies with such confidence that his interlocutors generally believe him.

Yes, folks, it's the xenon isotope show!

        This is an experimental blogpost. It is not required reading -- feel free to skip it. I have chosen to write about xenon isotopes because it's an interesting challenge for a technical writer. Actually, it's two challenges. The first is to understand the bloody subject, and the second is to write about the bloody subject with enough clarity and wit to make other people understand it. Those of you who decide to read on will be rewarded with speculation about nuclear warfare on Mars. Thrills! So here we go...

An isotopic topic
        The 118 elements in the periodic table are uniquely defined by their atomic numbers, and this invariantly refers to the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom of that element. Hydrogen 1, Helium 2, Lithium 3...bla bla... Platinum 78, Gold 79, Mercury 80 ... bla bla .... Ununoctium 118, and there may well be a 119th and 120th coming along shortly, although only the first 94 elements are ever found naturally. The high-faluting ones are synthesized at vast expense and typically last for milliseconds. Only three atoms of Ununoctium have ever been synthesized. If you ask "Why would they do that?" their answer would be "Because now we know." By the way, Ununoctium officially became an element only four months ago. How time doesn't fly.

        Counting protons does not tell us all about the nuclear structure of an element, because in almost every case the nucleus is made of neutrons as well as protons. Take carbon (please...) Its atomic number is 6, so its nucleus always has 6 protons by definition. But 98.9% of the carbon on Earth also has 6 neutrons in its nucleus. 6 + 6 = 12, so 12 is what is now called the mass number of normal, bog standard carbon. Chemists know it by its nickname, ¹²C₆. But about 1% of carbon atoms you might find lying around have one extra neutron, and a very small proportion have two extra neutrons. They are, of course, ¹³C₆ and ¹⁴C₆ respectively, and the three different carbons  are the isotopes of carbon.

credit: emaze

       Now we get to the radioactive part. Put a teaspoonful of carbon-12 or carbon-13 on your kitchen table, and they'll stay right there for ever. They are stable isotopes. Even if you walk away and come back in a million years, there will still be exactly the same number of atoms on the table (unless you've had a fall of soot.) Carbon-14, however, is not like that. It is unstable, and spontaneously decays. Radioactive decay takes several forms but in this case each decay event causes a neutron to turn into a proton. The mass number thus remains 14, but the atomic number goes up one, and therefore that atom is no longer carbon. It becomes the next element in the table, which happens to be nitrogen. This decay process has a half-life of 5,730 years, so after that length of time half your carbon-14 has turned into nitrogen-14 and literally vanished into thin air. Nitrogen itself has one other stable isotope, nitrogen-15, plus a raft of unstable ones. Some of these decay back to carbon, some go on up to the next element, which happens to be oxygen.

        So there's yer basic tute on what isotopes are and what mischief they get up to. Enter xenon.

Noble xenon
        Helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon are the six so-called "noble" gases, although -- isn't this interesting? -- the brand new element Ununoctium may well turn out to be an ultra-heavy noble gas. The big feature of the nobles is that they don't form bonds with other elements, unlike carbon which will make molecules with anything that asks, the slut. So there's no such thing as argon hydroxide or xenon hydrochloride, for example. Xenon has the distinction of having more stable isotopes than any other element except tin. Here's a reference to 13 xenon isotopes, eight of which are stable. "NA" means "Natural Abundance."

====================================
¹²⁴Xe - NA 0.095%, decays to ¹²⁴Te, half-life 5 x 10¹⁶ y (essentially stable)

¹²⁵Xe - NA zero, decays to ¹²⁵I, half-life 16.9h

¹²⁶Xe - NA 0.089%, stable

¹²⁷Xe - NA zero, decays to ¹²⁷I, half-life 36.345d

¹²⁸Xe - NA 1.91%, stable

¹²⁹Xe - NA 26.4%, stable. Produced by beta decay of ¹²⁹I, half-life 16 million y

¹³⁰Xe - NA 4.07%, stable

¹³¹Xe - NA 21.2%, stable. Fission product of Thorium, Uranium, and Plutonium. Can be a decay product of ¹³¹I or ¹³¹Cs

¹³²Xe - NA 26.9%, stable. The most common natural isotope. Can be a decay product of ¹³²I or ¹³²Ba

¹³³Xe - NA zero, decays to ¹³³Cs, half-life 5.25d

¹³⁴Xe - NA 10.4%, decays to ¹³⁴Ba, half-life 1.1 x 10¹⁶ y (essentially stable). Fission product of Thorium, Uranium, and Plutonium

¹³⁵Xe - NA zero, decays to ¹³⁵Cs, half-life 9.14h. Fission product of Thorium, Uranium, and Plutonium

¹³⁶Xe - NA 8.86%, decays to ¹³⁶Ba, half-life 2.2 x 10²¹ y (essentially stable). Fission product of Thorium, Uranium, and Plutonium
====================================

        The four isotopes that are fission products can be expected to be unusually plentiful in the aftermath of a nuclear fission weapon detonation, and indeed these isotopes have been used to detect weapon tests. Xenon-129 is not a fission product in the conventional sense, but it is generated by a special nuclear reaction called fast fission. Fast fission is used in advanced reactor designs and in some fusion weapons (H-bombs, to put it crudely.)

Interplanetary warfare?
       As shown in the above reference, in planet Earth's atmosphere, xenon 129 is only slightly less abundant than the dominant isotope 132 -- 26.4% cf. 26.9%. Thanks to some brilliant space science, we now know a good deal about the atmosphere of planet Mars, and in that atmosphere 129 is more than 2.5 times as abundant as 132 (although both, of course, are far less abundant in absolute terms than the terrestrials.) This has led a maverick physicist called John Brandenburg to speculate that at least one fast fission event -- such as the detonation of a thermo-nuclear weapon -- has occurred at some time in Mars' history. Brandenburg has attracted quite a bit of attention by publishing this conjecture -- he's become a favorite on the pseudoscience circuit that includes late-night radio chat shows, internet radio, and TV productions with a very lenient view of what constitutes a historical fact (Yes, Ancient Aliens, I'm talking about you.)

Figure from John Brandenburg's 2015 LPSC poster. NOTE that these data are relative, not absolute

        So is Brandenburg right? Was Mars nearly obliterated by nuclear warfare? I hesitate to go up against a well-qualified physicist but my answer is probably not. Very probably not. The thing is, you don't need such a radical hypothesis as fast fission to explain the 129/132 isotope ratio on Mars. Look at that reference table again. Xenon-129 is remarkable among the isotopes in that it can be, and is, created by decay of Iodine-129 with a half life of 16 million years. Is Iodine-129 itself a fission product? No it is not. It is, however, a solid, not a gas, at normal temperatures (boiling point 184.3 °C.) So if, let's say, Mars' primordial atmosphere was almost entirely lost due to some catastrophe early in its history, iodine would not  be affected and it would not be strange that xenon-129 would be preferentially replenished.

        Well, that's exactly what Marsologists say happened, some time within the first 100 million years after the planet was formed. The planet has been around for some 4.5 billion years, so there has been plenty of time for iodine-129 to quietly turn itself into xenon-129, even given that 16m year half-life. Iodine-132 also decays to xenon-132, but that isotope is extremely rare and the decay half-life is measured in hours, so it's irrelevant.

Wrap-up
        NASA gets way too much scorn these days from people who are too ignorant to know better than to believe the chief NASA-haters, Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara. The agency is accused of fudging and masking important data, and avoiding key questions about extraterrestrial life. The truth, from what I know and have observed, is that NASA might delay release of some planetary data in order to give priority to the science teams to peer-review and publish them, but there is absolutely no concerted policy to hide evidence of living things or dodgy guesswork like nuclear explosions on Mars.

        There is too much scorn, and not nearly enough gratitude for the brilliance of the JPL designers whose experiments make it possible to have these arguments.

With grateful thanks to my excellent research assistant, Google Search.

Update 8 May 2016
Element 118 has now been provisionally named Oganesson (Og), honoring Yuri Oganessian who led the team that synthesised element-117.

=====================================
References:

Evidence for large, anomalous, nuclear explosions on Mars in the past. --Brandenburg, J.E. 46th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (2105) poster session

Rational wikipedia article on Dr John Brandenburg

Was Mars murdered? Podcast shownotes by Dr Stuart Robbins,

Wikipedia article on xenon and its isotopes

Wikipedia article on Martian atmosphere

Fission product tables for typical heavy isotopes. IAEA document

USGS Isotope resource - Xenon

The Great Hoagland/Wickramasinghe Disaster 0f 2016

        Kudos to whoever managed to book Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe onto Richard Hoagland's Other Side of Midnight chat-show, which is hanging onto the Dark Matter Digital Radio Network by its metaphorical fingernails, due to move to an as-yet unannounced new net-home at the end of next week. Wickramasinghe is exactly the right kind of guest for RCH: A respected but highly controversial scientist, working in an area (cosmology) that Hoagland has a nodding acquaintance with, and so ought to be able to ask some of the right questions.

        Booking decent guests has been this show's Achilles heel right from the start. Not a lot of interesting people are willing to be interviewed from midnight to 2 a.m. Pacific, or -- even worse -- 3-5 a.m. East. Keith Laney, in the EDT zone, may be always willing, but that kind-of proves my point about "not a lot of interesting people." Of course it greatly helps if, like Wickramasinghe, you're in the UK where it's 8-10 a.m. and you're fully awake. That also applied to another recently successful guest, my former colleague James Burke.

        Note that I did NOT say "my good friend James Burke," although I might have been justified in so doing. Richard Hoagland is, famously, not shy about name-dropping at all, and once he'd got over some connection problems and ascertained that he really was talking to the right cosmologist, he lit right in with (02:02) "Well an old friend of mine and yours, Arthur C. Clarke..."  (04:35) "...In addition to Arthur C. Clarke, who was a very good friend of mine, going back to my days at CBS when I was advising Walter Cronkite during the Apollo missions..." Oh Lordy, it never stops.

        Anyway, as I said, Wickramasinghe was a very promising guest. Such a pity that this turned into an unmitigated, cringe-worthy disaster after only 14 minutes. Wickramasinghe was filling us in on his relationship with Fred Hoyle, and the history of the Steady-State cosmological model, when he just dropped out. Went away. Vanished. Hoagland said "Did I lose you? Dr. Wickramasinghe? Hello? I'm really getting very unhappy with Skype. I think we're going to go to a different system, because Skype is not reliable...So... let me see what I can do here... Sorry, folks, this happens with unfortunate regularity because we're using this technology...We'll obviously have to explore another technology... ummm... in the future, and we will do that. But not tonight. So... let me get rid of this particular... er... item ... I think we might have to go to some music before I can connect up with Dr. Wickramasinghe again... So, Keith, if we can do that? Put a little something on while I'm connecting my switches here... and then we will be back momentarily..." However, he was not back momentarily, or even at all that night. Not having an engineer in his "studio," the simple task of re-connecting was beyond Hoagland's skills.^{note 1} After eight minutes of music, we were back to the Intro and the October 24th show with Seimion and Matloff re-ran until off-air time. The Wickramasinghe show was simply purged from the show's web-site and Farcebook page. As Khruschev was declared a non-person by the Kremlin in 1964, so this was declared a non-show by Keith Rowland (owner of DMDN) and Richard Hoagland. Oh. My. God.

        Well, what future for Hoagland and his chat-show? He's been dropping hints (at least it makes a change from dropping names) that "some Big Players" are interested in giving the show a home. After this fiasco, I imagine Big Players will be having Big Second Thoughts.

Thanks to Dr. Stuart Robbins for providing the audio. 

Update 3 May
        Well, now we know. The show moved to KCAA, an AM/FM station in the Inland Empire area east of L.A. The station rents its chat-show facilities to anyone who can pay. "Big players" my ass.

========================================
[1] Of course, it's always possible that he actually did reconnect, only to hear the professor say he was tired of this amateur bullshit and wanted no further part in it. That would jive with the purging of the show's online archive. We will never know.

Robert Morningstar and the Daily Mail really hate Hillary

        We don't do politics here because — particularly right now, and particularly in the USA — it's everywhere else. But James Concannon reports from the Facebook trenches with an aeronautical/avionics story that's certainly rooted in the P word.

James Concannon writes...

        There's no possible doubt about where Robert Morningstar's political sympathies lie. On the book of farces, he's now posting almost daily diatribes against the Democratic US presidential candidates. One that made me smile and react yesterday was this piece of tabloid trash from the London Daily Mail: Conspiracy theorist claims Hillary Clinton 'murdered' John F Kennedy Jnr because he was planning to run for the same senate seat as her in shocking new book.

        Recap: JFK Jnr., his wife and sister-in-law all died when the Saratoga light plane he was piloting went down during descent to Martha's Vineyard on the night of 16 July 1999.

Splashdown point of the aircraft: Not lined up with runway 6

        I happen to know that Mr. Morningstar is an accomplished private pilot himself, so I asked him for some clarification. How could this dirty deed have been accomplished, what evidence of foul play exists, and what evidence of Clinton skullduggery? He replied thuswise:

"The murder method was sabotage. executed by disabling the Saratoga's electrical system so that all JFK Jr's attitude and navigational instruments would fail when he arrived at Martha's Vineyard at night. I proved this to the NTSB in 2003, and his accident report file was subsequently changed from "Pilot Error" to "spatial disorientation" through my intercession with the Vice Chairman of the NTSB, General Rosenker. You can write to the NTSB under FOIA and ask them (with my permission) for the 2 accident reports (2000 & 2003), and request copy of our correspondence. Concannon, Thou art a "loose cannon." and Thou art truly our "Facebook village idiot." Stick to analyzing "moon dust" and leave flying to pilots. -> M*"

        Well, that of course is far from being a complete answer, and perhaps unnecessarily scornful, but it helps to understand AM*'s blinkered view of the event. The problem is this: JFK Jnr. was certified to fly under Visual Flight Rules (VFR) only, not by instruments. He got very unlucky with the weather — on approach to the Vineyard, the haze was so comprehensive that there was no visible horizon. Several other pilots in the area confirmed this. That was, in fact, the predominant cause of the tragedy, and a presumptive saboteur could not possibly have predicted that fact in advance. In fact, tampering with the avionics flown by a VFR pilot is extremely unlikely to succeed, since by definition such a pilot would not be relying on his instruments. The theory therefore inherently lacks credibility. In addition, Robert Morningstar and the Daily Mail will need to explain why radar was getting good and accurate data from Kennedy's encoding altimeter. NOTE: The NTSB Final Report includes this: "Examination of the airframe, systems, avionics, and engine did not reveal any evidence of a preimpact mechanical malfunction."

        As for identifying the Clintons as the saboteurs, there isn't even a whisper of evidence of that in the Daily Mail. I truly doubt that Roger Stone's book includes credible evidence either. None of that is a problem for Morningstar — he just goes ahead and posts anything derogatory about Democrats, truth be damned.

        I reject religion because it seems to me it makes people hate each other. Now it seems that politics does the same.

=================================
ref: More deets on the tragedy from the pedia that is wiki.
ref: The NTSB Final Report, including much altitude data that can only have been obtained from a functioning encoding altimeter.

Update:
It's now more than a week since I asked Mr Morningstar to explain the altitude data. We can now safely assume that he has exercised his right to remain silent on that question.

Kerry Cassidy is broke

        "We basically have run out of money," says Kerry^{note 1} in this update video dated March 17th. The caption reads "We are totally out of funds .. please help." Well, that's straightforward enough, anyway.

        To me, the surprise is that this didn't happen years ago. In my opinion, running the kind of wild and woolly operation Kerry does, and expecting your audience to support you 100% financially, is foolhardy. It might work for PBS (just barely,) but PBS's audience is mostly professional people with what they call discretionary income. My picture of Kerry's core audience is of people who barely have jobs, let alone money to throw around to enable Kerry to jet off to Gobekli Tepe with her paramour and stay in a nice hotel.

        So she may have managed to swing the Gobekli Tepe boondoggle, but the more general evidence is that I'm right. Late last year Kerry announced an Indiegogo campaign, with a $100,000 goal. The campaign wound up on November 28th having raised $5,850 -- just 6% of the target. This despite the fact that a $5,000 contribution would get you a perk of a dinner with Kerry (Good luck getting a word in edgeways there.)

Down and out
        I'm not unsympathetic. It's tough being broke, and believe me I know. But I just think Kerry's ambitions are totally unrealistic. She works hard, no doubt about that, but her product really isn't very good. She claims to have done a year of film school at UCLA Extension, but I see very few signs of a professional approach to videography. Her IMDB page includes no credits whatsoever as director, producer, writer, editor or director of photography. It lists just two credits as "herself." (I won't brag about my own IMDB credits, but they're... er, a lot.)

        This 25-minute video from Kerry's May 2013 trip to Washington DC serves to illustrate Kerry's shortcomings as a videographer. She starts with a minute of establishing shots of the city, setting up the venue (The National Press Building.) OK, a perfectly decent idea. But what she gives us is a minute of the camera waving around, finding focus, passing over some recognizable stuff then moving right along. This is not what you do to establish a location. What you do, as a professional, is to capture enough scenes from the tripod to offer your editor so that he or she can cut together a montage of the appropriate length. You do not use the out-of-focus shots or the wavey-waveys.^{note 2} Then you write a script that fits the picture^{note 3}, record it, and dub it on. Optionally, mix in a little M&E (Music and Effects.)

        In practice the editor may be the same person as the producer and camera operator, as I'm sure it is in the world of Kerry. Makes no diff. And I'm not saying the occasional whip-pan or crash-zoom is verboten -- just that everything shouldn't be on the move all the time. It's dizzying, and it serves its intentions very poorly.

        Her framing during interviews isn't too bad, actually. I was trained to keep the interviewee's eyes between 2/3 and 3/4 up the screen height, and Kerry pretty-much follows that. But from 06:58 to 07:28 in this piece she keeps the camera trained on the interviewee's lapel as she introduces herself for half a minute. CHOP IT OUT, Kerry. A professional would never allow that dreck into the cut story. She doesn't shoot enough cutaways to edit the interviews tightly -- she seems to be content to let them drone on at full length, and that applies to her entire oeuvre as far as I've seen. To my mind, she simply doesn't have the instinct for what works to create watchable documentaries.

        Her pieces to camera run the range from so-so to frighteningly bad. She doesn't light herself, so we get an ultra-low contrast picture. She doesn't seem to believe in learning a script, or teleprompting one, so we get plenty of ers and ums, and she has the devastating habit of shaking her head every so often, as though getting her hair out of her eyes (check the appeal for support video, at 01:45.) Her editing is at times inaccurate (again, check the appeal vid at 09:57 for a double-cut.) I hear you say this is all part of her down-home appeal, but I don't buy it. UNPROFESSIONAL is the word that comes to mind.

Awake and Aware
        So my suggestion to Kerry would be to give up on it. Maintain your library of however-many-thousand over-length interviews you have, but stop prancing around the world making more of them and expecting volunteers to foot the bill. Perhaps stick to conference organizing — that surely generates plenty of cash. The punters who pay good money to attend the Awake and Aware conferences aren't interested in Kerry specifically, but in the speakers she comes up with. She's pretty good at that, and of course these days she could always have a great new career as an Uber driver.

Update March 24
        Since declaring that she's skint and cannot continue "this important work," Kerry has produced and released the following videos:

Same day: Richard Bartlett & Melissa Joy: Matrix Energetics (whatever those are)
A day later: Chris Kehler: Quantum Energy Healing (whatever that is)

And today, "The Brussels bombings were a False Flag." Oh yes of course they were. Everything tragic is. That way we can all admire Kerry's brilliant access to THE REAL STORY and forget about wasting sympathy on the 30+ fake families who are pretending to have lost fake loved ones. Terrific job, Kerry.

Update March 31
Announcements that tell their own story: Today Kerry announced that she's putting together a tour of Europe, to take place sometime this Spring. She doesn't say she'll be hitchhiking and staying in youth hostels, either.

If that announcement had come a day later I'd have thought "Yeah, yeah, Kerry. April fool, right?"

============================================
[1] For those who have NFI who Kerry is, here's a briefing.
[2] Unless you're Dennis Hopper. Sorry, Easy Rider is one of my pet hates.
[3] In the newsgathering business they tend to start with a narration track and cut to it. Fine, that works too (but in my opinion is less creative.)

Yes, we have no Mike Bara

        I had earnestly intended to blog Mike's lecture at Conscious Life, but the audio quality is so appalling I can't stand to listen to it. Here's the link in case anyone wants to torture their ears in addition to their brain. I think his main topics were Planet 9 and Mars anomalies, which I already covered here and here respectively.

        Instead, give yourselves a treat and go read  Bob Zimmerman's scholarly (and very well illustrated) analysis of Curiosity's slow progress toward Sharp Mountain. 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.

        I guess, according to Zimmerman's projections, he can hang onto that ridiculous fantasy for a while yet. When Curiosity finally reveals Sharp to be just a mountain, what will he say then? Why, NOTHING, of course. Glad you asked.

Update:
        Perhaps we may have some Mike Bara after all -- or, yet another example of Bara's abject ignorance of sciency things and inability to carry out relatively simple research.

        As Bill Belcher pointed out in comments right here, this misshapen planet IS NOT, as Mike Bara told his audience (17 minutes in,) what Planet Earth would look like if the oceans were removed. Even the deepest part of the oceans (Mariana Trench, 11 kM) is only 0.0017 of the radius of the Earth.

        This model, created by Ales Bezdek, represents the variable gravitational field of Earth. And even that is deliberately exaggerated. Phil Plait blogged more details last September.

Will Mike Bara ever get any science right?

Nobody loves NASA, apparently

James Concannon writes...

        In an extraordinary display of mass media ignoring history, the last few days have seen quite a flap over the Apollo 10 "Music Behind the Moon." Never mind that the story was fairly well-known to journos on the NASA beat at the time (may 1969.) The fact that it happened behind the Moon meant that the transcripts came, not from the normal air-to-ground chit-chat but from the DSEA tapes that recorded conversation (and data) in the LM while the spacecraft was out of radio contact with Houston. Those are the ones that Robert Morningstar foolishly insists the astronauts didn't know about, despite the fact that switches on Panel 12 of the LM instrument panel are clearly labeled RECORDER ON/OFF.

        The fact that the DSEA transcripts were classified for a while (until 1976^{note 1}) was enough to arouse suspicion among the conspirati that something was being hidden, and the music was "unexplained." Actually, it was quite well explained -- by, among others,  Michael Collins, CMP of Apollo 11, in his book Carrying the Fire.

"There is a strange noise in my headset now, an eerie woo-woo sound. Had I not been warned about it, it would have scared the hell out of me (...) fortunately the radio technicians had a ready explanation for it: it was interference between the LM's and Command Module's VHF radios."

        The transcripts were well discussed in Above Top Secret seven years ago. The story only popped up strongly in the last few days because of hype for a new TV series, NASA's Unexplained Files. The show's producers claim that they are releasing the actual audio for the very first time.

        It got extensive play on the Book of Farces, and what annoyed me was the general reaction. The Coast to Coast AM page downplayed the story.

"The clarification on the story from the space agency will likely do little to dissuade conspiracy theorists who insist that NASA is covering up information on ETs. Nonetheless, it's probably safe to say that the fat lady has sung on the moon 'music' mystery."

        However, the 65 comments from faithful listeners were overwhelmingly scornful of NASA. Some samples:

* "Radio interference" NASA could make something up better than that.
* Sure NASA this isn't the 20th century anymore we aren't that stupid
* Theres never a mystery its always explained away im tired of the cover ups from nasa
* Never a straight answer are full of shite as usual take there orders from the cia.
* In NASA we trust...right
* lol why would I believe a word NASA say
* NASA is a BS agency.
* Of course NASA was quick to disprove it, they can't unravel the lies they've been building for 60 years       

        This is a sad state of affairs. I blame Richard Hoagland, Mike Bara and Robert Morningstar.


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[1] See this cover for the date classification was changed to "U." It's a bit of a mystery why these texts were not released immediately. The general theory is that the chit-chat was undisciplined and even included some -- gasp! -- expletives.