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.

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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.