Flight UA93

 I've been fretting about the details of UA93, the plane that went down near Shanksville PA when the hijackers abandoned their plan to crash into the US Capitol.

FIRST PROBLEM: although Todd Beamer and other passengers are legitimate heroes for their attacks on the hijackers, what did they think would happen if they killed all the hijackers ? None of the passengers were qualified to land that plane safely, so they were almost certain to crash in the end anyway.

SECOND PROBLEM: why did the hijackers take the plane down in open country? Surely a better option for them would be to land on a city and at least do Lockerbie-type damage. Probably much more since Pan am 103 was not guided into the ground.

Any ideas?

how do you pronounce OMICRON?

 I've always been taught Oh-MIKE-ron. Virtually the whole of the USA says OH-mick-ron. Interesting....

 This blog is on hiatus

Time to assess Jerome Corsi's prediction

         Jerome Corsi is the author of this, among other worthless pieces of self-published trash:

        He's very fond of writing and saying "Donald Trump always looks like he’s going to lose just before he wins", and on 3rd December he said, on Coast to Coast AM, "I'm 100% certain Trump will win the election" (note that that was exactly a month after Trump had decisively lost the election). Well, I don't think we need to wait for the inauguration. Today, as the mob assault on the Capitol is shameful history, and Congress has duly certified Joe Biden's win, I can say I'm 100% certain that Jerome Corsi was wrong.

        He's not a particularly interesting character this Corsi fellow. Just like his InfoWars colleague Alex Jones, he gives himself permission to write anything, regardless of the truth. The only purpose of his writing and speaking is to promote Republicans with lies and denigrate Democrats with innuendo (example: Obama was married to his male Pakistani roommate before Michelle^{note 1}). Yesterday's diatribe, headed "Trump Will Continue the Fight", included this lead:

« It is up to VP Mike Pence today to ... take action to preserve the greatest nation on God’s green earth from a takeover by the CCP division of the Army of Darkness. Pence presides over the joint session of Congress at 1pm Eastern, and has the power and responsibility to declare the fraudulent pre-certification of state electoral college delegates pledged to the #bidencrimefamily invalid. The battleground states must decertify their Biden electors and certify Trump electors.»

        Shows how much Corsi knows about constitutional law. Trump himself tried the same idea on Pence, and to his credit Pence replied "Sorry squire, no can do" (or an Americanised version thereof).

De-platformed
        Corsi was invited to the news segment of C2C-AM last night, as the joint session of Congress was reconvened and debating a trimmed-down list of ridiculous objections to the electoral collge voting. He made no comments about Trump's chances at all, instead wailing that he was being "de-platformed", that there is no freedom of speech, and that this will probably be his last appearance on the radio show because he'll soon be arrested.

         Well, I had a look round this morning and I don't know what he's talking about. His web site is still up. His YouTube and Vimeo channels are live. His Twitter and Farcebook accounts seem OK.^{note 2}

         Shame, really. I rejoice in the decision of Twitter and Facebook's to nix Trump's accounts and I wish they'd do the same to Corsi. Somebody who is that wrong has nothing useful to contribute.

Update 10th Jan

corsination.com now contains a notice, all tagged h1-strong, beginning:

« Due to the rampant censorship of the past few hours, our videos have been de-platformed. Because of this, none of the videos on the website currently play. »

        But wait... this is his own web site, the domain name bought by proxy in June 2018 and not due to expire until 2029. And his vids play perfectly well on the Tube that is You.

So Corsi's lying for some damn reason. Also he doesn't understand CSS.

===============/ \====================

[1] Source :https://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2012/08/09/corsi-obama-was-in-gay-marriage-to-pakistani-roommate/

[2] His YouTube channel has 70,000 subscribers. His Twitter and FB presences have 131,000 and 22,000 followers respectively. These people must be the most naive, credulous people on the face of the Earth.

False information on Coast to Coast AM

        It's not exactly hot news that what a few million late-night listeners heard on C2C-AM last night was nonsense. That program's respect for truth is hardly better than that of some of our favorite liars and propagandists—Robert Morningstar, Mike Bara to name but two.

        But it's particularly egregious of the producers (Lisa Lyon, Tom Danheiser) to be trotting out Ben Fuchs at a time when the hospital systems of the USA are tottering on the brink of collapse due to the flood of COVID-19 victims. In the Los Angeles area, several hospitals are now turning away ambulances because they have nowhere to put the patients they bring. One hospital in that area has been treating patients in the gift shop. Surely the time for accurate information is now.

ICU at Loma Linda University Medical Center.(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

        Ben Fuchs and Joel Wallach are regulars on C2C, pretending to be doctors giving useful advice. In fact, they are pill-pushers whose most frequent advice is "BUY OUR SUPPLEMENTS". Fuchs is a cosmetic pharmacist by training and Wallach is a vet who often advises his audience to eat a dozen eggs a day.

GMO humans

        Last night Fuchs handed out bullshit on the topic of the vaccination programs now under way in many parts of the world. He said that the vaccines are scary because they enter every cell in your body and take over the cell's genetic machinery. They permanently alter cellular DNA such that for the rest of a recipient's life he is "a GMO human being".

        Some of that erroneous information is merely a repeat of what George Noory himself stated on the show on 20th December. The fact is that a vaccine, just like a virus, does possess a "key" allowing entry to a cell, but the key is only useful if there's a corresponding lock into which it fits. Such locks are only present on a class of cells called antigen-presenting. Dendritic cells and macrophages are two common examples. I emphasize that the cells the vaccine has the key to are exactly the same as the cells the virus can get into. That's really the whole point. The vaccine gets in ahead of the virus and creates antibodies that are as effective against the virus as they are against the vaccine itself.

        The new vaccines are essentially just single strands of messenger RNA, a few thousand nucleotides long. They need to be decoded just like the cell's indigenous mRNA, and for that purpose they seek out a ribosome. So yes, it's true to say that they make use of the cell's genetic machinery, but "take it over" is a useless exaggeration. If that were true the cell would soon die.

        The worst boo-boo dropped by both Fuchs and Noory was the nonsense about GMO humans. mRNA, being single-stranded, cannot possibly graft itself into double-stranded DNA. There's a biochemical incompatability, too—where DNA uses thymine RNA uses uracil. There is an interesting exception to this precept— HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, finds an enzyme called reverse transcriptase and turns itself into valid DNA. But, mercifully, that's not a trick that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has learned, and certainly that is not what the vaccines are designed to do.

        In my opinion, it is the height of irresponsibility for a popular radio show to be telling its listeners to be suspicious of the vaccine now. There are three ways this pandemic can end: the virus undergoes a suicidal mutation, which is more or less what happened to the flu pandemic of 1918-20, it kills the majority of the world's population, or we all get vaccinated.

Time to assess Mark Richards' February prediction

 On February 20th, I wrote the following:

« I promise I'll be back at the end of the year when Mark Richards' prediction can be assessed with certainty. Given that Richards is now serving a life sentence in Vacaville jail, with no special access to sources, I'm very confident that I will be telling him, if he's listening, that he was wrong.»

So here I am, as promised, to evaluate the prediction. Here it is in full:

« 100,000 people in China [are] involved in the virus. 30% have died, 30% are infected and 40% are taken off-world by Reptilians assisting China in their drive to eliminate approx. 500 million people ...

Those humans taken off-world, according to Mark, by Reptilians, are sold to other races for food and used as sex slaves. This virus will mutate and other governments are using it to facilitate eliminating some of their populations as well. One-quarter of a million people will die of the virus this year.»

Evaluation: 

• At the time of the prediction, 74,588 Chinese were confirmed infected. I can't now retrieve the number of deaths at that time, but 30,000 is undoubtedly wrong.
• As of today 4,782 Chinese have died. The Reptilians have apparently made no significant progress toward 500 million.
• "This virus will mutate". Absolutely correct.
• As I noted in a later comment, it only took until 5th May for the quarter-million deaths to rack up. As of today, 1,822,467 have died world-wide. The USA alone passed the quarter-million mark about a month ago.
• Now USA 346,408 deaths. UK 74,235 deaths

So Richards was not all wrong, but wrong enough for me to do the toldya dance.

Corsi
        I'm not going to be able to resist similarly assessing Jerome Corsi's "Trump will win" prediction. But that will have to wait until 21st January.

Here's a surprise, Richard Hoagland was wrong

 From this blog, March 14, 2016:

« 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. ..... When Curiosity finally reveals Sharp to be just a mountain, what will he say then? Why, NOTHING, of course. Glad you asked. »

        Well, Curiosity has been on the lower slopes of Mt. Sharp for quite a while now and of course Hoagland has been silent on the topic.

        Yesterday NASA/JPL/CNES released the largest photo-mosaic of Mt. Sharp yet created. The images were from the ChemCam's Remote Micro-Imager, and the mosaic was created by a team at the University of Nantes, France from 216 overlapping images. Stéphane Le Mouélic provided the detailed explanation in a Marsblog. Here's a screen capture of one part of the huge photo-mosaic, but it's really worth looking at the whole thing.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech /LANL/CNES/CNRS/ IRAP/IAS/LPG

        If you think for one moment that Richard Hoagland is going to see that and publicly announce that he was completely mistaken, you don't know your Hoagland. Admitting error is NOT what he does. Let's face it, if he did he'd be doing so much of it that he'd have no time to plan and compile his ridiculous blogtalkradio show.

        Click on the label "hoagland errors" below to see a partial listing.

Planetary conjunctions

       The imminent Great Jupiter/Saturn Conjunction, plus a recent comment on this blog, got me wondering about gravitational forces at conjunctions. When Mars and Jupiter are in conjuction (as happened in 1836-7 and 1979-80, and will recur in 2123, 2170, 2313, and 2456) which of them exerts the greater pull on planet Earth? Mars is 8 times closer but more than 3000 times lighter. Let's find out.

DATA:

G = 6.674 x 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2 

Earth mass   5.97 x 10²⁴ kg
Mars mass    6.42 x 10²³ kg
Jupiter mass  2.00  x 10²⁷ kg

Earth-Mars av. dist.    78 x 10⁹ m
Earth-Jupiter av. dist 628 x 10⁹ m

FORMULA:

F = Gm₁m₂/d²

RESULT

Gravitational attraction Earth-Mars:      4.2 x 10¹⁶ newtons
Gravitational attraction Earth-Jupiter 202 x 10¹⁶ newtons

Eccentricity
         The orbit of Mars is sufficiently eccentric (0.09) that its closest approach to Earth is 55 x 10⁹ m. It's possible for a conjunction to coincide with closest approach, but that still wouldn't be enough to overcome Jupiter's dominance.

Congrats to CNSA (again)

        The Chinese National Space Agency is due congratulations for successfully retrieving lunar samples in its Chang'e 5 spacecraft today.

        However, unlike CNSA's brilliant achievement of January 2019, when they landed Chang'e 4 on the far side and placed a relay satellite in lunar orbit to talk to it, this was not a First. The Sovs performed this trick three times, with  Luna 16 (September 1970), Luna 20 (February 1972) and Luna 24 (August 1976).

More detail on Hoagland's jail time

        Jason Colavito, who does for pseudo-history what I do for pseudoscience, evidently tortured himself by listening to the whole three hours of last Sunday's Other Side of Midnight — Richard Hoagland's podcast on blogtalkradio.

        Colavito made his review into yesterday's blog, and I enjoyed his digs at pseudo-historian Scott Wolter — Hoagland's Sunday night guest and one of Colavito's perenniel punching bags. I enjoyed reading that Hoagland called the Utah monolith (now disappeared) a “hyperdimensional tetrahedron” because it's SO HOAGLAND to be that wrong about a current event.

        Perhaps most of all I enjoyed a comment from someone who labels himself "HOAGLAND HOKUM" but can only be Richard Grossman, publisher of Hoagland's 1987 book The Monuments of Mars. I reproduce Grossman's comment in full:

« Here is another little secret about Monuments: the only way the damn thing ever got written was that Hoagland went to prison for one of his inexplicable and weird scams (ostensibly something about a stolen rental car and New York Planetarium credit card)—whether it really happend or not as reported, whether it was really a scam or not, and whether he was really guilty or sentenced fairly or not (the answer to the latter is definitely “not,” as he had an attorney involved in his own weird paranoid cosmic conspiracy theories, including Hoagland). In the end he was incarcerated over a New York State warrant that he chose to flee (to the Golden State) rather than defend in situ; he was apprehended in Berkeley when stopped for having a cardboard rear license plate; refused to plea-bargain; and so got housed in L.A. County jail for over a year. Admittedly my version of the story is cobbled out of hearsay from a variety of semi-reliable sources, but it roughly tracks some event that actually happened. He was in jail; that’s where I addressed my mail to him regarding the book; and he did write much of the book there.»

David Sereda tells us a fairy story

       The Rational wikipedia describes David Sereda as an "all-purpose wingnut" — a believer in contact with Pleiadians, zero-point energy, and the healing power of solfeggio frequencies, among other crackpot ideas. He's one of those people who don't thoroughly understand what the U part of UFO means, and proclaims, in at least one book, that he can identify the unidentified, and explain the unexplained. Those blobby things, he says, are spaceships carrying hostile extraterrestrial intelligences.

        He was interviewed last Thursday by another all-purpose wingnut and conspiracy theorist, Kerry Cassidy. His theme was not at all topical—it was a theory that has been hashed and rehashed on websites and in books and TV shows for 17 years. The theory is nothing less than the idea that one of those blobby things was responsible for the breakup and destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia, 1st February 2003. His evidence is this strange time-lapse photograph taken from Bernal Hill in San Francisco by an amateur photographer as Columbia streaked overhead.

        To Sereda, the squiggle is an incoming extraterrestrial attack. He quite rightly says that lightning—an explanation that some have come up with^{note 1}—is not a possibility. Columbia was too high, and lightning does not last for any substantial fraction of ten seconds. However, he's so enamored of his attack theory that he fails to consider any other mundane explanation.

Just a jolt
        Sereda did not identify the amateur photographer who shot this and four other images over San Francisco. It is, in fact, a man by the name of Peter Goldie. Goldie himself was puzzzled enough by what he had captured that he went to great lengths to contact NASA and offer his photographs as forensic evidence. NASA took notice, and sent astronaut Tamara Jernigan to examine the shots personally. Goldie willingly allowed his camera to be taken to the FBI lab at Quantico, and the story hit the crackpot headlines. Goldie writes:

« Pick a fringe group, be it anti-government, fundamentalist believer, HAARP, chemclouds, right wing, left wing, secret dreams of psychics, etc… they all seem to have an angle on what really happened to the Columbia Shuttle, and it always involves the “purple corkscrew”, my “confiscated” camera and that “they” are forcing me to hide the truth.»

        Goldie's own explanation? He goes with the result of the FBI investigation: a jolt was all it took. He did not have a cable release, so the mere act of opening the shutter would have jogged the camera enough to cause the squiggle. Consider this, too: Goldie took five ten-second shots, panning the camera between each. During the minute that took, at a reentry speed of 17,500 mph, Columbia would have traveled nearly 300 miles. And yet, in every shot the squiggle ends at the point where the spacecraft is. If the squiggle was an attack the intercept point would have fallen further and further back in each photo.

        The cause of the tragedy has been well explained by a foam strike at take-off. Goldie told his story to Rawstory in February 2013. Read it here.

        So, basically, Sereda made a fool of himself last week.

Oberg on the case
        James Oberg investigated this claim in 2008. Here's his report.

Update:
      Sereda told the same fairy story on Coast to Coast AM, 7th December. Unchallenged by George Noory, of course.

==========================/ \==========================

[1] Quest TV floated the lightning theory in a YouTube vid in May this year.

No Lynne, COVID-19 is not cured by mouthwashes

        Lynne McTaggart is editorial director of the publication What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Nobody could accuse her of modesty—on her website she tells us that she is known as as a ‘metaphysical rock star’, ‘the Madonna of the Quantum World,’ ‘the Malcolm Gladwell of the New Science’ and even ‘The Dalai Mama.’ She proclaims her newsletter as "the world’s No 1 health magazine". Clearly, she needs no help at self-promotion, but Coast to Coast AM nevertheless gilded the lily with "She is consistently listed as one of the world’s 100 most spiritually influential people."

        This was advance copy for her two-hour appearance last night with host George Noory. I confess that I nodded off at some point during the two hours, but I heard her say that "alternative medicine cures all those illnesses that conventional medicine cannot". (Emphysema? Asthma? Diabetes mellitus? Creutzfeld-Jacob? Polio? Ebola? I'd like to see your data on those some time, Lynne).

        I'm not the only one with a skeptical view of McTaggart and other "alternative medicine" loonies. In an article in The Guardian^{note 1} on 17th February 2016, Ben Goldacre took McTaggart to task for confusing Tamiflu with a vaccine for bird flu in her "World's No.1" newsletter. McTaggart's article recommended, for treatment of bird flu, vitamins A, C, and E, homeopathy^{note 2}, and the herbal remedies echinacea^{note 3}, Hydrastis canadensis^{note 4}, Andrographis paniculata^{note 5}, and Phytolacca americana^{note 6}. Goldacre summed up:

« Seriously. It goes on for pages and pages, rehashing the Tamiflu information leaflet's safety data, in the most scaremongerish tones they can muster, quoting scientific journal articles - with the full citation, journal title, page number, year, issue number, all in the main body of the text - all to make themselves look as authoritative as is humanly possible, all while cursing and mocking the medical profession. And all the while they are blissfully, beautifully, wonderfully ignorant of the fact they have got the most important thing, at the heart of the matter, completely and utterly, pathetically, stupidly, obviously wrong. This isn't bad science. It's performance art.»

        Last night on C2C-AM McTaggart excelled herself by claiming that ordinary mouthwash is a cure for COVID-19. What a whopper of a misunderstanding!!! There is not the slightest evidence of this. What has been said, quite authoritatively,^{note 7} is that the use of commerical mouthwash may possibly reduce the transmission of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. Since COVID-19 patients typically have a very high viral load in the mouth and throat, that's almost obvious.

        What with this and the shameless monthly infomercials by "Doctor" Joel Wallach, Coast-to-Coast AM marches on in its mission to misinform its audience on medical matters.

========================/ \======================

[1] "How to be beautifully, blissfully wrong about Tamiflu: just call it a bird flu vaccine". The article was in the Guardian's long-running "Bad Science" series.

[2] Since the principle of homeopathy is the treatment of a disease with a dilute solution of the disease's known cause, this suggests immersing a small bird in a jar of water and shaking it.

[3] Purple coneflower, sold OTC as a cold remedy

[4] Goldenseal, sold OTC as an anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory

[5] Chiretta, with controversial claims of relief of AIDS symptoms

[6] Pokeweed, toxic to humans

[7] "Mouthwashes could reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission, study shows". Science Daily, 10th August 2020.

Robert Morningstar: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong and Wrong

 James Concannon writes...

        Robert Morningstar got the second half of Coast to Coast AM last Wednesday night. The producers (plus George Noory) must have thought it was time for a good old-fashioned liar, after recent appearances by Nick Pope and Seth Shostak, who both pretty well stick to facts. With AM* you either get misinformation, as when he's interpreting images or audio, or disinformation, as when he's deliberately mis-attributing images for propaganda purposes.

        On Wednesday night, it was all mis- and no dis-. He boasted about his own brilliance in digging up photo-evidence of Martian and Lunar civilizations, mentioning in particular his 2015 discovery of "Big Ben on the Moon". As I wrote in March 2015, this artifact is just a piece of random lint (looks like a tiny insect leg) in someone's scanner. Stuart Robbins also ridiculed this one later that year. Thanks again to "trekker" for pointing out that in the next frame "Big Ben" has migrated right-wards and is totally detached from the Moon.

Music of the Spheres
        I also wrote a major debunk piece about AM*'s next topic: The weird "music" heard by Apollo 10 (also Apollo 11 and 12) astronauts when they were behind the Moon. This was definitively traced to intermodulation between the VHF tracking of the two separate spacecraft. AM* said, testily, that he "just wishes NASA would come clean" about it.

        Well, y'know, four separate mission transcripts are available. The DSE and DSEA transcripts are available. The Press Kit is available. These documents have been on the Internet for ~20 years. Much more recently, a group of space enthusiasts has annotated the mission transcript as a flight journal. It's hard to know what else NASA could do to make this mission public. Of course Morningstar is imagining an alien orchestra and he wants NASA to admit it. But it's NOT TRUE.

        AM* even went as far as to create what he called a "radio play" on the subject. This consisted of four guys reading the mission transcript (very badly) plus someone simulating the Quindar tones (also very badly) on what sounded like a tin whistle. Here's a link to it.

Anti-vacc
        You can't monitor AM* for long before you understand that he's passionately anti-vacc (However, he's also passionately pro-Trump, and today's news must have created something of a dilemma for him). In the final moments of his two hours, he claimed that the swine flu (H1N1) mass vaccination campaign of 2009 caused many cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome. He further claimed that GBS is inherited in subsequent generations.

Well it's NOT TRUE that H1N1 vaccination caused a spate of GBS. Ref - para 5 of the Introduction. Certainly some people who had been vaccinated also contracted GBS, but simple statistics tells us not to attach special significance to this. In a population of 10 million, 21.5 can be expected to contract GBS in any six-week period, just by normal background infection rates. And well over 10 million were vaccinated.

It's NOT TRUE that GBS is inherited. Ref. - "Inheritance" para. Since no genetic mutation is associated with GBS, there is no possibility of inheritance.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong and Wrong

NASA haters mock InSight's problems

         The Mars seismic and heat flow lander known as InSight (for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) has definitely had its share of problems since its successful landing in Elysium Planitia on 26th November 2018. The seismometer and heat flow experiments were successfully deployed onto the surface and useful data returned. But the heat flow experiment included a digging mole which, it was hoped, would burrow as much as 5m into the Martian soil in a two-month process.

         However, the dig has not yet happened to any appreciable extent. The mole just doesn't seem able to make the kind of progress that was expected. Attempts to help it along by pushing down on it with the scoop have been partly successful, but are self-limited to the extent that, once the mole is properly buried, that technique will no longer be an option. JPL scientists now think that Martian soil simply doesn't have enough friction, but they have not given up.

Hidden Mission
        The Hidden Mission Forum, created in 2011 by Keith Laney, is a collection of bad-tempered redneck NASA-haters who collectively have a strong belief that Mars and The Moon were once the home of advanced civilizations. They spend their days moaning to each other about NASA's cover-up of these "facts", and they are extremely intolerant of contrary evidence. Any dissenter who joins the forum is extremely unwelcome. Some have been subjected to juvenile sexual taunting; some have been summarily kicked out.

        One of HMF's stalwarts using the nickname Vianova (and a John Wayne avatar) recently posted this, commenting on InSight's unexpected difficulty:

"The clown show continues ... for the last year or more .... all you hear from NASA is ... the Mole is "making progress", and then it fails again, then it make "progress" two months later, and fails again, then it makes more "progress", three months later, and now they think it is making "progress" again. 

Give up the fucking ghost, please. Just mercifully throw in the towel. Maybe God will be good and send a meteor to fly splat that piece of shit Mole and fake news space mission."

        In late August there was more bad news from InSight. The weather sensor went into safe mode and abruptly ceased sending data. Vianova commented:

"El Cheapo NASA space missions with tinker toy contraptions to do science, are bound to have recurrent problems. ... NASA doesn't know how to think big, they only think small investment, with inevitable small return, and then when they get some data, they call it a science bonanza. Even if they obviously fail, and play out a propaganda stunt in the news media, after giving themselves reward ceremonies for failing, by calling it a success."

        FACT: Cost of InSight was $425 million, kept low by re-using the landing system developed for Phoenix. That compares with about $2.5 billion for Mars Science Laboratory, the brilliantly successful mission that soft-landed the Curiosity rover in Gale crater eight years ago.

Ignorance
        In July 2015, after the Dawn and New Horizons missions both suffered computer glitches that were rapidly resolved, Keith Laney wrote that JPL mission managers would rather sabotage their own missions than "come clean" about what they really see in the Solar System. That's a measure of how much The Hidden Mission understands about mission management.

Update 17th October

JPL announced today that Insight's mole is at last completely buried. No word from HMF.

Steve Bales' crib sheet that saved the lunar landing

        You have to be a real space nut (like me) to fully appreciate the historic significance of this single sheet of paper, posted recently in a Space History FB group:

         It's the list of alarm conditions that could be generated by the Apollo Lunar Module computer. It was provided by Jack Garman, a 24-year-old backroom computer guru in Houston during the Apollo 11 mission. Guidance Officer (GUIDO) Steve Bales had it on his desk during the landing, and it was this that gave him confidence to make the call that the 1201 and 1202 executive overload program alarms were not serious enough to abort the landing. Bales received special commendation by President Nixon as he presented a Group Achievment Award to the whole Mission Management team, but perhaps it was Garman who should have had the recognition — or rather, should ALSO have had recognition. After all, it was Bales on the hot seat as Neil Armstrong radioed "Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm".

Rendezvous radar
        Naturally, there was a great deal of post-mortem analysis of that hairy but ultimately triumphant situation, and a story became current that the computer was overloaded because LM pilot Buzz Aldrin had accidentally turned on the rendezvous radar. So the computer was overloaded because the RVR was uselessly pinging a non-existent target. I plead guilty to having spread that false story myself in something I wrote in 1979, for the tenth anniversary.

        The fact is that the RVR was on but NOT by accident. It was standard and correct procedure. The thought was that it was a good idea to have it functioning and warmed up, one less thing to worry about in case of a real abort.

        The true cause of the overload was much trickier, and more difficult to diagnose. I'll quote from an article in Ars Technica by Lee Hutchinson, dateline 5th July 2019:

"The LM’s rendezvous radar contained a collection of electronics called the Attitude, Translation, and Control Assembly, or ATCA. The ATCA was responsible for providing an electrical interface whereby the LM’s guidance computer could control the radar’s hardware, and the ATCA was powered by 800Hz, 28-volt alternating current. The guidance computer in turn used a piece of equipment called a Coupling Data Unit, or CDU, to read the orientation of the radar’s antenna (its shaft and trunnion angles) so that the guidance computer could keep track of where the radar was pointed. The CDUs—there were actually two of them—were also powered by a separate 800Hz, 28-volt AC reference signal."

        As Hutchinson goes on to explain, the two separate AC reference sources were not constrained to be in phase with each other, as they really needed to be for the computer to make sense of the data. Their phase relationship depended on the precise instant at which the LM pilot turned on the RVR and set the mode switch to SLEW. 

Rendezvous radar controls in the LM

        Most of the time, during simulations, the two reference sources were sufficiently close to phase-lock that no problems arose. As ill luck would have it, Aldrin set that mode switch at the exact moment when the ATCA and CDU signals were 90° out of phase—the worst possible condition. The  CDU interpreted the data it was getting as far out of the normal range, and it issued a series of interrupts to the guidance computer, consuming 15% of the computer's time. 

         Jack Garman didn't know any of this as he wrote the crib-sheet for Steve Bales. He just knew that the 1201 and 1202 alarms would simply force the computer to re-prioritize its task list, and as long as those alarms didn't keep on coming faster and faster, all would be OK. And by the way, Jack did get recognition.

Garman receiving an award from Chris Kraft, Deputy Director of MSFC

        Even more technical detail on the alarms can be read in Tales from the Lunar Module Guidance Computer by Don Eyles, an M.I.T. programmer who designed most of the system.

George Haas is off his rocker

        George Haas is a sculptor in Purcellville, a historic township in rural Virginia. He got interested in the so-called "Face" on Mars after reading a book about it by Randolfo Rafael Pozos in 1991. He researched other "anomalies" on the Moon and Mars, and established, with William Saunders, what he called The Cydonia Institute as an imitation of a research institute. The institute's website currrently lists five members in addition to Haas and Saunders, one of whom I suspect is Haas's wife, also a sculptor.

        If you think Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara, proponents of the "Face" on Mars, are bamboozled by pareidolia, you ain't, as they say, seen nuthin' yet. George Haas's'examinations of NASA's Mars imagery (his slogan: "Through NASA's own photographs the truth will be revealed") have shown him what he says are:

A golden calf
A dolphin
An owl
A bearded jaguar
A bearded quetzalcoatl
An avian serpent
A howler monkey
A parrot
A Mayan ball court
A miles-long portrait of Queen Nefertiti

        I will respect Haas's wish that the content of his web site not be reproduced without written permission, but here's his Nefertiti, taken from the pinterest site:

        It is what it is — a totally fanciful coloration imposed on the Martian surface by a human artist. Something in the terrain reminded Haas of the famous Thutmose bust of Nefertiti, but any idea that some Martian civilization laid out this miles-long feature as a deliberate copy of the Thutmose bust is utterly lunatic. How would a Martian have knowledge of Nefertiti? Haas does not explain.

        Haas reports on these bizarre imaginitive findings in a series of web-published articles written in the style of science papers or memoranda, complete with elaborate footnoting. He calls these essays "Field Journals," though quite obviously he has not been "in the field" in any normal sense of the expression.

Raptorzone gamertag

       Latest of these lash-ups is Vol. 23 No. 1 — The Raptor Zone Complex. It concerns a series of terrain features in Elysium Planitia, a region covering approximately 0°N to 20.0°N and from 140°E to 170°E. "Anomalies" in this region were first noticed by a South African video-gamer, Jean Ward, in a strip from the Context camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter centered at 7.73° E, 148.56° N. Just like Haas himself, Ward regularly reports on his blog what he thinks he sees in NASA imagery. He writes about The Chewbacca Outpost, The Baltic Sea Anomaly/Millennium Falcon analog and The Star Ship Enterprise analog on Mars. Unlike Haas, however, Ward is quite diffident about his "findings". He writes:

« My intention is only to share anomalies I’ve discovered on Mars and not to convince anyone that there is or was a civilization on Mars. As Will Farrar from WhatsUpInTheSky says: “I see what I see, you see what you see.” »

        He also explains that the "Raptor Zone" has "nothing to do with raptors but everything to do with my Gamertag RaptorZN."

        In his re-reporting, however, George Haas was far from diffident. Where Ward thought he saw a pistol, Haas sees the head of an eagle, and he writes that a Martian civilization might have placed the structure as a marker or beacon alerting orbital travelers above that a settlement was located below. As I'm respecting Haas's copyright I won't reproduce his diagram here, but it's Fig.5 in his Journal — check it out. To my mind, there's no justification whatsoever for asserting that this is a contrived representation of a bird. It's a butte just like thousands of others on Mars.

        Haas has been a guest on Coast to Coast AM many times over the years, most recently last Thursday night when he described this and other fantasies. You can also eyeball the eagle head in the set of images posted on the C2C site. Naturally, he was not challenged by George Noory, not even when he said "There are signs that Venus was once inhabited." Coast to Coast welcomes loonies as guests and does not embarrass them by asking awkward questions.

Fravor in person

        David Fravor appeared in a marathon four-hour podcast hosted by Lex Fridman, posted two days ago. Fravor, of course, is the US Navy F/A 18 pilot involved in the 2004 sighting of unidentified aerial phenomena. Fravor's buddy Chad Underwood famously described one of these as a 40ft-long "tic-tac" because of its appearance (see this blog, December 2019). 

        It's a treat to see a key witness talking at length in a fully professional studio with good quality audio. But we're no closer to understanding what the tic-tac actually was. Here's a taste of it.

02:08:02 LF: "The basic question of... what do you think was it? If you had to put money on it. Is it advanced human-created technology? Is it alien technology? Is it an unknown physical phenomenon--you know like ball lightning for example .[..].. Is it, like I said, perception, cognition..a kind of hallucination that leads you to misinterpret things you were seeing .....or is it misinperpretation of some known physical phenomenon like an ice cloud or something like that? What do you think it was?

DF: "I don't think it was an ice cloud, because ice clouds don't [climb?] and react to you..er, do I think it was a light? I'd say no because of the aspects.[..]. some type of perception like plasma   I don't think so.

[..] I would say.. no, I mean, it looks... from all my experience      it was a hard object, it was aware that we were there, it reacted exactly like it was  an airplane [that would] do something exactly what I would do. You know, it mirrored me, it wasn't aggressive, it was never offensive...

::

02:11:06 LF: "Do you think it's human... like,  advanced human technology? That's simply top secret .. that was just not... or is it not something not of this world?"

DF: "If you'd asked me in 2004 I'd have said "I don't know". If you ask me now, so we're coming up on 16 years ago, for a technology like that -- you know and let's assume that it didn't have any conventional propulsion system, and I don't think it did ...er... I would like to think that if we had a technology that would advance mankind leaps and bounds from what we would normally do, then it would start coming out . To hide something like that for 16 years...."

Thanks to Chris Lawrence for monitoring

Top secret

Person A: "What I've just told you is Cosmic Top Secrett. Not even the President is fully in the picture."

Person B: "So how come you know it?"

Person A: "People talk to me."

Person B: "What people?"

Person A: "I can't tell you that."

       Any time you hear that dialog, the safest assumption is that Person A is just making stuff up. After all, if he's not willing to provide any way for Person B to check his story, what's to stop him?

        In last night's version of the dialog, on Coast to Coast AM, Person A was Canadian politician, engineer and UFO nutcase Paul Hellyer, and Person B was guest-host Ian Punnet—but essentially the same exchange of meaningless words has, in the past, featured Michael Salla, Kerry Cassidy, Andrew Basiago, Corey Goode, David Icke, Mark Richards, Randy Cramer, Laura Eisenhower,  etc. etc. etc.

        Hellyer's fantasy, expounded last night, was pretty much the standard global conspiracy theory we've all heard many times: The sinister and all-powerful cabal known as the Bilderberg Group is poised to reduce the world's population by about 50% and take over the remaining population, instituting a "New World Order". To Ian Punnet's credit, he took the dialog one step further by asking "What kind of people talk to you?" Hellyer replied, rather uncertainly "er...retired military officers". That's strange since only a very small minority of Bilderberg members are military. As a matter of fact, the annual meetings have not featured any military since 2016, when Chris Hadfield, Canadian Colonel and astronaut, and Phillip Breedlove, Former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, attended.

Exotic energy
        Paul Hellyer is a prolific author, with 13 books to his credit and another due soon. In his book Light at the End of the Tunnel (2010), he claims that exotic energy sources already exist. They have been developed by the U.S. "shadow government" at the massive underground "black operation" installations in Nevada and Arizona using technology borrowed from visitors from other planets. Yet they remain secret for the alleged benefit of the privileged few. In other books he has claimed that the "paperclip" German rocket scientists brought to the USA after WW2 are still entrenched in US society and are part of the sinister cabal (notwithstanding the fact that any surviving paperclip scientist would be roughly 100 years old).

 According to Wikipedia:

« In an interview with RT (formerly Russia Today) in 2014, Hellyer said that at least four species of aliens have been visiting Earth for thousands of years, with most of them coming from other star systems, although there are some living on Venus, Mars and Saturn’s moon. According to him, they "don't think we are good stewards of our planet." »

Wikipedia's citation is here.

        Last night Hellyer added, for good measure, that he is sure there is a US military presence on Mars.

Yep, making stuff up.

No power in ABQ

        Over the weekend, BOTH of Richard Hoagland's blogtalkradio shows were cancelled due to what he claims were power outages. The Big Picture with Georgia Lambert was replaced by a re-run of Kronos Rising with Max Hawthorne, and something-or-other was replaced by Trump's Secret War with Christopher Knowles, about which I commented a month ago.

        I've now lost count of the number of shows that have not gone ahead as advertised, but it's a lot. There are signs that he may be losing part of his fan base because of this. A "Club 19.5" member, Adam Prentice, posted this comment yesterday:

« Yet again. Getting beyond a joke, if Richard can't get the correct equipment in I suggest he hangs up his boots? Do you think I like getting up at 5am UK time on a Sunday morning.»

Another frustrated fan posted:

« I so agree. It’s beyond unprofessional. He could get a generator. »

        Unfortunately, although Power New Mexico has a fine web site giving information about current outages, there doesn't seem to be historical data such that somebody might check whether Hoagland is telling the truth, as opposed to just getting drunk and going to bed when he should be entertaining the members who pay for his service.

Update August 31st

Another replay last night. Hoagland posted:

« The power company continues with its repairs during the hours that most businesses are closed.   »

Update Sept. 5th
        A power outage for maintenance was announced for 11pm July 29th, affecting an area well south of Albuquerque. Nothing posted since then. 

Open letter to Sean David Morton

Dear Federal inmate 1708301081: 

         I'm responding to your two August blog posts, published by your friend Kerry Cassidy (who you swindled out of $116,000) .

        You complain that you were denied an attorney for the sentencing phase of your trial. Yes, the transcript confirms that. However, the following transcript from 4th April 2019 shows WHY you were.

«DEFENDANT: I knowing and unequivocally wish to represent myself.

THE COURT: I'm sure Ms. Cader has described to you the pitfalls of doing that, haven't you, Ms. Cader?

MS. CADER: Yes, Your Honor.

THE COURT: The case has more than the ordinary complexity for a criminal case. If you're not trained in the law, you'll be up against a prosecutor who is. There are Rules of Evidence that have to be observed, and you may find yourself unable to present your defense effectively because of your lack of knowledge and experience in laying a foundation and presenting evidence. Likewise, you may be at a lost [sic] to prevent evidence that shouldn't be admitted by the government. The trial is an exercise that requires experience and skill, and I can't tell you -- at least in my view -- how foolish your decision is. On the other hand, I can't prevent you from even making a foolish decision.

DEFENDANT: I understand all that, sir.

THE COURT: That is still your wish?

DEFENDANT: Yes, it is.»

        I remind you that your plea to be allowed to change your mind came at the very end of the sentencing hearing, when you finally realized what a bloody idiot you had been to decline counsel in the first place. The judge was absolutely correct in denying your late request, since counsel would not, at that point, have been able to do anything to forestall sentencing.

You wrote:

« [I] am convicted of a KLEIN CONSPIRACY, which means that I single handedly shut down the [sic] ALL of the working functions of the IRS and US FED GOV…»

      No, 1708301081, that is not what that means. It simply means that you conspired (with two tax preparers) to defraud the Federal Government.

You wrote:

« I have spent 3 years now in the federal gulag for having a CPA do my taxes, my getting a LEGAL AND LAWFUL RETURN, and then trying to HELP PEOPLE that were being crushed by the banks and the criminal debt system. »

        No,  1708301081, your tax returns for the years 2005-2008 were not LEGAL nor were they LAWFUL. Over a year ago prosecutors Hanna, Aull, Makarewicz and Hughes wrote this:

« In total, defendant submitted returns for the years 2005 through 2008 claiming refunds of $3,930,811 (2005 - $136,077; 2006 - $1,560,634; 2007 - $1,754,594; 2008 - $479,506). The tax returns were all completely false. ... [N]o withholding payments were ever made to the IRS on their behalf. The Forms 1099-OID submitted by defendants were also utter fabrications, and had never been issued to defendants by the listed financial institutions.

Of the five false tax returns submitted by defendants in March/April of 2009, four were caught by the IRS and identified as frivolous, thus resulting in the denial of defendants’ claimed refunds.  However, defendant’s 2008 income tax return slipped through the IRS review process and resulted in a refund.  On April 17, 2009, the IRS direct deposited $480,322.55 into a joint bank account held by defendants with Bank of America.»

        It avails you nothing to claim that the conspiracy was between your two tax preparers alone, and that you were no part of the conspiracy. Those documents carried your signature and you are legally responsible for them. By these actions and subsequent ones you were not trying to HELP PEOPLE. In fact, you were trying — and succeeding — to swindle people who invested with you. Six million dollars, wasn't it?

        Once again I suggest that you STFU, contemplate your own life of fraud, and serve your time.

Regards,

expat