Richard Hoagland's 70th birthday numerology

        It was Richard Hoagland's seventieth birthday last Saturday, and the occasion was marked publicly by yet another two-hour radio interview. Not on Coast to Coast AM, as I'm sure he would have preferred, but on a two-bit internet podcast associated with that madman David Icke. The interviewer was not Icke, but a bloke with a comedy Irish accent by name of Richie Allen.

        We got into numerology immediately, as Allen asked Hoagland how it felt to be 70, and Hoagland replied that, as 70 = 10 x 7, and seven is an important number in hyperdimensional physics (Eh??? Important how??), that must mean that great things are about to happen in the field he's been researching for 35 years. Oh yes, Great Things About To Happen. Where have we heard that before?

        Then it turned into a name-droppathon, as he reviewed his brilliant career. Walter Cronkite, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Isaac Azimov, Margaret Mead and Jules Bergman all got their name-checks. We heard again how he was responsible for naming the first Space Shuttle Enterprise (except he wasn't -- the letter-writing campaign was organized by Betty Trimble) and how he unearthed the Brookings Report and its cautionary message to NASA (except he didn't --  Don Ecker and Lee Clinton did.) Well, I suppose you can't really blame an old man for reminiscing about the far-off days when he actually had a job and was doing something useful.

About the Brookings Report,^{note 1} his wrap-up was as follows:

42:55 "For the next 50 years -- from the time of its inception in 58 -- NASA has steadfastly denied any and all evidence that they've ever detected anything that would even hint at the possibility of living organisms anywhere in the solar system."

        This is to ignore the hundreds of  scientific papers published by NASA scientists on Martian water, organics, and methane. I know it's fashionable to denigrate Wikipedia (often for good reasons, it must be said), but the wiki-article on Life on Mars is pretty good. It includes the sentence "The search for evidence of habitability, taphonomy (related to fossils), and organic carbon on the planet Mars is now a primary NASA objective." Hoagland is simply wrong.

Fantasy-land

"I'm a data-driven guy. I don't make claims -- regardless of what  my acerbic and over-the-top critics say all the time, because it's disinformation. I try to stick to facts -- I try to stick to things which you can independently verify. I try to stick to official sources, and official data. What I don't do is to pay a lot of attention to leaks."

        That was Hoagland, at 1:29:20 into the interview. Oh, how we acerbic critics wish it were true. But at 1:42:00 we got this astounding piece of flim-flam: Absolutely classic Hoagland.

"What's the one thing that would change everything on this planet? If we were to go to the Moon and bring back high technology. Absolutely tons of stuff are preserved underground. Don't look at the cratered surface -- think 200ft, 1000ft, a mile down, two miles down. There's obviously (emph. added) a ton of stuff in perfect preservation, particularly if it's been exposed to a vacuum. You bring that stuff back, you back-engineer it, you create electronics, you create power supplies, you create medicines, you create solutions for all kinds of intractable diseases, like cancer for instance -- that have already been worked on and perfected by the guys who went before us, who are part of the human family. We're not talking about aliens, we're talking about the human race, just a lot older and a lot more incredible than we've been allowed to believe up until just yesterday. And you do all that in the private sector. Not only would Musk make billions and billions and billions more, but he changes the direction of the planet for the better. And that's why Elon Musk must succeed, and all the other private guys must succeed--because they ... are the keys to the kingdom, the keys to the future of the human race, and the keys to the transformation of this planet from the hell it is for most people to the Garden of Eden it could be again if this information was made freely and publicly available."

        Not at all a bad speech, especially as it was totally off-the-cuff. However, it's pure fantasy, of course. I wish I had Hoagland's eloquence, but I'm glad I don't have his self-delusion.

Many happy returns, Richard.

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[1] If any readers don't know what "The Brookings Report" refers to, here's a briefing.

Latitude and longitude

        Biggie congrats to the Chinese Space Agency, that successfully landed Chang'e 3 and deployed the Yutu rover at 44.1143°N, 19.5149°W on the Moon. Here's a permalink to the landing site in the ACT-REACT LRO lunar map.

        Richard Hoagland was torn from his nice warm bed to comment on this event with C2C host John B. Wells last night. He went straight for the least useful aspect of it -- the numerology.

Long, not Lat, Richard dear
        For at least 15 years Hoagland has been telling us (screaming, it seems like) that the 19.5° latitude is extra special. Magic. Ritual. Hyperdimensional. In support of this, he has cited Jupiter's red spot, Olympus Mons, Neptune's dark spot and Mauna Kea. All of which are NOT at 19.5°, but that's perhaps a minor detail. Now suddenly it's the 19.5° longitude that's magic/ritual/hyperdimensional, as Hoagland proclaims that the Chinese know all about the ritual and observed it correctly. Richard Hoagland is confused, you might say. If you were less charitable you might say Hoagland is crazy.

The ETs know, y'know
        It got worse. He went sailing off into a total fantasy about how this was China's message to the extraterrestrial intelligences. Something along the lines of "Look you guys, we're the ones to talk to as representatives of Planet Earth. See how LEET we are -- the Americans are crap, basically"

        I would have collapsed laughing if I hadn't already been collapsed in bed at the next bit. He said the choice of 19.5° longitude would have sealed the deal. The ET high command would be thinking "Hmmm, these Chinese really understand. The magic 19.5, WOW!!" This would require that a) The ETs chose exactly the same point on the Moon to designate as the 0° longitude, b) They count in decimals, and c) They also divide a circle into 360 degrees.

        Richard Hoagland is very confused. My message to the Chinese: WELL DONE. To Coast-to-Coast: GET SOMEONE WHO KNOWS WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT, FOR GOD'S SAKE.

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.