No advanced, technological civilization -- going back (in our own history) to the Sumerians -- have advanced and continued to exist, unless they WROTE THINGS DOWN ... and left those crucial insights to FUTURE generations.
The media (as in "means of keeping such vital records" in existence) may change over millennia ... BUT--
The "messages" should be THE SAME:
Unless you "write things down," and store those writings (pictures of grandma ... Hollywood movies ... Bill Gates' computer graphics Windows animations ..., etc., etc.), the future will TOTALLY COLLAPSE ... in ONE or TWO generations--
Directly back into BARBARISM!
On a place (the Moon!) where there's NO air to (literally) breath ... unless the "breathing machines" are understood ... and MAINTAINED
--
Everyone will simply DIE. In a very short time.
So -- there MUST be fabulous LIBRARIES out there ... on the Moon, on Mars ... elsewhere in the solar system ... ANYWHERE where this amazing "previous civilization" lived and flourished ....
All we have to do is a) FIND them, and b) figure out how to READ them ....
NOT a trivial set of tasks.
But, FINDING them comes first .... :)
Or, getting NASA to 'fess up -- if THEY have already found them
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Lunar Loony Libraries
Yesterday, Richard Hoagland posted the following on his FB page. I don't think any explanatory comment from me is necessary.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Point-by-point critique of Mike Bara's 'The Choice'
The Choice is Mike Bara's bid to cash in on the 2012 Apocalypse mini-panic. According to its cover sell, it's a guide to "using conscious thought and physics of the mind to reshape the world." It won't surprise anyone to know that Bara no more delivers on that promise than Rhonda Byrne delivered on hers in The Secret. That part is poppycock. Well, actually, the whole book is poppycock.
What good can possibly be said about a book that has so many errors and accomplishes so tragically little? Well, let's see — at least it has an index, which is more than can be said for Dark Mission. The copy-edit is not too bad, although since it was done by a computer there are plenty of missing words, homophones and misplaced apostrophes to giggle at. Do book editors ever actually read MS these days? Mike Bara evidently worked commendably hard, delivering 75,000 words to New Page Books on June 21st, having signed only in March. It's very unlikely he got an advance. That's about all the positive I can think of.
Rather than take issue with the bone-headed pseudo-psychology this book represents, I will try and simply point out factual errors in the order in which they appear in the text. I may not be able to resist a little sarcasm. Sorry, it's my nature, just as it's Mike Bara's nature to chastise us all for our left-brained materialism as he steers his 2007 BMW 5 Series toward Las Vegas one more time for a rendezvous with his favorite strippers and porn starlets.
OK, here goes:
1 p.15 After a scattershot dismissal of the whole of conventional physics, Bara writes "What we have been missing ... is that Newton and Einstein aren't the whole picture."
Who does he think has been missing this? Certainly not every physicist in the entire world, all of whom are engaged in a daily struggle to fine-tune their equations and unravel the logic of the Universe. Does he think nine billion dollars were spent building the Large Hadron Collider by people who had missed this point?
2 p.17 "...if radio waves can be influenced by the positions of the planets, then our own thoughts, moods, and dreams can be affected, too."
Oh yeah? Who sez? A human brain and a short wave radio transmitter are not quite the same, Mike.
3 p.31 "...astrology is a perfectly valid and defensible science."
FACT: No it isn't.
4 p.32 "Without the Moon's calming influence, the Earth would spin so fast that the centrifugal force would most likely flatten us all like pancakes."
No, the reverse would happen. CentriFUGAL means "directed away from the center," so we'd become lighter, not heavier.
5 p.34 "Many of the planet's orbits, which ... should be perfectly circular by now, are highly elliptical. In fact, Mars's orbit is so eccentric that its distance from Earth goes from 34 million miles at its closest to 249 million miles at its greatest."
Ahem, excuse me but aren't planetary orbital eccentricities measured in relation to the Sun, not to some other random planet? Yes indeed they are.
FACT: Mars' aphelion is 154 million miles, perihelion 128 million miles, eccentricity 0.09 (cf. Earth 0.017.) Mars' orbit, although more eccentric than that of Earth, is not remarkably so. The figures Bara cites are correct but they do not illustrate the point he says they do.
This is a truly appalling, inexcusable error, coming so early in the book and making it absolutely certain that Mike Bara is not qualified to write on the subject of planetary science. When the New Page editors saw this they should have canceled his contract on the spot. Terrible, terrible. Embarrassing.
6 p.47 "Neptune's Great Dark Spot, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, the erupting volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io, Olympus Mons on Mars... and Earth's own Maunakea volcano ...all were at, or very near, the 19.5° latitude.
FACT: Neptune's dark spots are transient, forming and dissipating in just a few years. The one Mike is presumably citing, observed by Voyager 2, was first observed around 25°S and drifted north before dissipating.
The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is stable, and centered at 22°S.
The volcanoes of Io are far too numerous to be assigned any specific latitude. 12 known volcanoes are cited in the reference.
Olympus Mons is at 18°N.
Mauna Loa is at exactly 19.5°N - Bara almost got one right but he got the wrong Hawaiian volcano.
I'm sure he's going to say "I only wrote that they were very near 19.5°." Yes, Mike, you did, but that has no real meaning. Olympus Mons may be "very near" 19.5° but it's even nearer to 17.8°, or 18.8°, or.... etc. If this is supposed to be a geometric theory you're selling, it's either exact or it's useless.
7 p.57 "The human brain is nothing but a complex electrical signal transmitter."
FACT: Although there are some electrical pathways in the brain, chemical information exchange by neurotransmitters has overwhelmingly more influence. Why else does Mike Bara think the whiskey sours he knocks back in the lounges of Las Vegas, as he eyes the cougars across the bar, make him feel so nice and relaxed?
8 p.58 "...aren't our thoughts, which are also nothing more than electrical energy, actually coming from higher dimensions?"
It's hard to say what meaning to attach to this muddled idea. It's something to do with astrology, I think. The safe answer is "No, they aren't."
9 p.60 "Newton's laws of motion ... only work if the object being measured doesn't rotate."
Poppycock. The planet Earth, to name but one, is rotating, and objects in orbit around it still obey Newton's equation of gravity. If he'd written "Newton's laws of motion only work if the object being measured isn't moving at a substantial fraction of the speed of light," he'd have been right.
There's a terrible tendency for people like Mike Bara, who know just a little physics, to think "Einstein came along and disproved Newton." It's absolutely not true. Einstein came along and ADDED to Newton — EXTENDED Newton into more exotic contexts. A young man sitting under an apple tree can still reckon the falling apple is going to bonk him on the head according to Newton.
10 p.67 "...most mainstream physicists are actually blithering idiots..."
Well, perhaps I shouldn't classify that one as a factual error, exactly. I include it so that readers who don't plan on ever reading this ridiculous book get an insight into Mike Bara's personality flaws.
11 p.72 After expounding on ancient cultures such as the Mayans, Egyptians and Indo-Aryan Hindus and how life, to them, is a continuous repeating cycle, Bara writes "...in the west, time is an arrow. To the ancients, time is a wheel."
Is he saying that we in "the west" don't understand that the Sun rises and sets every day, or that the seasons repeat every 365 days? Is he saying that the ancients didn't understand that a human life is lived from birth to death? This is a sentence that sounds as if it's an aphorism but is actually without useful meaning.
12 p.128 Mike Bara is perenially confused about the International Space Station, or ISS for short. He thinks it's really called Isis, to fit in with Richard Hoagland's utterly indefensible theory that NASA spends its time worshipping Egyptian Gods.
FACT: The international space station is known as "International Space Station." ISS is not the same as Isis. Nobody attempts to pronounce it as though it were an acronym.
FACT: NASA is not interested in Egyptian Gods. When it isn't launching spacecraft, it spends its time trying to get a decent annual budget.
13 p.134 On this page Mike Bara demonstrates his ignorance of the nature of gravity. He writes "On the surface of the Earth, the magnitude of the gravitational field is more than enough to keep me in place, but if I was in orbit around the Earth, ... the influence of gravity would be so slight that I would be essentially weightless and float freely."
And what, pray, does Mike Bara think would be keeping him in orbit?
FACT: The pull of gravity simply follows an inverse square law. Newton, brilliantly, told us that the force exerted by the Earth on Mike Bara's body is equal to G*m1m2/d2 where G is the gravitational constant, m1 the mass of the Earth and m2 the mass of Mike Bara (less than it was a year ago, we understand. Well done Mike.) d is the distance Mike is from the center of the Earth, 6371 kM at the surface, about 6726 kM at ISS orbit. Yes, Newton's equation works perfectly well even though the Earth is rotating (see Bara's other error, p.60.)
Bara goes on to compare gravity with his imagined aether, and to state that, whereas gravity has a limited field of influence, the aether "exists everywhere and connects everything." This is just an extension of his ignorance. To be sure, if Mike Bara were to take his body to Alpha Centauri, he could safely ignore Earth's gravitational influence. But mathematically, no matter how large the factor d becomes, some infinitesimal value for G*m1m2/d2 could be calculated. So it's totally misleading to portray gravity as local only.
14 p.139 Bara describes a Faraday cage as being shielded by lead.
FACT: If it were, it'd be highly ineffective. The whole point of a Faraday cage is that its material is a good electrical conductor. Lead isn't.
15 p.143 "In November 1957 the Soviets had launched Sputnik 1..."
FACT: Sputnik 1 was launched on 4th October 1957.
16 p.144
Chapter 12 is all about the higher-than-expected orbit of USA's first satellite, Explorer 1. Richard Hoagland made a disastrous attempt to work out the mathematics of this on a web page, and this blog explained why he failed. Mike Bara's take on the situation is a little different but no less inaccurate.
He writes that "Explorer 1 ended up in an orbit that was almost 60% higher than it should have been." That is approximately true — the apogee was almost 60% higher than planned — but it's extremely misleading. What really matters is the additional energy the satellite had at orbit insertion, as measured by its instantaneous velocity. And a small change in velocity results in a much larger excursion in apogee (even Hoagland understood this, actually.)
So here's the calculation for Explorer 1
DATA:
Planned orbit 354 x 1,609 kM (220 x 1,000 miles)
Actual orbit 359 x 2,562 kM (223 x 1,592 miles)
Radius of Earth 6,375 kM
Gravitational constant, µ, of Earth 398,660 kM3/s2
CALCULATION:
semi-major axis of planned orbit, Lsmaj, (354+6375+6375+1609)/2 = 7356 kM
distance from center of Earth to orbit point, R, 6375+354 = 6729 kM
planned velocity at orbit injection, Vorb = sqrt(µ(2/R - 1/Lsmaj))
2/R - 1/Lsmaj = 0.0001613
Vorb = sqrt(64.3) = 8.018 kM/sec
semi-major axis of actual orbit, Lsmaj, (359+6375+6375+2562)/2 = 7835 kM
distance from center of Earth to orbit point, R, 6375+359 = 6734 kM
actual velocity at orbit injection, Vorb = sqrt(µ(2/R - 1/Lsmaj))
2/R - 1/Lsmaj = 0.000169
Vorb = sqrt(67.493) = 8.215 kM/sec
So we're talking about a velocity excess of about 3%. Bara writes "Despite various conventional explanations being bandied about over the decades since then, none of them have stood up to scrutiny." The conventional explanations that I'm aware of are a) cumulative overperformance of the fifteen small "Baby Sergeant" solid rockets, b) uncertainty about the pitch angle during burn of the 3rd/4th stages, and c) unusually strong high altitude winds.
I have to ask, in what sense have these not stood up to scrutiny? Who did the scrutiny? Not the notoriously error-prone Richard Hoagland, I hope for their sakes.
(The equation is presented here.)
17 p.146 "Werner Von Braun ... must have realized that if you wanted a spacecraft to follow conventional Newtonian celestial mechanics, Rule One had to be: Don't let it rotate. .... they immediately abandoned solid fuel rockets, spinning upper stages..."
FACT: Spin-stabilization continued to be a very common technique in spacecraft design, and it's still sometimes used to this day (See this, for example.) Solid fuel rockets are an extremely common phenomenon, especially for military applications in which instant readiness is an important factor. Bara is just wrong about this.
18 p.162 "...vibration ... is really just partial rotation..."
No it isn't.
19 p.165 "...every cell and every atom in our bodies is vibrating..."
FACT: Perhaps every atom is. It would be more correct to say that every sub-atomic particle is. But, every cell? I don't think so, Mike. It's amazing how this totally false idea has caught on in the crackpot New Age community. It seems that every two-bit spiritual guidance enthusiast who gets guested on "Coast to Coast AM" talks about getting the vibrations of our bodies tuned, or whatever. Bla-bla-bla. There's no foundation to the idea at all.
20 p.202 *sigh* Here we go again. Hoagland & Bara persist in claiming that the Brookings Report of 1960 directed NASA to withhold evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence lest it spread panic. They've been told, many times, that it just ain't so, but they will keep trotting it out. Here Bara writes that the report "detailed how best to inform the public in the event that NASA discovered extraterrestrial artifacts on the Moon or Mars." What utter poppycock!
FACT: The Brookings Report did not even consider the question. It recommended that the question ought to be considered, that's all. Here's the full quote:
If Mike Bara thinks that's "detailing how best to inform the public," he's got a reading comprehension problem.
21 p.206 Bara writes here that HAARP, although operating in the 3.6 megawatt range, can combine its 180 antennas to yield an energetic output of 5.1 terawatts. I've no idea where he gets the terawatt figure from — it's certainly an error.
22 p.214 "An annular eclipse means that the Moon and Sun are in perfect alignment, but the Sun is not totally blotted out because the Moon is a little too close to the Earth..."
No, Mike. Too far away. tsk, tsk, careless.....
23 p.217 "We have, each of us, enough energy to make this world into anything we wish it to be."
FACT: This is not true.
24 p.222 Bara writes that he'd love to have a Porsche to cruise around Hollywood with. He writes "It would feed my ego, and that is an aspect of my personality."
FACT: That's one thing he got right. And what an appropriate way to end this review. Thanks for reading, if you did.
What good can possibly be said about a book that has so many errors and accomplishes so tragically little? Well, let's see — at least it has an index, which is more than can be said for Dark Mission. The copy-edit is not too bad, although since it was done by a computer there are plenty of missing words, homophones and misplaced apostrophes to giggle at. Do book editors ever actually read MS these days? Mike Bara evidently worked commendably hard, delivering 75,000 words to New Page Books on June 21st, having signed only in March. It's very unlikely he got an advance. That's about all the positive I can think of.
Rather than take issue with the bone-headed pseudo-psychology this book represents, I will try and simply point out factual errors in the order in which they appear in the text. I may not be able to resist a little sarcasm. Sorry, it's my nature, just as it's Mike Bara's nature to chastise us all for our left-brained materialism as he steers his 2007 BMW 5 Series toward Las Vegas one more time for a rendezvous with his favorite strippers and porn starlets.
OK, here goes:
1 p.15 After a scattershot dismissal of the whole of conventional physics, Bara writes "What we have been missing ... is that Newton and Einstein aren't the whole picture."
Who does he think has been missing this? Certainly not every physicist in the entire world, all of whom are engaged in a daily struggle to fine-tune their equations and unravel the logic of the Universe. Does he think nine billion dollars were spent building the Large Hadron Collider by people who had missed this point?
2 p.17 "...if radio waves can be influenced by the positions of the planets, then our own thoughts, moods, and dreams can be affected, too."
Oh yeah? Who sez? A human brain and a short wave radio transmitter are not quite the same, Mike.
3 p.31 "...astrology is a perfectly valid and defensible science."
FACT: No it isn't.
4 p.32 "Without the Moon's calming influence, the Earth would spin so fast that the centrifugal force would most likely flatten us all like pancakes."
No, the reverse would happen. CentriFUGAL means "directed away from the center," so we'd become lighter, not heavier.
5 p.34 "Many of the planet's orbits, which ... should be perfectly circular by now, are highly elliptical. In fact, Mars's orbit is so eccentric that its distance from Earth goes from 34 million miles at its closest to 249 million miles at its greatest."
Ahem, excuse me but aren't planetary orbital eccentricities measured in relation to the Sun, not to some other random planet? Yes indeed they are.
FACT: Mars' aphelion is 154 million miles, perihelion 128 million miles, eccentricity 0.09 (cf. Earth 0.017.) Mars' orbit, although more eccentric than that of Earth, is not remarkably so. The figures Bara cites are correct but they do not illustrate the point he says they do.
This is a truly appalling, inexcusable error, coming so early in the book and making it absolutely certain that Mike Bara is not qualified to write on the subject of planetary science. When the New Page editors saw this they should have canceled his contract on the spot. Terrible, terrible. Embarrassing.
6 p.47 "Neptune's Great Dark Spot, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, the erupting volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io, Olympus Mons on Mars... and Earth's own Maunakea volcano ...all were at, or very near, the 19.5° latitude.
FACT: Neptune's dark spots are transient, forming and dissipating in just a few years. The one Mike is presumably citing, observed by Voyager 2, was first observed around 25°S and drifted north before dissipating.
The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is stable, and centered at 22°S.
The volcanoes of Io are far too numerous to be assigned any specific latitude. 12 known volcanoes are cited in the reference.
Olympus Mons is at 18°N.
Mauna Loa is at exactly 19.5°N - Bara almost got one right but he got the wrong Hawaiian volcano.
I'm sure he's going to say "I only wrote that they were very near 19.5°." Yes, Mike, you did, but that has no real meaning. Olympus Mons may be "very near" 19.5° but it's even nearer to 17.8°, or 18.8°, or.... etc. If this is supposed to be a geometric theory you're selling, it's either exact or it's useless.
7 p.57 "The human brain is nothing but a complex electrical signal transmitter."
FACT: Although there are some electrical pathways in the brain, chemical information exchange by neurotransmitters has overwhelmingly more influence. Why else does Mike Bara think the whiskey sours he knocks back in the lounges of Las Vegas, as he eyes the cougars across the bar, make him feel so nice and relaxed?
8 p.58 "...aren't our thoughts, which are also nothing more than electrical energy, actually coming from higher dimensions?"
It's hard to say what meaning to attach to this muddled idea. It's something to do with astrology, I think. The safe answer is "No, they aren't."
9 p.60 "Newton's laws of motion ... only work if the object being measured doesn't rotate."
Poppycock. The planet Earth, to name but one, is rotating, and objects in orbit around it still obey Newton's equation of gravity. If he'd written "Newton's laws of motion only work if the object being measured isn't moving at a substantial fraction of the speed of light," he'd have been right.
There's a terrible tendency for people like Mike Bara, who know just a little physics, to think "Einstein came along and disproved Newton." It's absolutely not true. Einstein came along and ADDED to Newton — EXTENDED Newton into more exotic contexts. A young man sitting under an apple tree can still reckon the falling apple is going to bonk him on the head according to Newton.
10 p.67 "...most mainstream physicists are actually blithering idiots..."
Well, perhaps I shouldn't classify that one as a factual error, exactly. I include it so that readers who don't plan on ever reading this ridiculous book get an insight into Mike Bara's personality flaws.
11 p.72 After expounding on ancient cultures such as the Mayans, Egyptians and Indo-Aryan Hindus and how life, to them, is a continuous repeating cycle, Bara writes "...in the west, time is an arrow. To the ancients, time is a wheel."
Is he saying that we in "the west" don't understand that the Sun rises and sets every day, or that the seasons repeat every 365 days? Is he saying that the ancients didn't understand that a human life is lived from birth to death? This is a sentence that sounds as if it's an aphorism but is actually without useful meaning.
12 p.128 Mike Bara is perenially confused about the International Space Station, or ISS for short. He thinks it's really called Isis, to fit in with Richard Hoagland's utterly indefensible theory that NASA spends its time worshipping Egyptian Gods.
FACT: The international space station is known as "International Space Station." ISS is not the same as Isis. Nobody attempts to pronounce it as though it were an acronym.
FACT: NASA is not interested in Egyptian Gods. When it isn't launching spacecraft, it spends its time trying to get a decent annual budget.
13 p.134 On this page Mike Bara demonstrates his ignorance of the nature of gravity. He writes "On the surface of the Earth, the magnitude of the gravitational field is more than enough to keep me in place, but if I was in orbit around the Earth, ... the influence of gravity would be so slight that I would be essentially weightless and float freely."
And what, pray, does Mike Bara think would be keeping him in orbit?
FACT: The pull of gravity simply follows an inverse square law. Newton, brilliantly, told us that the force exerted by the Earth on Mike Bara's body is equal to G*m1m2/d2 where G is the gravitational constant, m1 the mass of the Earth and m2 the mass of Mike Bara (less than it was a year ago, we understand. Well done Mike.) d is the distance Mike is from the center of the Earth, 6371 kM at the surface, about 6726 kM at ISS orbit. Yes, Newton's equation works perfectly well even though the Earth is rotating (see Bara's other error, p.60.)
Bara goes on to compare gravity with his imagined aether, and to state that, whereas gravity has a limited field of influence, the aether "exists everywhere and connects everything." This is just an extension of his ignorance. To be sure, if Mike Bara were to take his body to Alpha Centauri, he could safely ignore Earth's gravitational influence. But mathematically, no matter how large the factor d becomes, some infinitesimal value for G*m1m2/d2 could be calculated. So it's totally misleading to portray gravity as local only.
14 p.139 Bara describes a Faraday cage as being shielded by lead.
FACT: If it were, it'd be highly ineffective. The whole point of a Faraday cage is that its material is a good electrical conductor. Lead isn't.
15 p.143 "In November 1957 the Soviets had launched Sputnik 1..."
FACT: Sputnik 1 was launched on 4th October 1957.
16 p.144
Chapter 12 is all about the higher-than-expected orbit of USA's first satellite, Explorer 1. Richard Hoagland made a disastrous attempt to work out the mathematics of this on a web page, and this blog explained why he failed. Mike Bara's take on the situation is a little different but no less inaccurate.
He writes that "Explorer 1 ended up in an orbit that was almost 60% higher than it should have been." That is approximately true — the apogee was almost 60% higher than planned — but it's extremely misleading. What really matters is the additional energy the satellite had at orbit insertion, as measured by its instantaneous velocity. And a small change in velocity results in a much larger excursion in apogee (even Hoagland understood this, actually.)
So here's the calculation for Explorer 1
DATA:
Planned orbit 354 x 1,609 kM (220 x 1,000 miles)
Actual orbit 359 x 2,562 kM (223 x 1,592 miles)
Radius of Earth 6,375 kM
Gravitational constant, µ, of Earth 398,660 kM3/s2
CALCULATION:
semi-major axis of planned orbit, Lsmaj, (354+6375+6375+1609)/2 = 7356 kM
distance from center of Earth to orbit point, R, 6375+354 = 6729 kM
planned velocity at orbit injection, Vorb = sqrt(µ(2/R - 1/Lsmaj))
2/R - 1/Lsmaj = 0.0001613
Vorb = sqrt(64.3) = 8.018 kM/sec
semi-major axis of actual orbit, Lsmaj, (359+6375+6375+2562)/2 = 7835 kM
distance from center of Earth to orbit point, R, 6375+359 = 6734 kM
actual velocity at orbit injection, Vorb = sqrt(µ(2/R - 1/Lsmaj))
2/R - 1/Lsmaj = 0.000169
Vorb = sqrt(67.493) = 8.215 kM/sec
So we're talking about a velocity excess of about 3%. Bara writes "Despite various conventional explanations being bandied about over the decades since then, none of them have stood up to scrutiny." The conventional explanations that I'm aware of are a) cumulative overperformance of the fifteen small "Baby Sergeant" solid rockets, b) uncertainty about the pitch angle during burn of the 3rd/4th stages, and c) unusually strong high altitude winds.
I have to ask, in what sense have these not stood up to scrutiny? Who did the scrutiny? Not the notoriously error-prone Richard Hoagland, I hope for their sakes.
(The equation is presented here.)
17 p.146 "Werner Von Braun ... must have realized that if you wanted a spacecraft to follow conventional Newtonian celestial mechanics, Rule One had to be: Don't let it rotate. .... they immediately abandoned solid fuel rockets, spinning upper stages..."
FACT: Spin-stabilization continued to be a very common technique in spacecraft design, and it's still sometimes used to this day (See this, for example.) Solid fuel rockets are an extremely common phenomenon, especially for military applications in which instant readiness is an important factor. Bara is just wrong about this.
18 p.162 "...vibration ... is really just partial rotation..."
No it isn't.
19 p.165 "...every cell and every atom in our bodies is vibrating..."
FACT: Perhaps every atom is. It would be more correct to say that every sub-atomic particle is. But, every cell? I don't think so, Mike. It's amazing how this totally false idea has caught on in the crackpot New Age community. It seems that every two-bit spiritual guidance enthusiast who gets guested on "Coast to Coast AM" talks about getting the vibrations of our bodies tuned, or whatever. Bla-bla-bla. There's no foundation to the idea at all.
20 p.202 *sigh* Here we go again. Hoagland & Bara persist in claiming that the Brookings Report of 1960 directed NASA to withhold evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence lest it spread panic. They've been told, many times, that it just ain't so, but they will keep trotting it out. Here Bara writes that the report "detailed how best to inform the public in the event that NASA discovered extraterrestrial artifacts on the Moon or Mars." What utter poppycock!
FACT: The Brookings Report did not even consider the question. It recommended that the question ought to be considered, that's all. Here's the full quote:
"...two research areas can be recommended -- Continuing studies to determine [the public's] emotional and intellectual understanding and attitudes -- and successive alterations of them if any -- regarding the possibility and consequences of discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life. Historical and empirical studies of the behavior of peoples and their leaders when confronted with dramatic and unfamiliar events or social pressures. Such studies might help to provide programs for meeting and adjusting to the implications of such a discovery. Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include: how might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?"
If Mike Bara thinks that's "detailing how best to inform the public," he's got a reading comprehension problem.
21 p.206 Bara writes here that HAARP, although operating in the 3.6 megawatt range, can combine its 180 antennas to yield an energetic output of 5.1 terawatts. I've no idea where he gets the terawatt figure from — it's certainly an error.
22 p.214 "An annular eclipse means that the Moon and Sun are in perfect alignment, but the Sun is not totally blotted out because the Moon is a little too close to the Earth..."
No, Mike. Too far away. tsk, tsk, careless.....
23 p.217 "We have, each of us, enough energy to make this world into anything we wish it to be."
FACT: This is not true.
24 p.222 Bara writes that he'd love to have a Porsche to cruise around Hollywood with. He writes "It would feed my ego, and that is an aspect of my personality."
FACT: That's one thing he got right. And what an appropriate way to end this review. Thanks for reading, if you did.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Review of RCH/C2C 21st Sept
Richard Hoagland was vouchsafed about ten minutes in Hour 1 to comment on the re-accretion theory of Phobos that was expounded in Rome yesterday. He also, naturally, seized the occasion to promote the upcoming Transformation Conference, hoping to snag a few more punters at $500 a head.
Skipping the question of what happened to the dramatic announcement he'd predicted just two weeks ago, he contented himself by assuring us that "They're going to be driven inexorably toward the fact that Phobos is artificial, because their theory JUST WON'T WORK."
And why does he say re-accretion won't work? Because, he claimed, Phobos is already threatening to tear itself apart due to tidal forces. "You can't have accretion in a body that's dissociating," he stated (perhaps not exactly verbatim, but close.) In passing, we might raise an eyebrow since his use of the term dissociating blows his whole theory that this is a constructed body — dissociation essentially describes what happens to a loose clump of rocks and debris.
Well, as usual, due to his total lack of education in physics and astronomy, Hoagland has got it wrong. Tidal forces are a real phenomenon, to be sure. It's possible for them to be strong enough to cause the break-up of a moon, yes indeed. But NOT Phobos.
FACT: Tidal force exerted on a moon depends on the radius and density of both the moon and its parent planet, and most critically on the mean distance from the planet of the moon's orbit. A gentleman called Edouard Roche, a French astronomer, did the difficult calculations for us back in 1848, and came up with a critical orbit radius INSIDE WHICH a moon of a given size and mass could not survive. This radius is known as the Roche limit. The classic example of the Roche limit in action is Saturn: inside about 133,000 kM, you get rings — beyond it, moons can and do accrete.
FACT: Phobos's orbit is at 172% of its Roche limit.
On this very radio show, back in 2006, Hoagland said in response to new Mars Express images of the so-called Face on Mars, "Science is not about what you can see, it's about what you can measure." Time for Hoagland to stop hand-waving do some measuring, methinks.
Update, 10/13/10:
Yesterday this appeared on Hoagland's FB page:
No comment needed.
Skipping the question of what happened to the dramatic announcement he'd predicted just two weeks ago, he contented himself by assuring us that "They're going to be driven inexorably toward the fact that Phobos is artificial, because their theory JUST WON'T WORK."
And why does he say re-accretion won't work? Because, he claimed, Phobos is already threatening to tear itself apart due to tidal forces. "You can't have accretion in a body that's dissociating," he stated (perhaps not exactly verbatim, but close.) In passing, we might raise an eyebrow since his use of the term dissociating blows his whole theory that this is a constructed body — dissociation essentially describes what happens to a loose clump of rocks and debris.
Well, as usual, due to his total lack of education in physics and astronomy, Hoagland has got it wrong. Tidal forces are a real phenomenon, to be sure. It's possible for them to be strong enough to cause the break-up of a moon, yes indeed. But NOT Phobos.
FACT: Tidal force exerted on a moon depends on the radius and density of both the moon and its parent planet, and most critically on the mean distance from the planet of the moon's orbit. A gentleman called Edouard Roche, a French astronomer, did the difficult calculations for us back in 1848, and came up with a critical orbit radius INSIDE WHICH a moon of a given size and mass could not survive. This radius is known as the Roche limit. The classic example of the Roche limit in action is Saturn: inside about 133,000 kM, you get rings — beyond it, moons can and do accrete.
FACT: Phobos's orbit is at 172% of its Roche limit.
On this very radio show, back in 2006, Hoagland said in response to new Mars Express images of the so-called Face on Mars, "Science is not about what you can see, it's about what you can measure." Time for Hoagland to stop hand-waving do some measuring, methinks.
Update, 10/13/10:
Yesterday this appeared on Hoagland's FB page:
My "ESA guy" got scared and refused to release/disclose what he'd promised several months ago.
No comment needed.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
End of the line
End of the line for the dramatic revelations about Phobos at the EPSC conference.
End of the line for Deepwater Horizon.
Richard Hoagland was comprehensively wrong.
What's next? Oh, that's right -- the cities in the rings of Saturn. How fun.
End of the line for Deepwater Horizon.
Richard Hoagland was comprehensively wrong.
What's next? Oh, that's right -- the cities in the rings of Saturn. How fun.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
EXACTLY WHAT WE SAID!!!!!!!!
Hoagland & Bara have a great technique for making themselves appear to be much more on-the-ball than they really are. They just wait for any offbeat news item with a space connection, and claim that it's EXACTLY WHAT WE PREDICTED. Apparently nobody but me reacts by asking "When was this predicted? Was the prediction written down? Can I see?"
A few historical examples:
Yesterday a stunning example of this convenient recall adjustment phenomenon (let's call it CRAP) turned up in Hoagland's FB page. Somebody posted a recent space.com article on a new NASA initiative abbreviated as HEFT (Human Exploration Framework Team.) The initiative proposed amendments to the official Presidential plan for the future US space program, specifically:
Using all the powers of CRAP, Hoagland posted as follows:
That's pretty funny. Hilarious, in fact. The major discussion of the future of NASA on "Coast to Coast AM" took place on May 26th, and that has to be the one he's referring to. What most people remember about that is Richard Hoagland literally shouting down Robert Zubrin over the question of Phobos' artificiality. But in fact, the roundtable also included Buzz Aldrin and Howard Bloom. Here's the summary of that part of the discussion:
I heard that show, and the summary is accurate enough. The main point was that Hoagland agreed with Aldrin about the Phobos-then-Mars strategy. In fact, he predicted that President Obama would change his mind and make a Kennedy-style national commitment to that goal. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING was said about splitting the functions of Orion, and if anybody urged that NASA start right away on the heavy-lift vehicle, I missed it.
On Facebook, there was immediate strong verification of the effectiveness of CRAP. Chris Burch posted:
Really quite amazing, isn't it? Just like those mile-high glass domes on the Moon, if you insist they're there in an authoritative manner, some people will see them.
A few historical examples:
As I noted in the previous post, Mike Bara wrote that the star Regulus was 19.5° below the horizon as Buzz Aldrin took communion on the Moon, "exactly where the model would predict it to be" when in fact that's NOT what the "model" predicts.
On 4th Sept Hoagland wrote “A VARYING gravitational “constant” is CENTRAL to our Hyperdimensional/Torsion Field Model”
On 14th Oct 2008 Bara wrote that the hexagonal storms on Saturn were “an inherent and specific prediction of the Hoagland\Torun Hyperdimensional physics model.”
Neither Hoagland nor Bara, nor Hoagland's metaphorical bum-boy Max Kiejzik have ever been able to come up with a citation to confirm those last two, despite repeated (and polite) requests.
Yesterday a stunning example of this convenient recall adjustment phenomenon (let's call it CRAP) turned up in Hoagland's FB page. Somebody posted a recent space.com article on a new NASA initiative abbreviated as HEFT (Human Exploration Framework Team.) The initiative proposed amendments to the official Presidential plan for the future US space program, specifically:
* Start right now on developing a heavy lift rocket rather than waiting until 2015
* Retain the Orion design for future deep space expeditions
* Develop a separate version of the Orion capsule for ISS emergency rescue
Using all the powers of CRAP, Hoagland posted as follows:
It's coming together EXACTLY as we discussed, MANY months ago on "Coast." :)
That's pretty funny. Hilarious, in fact. The major discussion of the future of NASA on "Coast to Coast AM" took place on May 26th, and that has to be the one he's referring to. What most people remember about that is Richard Hoagland literally shouting down Robert Zubrin over the question of Phobos' artificiality. But in fact, the roundtable also included Buzz Aldrin and Howard Bloom. Here's the summary of that part of the discussion:
Bloom said he supports private efforts such as Elon Musk's Space X rocket, as well as Aldrin's Unified Space Vision. Joining him in the first half of the show, Apollo astronaut and rocket scientist Buzz Aldrin outlined a plan in which NASA could land on the Martian moon Phobos in 2022 and set up a base, with eventual landings on Mars itself by 2031. Aldrin also said that he supports an international effort to develop the moon with partners such as China and India.
In the second half of the program, founder of the Mars Society, Robert Zubrin and C2C Science Advisor Richard C. Hoagland discussed and sometimes debated space issues. Zubrin stated he was not in favor of the Obama space plan, and that instead "our goal should be to send humans to Mars by the end of the decade." Hoagland believes Obama has taken bad advice (from John Holdren in particular) in formulating NASA's mission plan.
I heard that show, and the summary is accurate enough. The main point was that Hoagland agreed with Aldrin about the Phobos-then-Mars strategy. In fact, he predicted that President Obama would change his mind and make a Kennedy-style national commitment to that goal. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING was said about splitting the functions of Orion, and if anybody urged that NASA start right away on the heavy-lift vehicle, I missed it.
On Facebook, there was immediate strong verification of the effectiveness of CRAP. Chris Burch posted:
He's right you know. He did predict this would go down.It's kind of irritating when someone is right all the time. I guess thats why Mr. Hoagland is a target for certain individuals. They just can't stand it. Hey. Give the man his due.
Really quite amazing, isn't it? Just like those mile-high glass domes on the Moon, if you insist they're there in an authoritative manner, some people will see them.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Mike Bara's very personal interpretation of the truth
Reading that error-filled book "Dark Mission," it isn't always easy to tell which author is responsible for the page you're on. In general, Hoagland is the one who overemphasizes EVERYTHING, and Mike Bara is the one who seems full of resentment. But perhaps they fool us at times.
There's no doubt, however, about the authorship of the material on pp. 11-14 in the intro to the 2nd edn. It's Bara, doing what he fancifully calls "additional research on key points" (presumably he didn't want to call it "correcting our cock-ups".) In this case the "key point" is the exact moment when Buzz Aldrin performed the rudimentary holy communion ceremony on the Moon he describes in his book Men From Earth. The moment is significant, Bara tells us, because it needs to fit their theory that NASA goes to ridiculous lengths to ensure that major mission events occur only when certain astrological conditions are satisfied: any of several stars are at any of five elevations.
Bara's first idea was that the ceremony occurred 33 minutes after the lunar landing, when the star Sirius was at an elevation of 19.5° as seen from the landing site. Now he tells us that that's most likely wrong. Better information suggests that the ceremony was later, at MET 105:25:38, after Aldrin made a short speech asking everyone to pause a moment and "give thanks in his or her own way." Hastily summoning the Red Shift software that Hoagland & Bara use to support the tottering towers of their theory, Bara declares triumphantly that all is OK. Even if Sirius was no longer at the magic elevation of 19.5°, Regulus (Alpha Leonis) was at MINUS 19.5°. Totally invisible, of course, but nevertheless satisfying the theory. Bara writes that this is exactly as their "model" would predict.
The trouble is, that's NOT what the model predicts. The model predicts that EITHER Regulus OR Sirius, OR Alnitak, OR Alnilam, OR Mintaka will be at an elevation of EITHER -33°, OR -19.5°, OR 0°, OR 19.5°, OR 33°. Bara himself reiterates this on the very next page, and in actual fact, Hoagland has sometimes cheated and used other celestial objects in support of the theory.
Anybody with training in science or even logic would dismiss this instantly as worthless evidence in support of a nutty idea. Perhaps the diehard fans of the comedy duo of H&B would say "we know what he means," and move on to the next bit of flim-flam. But most of us, I think, recognize this for what it is. A self-serving lie.
Update:
On The Final Frontier, James Concannon points out that Hoagland & Bara have been able to find "ritual" star alignments for only one of the six Apollo landings, Apollo 12. That really is fatal to their crackpot theory, because Hoagland traces what he calls NASA's obsession with Egyptian mythology to the NASA geologist Farouk El-Baz, who is Egyptian by birth. What was Dr. El-Baz's primary contribution to Apollo? Why, landing site selection, of course. So this so-called evil genius, architect of NASA's "fanatical, relentless"[1] drive to pay homage to the Egyptian Gods, was only able to achieve ONE hit out of six landings?
[1] Quote from the caption to Fig. 5-10, "Dark Mission"
There's no doubt, however, about the authorship of the material on pp. 11-14 in the intro to the 2nd edn. It's Bara, doing what he fancifully calls "additional research on key points" (presumably he didn't want to call it "correcting our cock-ups".) In this case the "key point" is the exact moment when Buzz Aldrin performed the rudimentary holy communion ceremony on the Moon he describes in his book Men From Earth. The moment is significant, Bara tells us, because it needs to fit their theory that NASA goes to ridiculous lengths to ensure that major mission events occur only when certain astrological conditions are satisfied: any of several stars are at any of five elevations.
Bara's first idea was that the ceremony occurred 33 minutes after the lunar landing, when the star Sirius was at an elevation of 19.5° as seen from the landing site. Now he tells us that that's most likely wrong. Better information suggests that the ceremony was later, at MET 105:25:38, after Aldrin made a short speech asking everyone to pause a moment and "give thanks in his or her own way." Hastily summoning the Red Shift software that Hoagland & Bara use to support the tottering towers of their theory, Bara declares triumphantly that all is OK. Even if Sirius was no longer at the magic elevation of 19.5°, Regulus (Alpha Leonis) was at MINUS 19.5°. Totally invisible, of course, but nevertheless satisfying the theory. Bara writes that this is exactly as their "model" would predict.
The trouble is, that's NOT what the model predicts. The model predicts that EITHER Regulus OR Sirius, OR Alnitak, OR Alnilam, OR Mintaka will be at an elevation of EITHER -33°, OR -19.5°, OR 0°, OR 19.5°, OR 33°. Bara himself reiterates this on the very next page, and in actual fact, Hoagland has sometimes cheated and used other celestial objects in support of the theory.
Anybody with training in science or even logic would dismiss this instantly as worthless evidence in support of a nutty idea. Perhaps the diehard fans of the comedy duo of H&B would say "we know what he means," and move on to the next bit of flim-flam. But most of us, I think, recognize this for what it is. A self-serving lie.
Update:
On The Final Frontier, James Concannon points out that Hoagland & Bara have been able to find "ritual" star alignments for only one of the six Apollo landings, Apollo 12. That really is fatal to their crackpot theory, because Hoagland traces what he calls NASA's obsession with Egyptian mythology to the NASA geologist Farouk El-Baz, who is Egyptian by birth. What was Dr. El-Baz's primary contribution to Apollo? Why, landing site selection, of course. So this so-called evil genius, architect of NASA's "fanatical, relentless"[1] drive to pay homage to the Egyptian Gods, was only able to achieve ONE hit out of six landings?
[1] Quote from the caption to Fig. 5-10, "Dark Mission"
Sunday, September 5, 2010
The fun is about to begin. Hmmm, yes.
Ever since the Mars Express close fly-bys of Phobos, in March this year, Richard Hoagland has been promising that The European Space Agency itself would soon vindicate his thoroughly unscientific idea that the little moon of Mars is artificial. In a radio show he even went so far as to claim "they're dying to say it -- they're just waiting to be asked."
Yesterday, on his FB page, he declared that the fun is about to begin. He means that the European Planetary Science Congress 2010 opens in two weeks, in Rome, and his idea of "fun" is the announcement that Phobos is artificial. Others may think that the "fun" will be in ridiculing Hoagland when that announcement is NOT made.
Phobos will be discussed in session SB5 on Small Bodies and Planetary Moons, 20-22 Sept. The abstracts have been published and -- no surprise to anyone with any science training -- there's no sign of any announcement that Phobos is a spaceship.
Later in Hoagland's FB text yesterday is a clue as to how he's planning to handle things when the conference is over.
When he's wrong, as he almost always is, his standard approach is to say nothing at all and move on to the next piece of utter nonsense. But in this case, look for Hoagland to say that HIS SOURCES have revealed to him that PRIVATELY the announcement WAS made in Rome.
Which, of course, would still be totally contrary to what he's been claiming ever since March. No doubt his disciples will not notice, and will continue to hail him as a hero and the only man who truly knows what's going on.
Yesterday, on his FB page, he declared that the fun is about to begin. He means that the European Planetary Science Congress 2010 opens in two weeks, in Rome, and his idea of "fun" is the announcement that Phobos is artificial. Others may think that the "fun" will be in ridiculing Hoagland when that announcement is NOT made.
Phobos will be discussed in session SB5 on Small Bodies and Planetary Moons, 20-22 Sept. The abstracts have been published and -- no surprise to anyone with any science training -- there's no sign of any announcement that Phobos is a spaceship.
Later in Hoagland's FB text yesterday is a clue as to how he's planning to handle things when the conference is over.
One word--
"Plastics" .... :)
No, I meant "Phobos."
Biggest bang for the buck!
NO question ... given what is WAITING there ....
Which, my lastest "intel" says the Europeans are going to unveil -- if not a GREAT deal more -- shortly .... :)
Stay tuned.
The fun is about to begin! :)
We've been double-crossed before ....
We just have to be patient; the "inside game" is rapidly coming to some kind of "climax."
What may come out in PUBLIC, however, is still not totally locked in
Positioning ... positioning ... positioning ....
When he's wrong, as he almost always is, his standard approach is to say nothing at all and move on to the next piece of utter nonsense. But in this case, look for Hoagland to say that HIS SOURCES have revealed to him that PRIVATELY the announcement WAS made in Rome.
Which, of course, would still be totally contrary to what he's been claiming ever since March. No doubt his disciples will not notice, and will continue to hail him as a hero and the only man who truly knows what's going on.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Hoagland's high-tech hustle
It's been noticeable that, in his many appearances on the Coast to Coast AM overnight radio show, Richard Hoagland the pseudo-scientist has not recently been begging for cash as he once used to. I surmise that even the producers of that show, as unprincipled and as contemptuous of their audience as they are, found it a bit embarrassing for their "science adviser" to be ending each segment with "Here's the PO Box number for donations to enable us to continue THIS IMPORTANT RESEARCH." Come to think of it, the time when the begging stopped more or less coincided with the time they started calling him science adviser. Could there be a quid pro quo by which they agreed to pay him a consultancy fee if he'd just please stop with the begging? I merely ask...
Yesterday on his FB page, in answer to a question from somebody posing as John Smith, Hoagland gave us all some pseudo-information about HAARP — that Alaskan ionosphere research facility jointly run by the US Navy, USAF and Univ. Alaska. Here's Hoagland's complete text:
Well now. Oh dear. I'm no expert in ionospheric excitations (or excitations of other kinds, these days — must be getting old) but I do know the following:
% HAARP's power is 3.6 MW
% There is no such thing as a "torsion field wave." Hoagland refers to torsion fields regularly, and he hammers home the point that they are caused by "rotation, rotation, rotation." He's wrong about that, too.
% The dire effects he cites, including incapacitation of nuclear weapons and influence over mass consciousness, are imaginary with the exception of influence over weather. Even that is highly localized and at least one order of magnitude less than the effects of solar storms that occur routinely without any conspiratorial effort on the part of DARPA.
% I'm no more an expert in psychiatry than ionospherology, but surely, isn't "We are AT WAR -- with ''someone''" a plain symptom of paranoia?
Well, I wrote that I quoted RCH's complete text. I lied. The kicker was an afterthought below:
That was followed by a hyperlink to enable his disciples to register for this conference. I simply can't bear to reproduce it here — the mere thought induces waves of nausea. Why? The registration fee is a stonking FOUR HUNDRED AND NINETY FIVE UNITED STATES DOLLARS.
So the begging hasn't really stopped, just gotten more brazen.
My remaining question is: WHAT THE FUCK has this junk science got to do with SETI?
Yesterday on his FB page, in answer to a question from somebody posing as John Smith, Hoagland gave us all some pseudo-information about HAARP — that Alaskan ionosphere research facility jointly run by the US Navy, USAF and Univ. Alaska. Here's Hoagland's complete text:
HAARP uses a few BEAMED kilowatts of radio energy, from a phased antenna array ... which enormously enhances its "effective radiated power" to manipulate the Earth's ionosphere -- an ionized "plasma."
Plasmas, when excited (by a radio... mechanisms or other means ...) generate TORSION Field waves ....
Which can a) manipulate weather, b) generate earthquakes, c) render nuclear weapons inert, d) influence mass consciousness, e) affect biological systems, etc. etc. ....
In other words, HAARP -- as a "trigger technology" -- is a LOT more than "merely a means to probe the physics of the Earth's upper atmosphere."
Hope this is helpful.
Your "suspicions" re Haiti (and a lot of OTHER "anomalous events" occuring recently ...) are absolutely correct!
As I've said many times earlier, we are AT WAR ... with "someone."
And, the weapons are NOT "roadside mines and suicide bombs"; those are merely the DISTRACTIONS from a far more serious conflict, currently going on in space ... and (selectively) here on Earth ....
And Haiti was only ONE of many, many other examples now occurring.
Well now. Oh dear. I'm no expert in ionospheric excitations (or excitations of other kinds, these days — must be getting old) but I do know the following:
% HAARP's power is 3.6 MW
% There is no such thing as a "torsion field wave." Hoagland refers to torsion fields regularly, and he hammers home the point that they are caused by "rotation, rotation, rotation." He's wrong about that, too.
% The dire effects he cites, including incapacitation of nuclear weapons and influence over mass consciousness, are imaginary with the exception of influence over weather. Even that is highly localized and at least one order of magnitude less than the effects of solar storms that occur routinely without any conspiratorial effort on the part of DARPA.
% I'm no more an expert in psychiatry than ionospherology, but surely, isn't "We are AT WAR -- with ''someone''" a plain symptom of paranoia?
Well, I wrote that I quoted RCH's complete text. I lied. The kicker was an afterthought below:
Details will be presented in Arizona, at the Greer "Transformation" Conference.
That was followed by a hyperlink to enable his disciples to register for this conference. I simply can't bear to reproduce it here — the mere thought induces waves of nausea. Why? The registration fee is a stonking FOUR HUNDRED AND NINETY FIVE UNITED STATES DOLLARS.
So the begging hasn't really stopped, just gotten more brazen.
My remaining question is: WHAT THE FUCK has this junk science got to do with SETI?
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