Even Hoagland's own procrastination, it seems, is a "stunning confirmation...."

Today's comedy routine.

        Three days ago Richard Hoagland called an end to his two-week absence from his Facebook page (during which the Branch Hoaglandians had flagrant separation anxiety) in order to plug the "Cruise into 2012" which he's participating in as a guest speaker. He's been engaged to talk nonsense on a ship for eight straight hours.

        OK, that last part was an exaggeration — but perhaps not much. He promised that This multi-hour, multi-media Enterprise Mission Presentation will address the stunning, rapidly unfolding "consc-iousness changes" now demonstrably occurring worldwide. Whatever that means. And no, I'm damned if I'll put in a link to the cruise details. He can do his own plugging.

        Anyway, yesterday a few commenters expressed some impatience that they'd be forced to wait until next Spring and/or fork out $1200 in order to receive the next dose of wisdom from The Great Hoagland-Master. They wondered if a little preview might be in order.

Hoagland replied:

"Now" is not the time to present this developing information; it will not be "ready for Prime Time" until next Spring ....

"Make no wine before its time." :)

...and then, you could almost hear his brain clicking into auto-mode: HOW TO END THIS IN A WAY THAT AFFIRMS HYPERDIMENSIONAL PHYSICS???

...then it was "Ah, got it!"

"Timing" is a KEY component of Hyperdimensional Physics -- because of the constantly changing astronomical alignments.

        It remains to be seen whether this will satisfy the throngs of disciples. It sounds suspiciously like another nod to astrology to me.

Hoagland says he can't post to his own website

(I originally posted this as a comment but it's worth a separate thread)

       Richard Hoagland has written more than once on his FB page that he's unable to post anything to his web site because of a hackathon that's been denying him access since last April.

       He repeated that claim last night on Coast to Coast AM, adding that even the talented network admin Keith Rowland had been unable to penetrate the diabolical conspiracy.

       James Concannon is in touch with Keith, and checked out the story. Here's Keith's reply:

Keith Rowland November 17 at 10:48am
The site has been operational and available for update all along. I know RCH has had problems on his own computer that may have limited his own access to the site. But the website is and has been functional all this time.

       Keith Rowland has a good rep among long-time netizens and it would certainly be a surprise if he was unable to debug a simple web site for seven months. Once again, Hoagland is trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

This just in: Mike Bara explains he's being stalked

       Apparently, posing a challenge to a very inaccurate statement about planetary astronomy counts as stalking in Bara's mind.

Bara reflects on his 3-hour radio show.

       Just in case Mike ever reads this, or in case a reader can get a message to him, here's a science note:

       The sidereal period of a planet (also known as the "true" period) is a function of the semi-major axis of its orbit only. The eccentricity of the orbit does not feature in the equation¹. In the special case of an orbit with eccentricity zero — perfectly circular, in other words — semi-major axis is simply another way of saying radius.

       It follows that, if the orbits of Earth and Mars were zero-eccentric, the period of Earth would still be one year exactly and that of Mars 1.88 years. There is, therefore, no possibility that they could remain at the same distance from each other over time, as Mike claimed today.

[1] The equation is T = √r³ where T = period in Earth-years, r = semi-major axis in astronomical units.

Update:
Peter Uwira of the Final Frontier FB page has very expertly compiled the Coast-to-Coast confrontation. Thanks a bunch, Peter. Very well done.

Further update: 
 Mike has now left my comment on his blog for about a week without deleting it. I may be entirely misinterpreting that, but it's possible that this is as close as we're ever going to see to Mike Bara conceding a point.

====================================================

       On another topic, I'm genuinely interested in the proposed mass consciousness experiment in conjunction with the Princeton GCP. I hope they go ahead with it.

The sheer sales power of Coast to Coast AM

       Last night, at 8pm EST, Mike Bara's book The Choice was ranked 90,418 in overall popularity at Amazon. Overnight, Mike did three hours on C2C and today (8:30am) it's at 1,049.

       Mike can do all the pseud-psych radio in the world, but this is where the gold is. This is why authors willingly give up a night's sleep.

       As to what Mike actually said — it seemed like gobbledegook to me (and to at least one commenter on this blog.) I think he mentioned that hyperdimensional physics is the direct path to God. That might explain why he and his buddy Richard Hoagland have such a hard time explaining it.

Comet Hartley 2: Oh so predictable

        The EPOXI flyby of Comet Hartley 2 yesterday was another brilliant success for JPL, and the images were extraordinary. The body of the comet looks like a two-kM-long jet-propelled peanut.

        In less than 24 hours, Richard Hoagland had figured out a highly unoriginal way of using this scientific triumph to draw attention to himself and his crackpot ideas. OF COURSE! CLAIM IT'S AN ALIEN SPACESHIP!!! He posted this:

Just look at the regular, tiered GEOMETRY of the lower end -- like a cutaway, 3-D view of a large skyscraper ... with many exposed "floors" ... after a massive internal explosion.

It's those subtle, interior SYMMETRIES that "give the game away."

And then, OF COURSE, NASA is hiding the true story.

[S]tudies (at MIT, I believe) some years ago, with cats, demonstrated that the human visual/brain mechanisms (cats are CLOSELY related to humans, genetically) ONLY see such 3-D regular geometry--

At CERTAIN ANGLES ....

NASA releases its images so those ANGLES are specifically NOT "triggered."

        Oh yes, sure, JPL scientists were up all night figuring out how they could release the images in a deceptive way. Never mind that Hoagland has, as usual, got the science totally wrong. The cat vision study was at UC Berkeley, and showed that the retina-brain interface acted far more rapidly for horizontal motion than for vertical motion. Nothing to do with seeing angles in static objects, and nobody said that the same applies to humans in any case.

        I wonder if the NASA/JPL scientists who work so hard and so effectively to bring us news from the Cosmos ever hear about Hoagland's ravings and unfounded accusations? I assume not, but you never know.

        Meanwhile, back on the FB page, even some of the gullible disciples apparently find this tale hard to swallow. Several of them have expressed doubt.

        James Concannon posted this, and of course Hoagland deleted it immediately:

To all the Branch Hoaglandians and True Disciples:

Now look, you guys... your NASA-hating and science-ignorant guru has spent most of the summer assuring you not only that Phobos is an alien spaceship but that ESA scientists will DEFINITELY confirm that at the EPSC conference in October.

IT NEVER HAPPENED.

Your glorious leader wrote, in mid-July, that the attempt to cap the Macondo oil well was certain to end in failure and make the oil gusher worse.

HE WAS DEAD WRONG.

Now he comes at you with this cock-and-bull story about Hartley being an alien spaceship, and some of you are willing to believe him.

WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOUR JUDGMENT??????

[Reprinted by permission]

Useful links:
EPOXI/Hartley quick image gallery
Full resolution images
Morph animation by Daniel Machacek
EPOXI fact sheet (pdf)

Lunar Loony Libraries

Yesterday, Richard Hoagland posted the following on his FB page. I don't think any explanatory comment from me is necessary.

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

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, L_smaj, (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, V_orb = sqrt(µ(2/R - 1/L_smaj))
2/R - 1/L_smaj = 0.0001613
V_orb = sqrt(64.3) = 8.018 kM/sec

semi-major axis of actual orbit, L_smaj, (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, V_orb = sqrt(µ(2/R - 1/L_smaj))
2/R - 1/L_smaj = 0.000169
V_orb = 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.

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:

My "ESA guy" got scared and refused to release/disclose what he'd promised several months ago.

No comment needed.