Here's a surprise, Richard Hoagland was wrong

 From this blog, March 14, 2016:

« When Gale crater was first announced as MSL's destination, Richard Hoagland announced on C2C-AM that Sharp Mountain was obviously an artificial construct, and that everyone at JPL knew that. Even President Obama knew it. ..... When Curiosity finally reveals Sharp to be just a mountain, what will he say then? Why, NOTHING, of course. Glad you asked. »

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

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

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

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

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

Planetary conjunctions

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

DATA:

G = 6.674 x 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2 

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

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

FORMULA:

F = Gm₁m₂/d²

RESULT

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

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

Congrats to CNSA (again)

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

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

More detail on Hoagland's jail time

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

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

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

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

David Sereda tells us a fairy story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Lynne, COVID-19 is not cured by mouthwashes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[6] Pokeweed, toxic to humans

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

Robert Morningstar: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong and Wrong

 James Concannon writes...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong and Wrong

NASA haters mock InSight's problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update 17th October

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