Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Digital Projection Tools and Techniques => Topic started by: Phil Indeblanc on December 14, 2015, 06:33:12 pm
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Did anyone see the interview?
https://youtu.be/rR4pf6pp1kQ
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I believe it's total BS! Doesn't look like Kubrick (despite the awful camera work), doesn't sound like Kubrick. Maybe this guy is named Stanley Kubrick, it's not IMHO the film director!
Here's the real deal in a fascinatingly if long video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa-KBqOFgDQ
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#5 was interesting....
http://realitysandwich.com/23226/kubrick_apollo/
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In the linked video between 19:00 and 20:00 the 'director' even tells the actor -badly- pretending to be Kubrik to answer in character. The whole thing is absolute rubbish.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed all of the landing sites and the photos are publicly available to see. :)
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In the linked video between 19:00 and 20:00 the 'director' even tells the actor -badly- pretending to be Kubrik to answer in character. The whole thing is absolute rubbish.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed all of the landing sites and the photos are publicly available to see. :)
At about the 19:15 mark he even tells him what to say. It's a fake and a poorly done one at that. Or it was meant as a joke.
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Maybe one of you can help me find a You-tube video I'm looking for. It shows Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree, and proves conclusively that the apple missed him completely when it fell! :o
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Maybe one of you can help me find a You-tube video I'm looking for. It shows Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree, and proves conclusively that the apple missed him completely when it fell! :o
It's the video just after the one showing Big Foot getting lost in the Bermuda triangle.
How anyone with a lick of intelligence could watch this silly video and think it's real is beyond me. Just a waste of 2 minutes of my life....
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It's the video just after the one showing Big Foot getting lost in the Bermuda triangle.
How anyone with a lick of intelligence could watch this silly video and think it's real is beyond me. Just a waste of 2 minutes of my life....
+10.
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The rubbish people will embrace to avoid dealing with realities they can't face…
-Dave-
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Don't you love it when the credibility of the word conspiracy is further reduced?...
As if someone were interested in making us feel that all conspiracy theories are obviously untrue. :P
Cheers,
Bernard
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Just remember that, at present, as many Americans would vote for D J Trump as believe that the moon landings were faked.
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Just remember that, at present, as many Americans would vote for D J Trump as believe that the moon landings were faked.
Probably the same people too ;D
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Probably the same people too ;D
That would surprising. Those supporting Trump appear to be hard core Republicans who mostly seem to believe in the official stories.
I don't believe that conspiracy believers belong to a given layer of the society for the very reason that there is nothing common among conspiracy theories. Some are most probably false (the faked moon landing, arab terrorists having flown planes in the twin towers in NY,...), some are probably true based on historical evidence (Pearl Harbour having been a set up,...).
It is a very disturbing trend of our supposedely free societies that any story not aligned with what our authorities tell us is seen as being necessarily false and that anyone daring to question those official stories is seen as crazy and ridiculed in the process.
Cheers,
Bernard
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That would surprising. Those supporting Trump appear to be hard core Republicans who mostly seem to believe in the official stories.
Like this story?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/22/donald-trumps-outrageous-claim-that-thousands-of-new-jersey-muslims-celebrated-the-911-attacks/ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/22/donald-trumps-outrageous-claim-that-thousands-of-new-jersey-muslims-celebrated-the-911-attacks/)
“Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”
EDIT: there's also this idiotic Trump conspiracy theory:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trumps-history-raising-birther-questions-president-obama/story?id=33861832
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Like this story?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/22/donald-trumps-outrageous-claim-that-thousands-of-new-jersey-muslims-celebrated-the-911-attacks/ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/22/donald-trumps-outrageous-claim-that-thousands-of-new-jersey-muslims-celebrated-the-911-attacks/)
“Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”
EDIT: there's also this idiotic Trump conspiracy theory:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trumps-history-raising-birther-questions-president-obama/story?id=33861832
Those 2 are obviously untrue.
Don't get me wrong, I fully agree that the guy is a dangerous populist and I am very sad that he is getting such an audience from a lot of people I can only assume are intelligent and well educated.
The only reasonable reading I can make is that those people consider politics in the US to be a big joke anyway and that you might as well extend a bit the air time of the biggest clown of them all. At least Trump isn't trying to give voters the impression they actually have some influence on the course of things.
Cheers,
Bernard
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"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it obviously make a sound?
If a tree falls in a forest and the police wasn't around, does it make a sound?
If a tree falls in a forest and the police is investigating, but the prosecutor decides not to press charges (for insufficient evidence of violating the forest noise ordinance, for instance - the officer did not have a calibrated decibel meter with him at the time), does it make a sound?
If eight trees fall in a forest and someone was around to hear it, do other falling trees in the forest make a sound?
If trees in a a forest in a land, far, far away, fall and plenty were around to hear it and record it, do falling trees on the other side of the land far, far away make a sound? Or our trees are perhaps different species of trees?
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"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it obviously make a sound?
If a tree falls in a forest and the police wasn't around, does it make a sound?
If a tree falls in a forest and the police is investigating, but the prosecutor decides not to press charges (for insufficient evidence of violating the forest noise ordinance, for instance - the officer did not have a calibrated decibel meter with him at the time), does it make a sound?
If eight trees fall in a forest and someone was around to hear it, do other falling trees in the forest make a sound?
If trees in a a forest in a land, far, far away, fall and plenty were around to hear it and record it, do falling trees on the other side of the land far, far away make a sound? Or our trees are perhaps different species of trees?
Sound, like color is a perceptional property of (in this context, let's stick with) humans.
If a tree falls in the forest, it does produces vibrations that travel through the air. If no one is around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound.
If the tree produces vibrations that travel through the air that are outside human perception, it doesn't produce a sound.
If the sun emits UV light but we can't see it, is it visible? To us, no. None the less, there are the electromagnet wavelengths of UV light emitting from the sun!
What is and what isn't human perception should be the first question defined and specified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics):
Hearing is not a purely mechanical phenomenon of wave propagation, but is also a sensory and perceptual event; in other words, when a person hears something, that something arrives at the ear as a mechanical sound wave traveling through the air, but within the ear it is transformed into neural action potentials.
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Don't get me wrong, I fully agree that the guy is a dangerous populist and I am very sad that he is getting such an audience from a lot of people I can only assume are intelligent and well educated.
I guess we could debate or define what intelligent and well educated implies or if polls are scientific metrics. ;D
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/27/donald-trumps-surge-is-heavily-reliant-on-less-educated-americans-heres-why/ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/27/donald-trumps-surge-is-heavily-reliant-on-less-educated-americans-heres-why/):
Trump's support is strongest with Republicans in the Midwest, conservatives across the country who do not have a college degree and (perhaps not surprisingly) those who report the most negative views of immigration and Mexican immigrants in particular, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week.
http://www.inquisitr.com/2610326/donald-trump-supporters-mostly-uneducated-new-poll-finds/ (http://www.inquisitr.com/2610326/donald-trump-supporters-mostly-uneducated-new-poll-finds/)
“Trump’s support is heavily concentrated among non-college educated Republicans and those who only lean Republican and thus are less inclined to show up and vote in primaries and caucuses,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics in an email to the news site.
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/2610326/donald-trump-supporters-mostly-uneducated-new-poll-finds/#Gvdd50DIfHpSkOZW.99 (http://www.inquisitr.com/2610326/donald-trump-supporters-mostly-uneducated-new-poll-finds/#Gvdd50DIfHpSkOZW.99)
http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/05/heres-the-lowdown-on-who-supports-donald-trump/ (http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/05/heres-the-lowdown-on-who-supports-donald-trump/)
Polling data reveal that Trump supporters are more likely to be male, white, older, with less education—but they are not more likely to be right-wing.
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Half knowledge is often more dangerous than no knowledge.
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Half knowledge is often more dangerous than no knowledge.
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)
Jeremy
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One major factor in conspiracy "theories" getting created and then taking hold has to do with our exceedingly poor grasp of probability. If the odds of a lone gunman standing at a window of a book depository with a rifle, shooting at a man riding past on the street below in the backseat of an open car and killing him are 1 in (say) 50000…then if you run the scenario 50000 times the man in the car will, with 100% certainty, be killed once. Even on the first run-through the odds are >0. But we're made uneasy by this intrusion into the world of simple cause & effect scenarios—which we're primed to seek out—and so tune it out, preferring to equate improbable with impossible. Then we make up explanatory stories to rationalize our unease.
At the core of moon landing denial is the rejection of cosmologies that allow space travel. If you believe space, as a medium you can enter and move about within, either doesn't exist or is off-limits to human beings then of course such travel is impossible. And anyone claiming to have done it must be lying. No matter how absurd the denial becomes in the face of contrary evidence, the denialists have a deep psychological & emotional investment in their cosmology and therefore have no choice but to keep doubling down on it.
-Dave-
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Probability is indeed diffucult to grasp :) The probability of a kill in your scenario is only around 65%. For the mathematically inclined, the survival probability approaches 1/e as the number of trials increases.
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Probability is indeed diffucult to grasp :) The probability of a kill in your scenario is only around 65%. For the mathematically inclined, the survival probability approaches 1/e as the number of trials increases.
Oops, I did get it wrong. Instead imagine 50000 parallel & identical (up to this point) worlds where the scenario plays out simultaneously. That should work: the guy in the car will be killed once. Otherwise, yes, the situation is different and—on the surface—counterintuitive…as in, for instance, the Monty Hall problem.
-Dave-
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Sorry, the math is still not that simple. For this scenario, you need a Poisson distribution. The probability of no kill in any of the parallel worlds is roughly 37%. The probability of a kill in exactly one parallel world is also 37%. But we are getting far off topic ....
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Oh well, back to class. :)
My original intent was to link the equating of improbable with impossible to conspiratorial reasoning. As in "the man in the car just couldn't possibly have been killed by a lone gunman, therefore [insert preferred conspiracy scenario]." This is the sort of post-hoc argument made to rationalize a belief held for deeper (emotional, psychological (including innate tendencies that may have genetic links), tribal) reasons.
-Dave-
(Note: posted this earlier minus the last sentence due to my friend's young son wanting an iPad lesson. He's almost 2 now. Priorities… ;) )
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NASA recently released 14.000+ scans from the Apollo missions. These are all pictures taken with the iconic Hasselblad cameras modified for the Apollo program.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/albums (https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/albums)
As much as people like to think that one video and a couple of pictures were faked, it would be impossible to 1) make tens of thousands of people involved in the program keep their mouth shut for all these years, and 2) fake the humongous amount of photographic and video evidence (as well as real stuff like crap we left on the moon and other bits you can kind of see with a good telescope).
Besides, going to space is not as hard as people think. Doing it safely is much harder, but we didn't think about that too much back during the Cold War, did we?
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Sure, the evidence for the moon landings is mountainous, overwhelming even. Besides all the photos, including recent ones of the landing sites taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the fact that until recently we regularly bounced laser light off mirrors left on the lunar surface to measure Earth-to-Moon distance (and the variability thereof), there's the loads of bureaucratic paperwork left behind. And the documented astronaut training. And all the tech created. Etc. Attributing it all to a conspiracy is absurd beyond absurd.
But to people who can't accept the moon landings none of that matters. Their need to believe it didn't happen trumps everything else. Attempting to reason with them is usually fruitless…in fact it tends to reinforce their refusal to evaluate the evidence rationally (the "backfire effect"). About all you can do is present the evidence as clearly as possible, while accepting that some folks can't/won't deal with it reasonably.
Then there are people who claim not to accept this, that or the other as part of a chain-yanking exercise. Sometimes this can even be useful, as in deflating excessive pedantry. ;)
-Dave-
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"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it obviously make a sound?
If a tree falls in a forest and the police wasn't around, does it make a sound?
If a tree falls in a forest and the police is investigating, but the prosecutor decides not to press charges (for insufficient evidence of violating the forest noise ordinance, for instance - the officer did not have a calibrated decibel meter with him at the time), does it make a sound?
If eight trees fall in a forest and someone was around to hear it, do other falling trees in the forest make a sound?
If trees in a a forest in a land, far, far away, fall and plenty were around to hear it and record it, do falling trees on the other side of the land far, far away make a sound? Or our trees are perhaps different species of trees?
these days the trees make selfies as they fall and text them to the tress on the other side of the world!
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It's the video just after the one showing Big Foot getting lost in the Bermuda triangle.
How anyone with a lick of intelligence could watch this silly video and think it's real is beyond me. Just a waste of 2 minutes of my life....
Well I certainly am glad to have taken the 2min, as I think some of the posts here are great :-)
I was actually hoping to get a better understanding of the footage that some people claim it was faked. I was hoping some folks here could help in that area, and demystify things... if applicable.
Questioning the moon landing is very reasonable when the only source you have is the news. Also when you detach yourself from the time that it happened and are not linked to that period, it is even easier to question it, don't you think?
Reading Bernard's post, I have to agree...If I understood it right.
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Questioning the moon landing is very reasonable when the only source you have is the news. Also when you detach yourself from the time that it happened and are not linked to that period, it is even easier to question it, don't you think?
No, I don't think that's reasonable.
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...because.....
?
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...because.....
Because I have no problem when the 'only source' is the news (I tend to read many differing news sources). I believe the earth is round, not because I've flown over it from outer space, but because 'the news' from differing sources have provided solid evidence of this fact. I don't think I need to detach myself from the time. I was alive and recall seeing the moon landing 'on the news'.
Lastly, there isn't a lick of proof that the moon landing was faked, just the opposite. Many of those facts have already been provided here.
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Because I have no problem when the 'only source' is the news (I tend to read many differing news sources). I believe the earth is round, not because I've flown over it from outer space, but because 'the news' from differing sources have provided solid evidence of this fact. I don't think I need to detach myself from the time. I was alive and recall seeing the moon landing 'on the news'.
Lastly, there isn't a lick of proof that the moon landing was faked, just the opposite. Many of those facts have already been provided here.
Reading *many different* "news sources" doesn't say a whole lot now a days. Well in the case of the OP "story", we have the agreed news sources claiming it is so. So its A perspective. Very possible. Probable? Perhaps? After some events, you can't help but not believe the news. So knowing this now, it casts some doubt to past news that is questionable. Some where in the what little I have read, there was some mention of Buzz Aldrin's brother or some "noise" perhaps that there was something. Not anything conclusive.
As for the earth being round, I would think it is. I can't prove it to you. But there are a number of credible sources that make logical sense, and I can accept this as a "default". There are ideas theories that are proven by evidence. The more the evidence, the more likelihood that the theaory can be proven to be so.
Lastly, I was not watching any news or around at the time the moon landing was announced, but I have only heard of reports of it from the local agencies. Otherwise, I have heard some "sources" claiming that it is fake, because, the shadows and background and such don't make sense to those that say its a fake. I have not looked into it. If I did, I can't say that I would be able to be sure of things without someone explaining it. Unless there are obvious "cloning" artifacts :-) . Now with Photoshop or Premier, etc...they could have had a field day about the moon...if they wanted to fake it!
...So its interesting to know, or see in a photograph or video....if there is a way to reveal what the shadows or backgrounds and air, or lack of should depict.
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Reading *many different* "news sources" doesn't say a whole lot now a days
"All generalizations are false, including this one".
-Mark Twain
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"All generalizations are false, including this one".
-Mark Twain
True :-)
Though...
I'm not sure if anyone is generalizing anything...
I was watching a study, or test being done....
They put 150,000 marbles in a large jar. Then they started asking random people to guess how many marbles they thought were in the jar....
Guesses were coming in from as little as 50 to millions, etc...
But the more they had sample guesses, after averaging the guess entries, it was shocking how close the average answer was. It was off by a couple hundred or something very small.
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Reading *many different* "news sources" doesn't say a whole lot now a days.
It's a good thing IMO to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism about what you see, hear & read in the "news." But this is ultimately unrelated to denialism and conspiracy theorizing. These phenomena are driven not by skepticism but by an a priori belief in or commitment to something else that prevents acknowledgment or acceptance of the thing or event being denied. The denying & theorizing are post-hoc rationalizations intended to smooth over contradictions between what is known and what is believed.
-Dave-
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After those 3 buildings came down... anything is possible for a powerful media to convince the public.
If you're not skeptic, you're experiencing bliss.
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After those 3 buildings came down... anything is possible for a powerful media to convince the public.
If you're not skeptic, you're experiencing bliss.
It's equally important to be equally skeptical of wild & crazy alternate explanations of what the media "inform" you about. Occams's Razor applies to both.
-Dave-
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So in the 2003 build up to the Iraq war, European and US media obviously had highly different interpretations of reality. I think it is fair to claim that those interpretations contributed to the publics opinion, although this could be a case of "hen and egg" where (local) media tends to bias its interpretations towards what their target audience believes in the first place. Would it be conspiratoric of me, then, to claim that the political leaders of the US seemed to have a creative view on truth? Or that for any politician with ambitions to do some particular thing, there is an enormous gain to be had by swaying media your way, thereby getting the people to side with you?
As a cynic, I like to play games of "follow the money". In many classic conspiracy theories, you single out one (e.g. ethnic) group as "bad", and the thinking is that if we only put those in jail, throw them out of the country etc, everything will be good. This plays well into majority populations that are (perhaps) struck by unemployment, poverty, starvation, or the general feeling of being dethroned. I guess this is similar to creating an external enemy (i.e. going to war) in order to make your people more coherent. So (some) political leaders have potentially a lot to gain by those conspiracy theories.
But the moon landing? Who would "gain" by having it declared fake? Anti NASA-ers? It does not make sense to me, even ignoring the massive evidence that it happened.
-h
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I was watching a study, or test being done....
They put 150,000 marbles in a large jar. Then they started asking random people to guess how many marbles they thought were in the jar....
Guesses were coming in from as little as 50 to millions, etc...
But the more they had sample guesses, after averaging the guess entries, it was shocking how close the average answer was. It was off by a couple hundred or something very small.
If you ask 10.000 people, their averaged response can, according to some claims (often) be "better" than the single response from an expert. At least in somewhat more complex questions than guessing the number of rubbles, things like "will Russia enter/exit Syria this year?". The thinking seems to be that in a large population there will be hidden (perhaps unconscious) knowledge that no single expert have. Is there not a name for this? I guess that democracy, free trade/stock markets, wikipedia, crowdsourcing are all related to your reported experiment.
I guess that this works well as long as the population is "unbiased"; their errors are just some noisy distribution around the true mean. In questions where there is a significant bias, this approach ought not to work.
The "bandwagon effect" describes what happens when physicists do (publish) experiments after another (respected) physicists; they tend to cluster close to the initial experimenter, even if she was wrong. Perhaps they will reject (not publish) results that are too far away from historic results. This means that if you look at a bunch of independent published papers, there might be a consistent bias towards the initial "respected" one, instead of a non-biased spread around the true mean:
(http://joerojasburke.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/tumblr_n5a24ockuh1r98cn7o1_1280.png?w=470)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0508199.pdf
http://joerojasburke.com/2014/06/11/overconfidence-bias/
or:
(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/how_it_works.png)
http://xkcd.com/385/
In perceptual psychological experiments, it has often been found that some random person from the street will have the same preference in e.g. loudspeakers as a trained expert, but will need significantly more time for training/averaging due to "noisy" responses (or equivalently, more people needed). But also, people will generally prefer the sound of a blue loudspeaker over a black loudspeaker even when they are acoustically identical. One might expect "experts" to be aware of some such phenomena and (perhaps) being able to reduce their own bias in some such cases.
-h
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As a cynic, I like to play games of "follow the money".
Yup. (I prefer "realist" while admitting there's often a fine line between that and "cynic.")
But the moon landing? Who would "gain" by having it declared fake? Anti NASA-ers? It does not make sense to me, even ignoring the massive evidence that it happened.
I doubt anyone in denial about the moon landings cares about having them somehow declared fake. The goal is IMO just to create enough doubt to allow yourself to continue believing in whatever it is that conflicts with the possibility of humans visiting the moon.
On a trek through southern Israel in summer 1984 I met a guy, an American, who believed the sky was literally a dome encircling the earth…with the stars, planets, moon, etc. in effect holograms projected on it. He was very sincere about this and other weird (to me) notions, and as he was otherwise a seemingly sane guy—and an amiable traveling companion for the few days we spent going in the same direction—I chose not to "debate" with him.
-Dave-
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I believe there is no truth in the news, no news in the truth.
I think that it was (perhaps) James Fallows who on some recent (2 weeks) radio interview opined that "the news" had taken a bad turn once it was required to be entertainment. It needs to sensationalize stuff in order to get attention --which is a sad commentary on the populace, too, of course.
Maybe that makes me a skeptic, but honestly, how can you turn on three news channels with a bias reporting the same story with three different tones, or more than that three different story outcome from the same event.
Hmmm, I find it of less variety and more dependable bias, often. OTOH, there can be a sad lack of actual news investigation, wit, & reporting, and more an --all sounds the same-- echo chamber of commentary --can do that from the armchair. E.g., the shocking killing of that crazed youth with a knife, shot 16 times --most while lying wounded-- kept getting reported as "while he was walking away ..." and yet the video before my eyes showed it differently : he was walking *by* but then spun rapidly around :: that is NOT a wise move when nervous guns are pointed at you (and isn't exactly just "walking away")! Even the language : once we had "hunkering" and now unfortunately it's all "doubling down". Looks more than language skills seem to be in demand for TeeVee (and why do we have to look at the on-the-scene reporter's groomed hair instead of THE SCENE itself????!). --a most recent peeve : mathematicians have found a peculiarity in the prime numbers showing a lack of randomness; the CBC's As It Happens reported this by a guy too keen for presumed comic acting than reporting, viz. Jeff Douglas; the segment was drawn out by his mocking presentation & short on facts, followed by selected rock music that must've involved numbers. (Egadz, why his credentials are so matching --to wit: " Jeff Douglas is a Canadian presenter, actor and television personality" .:. perfect for "news" as entertainment. (As for the primes, cf www.nature.com/news/peculiar-pattern-found-in-random-prime-numbers-1.19550 (http://www.nature.com/news/peculiar-pattern-found-in-random-prime-numbers-1.19550)
... okay, I could rant on so better run off ...
--dl*
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Having listened to Trump's dialogue, I have noticed that many people, (left and right wing, university educated and not) in trusted company, speak very much like him. Saying what you think, directly and honestly, without filtering for fear of not being liked, is sooooo refreshing.
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Having listened to Trump's dialogue, I have noticed that many people, (left and right wing, university educated and not) in trusted company, speak very much like him. Saying what you think, directly and honestly, without filtering for fear of not being liked, is sooooo refreshing.
Hi Garry,
Sociopaths (and I'm being kind) like Trump, and others who present simple 'black and white' solutions, are not refreshing, they spread a kind of neo-facist populism, which poisons coherent societies. Studies have shown that they do not perform better than others, they only have no remorse when things go south. They usually leave a trail of casualties.
I can recommend a book called "Snakes in suits" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_in_Suits) (summary review (http://www.summary.com/book-reviews/_/Snakes-in-Suits/)) for those who prefer to think twice, instead of going for the simple solutions (which are often the wrong solutions).
Cheers,
Bart
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... Sociopaths...
Yes, it is so much better to have cool, smooth-talking, hope-peddling, Rome-burning fiddlers instead. Or those promising a free ice cream day in the land of butterflies and unicorns.
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The thing I like about the possible GOP nominee is that he's an effective bigot/asshole outer. What was once covert is now, whether you/they like it or not, overt. Who can now pretend the Southern Strategy hasn't existed or still doesn't exist? IMO it's better to know where people actually stand on things.
-Dave-
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Hi Garry,
Sociopaths (and I'm being kind) like Trump, and others who present simple 'black and white' solutions, are not refreshing, they spread a kind of neo-facist populism, which poisons coherent societies. Studies have shown that they do not perform better than others, they only have no remorse when things go south. They usually leave a trail of casualties.
I can recommend a book called "Snakes in suits" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_in_Suits) (summary review (http://www.summary.com/book-reviews/_/Snakes-in-Suits/)) for those who prefer to think twice, instead of going for the simple solutions (which are often the wrong solutions).
Cheers,
Bart
As a politician, there must be a tension between being ideological vs pragmatic.
The ideological politician has a lot going for her. By studying a compact set of ideology, one can (fairly accurately) predict her opinion in a range of questions. For me, that is efficient. I don't have the time (or inclination) to dive deeply into the fine details of trade deals between the EU and the EEA (European Economic Area). I trust that a politician who get my vote have a general view that makes her (with help from her people) dive into the matter, make a choice, and debate that view with other politicians in such a way that we the people are educated. On the other hand, when things go bad with ideological people, things tends to go really bad. Be it religion, politics or camera settings.
The pragmatic politician is more of a "car mechanic" in that whatever works, works. This tends to correlate with the "populist" label, meaning that instead of following a (hopefully deeply though out) consistent ideology, their opinion can swing any which way the people swing. For a democracy, this can be a great thing. So what if our leaders decide that some line of thought is below them ("having large predators in our nature is potentially dangerous to our kids. Lets eradicate all of them"). Even though I am against this particular thought, I see the problem with having large parts of the voters swaying one way, and nearly all politicians swaying the other way. The "populists" come to the rescue by perhaps good gut-feeling, perhaps carefully analyzing the "market" and finding the blank spots.
I don't know or understand the fine points of US politics (why should I, it is not my country). I do believe that my own country and neighbors have had our fair share of right-wing, anti-establishment populists, though. They don't get my vote for a number of reasons. While I have liberal and liberalist tendencies compared to the political centre of gravity in my country, I think that these guys tick all of the wrong boxes. Cheaper alcohol, more repression in schools and refusing working foreigners access to our country is probably not what would make my country "great" instead of merely "good".
Having a particular sociolect or dialect does not make you any better (or worse) as a politician. Everything should be stated as simple as possible, but not any simpler. By this, I mean that some things are inherently complex. I would rather have a politician who says that "global warming is complex but we should do as best we can with the knowledge that we have", rather than one who says that "it is all lies" or one who says that "abolish your lifestyle today, or else the world is doomed". I do acknowledge that some of them are annoyingly un-inclusive, or rather: their political training have taught them how to avoid offending anyone or admitting that any action they do will have any negative consequences for anyone. Thus, the information content of their speech is close to zero.
-h
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Yes, there's a balance between having a coherent worldview and holding positions in accord with that, while also being persuadable by evidence and the rational evaluation of it. Politics unfortunately tends to attract the unbalanced polar extremes: feckless twist-in-the-winds and rigid ideologues.
When it comes to demagogues you can throw all that out the window. There is seemingly no worldview beyond the need to indulge in self-aggrandizement and little regard for reason or evidence.
-Dave-
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Last night the lens attached to my camera landed, so to speak, on the almost full Moon. Is the photo real or fake? You be the judge. ;)
-Dave-
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Dave, nice image of the holographic projection on the Dome.
Brad
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Hehe, impressive tech for sure. ;D
-Dave-
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Interesting where this has gone over time, yet surely the only news I can rely on are the local weather predictions :-)
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Yep. The only news I pay serious attention to—besides weather forecasts—concerns financial market behavior, baseball, music & musicians I like and events & discoveries in the astrophysics realm. :) The rest will be, I suspect, best understood in retrospect.
-Dave-
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Another month, another Moon. I like how the cloudy/hazy stuff has lowered contrast and given the Moon's surface a silvery sheen.
-Dave-
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It seems I observed & photographed a plane attempting to land on the crescent edge of last evening's Moon.
-Dave-
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Very cool (fake) Moon landing, Dave.
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Thanks. I was hoping the plane's pilot might be Sully, but if so he's been silent thus far on the subject. :)
Pertinent to another current LuLa thread, originally about the video capabilities of SLRs but having now veered into Leicas and film cameras and various other stuff, here's a pic of the Moon from about 30 minutes ago. Taken with my black Leica M8.2 and a 54-year-old 135/4 Tele-Elmar lens. Nothing special but I like taking record shots of the Moon in its various phases. I've also included a full-res crop to show the per-pixel quality of the camera/lens combo. Not bad IMO for 10mp and an "effective focal length" (do not like that term) of ~180mm.
-Dave-
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Of course the moonwalks happened. I am concerned about anyone who thinks otherwise. Here's an informative short film that debunks conspiracy myths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU
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The Apollo 15 landing site, as photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft in 2012:
(https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/627886main_M175252641LR_ap15.jpg)
ALSEP = Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package
LRV = Lunar Roving Vehicle, aka "Rover"
Of course if you can't handle human space travel you'll dismiss the photo too.
The attached pic is one you'd better not dismiss! I took it last evening. :D
-Dave-
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Since we're already veeering so much here: the attached pic is of me at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida—with a modded Saturn V rocket, in fact the last Saturn V to launch, containing Skylab in the background—taken by my dad in early May 1973. This is an outtake…the good pic, with me looking at the camera rather than squinting, resides with a cousin in the UK. Dad used his Leica M2, 50/2 Summicron lens and Kodachrome 64. On this trip I had to manage with my Kodak Instamatic, which was quite a letdown after being allowed to use the Leica during the previous year. :) Dad took pics of Skylab's launch (while I, inexplicably, did not), which we saw ~10 days later from a nearby vantage point, but my cousin has these too.
-Dave-
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That has got to be the worst EtchA Sketch photo of the moon and what ever that garbage is drawn up on it. I think I have better footage.
So we can see particles of Saturn Rings, and Jupiter much further to the point that would should be able to check the tire pressure on the Rover.
Not buying it.
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Whoa, blast from the past.
Quoting self re. the LRO photo: "Of course if you can't handle human space travel you'll dismiss the photo too."
-Dave-
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Final nail in the Moon Landing Conspiracy theory
(https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2019/04/footprintsmoonfeat-800x420.jpg)
https://petapixel.com/2019/04/10/footprints-on-the-moon-photos-with-a-different-view-of-the-moon-landings/
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"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it obviously make a sound?
If a tree falls in a forest and the police wasn't around, does it make a sound?
If a tree falls in a forest and the police is investigating, but the prosecutor decides not to press charges (for insufficient evidence of violating the forest noise ordinance, for instance - the officer did not have a calibrated decibel meter with him at the time), does it make a sound?
If eight trees fall in a forest and someone was around to hear it, do other falling trees in the forest make a sound?
If trees in a a forest in a land, far, far away, fall and plenty were around to hear it and record it, do falling trees on the other side of the land far, far away make a sound? Or our trees are perhaps different species of trees?
“If a husband says something, and his wife is not there to hear it, is he still wrong?”
Rand
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I am waiting for some flat earth person to get to the edge and photograph it.
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I am waiting for some flat earth person to get to the edge and photograph it.
They can't. It's got a big fence around it and one of those all-inclusive signs advising ordering the use of hard hats anywhere on the "project".
As anyone who disobeys the sign does so at his own risk, nobody bothers to search when they don't return to their jeeps. Those just get put into the used car market and that's it: evidence of presence gone. There are never any frantic wives looking for them; women don't go for that type of guy, which is why he has nothing better to do than go looking to disprove reality.
:-)
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“If a husband says something, and his wife is not there to hear it, is he still wrong?”
Rand
Good one :-)
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“If a husband says something, and his wife is not there to hear it, is he still wrong?”
Rand
Of course he is; she doesn't have to hear anything to understand how he's wired. That's a major difference - and advantage - that women have over men.
Rob
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And here is the great man himself responding to a doubter http://www.openculture.com/2020/06/neil-armstrong-sets-straight-an-internet-truther-who-accused-him-of-faking-the-moon-landing-2000.html.