Pareidolia

Hi,
today I will write about pareidolia a commonly seen phenomena. People often see familiar objects in completely random things, like rocks.

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Clearly there is face in the upper middle part of the picture on the left. There is definitely sign of both eyes, of nose and mouth, thats more than one needs to recognise face in something, consider the following one on the right. Do you see the black thick circle filled with yellow color, two ellipses and curved line extended in the ends? Yeah me too.

The point is that humans are great in recognizing (most often faces) in things that are actually not them. The first picture is photo of region Cydonia which is a area on Mars. It was taken in 1976 by Viking 1 and of course people thought that it was proof for extraterrestrial life! Well if you take enough photos of Mars there is high probability that some of the rocks there will resemble primitive faces.

“I am the evidence of life on Earth, beware!”

Pareidolia does not happen only in images but also in sounds. For example there is a group of people who listen to so-called “ghost boxes” (sub category of ghost hunters). Ghost box is a box that is skimming quickly through radio channels. This creates lot of background noise and static noise with mix of what you can hear from the actual radio.. they say that the ghost can easily communicate through it.

Simplest explanation is of course that they just interpret extremely bad audio as some kind of words, plus if they listen for many hours they will eventually pop out something that will be an answer to your question, here is a link so you can consider for yourself, remember humans are great in interpreting random noise as actual words[1] (skip like 3 minutes for actual talk).

The story of the original Mars picture got stretched over many years. 2 decades after taking the picture, there was much better one taken by Mars Express as you can see below it was just the low resolution of Viking spacecraft.

There are many things that can trick us so it is not best to take the first explanation that we can think of, be sceptical and do not share if you do not know anything about it.

Dragallur

[1]The “answers” should be mostly made by random quotes from songs.

Smiley: By en:User:Mystìc – Originally created by en:User:Mystìc at en:Image:SNive.gif. Vectorized by Psiĥedelisto, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55079042

Pear: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3280816/What-photos-s-faces-suffer-facial-pareidolia.html

 

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My favorite scientists and astronomers

Hi,
so I came up with this idea of list of people that I admire in science. Those are not usually scientists most like ex-scientists who are writing, blogging, learning students and so on.

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I want to start with Phil Plait also known as Bad Astronomer. Why? Because he is famous

Phil

skeptic in the science community who is leading the league against Moon hoax. When I was writing about moon landing I cited his work quite a few times. He also wrote the book Death form the skies and he was featured in Crash Course Astronomy which was pretty cool, here are some links:

His blog.

His first blog (mostly bad astronomy).

Crash Course Astronomy

Second person in my list is Neil deGrass Tyson. He is astrophysicist, also sceptic and agnostic. He makes quite often fun of Flat Earth and is pretty cool.

Video

Demonstrating the power of gravity in the response to rapper singing about Flat Earth.

Another of my favorite scientists is Bill Nye. I am pretty sure that you know this one.

Science BOSS.

I actually saw him for the first time in USA in science class but actually listened to some of his talks few months ago for the first time. While he is very popular generally I kind of liked his debate with Ken Ham.. watch it, it is worth the 3 hours when you will witness the worst kind of argumentation in all history of creationism 😉 [1]

I would add Michio Kaku but I did not see so much stuff from him so I will just leave it here.

Dragallur

[1] Check out Ken Ham memes, those are best!

WTF? A conspiracy? 7) Perfect pictures

Hi,
it has been a long time since I posted about the Moon hoax but today I am returning. So I found that moon hoaxers think that Apollo must be faked because the pictures taken on Moon are strangely good.

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Oh wow, that’s right. All of the pictures look like they have been taken by experts who had enough time to put everything right where they wanted. I mean look at it. Buzz saluting during Apollo 11 mission is perfectly placed in the image next to the “waving flag“. And yes there are tens of similar pictures and all of them are so good. OMG!

Fine, it took some time but finally I found the one you can see below.

I mean, ok clearly this picture is not good one, that is obvious since Armstrong steps out of the picture while it is taken.

I am really curious what would hoaxers say to this, it is from Apollo 11 archive. 

Next one is not good either, the lunar modul is cut on the right.

Fine there is clear mistake on the hoaxer’s side. They assume that they would see a bad picture in magazine? Or in TV? Really that is just so dumb!

Phil Plait on his bad astronomy says that in fox show about moon landing they called some NASA expert on Apollo cameras and they asked him if he knows why those pictures are so good. Well I can imagine that I would not be able to come up with answer right away while someone is recording me for TV show, while trying his best to put me down.

That is all for today.

Dragallur

 

Apollo missions: Apollo 11

Hi,
here it comes, here it goes! Finally after so many posts I am here with the most famous space flight EVER! The Apollo 11, I know it was a bit strange that I was writing about conspiracy of moon landing before talking about moon landing. Here it comes now, this surely long waited post!

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First of all: the crew.
Neil Armostrong was the captain of this mission. As probably all astronauts, before his space carrier he was working as pilot in the US Navy even fighting in Korean war.
After that he joined the NASA program and he flied for the first time in Gemini 8 mission which was the first mission to connect two separate parts of rocket in space.
After that his second and last flight was in the year of 1969 which was Apollo 11. He died because of some heart complications in the year 2012.

The name of the second guy is Buzz Aldrin. Again he was working for military and fighting in Korean war. His first mission was Gemini 12 and then of course A11. He is now 85 years old and he is the second person to step on Moon!

Poor Michael Collins even that he was in the Apollo 11 mission he was not allowed to step on Moon because he was orbiting our satellite while the other guys were having fun down there. Again he was pilot in military and he was also in Gemini 10 mission.

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Now for the mission itself.

The mission started 16th July of 1969. The crew rode in Saturn V rocket. It took them 12 minutes to get on the orbit and they made 1.5 turn around Earth. After this they made right for Moon. There were 4 corrections of direction assumed but they had to do only one somewhere in the middle of the way. It took three days to get on the orbit of Moon.

The picture on the right was taken from Columbia (the thing that stayed on the orbit all the time of landing) and it shows Eagle (the thing that landed on Moon).

When the landing module was going down in few phases there were some problems with computer and with their position because the motors were on for a longer time that they needed to be.

Computer was not able to count their landing position because of “executive overflow” which was caused by it to use its computing power on meeting radar which was not used at that point. One young guy named Steve Bales called in this very pressing moment that they can continue which was then awarded with medal of freedom.

 It was planned that they would sleep for five hours but Armostrong and Buzz decided not to, since they would not be able to fall asleep. It took them 3.5 hours to prepare and then they opened the door and in 2:56UTC 21.7.1969 he said the famous sentence about stepping on ground (and he also stepped there)!
They took the first samples of Moon rock, then they put there American flag, seismometer and something with laser which I am not really sure what it was. Also what is less known when they were leaving Moon they left there message:

Here men from planet Earth First set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.

Then they left some stuff on the surface so they had lower mass and flied back to Earth. They were safely recovered from ocean.

This mission accomplished the thing that Kennedy wanted Americans to achieve: In 60s they landed on Moon.
Also this was very good for USA because they practically won the space race.

In 70s lot of people raised and said that it was fake. I have already lot of posts about it so check it out!
Dragallur

WTF? A conspiracy? 6) No blast crater

Hi,
here it comes, here it goes. Today I will write about another part of conspiracy theory of Moon landing. I know it seems that the list of hoaxes is not ending. And yes it is very long and that is why this hoax is so popular, it seems that there is so many arguments that even if one or two are wrong there is another squad standing behind, it is TRUE. But it will be debunked, I promise!

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Today I will talk about the “No blast crater” argument. To this one next picture relates and it is showing lander with circle on the place where should be blast crater.
When all Apollo landings landed it is assumed that they should left a huge blast crater behind since they would fell in great speeds. Also by the way the lander would not survive if it crashed with such a speed to create crater.
Here comes the question: How did NASA managed to not create blast crater?

They DID NOT go so fast when they were landing! As Phil Plait said:

When someone driving a car pulls into a parking spot, do they do it at 100 kilometers per hour?

Not only that they landed in small speeds but also the surface there is right under millimeters of dust hard rock and the gravity of Moon is much smaller (1/6).
The thing is that actually the lander had so big area of its “legs” that there was about 1,5 pound per square inch which is less than when the astronauts were walking on the Moon and that is why they were making footprints.

Some would say that footprints need water to form, but look at flour, it does not need it! It just stays in very steep shapes! This is called angle of repose. Things that have higher friction are able to have higher angle of repose. Also this is changed by gravity.

Dragallur

PS: I am going to make videos on YouTube. Today or in the weekend I will release probably first one so check it out (channel is ScienceAndRationality)!
1st picture: http://www.americanmoon.org/top10/index.htm
2nd picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose

WTF? A conspiracy? 5) Not parallel shadows

Hi,
here it comes, here it goes! Another debunking of the Moon hoax. As for now I already covered 4 “arguments” and you can check them on my other posts, just to see how silly they are.
Flag flapping in the breeze. Deadly radiation of Van Allen belts. Copied backgrounds of NASA images and Erased stars on the pictures + the prologue of those series.

So today I continue and this time I chose the argument of non-parallel shadows on the pictures by NASA.

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As you can see on the picture which was taken on Moon the shadows seem very strange. The yellow lines clearly show that the light is much closer to the objects and the Sun would not cast such shadows. This clearly means that those photos are faked and we never went to the Moon.

Ok here comes the fun part again. The hoaxers forgot on thing named: perspective.
The thing is that the Moon is 3D while the photo is just two dimensional. This makes some strange things such as those shadows. Actually I found one debunker to have on his page this photo so, thanks to him. If you viewed this from birds view you would clearly see that those shadows are parallel but from ground and on picture it seems as the shadows head into different directions, so if you dont believe that the Earth is hoaxed you should be convinced. If not you can try it for yourself. Plus if there is some downhill it can be distorted even more.

Thats about it. Thanks for reading.
Dragallur

WTF? A conspiracy? 4) Identical backgrounds

Hi,
with one day pause I am coming with post about conspiracy theory of Moon landing. Yes again there is another “argument” by those hoaxers which I am going to crush to pieces thanks to awesome Phil Plait and his Bad Astronomy webpage.
This time lets focus on identical backgrounds on two images which were surely taken from very different distances and they must be faked because NASA was too lazy and they used same background twice.

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Ok so here are the pictures from Apollo 15. On the first one where you can see more of those mountains there is no moonlanding apparatus and there is this rocky ground. While on the other there is the opposite but on both pictures there are same “backgrounds” used.
Fine here comes the debunktion. On Moon things stuff does not behave as one would execpt. On Earth we can judge distances by things around because we already know their size from experience, like house, shrub or car. But we dont have these things on Moon.
Once I was looking into the heart of Black Canyon in USA. It was one of the best things I have seen in my entire life and the same thing happened, I was not able to judge the distance.. it looked like that the bottom is 200 meters below me, but bottom of Black Canyon can be almost 700 meters (on the picture you can see the tallest cliff in Colorado, it was taken from wikipedia, thanks).

So there are no things by which you could judge the size of stuff which means that you dont really know how far it is + we also judge by the blur of the air. When there is stuff far away it is much less visible but on the Moon there is everything perfectly clear and you dont know if the rock is meter, 2, 200 or 10000 far away. Here is nice video which will blow your mind and show that you simply can not trust your eyes.

This means that the first picture is probably much closer to the mountains but still very very far away since they are on both pictures of identical size.

Dragallur
Check out the debunking of: Flag, Stars. And the prologue.

 

WTF? A conspiracy? 3) Van Allen radiation belt

Hi,
one of arguments by hoaxers is that astronauts would never be able to pass Van Allen radiation belts.

First of all, what are the radiation belts.
Those are belts around whole planet created by interaction of Earth`s magnetosphere and solar wind.
Solar wind is flow of energetic particles from Sun. Those belts were first discovered by James Van Allen.
There are two parts of them. Outer belt which is less dangerous and inner belt where is much more charged particles and especially protons.
It was also proved that there is antimatter in those belts but it is just such a low amount that we would not be able to use it anyway.

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Well so hoaxers made up that if human being tried to cross this radiation belt it would kill him. The problem is that it would not, if he went fast enough.

Van Allen`s radiation belts are not stationary which means that there are days when there is more radiation and days when there is less.
Quess when NASA wanted Apollo to fly, huh?
So Apollo 11 went in angle of 30° from equator where the concetration of charged particles was smallest.
The fatal dose of radiation is 1000 rads while the astronauts got from the most dangerous part about 26 rads, which they survived.
This site more deeply explains it.
Most of the charged particles would not be even able to penetrate the space craft. Those which would, would give astronauts a dose about 50mSv. Which is something but it even counts with “higher” number of protons to not going through but all of them shooting the body.
The dosimeters you can check here.

Dragallur

WTF? A conspiracy? 1) Flag flapping

Hi,
last time I talked about a conspiracy about landing on the Moon. Ok I say it is crap and I will try to destroy all the arguments against Apollo 11.
Today I will start with hoax number 1.

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Flag flapping in the breeze!

As you can see on this picture there is Neil Armstrong standing next to flag which is said to be flapping in the air, while there is no air on the surface because there is no atmosphere which means no wind.. this is right there can not be any breeze, BUT those people forgot about something.

Ok, so what else could make this flag moving? Right it is the astronaut himself. When Neil or Aldrin took this flag and they put it to the ground they were definitely moving with it and since there is not air friction flag kept on flapping for long time so it looked like breeze. I found video by mythbusters where they show this, plus they test it of course with Earth´s gravity while on Moon I assume that it would be flapping even longer since the gravity would not pull it so much.

Plus if there would be breeze there would be also dust flying around, it is not.

Amy Shira Teitel explains how the flags were constructed so make sure to check it.

There are many arguments so I will explain them one by one in future episodes.

Dragallur

EDIT: The first picture on which it seems that the flag is moving, actually it does not move. The horizontal pole of the flag was not fully expanded and Neil with Aldrin wanted it to look like it is flapping, actually no it is still they did their job really well :D.