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Post by stutefish on Feb 17, 2006 14:40:40 GMT -4
And thank you PW, for getting the ball rolling. I was actually very excited by your description of NASA's procedures, which struck me forcefully with their careful planning, array of fallback positions, and just enough sense of adventurous risk to give me a delicious thrill.
Should a solar flave have erupted, their response would have been yet another glorious example of humanity's ingenuity and boldness. The exact details of their prediction methods didn't detract from the overall impression and impressiveness at all, in my mind.
I almost wish a solar flare had happened, just for the bragging rights. "Well, we all survived because we were prepared for the sun suddenly flooding our region of space with a torrent of deadly radiation. We were spring-loaded for a series of abort procedures, and as you can see, everything went according to plan."
One of the things that has always struck me about Apollo, and spaceflight in general, ever since I read The Right Stuff as a boy, was how these projects combined strongly emotional and inspiring experiences with cold, calm reason. The moral of the story seemed to be that the guys who get the privilege of achieving glorious deeds at great risk are the guys who can most thoroughly focus on the hours of mind-numbing checklists that make the whole endeavor even remotely possible.
Me? I'd have been so excited about the performance of the cutting-edge new fighter-interceptor I was testing, that I'd have fallen off the ziggurat on my first flight, and never graduated to space travel.
Good thing they chose guys like Armstrong and Conrad, instead...
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Post by stutefish on Feb 16, 2006 22:36:11 GMT -4
Thank you, Jay.
I'm not a scientist of any kind, and in no position to insist on a strict definition of "prediction". Being able to see and interpret precursors up to 12 hours in advance certainly seems to meet the prediction requirement necessary for NASA's countermeasures.
I am satisfied.
Again, thank you Jay.
And now, I'm off to learn more about solar weather prediction.
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Post by stutefish on Feb 16, 2006 15:12:52 GMT -4
Thank you all for your very informative and interesting replies.
The contradiction I'm concerned with has nothing to do with statistical probabilities, but with Lunarwolf's statement that NASA had telescopes watching the sun, and could anticipate a solar flare with enough lead time to take precautionary measures during the Apollo missions, and Turbonium's counter-claim--supported by quotes from the same organizations Lunarwolf referenced in his own claim--that such predictions are impossible.
Lunarwolf's explanation that solar storms, like earthly ones, have measurable and consistent precursors events makes sense to me, but mostly on common-sense grounds: A complex and energetic system like the Earth's atmosphere doesn't produce massive storms without a noticeable buildup beforehand, why should the sun's atmosphere be any different?
But this common-sense argument doesn't do much to address the people whom Turbonium has quoted--the very same solar weather experts Lunarwolf referenced as authoritative confirmation of his claim.
That is the contradiction I'm concerned with: Lunarwolf says people can and do predict solar weather all the time. Turbonium points out that the very people Lunarwolf refers to say that they cannot in fact do any such thing.
I didn't mean to ruffle anyone's feathers by using "luck" and "fortune" as synonym for "probability". I hope no one was unduly offended.
But can we at least agree that there's a qualitative difference between the claim "we can determine the probability of a solar flare event occurring on a given date" and "we can clearly see the precursors to a likely solar flare event, and take action accordingly before the event occurs"?
The former claim depends on observations of past data to make predictions about the nature of future data. The latter claim depends on observations on present data, in real time, to make decisions in real time about the nature of the present mission.
The question isn't "how likely was a solar flare during any given moment of an Apollo mission?" The question is, "how would NASA know a solar flare was coming, and when would they know it?"
EDIT to fix missing quotation mark.
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Post by stutefish on Feb 16, 2006 1:15:43 GMT -4
Hello. The fundamental contradiction between As to the precaustions, NASA had a number of telescopes that were watching the sun for any signs of a Flare coming. and First - solar flares were and still are completely unpredicatable - there was and still is no way to look at the Sun through telescopes for any impending "signs of a flare coming". The only way a flare is detected is after it has occurred. has not been resolved. Indeed, after this strong reply from Turbonium apollohoax.proboards21.com/index.cgi?board=theories&action=display&thread=1137416221&page=3#1137844063 the matter seems to have been largely dropped in favor of a debate about fortune, the Fisher Pen Story, and a rather tedious exploration of The Secret Lives of Margamatix. But could the answer to our dilemma be here? "At the present time, solar flares are completely unpredictable. By the time telescopes spot their tell-tale signs on the solar surface millions of miles away, their deadly cargoes of X-rays have already reached Earth orbit. A half-hour later, a burst of energetic particles begins to arrive." It seems to me that if there is a half-hour lag between the EM radiation and the particle radiation, then that's a half hour for precautions to be taken. But this hydra has many heads: What were NASA's plans in case of an event while the crew was on the lunar surface? Are we back to talking about Luck again?
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Post by stutefish on Sept 14, 2006 18:03:09 GMT -4
1. I'm a subject-matter expert, therefore I'm qualified to claim that it was a hoax.
2. All the subject-matter experts are paid tools of TPTB; none of them can be trusted.
I think this contradiction gets overlooked because the first premise is so trivially debunked.
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Post by stutefish on Feb 16, 2006 18:21:55 GMT -4
Not meant as a foray into petrology or mineralogy, of which I know little, but microcraters (or zap pits) can be simulated today in most media, from rocks to metals. Not that this technology was available back in 1969, but I thought I'd post it out of general interest. The link below describes how microcraters 25 µm in diameter and a depth ranging 5-20 µm are created in quartz samples with irradiated laser pulses. webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/diss/2001/mueller/diss.pdfBelow is the title and link to a document describing simulating space weathering, including microcraters, with laser pulses... Simulation of space weathering of planet-forming materials: Nanosecond pulse laser irradiation and proton implantation on olivine and pyroxene samples. Laboratory simulation of space weathering: ESR measurements of nanophase metallic iron in laser-irradiated materialswww.terrapub.co.jp/journals/EPS/pdf/2002e/5412e005.pdfOne more link, with metal as the sample media...... adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=2003SPIE.5147..377D&db_key=PHY&data_type=HTML&format=..laser induced craters are presented in this work. Experiments with femtosecond pulses were performed in air with a Ti:sapphire laser (800 nm, 100 fs) at mean fluences of 2, 5 and 10 J/cm2. Series of microcraters were induced with 100 to 5,000 laser pulses per holeVery nice work, Turbo. I guess what I'm curious about is this: It may be possible to simulate the Mona Lisa at least well enough to fool the Mk I Eyeball, but a thorough microscopic investigation might reveal inconsistencies in the brush stroke, brush material, pigment chemistry, etc. Common sense argues that there should be telltale characteristics that set microcraters made by lasers apart from microcraters made by high-energy particles. But of course the real pudding would be to compare these laser-made craters to the ones found in actual lunar material. I think it's significant to note that you are not claiming that we have the technology to create microcraters using high-energy particles (which, not lasers, made the craters seen in the Apollo samples). The Apollo samples should be ideal for this comparison, since whatever the result, it's still a fact that the Apollo samples were produced before the current laser technology was developed. The Russian samples would also serve, in addition to confirming the authenticity of the Apollo samples. (Unless the Russians also hoaxed their own space program. Actually, how come the HBs never seem to come up with that possibility? The problematic "Russians were in on it" CT is popular, but what if the Russians were busy faking their own project, and simply agreed to NASA's claims because they didn't want to reveal that in their ignorance they actually had no clue if NASA was lying or not?)
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Post by stutefish on Feb 16, 2006 19:17:41 GMT -4
Over the last week or so since I have found this board, I have learned:
(kickin' it mad HB bullet-point style)
+ That the Moon is a significant source of gamma rays, compared to the Sun. + That even so, the Moon is still not a significant source of gamma rays over the duration of an Apollo mission. + That gamma rays are the product of cosmic ray impacts on the lunar regolith. + That there was a cameraman in charge of remotely controlling the videocamera that filmed the launch of the AMs for Apollos 15, 16, and 17. + That even thought his cameraman rehearsed the procedure repeatedly beforehand, and even though the parameters of the shoot were well known, it still took everybody three tries to get it right. + That Al Bean (allegedly) claims it was a reflection off the LM that ruined Apollo 12's color videocamera. + That the camera didn't even have a lens cap. [1] + That Neil Armstrong's copilot wasn't just some guy named "Buzz", but rather Doctor Aldrin of MIT, one of the world's formost experts in the totally novel field of orbital rendezvous using simple tools. + That the Apollo crews (both ground crew and astronauts) made a lot of jokes, but that their humor was mostly very dry, very subtle, very in-joke. + That the Apollo lunar samples are anhydrous, and that this condition is at present unkown in any earth rock samples. + That the Canadarm is the most important part of the Space Shuttle.[2] + That this board has the most bizarre quotation system I have ever seen.
[1] I understand Jay's argument that this is no excuse. I am, however, firmly in the camp that you don't send a guy to the Moon in one of the most bold, dangerous, and daring endeavors in human history, and then tell him "on top of everything else, remember not to point this camera towards the sun". Doesn't the guy already have enough on his mind, without having to manually and painstakingly--and continuously!--solve a problem that could've been solved trivially with a lens cap? It's not even like they needed advanced robotics to take that problem off the Astronaut's hands.
[2] Okay, not really.
EDIT: To pretty up the formatting a bit, add footnote [2], and capitalize "Sun" in the first bullet-point.
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Post by stutefish on Dec 20, 2006 18:27:09 GMT -4
Many countries would love to burn down the white house but only one country has been successful in doin so, and they did it on their first attempt. Canada! The White House burning story is a hoax. If Canada could burn down the White House, how come they haven't done so recently? In fact, there's probably more evidence for the Apollo missions than there is for Canada burning down the White House.
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Post by stutefish on Jan 8, 2007 19:53:48 GMT -4
Regardless on how much you insist otherwise, everything you post here about right or wrong is just your opinion of what is right or wrong. That's just your opinion; for all we know you could be wrong about this, and he's actually stating facts about right and wrong. Says you. By your own logic, you could be totally wrong about this. I lived in Brazil for three years. I was not shocked to my core (or even to my mantle, really). So I know that your opinions about things are wrong at least some of the time. That's just your opinion. I'm guessing he gets his authority from the same place you do. Speaking of which, where do you get the authority to claim that there's an objective thing called an "opinion", with a nature that is absolute and independent of individual perception, such as you describe? After all, it's just your opinion that opinions are limited things that can't reflect an objective reality. It's not like other people's opinions are bound by your definition.
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