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Post by PeterB on Feb 7, 2011 9:08:32 GMT -4
I've been there and seen that moon rock. They've got some at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff too. I think that comes from the Luna mission, no human hands were required to collect it. I don't go along with Kaysing's idea that the moon rocks are just ordinary Earth rocks that have been treated. I don't doubt that they are real rocks from the moon, I just dispute how they travelled from the moon to museum cases. Three Soviet unmanned sample retriever missions collected 300 grams of material from the Moon. NASA managed to collect more than a thousand times as much - 380 kilograms. If NASA did that with unmanned missions, how did they do it? Where's the evidence for the existence of NASA's unmanned sample retriever spacecraft? How did they collect rocks as heavy as 10 kilograms? How did they collect clods of compressed soil? How did they collect core samples more than three metres long? How did they transport all that material back to the Earth? How did they produce photographs of those rocks sitting on the Moon's surface, with astronauts appearing in those photos? Why were geologists studying the Apollo rocks able to talk to the astronauts who supposedly collected them? How is it that geologists working on the later three missions were able to request the astronauts pick up particular rocks, and then examine those very rocks in their labs?
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Post by PeterB on Feb 5, 2011 10:22:10 GMT -4
HagbardCeline said:
What means? How did they fake the video footage lasting several minutes at a time of the astronauts walking on the Moon between 10 and 100 metres away from the camera?
You can fake the low gravity on a Vomit Comet aircraft, but not that distance from the camera or the vacuum effects. You can fake the vacuum effects in a vacuum chamber, but not the low gravity or distance from the camera. You can fake the distance from the camera in a set in the desert at night, but not the low gravity or the vacuum effects. To fake all three, you have to be on the Moon.
What basis do you have for your uncertainty? Some scientific paper supporting your position? Or just your assumption that it must be so for your theory to be right?
Two books for children, neither of which you can name, one of which you last saw decades ago, and the other that you bought at a science museum. Sorry, but that sounds more like George W Bush's library rather than compelling evidence.
Okay, what else was a show-stopper for Apollo?
I assume you realise that the authorities involved would include the geology community (including thousands of people who've had a chance to examine the Apollo rocks), the engineering community (who've been able to examine the Apollo and Saturn systems, and in some cases use or improve them), the physics community (who've been able to study data collected by Apollo) and the astronomical community (who've been able to study images of stars collected on the Apollo 16 mission).
Which flows of information do you think were "controlled", how were they controlled, and what was the effect of that control?
It's only relevant if your conspiracy theory is true. You haven't proved that yet. For the time being it's like proving that if Liverpool can beat Stoke then so can any other football team, regardless of skill level.
I'd like to see your evidence.
So you have no evidence to support your claim, yet you know it's true...
If you want to take all this on faith, that's fine. But in that case don't try to claim any scientific credibility with us.
And why must they be right? Why could they not be (a) mistaken, (b) engaged in US Government disinformation, (c) lying, or (d) mad?
How can he be a hero if he was involved in the hoax? Doesn't his involvement mean his reliability must be suspect?
Or are you one of these people who applies a variable standard for evidence, depending on whether it supports or opposes your pre-determined conclusions?
It makes a huge difference. The longer you spend in space outside the Van Allen Belts, the greater the chance you'll experience a solar eruption. For a mission to the Moon lasting a fortnight, the odds are low, and you're never more than three days from the safety of the Earth. For a mission to Mars lasting at least a year and a half, the odds are much higher.
If I don't look for any 1960s data on the Van Allen Belts I can pretend there wasn't any.
There. Corrected that for you.
HagbardCeline, here's an idea. Go to your local university. Talk to the geology professors there. I'm pretty certain that at least one of them has worked with someone who's worked on the Apollo rocks. Talk to the physics professors there and find out about the dangers of the Van Allen Belts. Talk to the history professors about world history since World War Two. Or go to a professional photographer and talk to them about the Apollo photos. Show us you can learn new stuff.
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Post by PeterB on Feb 5, 2011 10:06:02 GMT -4
Iran is also happy about this. they said it makes a ME ruled by Islamic states easier. And I'm sure Hamas will be happy too - almost any government in Egypt is likely to end the blockade of Gaza. Now that's something you want to see too, isn't it?
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Post by PeterB on Jan 31, 2011 8:43:11 GMT -4
Ah yes, one of Australia's great skeptic exports.
I saw him live in Canberra last year - excellent stuff. You should also try to find his little ditty about homeopathy.
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Post by PeterB on Jan 31, 2011 8:41:44 GMT -4
What's being reported in Australia is that the USA is trying to stay neutral, not that it's supporting the rioters. I think the US Government is well aware that a democratically elected government is likely to be strongly anti-US, yet they're also aware that Mubarak can only stop the riots with excessive violence. The suggestion is that they're trying to convince Mubarak to stand aside and nominate a successor who's sort-of acceptable to everyone.
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Post by PeterB on Jan 14, 2011 10:09:02 GMT -4
A short web search turned up 17 cricket clubs in Houston. Not so amazing really considering the number of Houstonians from India and Pakistan. When I was in Houston in 2004 I stayed at a motel near the Johnson Space Center. In the morning that I headed out to JSC, the guy on the front counter was a Sri Lankan studying at one of the local unis. We had a good 10 minute chat about cricket - I think he was excited to have someone he could talk to about it.
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Post by PeterB on Jan 14, 2011 10:04:46 GMT -4
How are the recovery efforts going? Slowly, messily and unpleasantly. Apparently about 50 people are still unaccounted for, with grave fears for 12 of them. The unpleasant bit is the police saying that some of the missing may never be found, such was the ferocity of the flooding in some parts. One woman's body was found 80 kilometres from where she was swept away. My wife was quite upset at stories about some children who died, swept out of parents' arms, and of children who survived after being shoved into the roof cavity, with the people who shoved them up there themselves not surviving. One of the hairy stories is the town of Goondiwindi, which has a levee bank to protect it from flooding. It protects the town if the river rises to 11 metres. The forecast was that the river would rise to 10.85 metres. Fifteen centimetres isn't much! It turned out the river maxed at 10.64 metres, still alarmingly close.
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Post by PeterB on Jan 12, 2011 8:30:18 GMT -4
Yes the bubble is a great fear. Most of my savings go into stock. The advantage of stock is that as long as I keep trading (which can just mean saving more and more) and pay no admin fees (aside from initial charges of course) and collect nice dividends as a secondary gain to the appreciation of the investment itself. That's the main reason I'm not interested in investing in gold. Regardless of how much profit you make when you sell it, it doesn't pay any dividend in the interim, and it isn't productive in any way. At least with most shares you're owning part of something that makes something or does something. Which can't go on forever. Well, I suppose at some point in the future, we'll hit Peak Gold, but I'd be curious to know if anyone's made that calculation...
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Post by PeterB on Jan 12, 2011 8:24:11 GMT -4
Thanks for all the insight. No worries. I bet that's the case with most sports. There was a game I used to play as a kid which basically involved a group of us throwing a tennis ball against a wall and catching it, but we managed to come up with quite a complicated set of rules. Made perfect sense to us, though. That's the thing. Firstly, watching a game illustrates so much of the rules that otherwise are dry words on a page. Secondly, going to the cricket is a great social activity - dad takes the kids, groups of young men and women socialising, blokes chucking a sickie, retired folks - and everyone has something different to do between balls, whether it's reading a book, ogling the opposite sex, listening to the commentary on the radio, chucking a beach ball around, or just having a beer.
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Post by PeterB on Jan 12, 2011 8:08:37 GMT -4
Joe Durnavich quoted: For this last statement to hold, surely victims must have their firearms on open display, otherwise there's no deterrent effect.
Then, if arming the populace is considered the method of deterring violence against people, surely there need to be strict measures to ensure people are properly trained in the use, maintenance and storage of their weapons. That sounds like a huge industry for governments to regulate, suggesting an increase in government involvement in an industry which seems to trade a lot on wariness of the government.
Only zero if you equate injury and death. The top quote above talks about an increase in death to balance the decrease in injury. Frankly, if someone was going to assault me, I'd much prefer to be beaten up and left alive than shot dead.
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Post by PeterB on Jan 11, 2011 12:05:59 GMT -4
You might like to spare a thought for the people of South-East Queensland, who are experiencing some fairly horrific floods at the moment. www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/12/3110921.htmA few years ago, Brisbane was on extremely tight water restrictions, as most of eastern Australia was in drought. That drought broke in spring. Now Brisbane is being flooded.
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Post by PeterB on Jan 11, 2011 12:00:26 GMT -4
I see a little more now. Since I've never seen a cricket game it is all new to me. So unlike baseball, the batter regularly hits the ball and may do so many times in an inning. That's right. When you're batting, you can stay in as long as you like, until you get out...as opposed to the three strikes available to a batter in baseball. Heh, I watched parts of three of the four wild-card games this last weekend (one of them on a TV at work). (And cheering for the Patriots.) A test match is the complete version of cricket, played between two countries. The term "test" is also used for international fixtures in other sports, such as rugby union. In the complete version of the game, each team gets two innings, and each team can bat for as long as it likes, until ten batsmen are out. Test matches are played over five days (six hours per day for a total of 30 hours of play). Matches at the state or county level are usually four days long. In local competitions, matches usually last for two days, though it's rare for both teams to be able to bat twice, so results are often determined on the runs scored in each team's first innings. The other main version of cricket is the one-day game, or limited overs cricket. In this game, each team gets to bat once, and there's a strict limit on the number of balls (pitches) they're allowed to face. In the original version of this game, each team gets to face 300 balls, and games usually last all day (although some games are day-night matches, starting after lunch and finishing in the late evening. In the new version, called Twenty-20, each team gets to face 120 balls, and games usually last about 4 hours. International games are simply called One Day Internationals or Twenty-20 Internationals, and don't have the same cachet as test matches, even though they're more popular and more profitable. Test matches between Australia and England are played roughly every two years, in series of five or six matches. The trophy played for is called "The Ashes", and, bizarrely, it's a late 19th century cremation urn. Wikipedia has the story if you're interested. Anyway, even though England and Australia are currently the 4th and 5th rated cricket nations, this last series gained more coverage than the concurrent series between India and South Africa, even though they're the 1st and 2nd rated cricket nations.
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Post by PeterB on Jan 11, 2011 10:21:44 GMT -4
So what is a good batting average in cricket? How much below a good batter would the average of a bowler be? In baseball, most non-pitching players on a strong team will average between ~.250 and ~.300 with the very best above .300. On the other hand a pitcher will have an average broadly surrounding .125 with the best in the low .200s. The difference is a bit greater. The career batting averages of the Australian captain (Ricky Ponting) and vice-captain (Michael Clarke), both specialist batsmen are about 51 and 46 respectively. These are good averages for batsmen. In this series, Ponting's average was about 16 and Clarke's was 21. By contrast, a specialist bowler will do well to have a batting average of 20, and most are closer to 10. Another interesting indication of the difference between the two sides was that Australia selected 17 different players during the series (teams of 11), while England used only 13. Australia selected nine different specialist batsmen for six specialist batting positions, while England used the same six specialist batsmen throughout the series.
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Post by PeterB on Jan 11, 2011 10:03:51 GMT -4
Only the north part of Sudan is Arabic. Most people in South Sudan are African and Christian.Please don't bring thee thaughts about. It ws the agonyzingtrauma of Lebanon that Christians started saying that they are not Arabs but phoenicians and Islam came from the Islamic conquests so they have to be separated from the Arabs. On the other hand, Islamis here back then said that they belong to pan arabism and some didn't acknowledge the borders of Lebanon.Many countreis have different ppl' s origins. If each ethnic group started saying that they should split it is a tradgedy. People should start thinking that they belong to their country no matter wha treligions and ethnic backgrounds they came from. The problem with this idea is that when a government imposes rules which suit the majority population, or the dominant population, the remainder have no loyalty to their country. This appears to have been very much the case with Sudan. How comfortable would you feel living in Lebanon if all positions in government were occupied by Muslims, and they imposed Sharia Law on the entire population, Muslim or not? The difference here is that the USA at the time of the Civil War was culturally and religiously fairly homogenous, much more so than Sudan is today. There's a huge difference between a Muslim/Animist split and a Baptist/Episcopalian split. But basically everyone speaks the same dialect of Arabic, yes? This isn't the case in Sudan. No, we can't go back in history, but there's no reason not to act now to fix problems from the past. Many countries have found that letting separatist populations leave has resolved problems - East Timor from Indonesia, the various south Slav republics, Ireland from the United Kingdom. And a process like this could easily work the other way. If the two Yemens can merge, why not other Arab states? If their needs are accommodated and culture respected, they should be fine. What I'm reading is that the civil wars were based around ethnic tensions between north and south. Major powers might have stoked the problem, and might have benefited from it. But to say the major powers "created" the civil war is to ignore the evidence.
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Post by PeterB on Jan 11, 2011 8:49:35 GMT -4
It would certainly have made things more difficult for him. Maybe. No, but I am quite happy that I personally can own and use a firearm responsibly to defend my home and family. I understand Giffords said she had a firearm. It didn't help her. Look, I can see how you would feel a lot more secure with a firearm for protection. But personally, the idea doesn't appeal to me, on several grounds: 1. The lack of threat - home invasions are very rare in Australia, and a large proportion of them occur within the criminal subculture. 2. The opportunity for use - I find it hard to ascertain circumstances where possession of a firearm would be useful. If the firearm was properly secured, would I be able to retrieve it in time? 3. Mistaken identity - I don't think I need to explain this. 4. Use within the home - either accidental or deliberate.
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