Britney's Piers Posted May 17, 2012 Share Posted May 17, 2012 If scientists can claim that last year was the second warmest in recorded history then anything's possible. I'm with Nuggets - I only believe what I see with my own eyes now. It makes pretty much no difference to my life on a day to day level. For all I know the moon landings never happened, nor the second world war, nor the English civil war. Apparently there is a country called Australia, although I've never been there so it could be a clever fabrication. What difference would any of this actually make? I agree somewhat, I'm maybe not as paranoid. Some events in history though are taken wholly on faith for some reason, we don't know if Shakespeare wrote all his plays, or even whether such a person existed, but this is taught to every child in school as fact. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fluffy666 Posted May 17, 2012 Share Posted May 17, 2012 If scientists can claim that last year was the second warmest in recorded history then anything's possible. I'm with Nuggets - I only believe what I see with my own eyes now. It makes pretty much no difference to my life on a day to day level. Why do you believe what you see with your eyes? Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Here is an alternative reason: TPTB have a strong dislike for science in general. Why? Because the idea of empiricism - putting the data ahead of personal opinions and beliefs, being provably wrong, etc are the antithesis of the way the power hungry think, and science has a habit of coming up with results they don't like. The whole postmodern attack on science - which your statement above encapsulates quite succinctly - is fed to people as a way of discrediting science and the conclusions it comes up with. After all, you are unembarrassedly declaring that your personal, subjective experience trumps that of all the scientists who have spent centuries carefully taking temperature measurements. For all I know the moon landings never happened, nor the second world war, nor the English civil war. Apparently there is a country called Australia, although I've never been there so it could be a clever fabrication. What difference would any of this actually make? This. If you are not prepared to listen (with appropriate skepticism) to what the experts in the field have to say - being prepared to do your own investigation* as required - but instead simply listen to whatever explanation sounds best and appeals to 'what you think you know', then any charlatan that comes along can and will take advantage of you. If you are hiking in a remote forest, it's not a good idea to throw away your compass and rely on your gut instinct.. The whole 'Apollo-hoax' thing may seem harmless.. but the idea is to cast further doubt on 'official' or 'scientific' sources. *Investigation does no mean 'Look up any site you can on the internet and agree with whatever they say'. A genuine skeptic applies more skepticism to those he/she agrees with. Confirmation bias is a killer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frank Hovis Posted May 17, 2012 Share Posted May 17, 2012 *Investigation does no mean 'Look up any site you can on the internet and agree with whatever they say'. A genuine skeptic applies more skepticism to those he/she agrees with. Confirmation bias is a killer. Blast. That's my PhD down the tubes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dorkins Posted May 17, 2012 Share Posted May 17, 2012 I think my main problem with the people who think Apollo was a hoax is that they rarely do serious technical analysis. Don't just tell me that the landers weren't big enough to hold the equipment NASA claimed they did, or that there wouldn't have been enough fuel, or that the temperature extremes on the Moon would have been too severe for the astronauts to survive: show me the numbers. Unless they can really show that putting people on the Moon was well beyond 1960s technology, they don't have much of a case. The stuff about who was in which secret society, where are the archives stored, and playing around with TV clips and photographs is all just noise. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fluffy666 Posted May 17, 2012 Share Posted May 17, 2012 Blast. That's my PhD down the tubes. Sometimes people are wrong on the Internet. Surprising but true. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest eight Posted May 17, 2012 Share Posted May 17, 2012 I agree somewhat, I'm maybe not as paranoid. Some events in history though are taken wholly on faith for some reason, we don't know if Shakespeare wrote all his plays, or even whether such a person existed, but this is taught to every child in school as fact. I think because the word "history" has a kind of definitive quality about it. Perhaps we should refer to the historical narrative or something instead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest eight Posted May 17, 2012 Share Posted May 17, 2012 Why do you believe what you see with your eyes? Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. People like you scare the shit out of me. Seriously. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry Monk Posted May 17, 2012 Share Posted May 17, 2012 I believe NASA when they said men walked on the moon. But then I also believed Gordon Brown when he told me there would be no return to Boom and Bust. Gullible, that's my problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sbn Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 i've got to add my twopenneth. For me, its the footage of the lander departing the moon. Just looks horribly fake, and who tilted the camera upwards to track it as it ascended? I've heard explainatuons, but jeez, its a difficult shot, why take it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fluffy666 Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 People like you scare the shit out of me. Seriously. What, people who are genuinely skeptical? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leroast Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 Why do you believe what you see with your eyes? Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. People like you scare the shit out of me. Seriously. Fluffy has a point The most famous demonstration of this "inattention blindness" is the invisible gorilla, a video-based experiment created by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Viewers are asked to pay close attention to a specific aspect of a basketball game, and around half completely fail to see a person in a gorilla suit walk slowly across the screen, beat their chest and walk off again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leroast Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 Heres the full article, worth reading in its entirety. The grand delusion: What you see is not what you get Your senses are your windows on the world, and you probably think they do a fair job at capturing an accurate depiction of reality. Don't kid yourself. Sensory perception - especially vision - is a figment of your imagination. "What you're experiencing is largely the product of what's inside your head," says psychologist Ron Rensink at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "It's informed by what comes in through your eyes, but it's not directly reflecting it." Given the basic features of your visual system, it couldn't be any other way. For example, every 5 seconds or so, you blink. Yet unless you're thinking about it, as you probably are right now, you don't notice the blackouts because your brain edits them out. Blinking is just the tip of the iceberg. Even when your eyes are open they're only taking in a fraction of the visual information that is available. In the centre of your retina is a dense patch of photoreceptor cells about 1 millimetre across. This is the fovea, the visual system's sweet spot where perception of detail and colour is at its best. "When you move away from the fovea, visual acuity falls away really quickly, and colour vision disappears," says Rensink. About 10 degrees to the side of the fovea, visual acuity is only about 20 per cent of the maximum. What that means is you can only capture a tiny percentage of the visual field in full colour and detail at any one time. Hold your hand at arm's length and look at your thumbnail. That is roughly the area covered by the fovea. Most of the rest is captured in fuzzy monochrome. And yet vision doesn't actually feel like this: it feels like a movie. That, in part, is because your eyes are constantly flitting over the visual scene, fixing on one spot for a fraction of a second then moving on. These jerky eye movements are called saccades and they happen about 3 times a second and last up to 200 milliseconds. With each fixation your visual system grabs a bite of high-resolution detail which it somehow weaves together to create an illusion of completeness. That's remarkable given that during saccades themselves, you are effectively blind. Your eyes don't stop transmitting information as they lurch from one fixation to the next, but for about 100 milliseconds your brain is not processing it. Look in the mirror and deliberately flick your eyes from left to right and back again. You won't see your eyes move - not because the movement is too fast (other people's saccades are visible), but because your brain isn't processing the information. Given that you perform approximately 150,000 saccades every day, that means your visual system is "offline" for a total of about 4 hours during each waking day even without blinking (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 12, p 466). Yet you don't notice anything amiss. Exactly how your brain weaves such fragmentary information into the smooth technicolour movie that we experience as reality remains a mystery. One leading idea is that it makes a prediction and then uses the foveal "spotlight" to verify it. "We create something internally and then we check, check, check," says Rensink. "Essentially we experience the brain's best guess about what is happening now." In conjuring up this "now", the visual system has to do something even more remarkable: predict the future. Information striking the fovea cannot be relayed instantaneously to conscious perception: first it has to travel down the optic nerve and be processed by the brain. This takes several hundred milliseconds, by which time the world has moved on. And so the brain makes a prediction about what the world will look like about 200 milliseconds into the future, and that is what you see. Without this future projection you would be unable to catch a ball, dodge moving objects or walk around without crashing into things. There's another huge hole in the visual system that can render you oblivious to things that should be unmissable. The jerky movements that shift your fovea around the visual scene don't happen at random - they are directed by your brain's attentional system. Sometimes you consciously decide what to attend to, such as when you read. At other times your attention is grabbed by a movement in your peripheral vision or an unexpected noise. The problem with attention is that it is a limited resource. For reasons that remain unknown, most people are unable to keep track of more than four or five moving objects at once. That can lead your visual system to be oblivious to things that are staring you in the face. The most famous demonstration of this "inattention blindness" is the invisible gorilla, a video-based experiment created by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Viewers are asked to pay close attention to a specific aspect of a basketball game, and around half completely fail to see a person in a gorilla suit walk slowly across the screen, beat their chest and walk off again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PopGun Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 Imho the moon landings were real, but the Americans just couldn't help themselves and 'overcooked' the footage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nuggets Mahoney Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 Imho the moon landings were real, but the Americans just couldn't help themselves and 'overcooked' the footage. I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PopGun Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about I'm guessing most of the visual feedback from the moon wasn't that visually interesting for the folks back home in their living rooms, so maybe some 'editing' was involved. Hence why some of the footage looked a bit dodgy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nuggets Mahoney Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 I'm guessing most of the visual feedback from the moon wasn't that visually interesting for the folks back home in their living rooms, so maybe some 'editing' was involved. Hence why some of the footage looked a bit dodgy. To me that photo I posted looks studio lit. That is nowhere near the same as asserting that it *is* studio lit. Once more photographs come from the lunar surface from other sources I'll have a better idea of what photos taken in natural light on the Moon look like. Maybe, even probably, they do come out looking studio lit. 20 years ago I kind of expected that more would come in my lifetime. I doubt that now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nuggets Mahoney Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 ... I should mention that one of the reasons why Apollo photography looks a tad unnatural to some people's eyes is that the astronauts were using 70mm film instead of the much more common 35mm format. One of the quirks of 70mm film is that is has a much narrower depth of field than 35mm. If you take a picture of someone with 70mm it's much more likely that the background will be out of focus and unreal looking Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Riedquat Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 I'd expect the lighting on the Moon to look a little different from that on Earth, in particular when it comes to shadows. The major difference is that there isn't an atmosphere to give a bright sky that will fill in the shadows somewhat (although there will still be some from the surrounding landscape). It's not unlikely that that would give a studio lit effect, and of course even distant hills will be as clear as anything nearby, focusing aside. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
happy_renting Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 The spacecraft was moving so fast the time spent in the van allen belts was negligible. Each astronaut was subjected to no more radiation than a typical chest xray. Interestingly the astronauts did observe weird occasional flashes, which I think were attributed to cosmic rays going in their eyes. I think a recent study showed that astronauts show more cataracts due to their increased radiation exposure. Astronauts should wear tin foil hats. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
happy_renting Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 ... I should mention that one of the reasons why Apollo photography looks a tad unnatural to some people's eyes is that the astronauts were using 70mm film instead of the much more common 35mm format. One of the quirks of 70mm film is that is has a much narrower depth of field than 35mm. If you take a picture of someone with 70mm it's much more likely that the background will be out of focus and unreal looking You are demonstrating, with this nonsense, that you know nothing about optics or photography. Depth of field is a function of lens design and aperture. Film does not have a 'depth of field'. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nuggets Mahoney Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 You are demonstrating, with this nonsense, that you know nothing about optics or photography. Depth of field is a function of lens design and aperture. Film does not have a 'depth of field'. I do but I'm trying to keep it simple. The film format you use dictates your focal length for a desired angle of view edit: But yes I could have used more tactical wording. In my experience trying to explain f-numbers, shutter speeds and depth of field is 2nd only to fractional reserve banking in the eye-glazing department edit #2: would this work for you - 'the combination of camera equipment the astronauts were using leaned towards a narrower depth of field than consumer cameras back on Earth'? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
corevalue Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about This photo really looks like a fake. The foreground has deep shadows, but the hill on the horizon appears uniformly lit. Surely, as there is no overhead light (the moons sky being dark), the left of that hill should be dark. And why does the ground texture change a few yards behing the astronaut? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frank Hovis Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 This photo really looks like a fake. The foreground has deep shadows, but the hill on the horizon appears uniformly lit. Surely, as there is no overhead light (the moons sky being dark), the left of that hill should be dark. And why does the ground texture change a few yards behing the astronaut? It's from Space 1999. Soon to be remade as Space 2099 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/space-2099-television-remake-288601 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nuggets Mahoney Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 And why does the ground texture change a few yards behing the astronaut? Two possible answers spring to mind... a. Because it was set-up in a studio by Stanley Kubrick using front-projection which Kubrick later confessed to through coded references in The Shining b. Because the combination of camera equipment the astronauts were using leaned towards a narrower depth of field than consumer cameras back on Earth Take your pick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frank Hovis Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 Two possible answers spring to mind... a. Because it was set-up in a studio by Stanley Kubrick using front-projection which Kubrick later confessed to through coded references in The Shining b. Because the combination of camera equipment the astronauts were using leaned towards a narrower depth of field than consumer cameras back on Earth Take your pick It's (a) isn't it. I don't buy this 70mm argument. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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