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Messages - garygreen

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1421
Flat Earth Community / Re: No Transmission Delays to the Moon
« on: February 25, 2015, 05:26:32 PM »
After watching the second video and making at least an attempt at genuine scrutiny and skepticism (what's your excuse, Tom?), I am even more convinced that the communication delays were real.  All that the author is doing is finding especially confusing clips where two people are interrupting and talking over one another and interpreting it in a way that 'proves' his argument.  Confusion, interruption, and talking-over are not at all what I'd expect to hear from actors reading a script.  It's exactly what I'd expect to hear from two people talking on full duplex radios with a time delay.  Do you not see the literally beautiful irony here?

Video 2, example 1

I took the mp3 audio from this NASA archive and made this clip.



Cernan is speaking when Houston interrupts to say they have a picture.  2.5 seconds after the end of the word "Hey" is Cernan's "Yeah?"  2.5 seconds after the end of Houston's sentence is the beginning of Cernan's "Beautiful, babe."  This is exactly what I would expect to hear from someone who just got interrupted over a full duplex operation with a time delay of 2.5 seconds.  It is not what I'd expect from actors reading a script.

The video author asserts that Cernan's "Yeah?" is actually, "You have?"  This isn't entirely unreasonable since NASA's own transcripts record Cernan as saying "You have?  Beautiful, babe."  After listening to the audio myself, I think he's saying "yeah?" in response to being interrupted by Houston.

Video 2, example 3 or 4 or whatever

I ripped the audio from the MPEG from this NASA archive and made this clip.



Cernan's first "Yeah" follows the end Houston's first sentence by nearly three seconds.  Cernan's sentence stops when he hears Houston's second sentence in the middle of his own.  You can even hear Houston's echo in the audio!  As expected, the echo is heard just a little more than 2.5 seconds after it was said by Houston.

I just don't see where the 'FTL' communication is happening.  I've examined three of his examples so far and found exactly what I would expect from full duplex radios on a 2.5 second delay.  His examples, if anything, directly contradict the hoax narrative.

1422
Flat Earth Community / Re: No Transmission Delays to the Moon
« on: February 24, 2015, 06:16:27 PM »
These videos are awful.  I can't believe anyone would take them at face value.

I dunno what audio source he used, but I found two sources: 1) mp3 rip of Restored Apollo 11 EVA from the NASA Youtube channel; and 2) Audio file 175-AAA from this archive.  To my understanding, these both are the air-to-ground broadcasts as they would have been heard from Houston.

I used the most recent version of Audacity (free and open-source) to clip the audio down to the segment relevant to the first example given in the first video.  The two clips were identical, so I'll just display the one from the NASA Youtube video:



I count nearly four whole seconds between the end of Houston's sentence (black) and the response from the Moon (red).  I have no idea how the OP's video arrived at its figure of 1 second.***  Since it lacks the echo found in my sources, I assume he used an audio source that had already been edited.  Because he's an idiot.

The echo is interesting, though.  It sounds like the word "scene."  Guess what word is coming from Houston precisely 2.5 seconds prior...  This is damning not only because it indicates that the communications delays were real, but also because it leads to absurdities in the hoax narrative.  It proves, if Apollo 11 was faked, that NASA was aware of the need to simulate communications delays and was clever enough to do it.  How was NASA able to so obviously blunder a problem of which they were aware and clearly knew how to solve?  And isn't the hoax narrative that these are the voices of actors reading from a script?  How could such mistakes even happen in that scenario?

Ultimately the huge mistake that most of these analyses make is in assuming, as the author of these videos explicitly does, that astronauts will always wait to respond to Houston until Houston has finished its sentence or stopped speaking.  This assumption is totally unfounded and completely unreasonable.

Here's the clip I made.
https://soundcloud.com/garygreen-1/restored-apollo-11-eva

*** I literally just realized that what he's doing is counting the time from the end of the word "scene" to the beginning of the echo.  THE VIDEO ITSELF RECOGNIZES THAT IT IS AN ECHO OF THE WORD "SCENE."  Which, again, follows Houston's use of the word 2.5 seconds after the fact.
 

1423
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Ask a Jew anything.
« on: February 16, 2015, 07:13:30 PM »
Do you believe that finding David's Palace necessarily means that the Biblical narrative of King David is historically accurate?

Why you do believe that the Bible is historically accurate?  This seems like a reasonable question.

1424
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Ask a Jew anything.
« on: February 16, 2015, 06:35:48 PM »
Why do you believe that the things written in the Bible are true?

1425
Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread
« on: February 03, 2015, 12:24:15 AM »
Everything that happened after the Packers game was a freeroll.  I'm never going to turn down my nose at a Super Bowl appearance.  Good season.

And Pete's call was fine.  It absolutely was not the worst call in Super Bowl history.

1426
Flat Earth Theory / Re: Justify this
« on: January 31, 2015, 04:59:40 AM »
I found a black swan.  Therefore, there are no white swans.

1427
Flat Earth Theory / Re: Is a flat earth circular?
« on: January 27, 2015, 03:48:22 AM »
What are you talking about?  What surveyors?  This is a map projection.

If it were purely a map projection, it should look like the classic FE map with a circular Antarctica.

Why?  I'll refer you to this delightful XKCD comic on map projections: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/map_projections.png

I don't know dick about maps, but the original source refers to this as a Constant-Scale Natural Boundary Map.  This book says,
    Whereas conventional maps can be expressed as outward-expanding formulae with well-defined central features and relatively poorly defined edges, Constant Scale Natural Boundary (CSNB) maps have well-defined boundaries that result from natural processes and thus allow spatial and dynamic relationships to be observed in a new way useful to understanding these processes. CSNB mapping presents a new approach to visualization that produces maps markedly different from those produced by conventional cartographic methods.

Also the image I posted shows how they cut up Antarctica.  It's adjacent to the word "key."

1428
Flat Earth Theory / Re: Is a flat earth circular?
« on: January 27, 2015, 12:45:45 AM »
What are you talking about?  What surveyors?  This is a map projection.

http://rightbasicbuilding.com/earth-ocean-currents-polar-views/


1429
Flat Earth Theory / Re: No gravity on Earth
« on: January 15, 2015, 06:00:45 PM »
Are you suggesting that all weights and measures are dependant on where the moon and sun happen to be? Should traders be selling their products during neap tides?

This is maybe my favorite Thork argument.  I don't think you understand how commodities are traded.

Let's suppose we live in some wacky world where I trade commodities by always weighing them out in front of the buyer or seller and for some reason getting to choose the time and place of weighing.  I want to take advantage of the gravitational effects of the Moon to flip 1 kilogram of gold for a profit; so, I buy my kilogram of gold and wait to sell it until the Moon is directly beneath me in its orbit around the Earth (thus pulling the kilogram of gold toward the scale and increasing its weight).

How much extra cash would I net?  Not much.  Newton's Laws predict that the Moon would increase its weight by only 0.0000311 Newtons, or 0.000003171 kilograms-force

Gold currently sells for $40,500 per kilogram.  So, for each kilogram you bought and sold in this manner, you'd net $0.12.

Even if commodities were traded in such an absurd manner, I don't see how this illustrates an inconsistency with gravitation.

*I haven't taken a physics course in over a decade.  Someone correct me if I'm getting these relationship all wrong.  It's a definite possibility.

1430
Flat Earth Community / Re: Fundraising Idea: Task-Based Micro Payments
« on: January 15, 2015, 03:19:04 PM »
I think the OP vastly overestimates the general interest and curiosity in TFES.  If I had been solicited for money (either directly or indirectly) when I arrived, I just would have left and never returned.  I was curious about FET, but not that curious.  I probably would have further assumed that FET wasn't a real thing, but just some sort of weird clickbait scheme.

Even having been here for a bit, I would probably leave if I had to deal with a bunch of popups or solicitations or whatever.  Not that my presence here matters to anything or anyone; I just think others would probably do the same.

My attempt to be constructive: I don't think anyone will want to contribute to a sort of FET general fund; but, I do think you could probably drum up some donations from people like me if you were to plan a detailed experiment and submit it to the community like a grant proposal.  The key word here is "detailed."  Taking the BLE as an example, maybe you could submit a proposal on the boards for a modern update.  Describe the equipment that will be used, your methodology, etc.  Like any experiment, every detail need to be subjected to scrutiny.

I know that none of you are ever going to chart Antarctica, so I obviously would never donate to that.  And I wouldn't donate to a general operating fund to be spent by whomever on whatever.  But I might throw a few bucks at a well-planned experiment.

1431
Flat Earth Theory / Re: No gravity on Earth
« on: January 09, 2015, 06:08:50 PM »


This entire video can be summed up with, "but that's not how I'd have thought it should look."  That's not actually an argument.  It's just a lack of imagination.  And a fallacy.

She should also probably take at least one photography class.

It's a shame you aren't as skeptical of Youtube videos as you are of Wikipedia.  As it turns out, anyone can upload a Youtube video saying whatever they want.  There's no review process.  So it's sort of weird how you just gobble up everything this idiot says.

1432
Flat Earth Community / Re: How many people are in on the conspiracy?
« on: December 13, 2014, 03:03:00 PM »
The point is that an entire world of programmers missed it in a very public open source security project used by millions of computers. Yet you are telling me that, simply because it it open source, that Joe Taylor's somewhat more obscure software project has probably been vetted so that all math is perfectly sound, the code is constructed to flow instantly without any subtle delays, and there are no hidden functions, all without the software reviewers, if it was even ever looked over, knowing what to look for.

Did you not read the links I just posted?  The backdoor wasn't missed.  Wired was writing articles about it in 2007.

1433
Let's talk about Linus Pauling.  Let's also talk about Hoffman-La Roche, the pharmaceutical company that used to dominate the vitamin C market until being convicted of leading a price-fixing cartel in the largest anti-trust case ever decided in the US.  Guess what?  They funded and reviewed Pauling work.  Whoops.

So what?

If you were working for the Army and gave us a study proving that there was no corruption in Army finances, your work would absolutely be invalid.

Legitimate evidence comes from an outside source - external auditors, peer review by unconnected persons, etc. This should not be difficult to understand.


1434
Flat Earth Community / Re: How many people are in on the conspiracy?
« on: December 12, 2014, 04:24:19 PM »
Just because it's open source, it doesn't make it impervious. As I recall it was recently leaked by the Snowden documents that the NSA snuck code into public cryptographic standards by using highly complex and indecipherable advanced mathematics which only few could understand, and written in an inconvenient way. The random number generator produced keys which seemed random but were actually subtly not. This allowed the NSA, knowing how the number was tainted, to calculate the private key from a public key.

Since it was open source, everyone made the same literal justification you made in defense of legitimacy, the software passed several "code reviews," and the world proceeded to use it, basically giving the NSA free reign to access the most sensitive computers and networks as they pleased, without needing to hack anything.

The mere fact that this software was produced by someone receiving checks from the government invalidates its use as a tool for demonstrating the honesty of the government.

You're referring to Dual_EC_DRBG, yeah?

Everything you wrote here is wildly incorrect. 

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2007/11/did_nsa_put_a_secret.html
http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/190
http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/048
http://www.math.ntnu.no/~kristiag/drafts/dual-ec-drbg-comments.pdf

1436
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson
« on: December 07, 2014, 06:32:58 PM »
I can't seem to find the post I wanted to quote, so I'll just wing it.  Also, this isn't really meant to be a omg-you're-so-wrong post, but just an explanation of why I believe that people of color in America are still systematically oppressed.  If anyone is interested, I highly recommend the book Racism without Racists.  It's obviously a much more well-researched and persuasive text than this post will be, and you can find it online for free pretty easily.

Quote from: pp
You probably think I'm racist.
For whatever it's worth, I unequivocally do not think that you're a racist, and nothing you've said in this thread makes me think otherwise.  Our viewpoints likely only diverge from one another in just a few places.

I also don't think that systematic marginalization of people of color in America requires anyone in it to hate racial minorities.

Quote from: pp
On institutional racism.
I don't think that racism originates in institutions.  My original statement was that people of color are, in my view, systematically oppressed.  By that I mean that they are discriminated against and marginalized systematically, i.e. as a class; and, that this oppression/discrimination/marginalization is exogenous to skin color.  I believe that that marginalization comes from a multiplicity of sources, some of them institutional (more on that shortly), but most of them diffuse and subtle.

Quote from: pp
On falsifiability
Statements that take the form "All x are y," or "No x is y," are definitely falsifiable.  All swans are white.  No swan is black.  Totally falsifiable.  I don't see why similar statements, like, "No race in America is systematically marginalized," can't be falsified in principle.  It might be difficult, but I see no reason why we can't treat it as a null hypothesis and get to work crunching numbers.

Ultimately, though, I dislike falsifiability as a criterion for belief in this arena.  It's too close to logical positivism for my comfort.  The premise that falsifiability should be my criterion for belief is itself unfalsifiable.  The preponderance of evidence and a healthy dose of skepticism is good enough for me.

Quote from: pp
There is no evidence to support your claims.
This was your original claim, so I'll round things off here.  Again, I suspect that you will find these things unpersuasive, and that's no big deal.  But, for whatever it's worth, here are some of the broad strokes that cause me to believe that people of color are marginalized in American society:

(1) The most obvious in my mind is that people of color in America describe themselves as marginalized and without equality of opportunity.  There is an abundance of narratives to this effect in both academic and popular literature/media.  Not only are the narratives consistent with one another, but also they're consistent with the narratives of other peoples we know were/are oppressed and marginalized.  I have no reason or method to dispute such consistency across millions of accounts.

(2)  There's plenty of empirical research that demonstrates the existence of racial bias in many settings.  It's difficult for me to believe that this bias is unrelated to the material disparity between whites and people of color.  Here is a typical example:

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-a0035663.pdf
    We find converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children.

(3)  There are plenty of institutional sources of marginalization and oppression that don't on face discriminate against people of color, and thus can't be solved by Equal Protection.  Property taxes are an excellent example.  Poor urban communities (mostly people of color) face a massive disparity in spending on education, parks, libraries, police and fire, road maintenance, etc.  That white students overwhelmingly get better access to education alone is, to me, hugely debilitating to black communities.

(4)  History is still super relevant to me, and I think that centuries and centuries of literal enslavement are very relevant to the material conditions of today's minority communities.  Even if it were true that racial bias largely disappeared in the second half of the 20th century, I don't see how that alone can even come close to equalizing racial disparity in America today.

These are just some examples, but I'm sure you get the idea at this point.

Quote from: pp
On WWII
Entirely lightheartedly, I'll totally have a history fight with you.  I dunno anything about your family's migration (obviously), but I'd be shocked if one couldn't make the case that your current citizenship is a consequence of WWII.  And your current citizenship has an obvious impact on your current/potential material conditions.  It's hard for me to see how WWII is 'over' in that sense, either for you or your grandfather.

1437
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson
« on: November 25, 2014, 09:13:51 PM »
Also, while I'm sorry that things may not have been great 45 years ago, that was 45 years ago, just 6 years after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. No one's claiming that America hasn't had issues with institutionalised racism half a century ago. My grandfather remembers WW2, but he doesn't act like the war hasn't ended - because it has.

So I'm guessing that your grandfather doesn't live in Poland. 

But whatever, you're using WW2 as an example of an event with no lingering effects, so I'm pretty sure you're just trolling me.

1438
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson
« on: November 25, 2014, 06:42:25 PM »
systematic oppression of millions of people of color.
Yeah, we're not very concerned about made-up shit that people keep claiming over and over without producing a shred of evidence. Go figure.

Two things: (1) how much evidence would you like?  And of what type: narratives, statistics, other?  What would you consider to be credible evidence?  You tell me your criteria for what would constitute sound evidence supporting my claim, and I'll do my best to provide it if it exists.  I'll put it in a new thread or something to keep from cluttering this one.

(2) Having had this conversation before, my guess is that we simply have incommensurate opinions on the definition or criterion for oppression.  You likely believe something to the effect that, "So long as the government doesn't overtly and legally restrict your rights, you are not oppressed."  I believe that power in general and oppression in particular operate much more broadly, diffusely, and subtly.

they were accused by the mob of being police-hired instigators whose sole job was to discredit the riot.

Well, that's actually happened before.  Like, a bunch of times.  There are plenty of folks alive in Ferguson today who remember those tactics being used by state and federal authorities.  They remember that the FBI was carrying out political assassinations against black community members at least as recently as 1969.

1439
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson
« on: November 25, 2014, 06:07:42 PM »
Let me back up one small step and briefly apologize.  I'm doing the whole 'everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot' thing that I dislike so much in others.  Like many, I have strong feelings on this topic.

No, that is not the underlying cause of the looting. People just like to loot when there's a good excuse to do it. Also, the majority of the stores looted were small businesses owned by minorities.

We probably have incommensurate opinions here.  I think that the riots are fundamentally caused by the belief in these citizens that the police are a violent, adversarial force that targets people of color.  I don't think that this belief is arbitrary or asinine, and I think that it reflects an empirically demonstrable bias/discrimination/oppression/whatever of persons of color in America.

What exactly is systematic and state-sponsored about this?

The shooting of Michael Brown was state-sponsored, and many people of color who distrust the police do so precisely because the use of force by police feels (and empirically is) disproportionally targeted at them.

And I mean today. Not in the past. Sure, there are some pricks who are racist, but there are no laws that uphold racism.

In this specific case there is evidence to back up an assault and that shots were fired in self defense in what seemed to be a struggle (backed up by the autopsy). Are you telling me it's a conspiracy to frame a black teenager so that the blacks will stay in their place? Do you have specific examples and laws to back up your outrage?

It's at this point that I don't know where to go in the discussion.  I don't mean that backhandedly, but we probably simply have incommensurate opinions on the degree to which racial inequality still exists in America.  I think racial inequality in America today is still quite pronounced.  No, we don't have laws that explicitly prohibit people of color from voting or whatever, but I don't think racial inequality can be measured or understood in such narrow terms.  Jim Crow laws weren't actual laws, but they undoubtedly had a material impact on people of color in their day.  Racial inequality doesn't require conspiracies or state-sponsorship.

Also, remember that there are thousands of people living in Ferguson today who were alive and remember when the federal government absolutely did target people of color as threats to national security and treated them as such.

1440
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: R.I.P. Ferguson
« on: November 25, 2014, 04:56:43 PM »
White people: super concerned with justice in the context of economic goods owned by other whites, less so with justice in the context of systematic oppression of millions of people of color.

Yes, I am sure no "people of color" were affected by "justice in the context of economic goods" with their own community being burned down. Get off your high horse and stop being so pious.

Christ.  I'm sure there were.  Obviously not my point.  My point is that the same people who are so loudly decrying the injustice of looting a Walgreens don't seem to give a shit that the underlying cause of the looting is systematic, society-wide, state-sponsored injustice.

Really, though, super sorry to hear about what happened to a Walgreens.  That's awful.  The injustice of it all!  How untoward!

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