9681

Flat Earth Media / Re: Save the Repository

« on: January 16, 2015, 07:25:39 AM »

I encourage the OP to just take the lead and go wild with the idea. He can do some research and figure out how to do it. If he can find a solution then maybe others here will help run it through the program. Once he is able to digitize the material he can submit it to the society and it will be uploaded to the repository.

Good luck!

9682

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Coriolis effect in FET

« on: January 16, 2015, 06:49:34 AM »

In the classic model, an explanation given in the past has been that the sun is stirring up wind systems as its warm spotlight passes over the equator. Heat causes a change in pressure, which puts wind systems into motion. After the sun's spotlight leaves an area the winds are sucked in from the North and South to meet in the middle. Over eons this has caused the wind systems in the North to generally move one way and wind systems in the South to generally move the other way. Bullets and artillery shells are affected by this wind, often mistaken for the rotation of the earth.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Coriolis effect in FET

« on: January 16, 2015, 06:45:38 AM »

The answer we've given in the past to this question is that the stars have a slight gravitational field. This is how the variation of g at high altitudes is explained. The stars are also rotating above the earth at one rotation per 24 hours. That bullets and artillery shells are are deflected is because the stars are pulling the bullet.

Why do storms always rotate anti-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern....?

This is explained in the bi-polar model by counter-rotating celestial systems which grind against each other like a spinning pair of gears.



The gravitation of the spinning celestial gears overhead pulls wind systems clockwise or counter-clockwise. The gears are centered over the North and South Pole. The layout of the earth in the bi-polar model is depicted with two poles. Here is a general illustration:



At the equator we can see this gear system begin pulling away from itself, which should be impossible if the earth were a globe.





If the earth were a globe the stars should be an equal distance away from each other at all times as they pass across the sky, and not physically spreading apart and growing in distance from one another. This is evidence that the stars are operating in the manner described.

9684

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Eclipses

« on: January 16, 2015, 06:41:50 AM »

The only method NASA uses to predict the eclipse is the Saros Cycle. The Saros Cycle is an Ancient Babylonian method based on recurring patterns in the sky. The Ancient Babylonians were Flat Earthers. Flat Earth Theory is better.

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Flat Earth Community / Re: Fundraising Idea: Task-Based Micro Payments

« on: January 16, 2015, 06:03:11 AM »

Do you think that real scientific organizations all operate on zero budgets and their scientists all work for free?

Tom, how many times have you dismissed "real scientific organizations" because the "real scientists" were paid to produce the results that their employers wanted.  Is this what you really want for TFES?

We are already accused of faking research. If we had an actual budget we would get more and better quality research. Isn't that what you have been asking for since you got here?

Still a no, in my case.  It's backhanded and sleazy, the sort of thing I'd expect to find on a less-than-reputable website, and this kind of campaign really doesn't sit well with me.  I know it's your company and all, and I mean no offense, that's just the way I feel about it.  I'm not interested in being associated with a website with these practices at all.

I think the T-Shirts and the book(s) are much more in the direction we need to look for fundraising efforts, and I concur that registering as a nonprofit and supporting charitable organizations would be good for us.  I don't oppose ideas for fundraising in general, but this one, scientific focus or no, is just not something I'd recommend for any website who doesn't want to appear shady, and it's not something I can participate in at all.  I do this crap at work because I have to, and my employer graciously works around my school schedule.  Outside of that context, I want nothing to do with it.

How is offering two issues of Smithsonian Magazine with the copy of the new Earth Not a Globe book sleazy or backhanded? That's the least offensive form of advertising I can imagine. We would certainly get more interest than if we were to sell the book outright. We would be basically giving the book away for free, as well as a popular science magazine.

I would be more offended if I went to a Hollow Earth site and they were trying to push their books on me for profit, withholding research about a Hollow Earth unless I pay them money. My idea is a less sleazy way to fund-raise. The research is being given out for free. You want us to withhold research from the public unless we get paid in cash. That's terrible.

A disclaimer can be made that the "Smithsonian Magazine is partnered with the Flat Earth Society to bring you this offer." Anyone with an IQ above room temperature could figure out that money is somehow exchanging hands. It's not really that backhanded.

9686

Flat Earth Community / Re: Fundraising Idea: Task-Based Micro Payments

« on: January 16, 2015, 02:40:43 AM »

I would have to say that I would have to bow out of the society as a whole were this to happen.  I'm not at all comfortable supporting a group that resorts to the lowest common denominator methods of internet marketing.    The whole idea makes me sick to my stomach.

Here is another idea:

Instead of using low tier offers which are geared towards a general audience (ie, enter your zip code for a free box of Cheerios) we can take the time to pick out offers relevant to science and technology. It will be more time consuming to find these offers, and they sometimes need approval before running, but they exist. Right now Smithsonian Magazine is offering to pay $9 for signups for their 2 issue free trial. Users will receive 2 issues of their magazine and then have the option of signing up with Smithsonian for more.

We would get users to sign up with something like this:

Download Earth Not a Globe 2015 Expanded Edition and
Get 2 Free Issues of Smithsonian Magazine

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Flat Earth Community / Re: Fundraising Idea: Task-Based Micro Payments

« on: January 16, 2015, 02:30:21 AM »

The main problem I have with this idea, Tom ... is why are we fundraising?

There are a lot of ideas going around that require money. The projects we work on would be decided democratically.

I don't care about Antarctica.

What do you care about? Raising money for the sake of it seems a little odd.

No it does not seem odd. The goal of any organization, non-profit or otherwise, should be to raise money and remain liquid.

If this society is ever to achieve its goals it needs capital. Research needs compensation. Expeditions to foreign lands require cash. Experiments need dollars. Simply getting an article peer reviewed and distributed requires investment.

Do you think that real scientific organizations all operate on zero budgets and their scientists all work for free?

What do you hope to gain? I can only assume you hope to get media coverage with a similar story to "hollow earth seeks to find entrance". If its purely raising our profile, I'm sure we can do that another way for similar effect without shaking down all our visitors for loose change.

I am asking for ideas for how capital can be raised without becoming unattractive. So far I have seen put downs and zero effort.

If you'd said "We must redo the Bedford level experiment properly" I could at least understand that you had a specific purpose and motive. To fix a specific problem. But "I want to raise funds for something" suggests you are looking to add a process without an end goal.

If a redo of the Belford Canal experiment is what you would like to campaign for you would need to get the entire community on your side. My side right now is "lets figure out how to raise capital to do the interesting things we want to do".

As I've said before, if TFES became a registered charity and revenue went to a good cause - say a children's hospital or education materials for disadvantaged or disabled kids, I'd give you all the help my time allowed. But I can't get excited about a never ending fund to send a balloon into the stratosphere or buy a virgin galactic ticket.

Why would we raise funds and give it to children for education materials? We already pay our taxes to people to do that. This is the Flat Earth Society. We should be raising funds to further Flat Earth research.

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Flat Earth Community / Re: Fundraising Idea: Task-Based Micro Payments

« on: January 15, 2015, 08:01:00 AM »

they get to talk to a Flat Earther

We hire out indian contractors

I think we can pop that idea in the bin, straight away. If we aren't honest about our methods, why would anyone think we are honest in our answers?

I would be happy if a machine could copy and paste the answer, but an indian contractor would have to do. If I was personally sitting there in the chat room all day I would just be copy-pasting answers anyway. Does it really matter if we hire people to do it?

They get to see the answer that a Flat Earther made. "Ask a Flat Earther" is not false advertising. I don't see why it matters who is copy-pasting the answer.

Honestly, I'm not really feeling this idea. What are we trying to achieve? Are YOU going to go to Antarctica? Personally its a bit cold and I'd struggle to get the time off work. Ignore the method of transaction, I don't know why you'd collect money for a grand experiment? What would it prove? That the earth is flat? What experiment would achieve that?

As I said, this would just be a general fund-raising tactic. I don't care about Antarctica. But I am interested in funding large projects for the community to work on. The community would decide which direction we go by democratic vote.

Many thousands of people from all over the world come to the Flat Earth Society website brimming with questions and curiosity. How could this or that work. You know the questions are endless. They look at the main site and leave confused and disappointed, with none of their questions answered. It takes an especially interested person to find the forums, register an account, and fight for a flat earther to talk to. If we could somehow turn those questions into money it would be the perfect way to fund this society.

If we were going down the route of selling people's zip codes or e-mail addresses (trading personal information for monetary gain) and harassing people to interact or divulge interests and data, why wouldn't we just put ads on the site? Get click money? Or up the price of our T-shirts 50 cents? Or ask for $50 donations when we get requests for interviews?

Banner money is insignificant compared to forcing $1 or more out of every visitor with questions, as I described. The price you get from every banner view is often on the range of 10 cents per 1000 views in a pay per view model.

We wouldn't be selling people's data. We never have their data. The companies running the offers might. But getting your information tracked somewhere that you are interested in a aerospace engineering degree from a quick "Back to School" survey you did is simply the price you need to pay if you want personalized attention..

In summary I think there are smarter and less intrusive ways to monetise, but I'd only be interested if TFES became an official charity and used its name and power to raise money for something I'd deem worthwhile. Sending you and Pongo to Antartica may be amusing, but its not a good use of funds. Sorry Tom.

If you have a better way of funding the society I would like to hear it. I can tell you straight away that banner ads can't even pay for hosting, raising t-shirt prices by 50 cents won't provide any significant funds, and reputable news organizations don't pay for interviews.

9689

Flat Earth Community / Re: Fundraising Idea: Task-Based Micro Payments

« on: January 15, 2015, 03:29:43 AM »

I kind of like the last example I had with this technology. It would definitely take a load off our shoulders from answering the daily basic questions, allowing us to focus on the new and interesting. In addition it would provide us the funding we need. It also provides the public service of letting the masses know about Flat Earth Theory. We mainly would need to get Daniel on board.

For transparency, there would be a way to make the reporting statistics open to the public, so that the money is more visible to ensure that nothing nefarious is going on, showing that the amount we claim to earn matches the amount we claim to have in our research fund.

If the reorganization of the Zetetic Council goes through, our meetings with the official Flat Earth Society members could even lean more towards "what should we do with the money?" where everyone can vote on a plan, or suggest one of their own.

9690

Flat Earth Community / Re: Fundraising Idea: Task-Based Micro Payments

« on: January 15, 2015, 03:09:02 AM »

I have another idea for this, but this would require the participation of Daniel. But he said that we could help out with the main site.

The vast majority of the public comes to the Flat Earth Society, visits the main page of the site, and then leaves unsatisfied. Only fraction actually registers a forums account to grill us. On the front page of the website what if we had a feature "Ask a Flat Earther"? The user asks his or her question and is prompted to complete an offer with a message explaining that our time is valuable, that the offer can be completed quickly at no cost to them, and that proceeds go towards scientific experiments and expeditions. Once the offer is completed a chat window pops up and a live operator talks to them.

We hire out indian contractors who will, for 15 cents a question, do a search of the forum, a search of ENAG, or a search of the Wiki, and provides the public with their copy-pasted answer. We take the rest of the money from the offers completed and put it into a fund. The public gets their limitless questions answered, they get to talk to a Flat Earther, and everyone is happy. Meanwhile we work on the backend to keep making answers for questions through projects such as the new ENAG book.

Thus, via the power of curiosity and public attention, The Flat Earth Society is turned into a well funded research organization.

9691

Flat Earth Community / Fundraising Idea: Task-Based Micro Payments

« on: January 14, 2015, 11:21:53 PM »

I was thinking how we would go about fundraising for a big project like the one pongo posted on the other forum. He wants to organize a $4 Million Dollar expedition to Antarctica.

As one of my personal hobbies, I operate a small marketing company. We specialize in providing innovative ways for websites to collect micropayments for their content. The dream in the idea of micropayments has always been for content creators on the internet to collect a small sum of money (ie. $0.10, $0.25, or $1) in exchange for viewing or downloading their content. Unfortunately in practice this has never really worked out for two reasons:

1. Banks almost universally charge a minimum transfer fee which does not lend well to very small transactions. Banks that charge a flat percentage are hard to find.

2. People are not really willing to pay money for content. It's a turnoff on the web.

This is where my marketing company comes in. Instead of charging money, we provide a way for website owners to put a popup gateway on their links so that when a user visits a page or attempts to download a file they are given the option of either paying a small fee or completing a non-intrusive offer to access the material. This offer takes between 10 seconds and one minute to complete. Examples of offers are:

- Provide your email address for a Free $10 KFC Gift Card
- Complete a Back to School Survey
- Enter to win a trip to Disneyworld
- Register an account on a Clash of Kings web strategy game
- Provide your zip code to receive a Free Box of Cheerios

We have hundreds of such offers in our database. The pop up would give users a choice to select which offer they are most interested in. They are usually given a choice of 7 to 10 offers to select from. In exchange for their time they receive the content and the hosting website gets the money (usually around $1 an offer, or even more). Users do not actually have to buy anything on the following pages of that offer for parent website to get paid. Payment is issued to the website as soon as the fields on the first page of the offer are filled out.

Now how can we use this tool for our benefit?

Using such a tool, we can provide an alternative way for users to donate towards science experiments and expeditions. Here are a few examples for how we could use something like this:

- We can create a kickstarter-type page and ask for donations, with the option of completing a 10 second offer on the lowest tier. This would attract passerbies who might want to put in some sort of minimal effort in appreciation or curiosity, but don't want to contribute cash money.

- We might integrate the code into the New Post button on a certain forum, in order to provide a barrier to, say, ask a question to the Flat Earthers. If we had a dollar for every question that got posted to us over the years, we would be rich. When making a post a pop up would come up and kindly explain that our time is valuable to us, the tasks take only seconds to complete, and that proceeds will go towards an expedition to Antarctica (or whatever the current project is).

- A timer could be set so that once every 3 days visitors are asked to complete an offer for continued access to the forum. Although, some may take issue with this.

There might be other ideas we can use this with as well. I'm not necessarily saying that we should go for the $4 Million Dollar Antarctica trip, but that it might be a feasible way to raise money in general for the various projects we want to work on. Until we have funds a lot of these things are merely pipe dreams. The goal for using this tool would be to balance intrusiveness and fundraising.

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Flat Earth Projects / Proposal to create the Earth Not a Globe Forum

« on: January 14, 2015, 09:49:55 PM »

This is a proposal to create the editor's forum for the new Earth Not a Globe book.

 - The forum will be called Earth Not a Globe Workshop

 - Earth Not a Globe Workshop will be open to the public

 - Moderators will be Tsunami, Tintagel, jora, Thork, Secret User, Myself, in order to over moderate as, suggested by Tintagel

 - Moderators may elect to demoderate themselves at request

 - Guidelines for discussion etiquette will be created and stickied by Tintagel, at her reconnaissance

 - Content, format, and direction of writing will be undecided in this proposal and discussed in that forum, once created

 - An appropriate thread with formatting directions will be stickied once a consensus is met

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Flat Earth Community / Re: Shape of daylight on a disc

« on: January 14, 2015, 02:19:13 AM »

You are making a false assumption, and then calling us liars when we can't prove your false assumption is correct.

Please explain where my assumptions are false, and provide explanation of the mechanism that produces different predictions.

You are assuming that exactly half of the disc is lit by the sun on the equinoxes.  You have no evidence that this is so.  In our model sunlight is diffused and propagated by the atmoplane, becoming an oblong spotlight.  Tom's illustrations summarize it rather well, I think.

False. We regularly post live cam links to document sunrise an sunset times including time-lapsed records for a year. I can only understand your refusal to accept reality as willful ignorance. You need only look at the sky on an equinox to disprove Tom's cartoons.

Please link us to the research you claim to have made here, since you can't seem to find any official research on the matter.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Tides

« on: January 13, 2015, 04:20:27 PM »

First, the sun is much closer in FET and it still puts out the same heat ... obviously.

As mentioned Rowbotham has entire chapters devoted to tides in which he documents the maths in excruciating detail.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/za/za30.htm

LOL. You guys should really abandon SBR. He demonstrates within the first few paragraphs how little he ever understood.

Such as?

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Flat Earth Community / Re: Shape of daylight on a disc

« on: January 13, 2015, 03:04:13 AM »

Second, is there some reason you believe that I've claimed any scientific credentials?

http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=15565.msg291595#msg291595

My Ph.D. is in OR. I taught undergraduate physics, graduate law, graduate business, graduate math, graduation computer science. My publications are in OR, Comp Sci., OM, AI, and physics. I've worked as a contractor for the DOD, FBI, GAO, and NASA.

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Flat Earth Community / Re: Shape of daylight on a disc

« on: January 13, 2015, 12:35:01 AM »

On the equinoxes, the sun illuminates everywhere on earth for 12 hours. Its "spotlight" covers exactly 50% of the earth.

Which scientist studied the earth from every point on its surface on this day to prove this?

Why would you require proof, especially from a single scientist's study? Did you hold Rowbotham to the same level of evidence?

I expected that RE'ers had some level of evidence behind their facts. Published studies, that sort of thing.

I assume Google searches work for you.

From Wikipedia article on Equinox:

References
1 United States Naval Observatory (2010-06-10). "Earth's Seasons: Equinoxes, Solstices, Perihelion, and Aphelion, 2000-2020".
2 Owens, Steve (20 March 2010). "Equinox, Equilux, and Twilight Times". Dark Sky Diary (blog). Retrieved 31 December 2010.
3 Montenbruck, Oliver; Pfleger, Thomas. Astronomy on the Personal Computer. Springer-Verlag. p. 17. ISBN 0-387-57700-9.
4 Meeus; Mathematical Astronomical Morsels; ISBN 0-943396-51-4
5 PIA11667: The Rite of Spring". Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Retrieved 21 March 2014.

Those are citations for a Wikipedia article, which reference books and sources about earth science, not studies from scientists who studied all points on the earth's surface during the equinox. Why don't you try being honest for once?

9697

Flat Earth Community / Re: Shape of daylight on a disc

« on: January 12, 2015, 10:47:22 PM »

On the equinoxes, the sun illuminates everywhere on earth for 12 hours. Its "spotlight" covers exactly 50% of the earth.

Which scientist studied the earth from every point on its surface on this day to prove this?

Why would you require proof, especially from a single scientist's study? Did you hold Rowbotham to the same level of evidence?

I expected that RE'ers had some level of evidence behind their facts. Published studies, that sort of thing.

9698

Flat Earth Community / Re: Shape of daylight on a disc

« on: January 12, 2015, 10:33:10 PM »

On the equinoxes, the sun illuminates everywhere on earth for 12 hours. Its "spotlight" covers exactly 50% of the earth.

Which scientist studied the earth from every point on its surface on this day to prove this?

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Flat Earth Community / Re: Shape of daylight on a disc

« on: January 12, 2015, 09:53:03 PM »

What makes you think it looks like a "D"?

9700

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: REQUEST FOR COMMENTS: Reunification Proposal

« on: January 12, 2015, 08:17:47 AM »

I don't really care about an absent owner. What is there to care about? As long as the forum can operate autonomously on its own, it doesn't matter if he exists or not. An absent owner is just static, in the background, not contributing or posting to the forums. I would rather not be concerned with "being the better FES," or any fruitless competition between websites, but taking a unified FES to the next level and to new heights in the face of adversity.

Why be jealous of Daniel? He's not the person the everyone on the forum is interested in and wants to talk to. People want to talk to the Flat Earthers who argue for FET. Instead feel sad for Daniel, that he is putting money into a website for an unearned title with no one interested in talking to him. Accept his existence as owner of the website, and forget the matter. There are better things to do.