This seems appropriate to post now, since I’m on the East coast giving my Moon hoax talk at New England College in New Hampshire and the St. Andrews school in Delaware.
It’s been claimed that if you speed up Apollo footage of the astronauts on the Moon by two times, it looks like they are moving normally. This must mean that NASA filmed them in a studio, and simply slowed down the video by a factor of two to make it seem like lighter gravity.
Brilliant! Except for one problem: it doesn’t work.
First off, slowing the film by a factor of two is wrong. The time it takes for objects to fall depends on the local gravity: in fact, on the square root of the local gravity. Since the Moon has 1/6 the gravity of Earth, things take 61/2 or about 2.45 times longer. Doubling is close, but not quite right. For those doing the math at home, remember that the distance an object falls equals 1/2 a t2 (from Newton; a = acceleration due to gravity and t = time). Solve for t. Voila.
Another problem is that this only works for things falling under gravity. The motion of the astronauts’ arms, legs, etc. still look normal when viewed at normal speed. When doubled, the astronauts’ movements look cartoonish. You can see this for yourself on a YouTube clip someone kindly posted:
See how silly this is? Mind you, Joe Rogan used this as support of hoaxery when we debated on Penn’s show. I told him he was wrong, and he said he was right. You be the judge.
But I’m right and he’s wrong.
"I’m not bad… I’m just drawn that way."
Continuing on the theme of the political humpery of science, I’m pleased to forward a message from the Union of Concerned Scientists:
Three top cartoonists have joined with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to kick off the organization’s second annual “Science Idol” scientific integrity cartoon contest to draw humorous attention to a very serious issue: political interference in science.
Can you draw? Are you sick of the way the White House has bastardized reality? Then pick up a pen, put on your tin foil hat, draw a cartoon, and submit it to Science Idol.
If I could draw, I’d be all over this. Sadly, I’m only gifted with this incredible writing talent.
Haven’t you been listening?
Well, Chris Mooney, as usual, has the goods. This time it’s the NOAA holding down scientists who have the opinion that global warming is fueling more intense hurricanes. Not, you must note, that this is established science: they are suppressing scientists who simply say the evidence is there and we should at least look into this more.
This is, purely and simply, evil. I might wish it weren’t so prevalent, but we’ve seen how this Administration behaves toward science. Now, at this point, after so many years, what makes me most sad is how many people still try to deny it. The evidence is in. And in and in and in. Time to stop denying, and start doing something about it. These Congressional hearings (remember oversight, and checks and balances? I sure do, and it’s nice to see them again) are a fine start. But they’re only a start. I want to see a lot more of this — a lot more — in the coming months.
This is very cool: you know those images — called stereograms — of weird semi-random patterns that, when you look them, you suddenly see a 3D dinosaur or a planet or something else?
There’s an animated one now.
Tip o’ the binoculars to Fark. Warning: many childish remarks, and some NSFW stuff.
When someone emails me asking to link to a site of theirs, I tend to ignore the email. Too much spam! But I’ll make an exception here, for sure.
Check out Sky-Map. It’s an interactive all-sky map, and it’s web-based. This is a piece of software that is sorely needed. There are lots of skymap websites out there, but few are really useful in the way I need… like finding out if Saturn is close to a bright star tonight, or if the Moon is near a planet. I have software on my PC I use (TheSky by Software Bisque if you’re curious; I use the old version 5 because I don’t like 6 as much, and it runs too slowly on my PC which is a bit long in the tooth), but I want something portable.
With Sky-Map, you can look at positions of objects, set your time and location and see what’s up now, and more. It’ll even show you the Sloan Digital Sky Survey image of an area of the sky, if available. My one major complaint: I’d like to see the constellation names displayed as a default, since sometimes the outlines aren’t all that familiar to me– and I’m fairly familiar with the sky and constellations. But that’s a quibble.
It’s a cool piece of coding, and you’ll have fun poking around. Enjoy.
I hate to have to do this, but Q & BA is going on hiatus for a while. My schedule is out of control, with many projects coming to a head, and I simply don’t have the time to devote to these videos. It’s killing me, but the decision had to be made.
I’m not cancelling it or stopping altogether; I’m just putting it on hold for a few months until things calm down. I’m hoping to restart it this summer if I can.
I apologize for having to do this, but… well, I’ll just say that some of the projects I’m working on will be very cool, and well worth the effort. You’ll see. 
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It’s rare that I’ll link to something that’s old, but I happened to stumble on this recently, and it’s so good it’s worth reading even this late into it: Skeptico brilliantly tears apart evidence of psychic powers. Sweet, concise, logical, methodical, and really devastating to paranormal claims. I bet they didn’t see this coming!
