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Old 21-November-2007, 05:36 PM
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JayUtah JayUtah is offline
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Badge Man is probably Jack White's best known invention. It's somewhat relevant to point out White's absurd contributions to other, off-topic conspiracy theories in order to calibrate your credulity for what he offers on the subject of Apollo photography. Badge Man is an example of what happens when enlargement removes important context and invites you to imagine detail that would have been contradicted by the original scale. His other attempts at photographic interpretation, e.g. 9/11, reveal how inept he is at spatial reasoning.

But it's not merely ineptness and ignorance. Here's an example of the typical Jack White Apollo mess. http://www.clavius.org/bigmt.html It employs the crop-and-resize trick White has used on a number of occasions to create the appearance of anomaly. Since White has been reminded repeatedly that his crop-and-resize process cannot preserve important spatial relationships, it's more likely at this point that it's manipulation intended to mislead the viewer.

He has also used cropping and composition to omit from the viewer's attention important evidence from photographs that contradicts his findings. On one occasion he composed a fanciful lunar skyline from several Apollo photographs, trying to show that they all reproduced the same theatrical backdrop. After critics painstakingly discovered which photos White had used for his composition (White typically won't tell you) and located the full-frame versions, they discovered that the portions of the skylines in them that White had cropped away bore no resemblance at all to the idealized continuous skyline White had invented.

And in keeping with his notoriously bad spatial reasoning ability, White maintains that the photographic record inconsistently documents the LRV deployment schedule. White mistakes the first-deployed MESA for the later-deployed LRV packaging, unaware of the sides of the LM on which that equipment was installed. And to support his wrong interpretation, he offers pictures of the half-built LM where he displays his legendary inability to recognize whether he's looking at the front, side, or back of the lunar module.

Granted, the convoluted surface of the ascent stage and the relative symmetry of the descent stage can make such orientation difficult to people who aren't accustomed to looking at the spacecraft. But once you point out key features, most people are able recognize them in other photos and improve their ability. Not Jack White. No matter how many times you point out the identifying markings of the lunar module, White never figures it out. He is simply worse than an amateur at basic exercises in spatial reasoning.
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