http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djubl...f/FlatHome.htm

I was actually doing a search for a punk rock band and found this site

*edit I found this disclaimer on their site...it appears it is a joke after all...still rather amusing

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Comixx on 2002-03-21 20:44 ]</font>

Flat Earth! Gotta love it. There's a wonderful site created by an artistic fellow, Dave Fischer, creator of the Platygaean Society and FELFAT. Quoting from his FAQ about the Platygaean Society:
----------
1) What is the Earth's shape?

The Earth is flat. It is shaped in the form of a pentagon, and thus has five corners.

2) What is the "middle corner"?

If one was to draw a line from each corner to the centre of the opposing side of the Earth, the line would intersect in the middle of the Flat Earth. This place is known as the Middle Corner.

3) Hey, wait a minute, that is not a real corner...

So? The equator of the spherical earthers is an imaginary line as well. Does this mean that their model does not have a northern and a southern hemisphere? You cannot count in imaginary numbers, but does that mean that they do not exist?
...

5) Does the "middle corner" prove that 5=6?

Yes
-------

Here's a link to the FAQ.

And for goodness sake don't fail to check out FELFAT, which organization holds that the Earth is now spherical but was forced into that unnatural shape by television moguls. FELFAT boldly proposes a remedy:

"The Flat Earth Liberation Front Against Television (FELFAT) is working towards the return of the earth from its current unnatural spherical shape to its original, natural flat unbounded shape. To do this, we propose to dig a trench through the earth's crust, unfold it, and landfill around the edges, infinitely."

Enjoy!

--Don Stahl




<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: DStahl on 2002-03-22 01:48 ]</font>

Of course, as a member in bad standing of the International Flat Earth Research Society, I must protest these upstarts and their whimsy. Anyone familiar with the work of the late Charles Johnson, as carried forward by his wife Marjorie, will understand that humor, wit, japery, and bons mot have no place in the rejection of that Greek "Grease Ball" theory.

Marjorie, in the 1970's, took a trip to Australia, and came back with a notarized and witnessed document, in which she stated, under oath, that she had not been upside down while there.

That is how serious this is. There shall be no smirking, giggling, tittering, or wrinkling of the nose. We TRUE Biblical Astronomers know that the cosmos is geostationary and geocentric AND that the world is flat. (Well, kinda lumpy, but that doesn't invalidate the eternal revealed truth...)

Mrmee mrmee mrmee

Silas

Silas, you have a point--however, I believe that Fischer is deadly earnest in leading FELFAT in its efforts to unfold the Earth. FELFAT proposes to initiate digging along the International Dateline, since this would avoid disrupting major population centers. FELFAT leadership has boldly located the Dateline off Alaska and even done exploratory digging! Here's a photo from the First Expedition, captioned From Here We Head South!



PS: I believe Mr. Fischer (arm extended, above) would not mind this link to his work, as it is free publicity.

--Don Stahl

That the earth is a sphere was known
to scholars since the dawn of history. The ancient Greek sculpture of the Farnese
Atlas shows him holding the globe on his shoulders. Pythagoras, Parmenides, Eudoxus,
Plato, Aristotle, Erastosthenes, Euclid, Aristarchus, Archimedes, Strato, Ptolemy, and the Talmudic sages all held the world to be a globe.

Yaknow, truth can come from unexpected sources.

It was known in Classical times, by the literate people, but it was almost forgotten in the Middle Ages.
Mind you, it wasn't easy to show that the world was spherical back then. They didn't have pictures from the space shuttle. Some believed in it just because the sphere was considered the most perfect 3-dimensional shape.

Although that was the globe of the sky, not the globe of the earth, you are still correct.

However, that the world was spherical was not known to the Chaldeans, who originated the cosmology that was known to the very ancient Jews. The Bible is explicit: the world was thought to be flat.

And so, of course, it is.

(No, I don't really believe it; I'm just having fun out-Heroding Herod.)

Silas

Bouw's refutation of the idea that the Bible teaches a flat Earth!

http://www.geocentricity.com/flatearth.htm

Staggering. The depths to which intelligent men will sink to defend their prejudices.

The ancients believed the world was flat, and that the heavens were a tent above the earth (a Bible verse that Bouw "forgot" to quote.) The Jews of Genesis and Exodus had no way to measure the curvature of the earth, nor any inclination (is that a pun?) to do so.

The oldest books of the Bible speak of the earth as flat, simply and solely because they had no reason to think otherwise. They didn't know. The oldest books of the Bible fail to speak of Aluminum, or Neptune, or the use of glass to produce a spectrum, or the catenary curve of a hanging cord, or the boardgame of chess, or... Or tens of millions of things that weren't known then, and are known now.

The writers of Genesis and Exodus believed the world was flat. That is not a sin, nor a crime, nor a failure: they simply didn't know.

It isn't necessary to defend them to the degree of perfection. They weren't. Their writings aren't.

(One wonders what Joshua would have answered if asked about whether a feather falls faster than a hammer in a vacuum...)

Silas

But the point is, Silas, Bouw does believe the Bible is perfect received truth. At least on his personal info page he asserts that science can never correct the Bible. Thus when there is a conflict between scripture and science he has only two ways to respond: he can 'reinterpret' the scripture in question to eliminate the conflict, as he does with the flat-Earth passages; or he can refute the scientific finding, as he attempts to do with his use of Tychonic geocentrism.

The variety of thought patterns among humans amazes me. Some people think in ways I find absolutely unreasonable, and no doubt they feel the same about me. Oh well, let a thousand flowers bloom and a thousand schools of thought contend.

--Don Stahl

Well, it beats the heck out of "Knowledge proceeds from the barrel of a gun." (Grin!)

Silas

Are we to conclude that anyone who thinks "out of the box" as the saying
goes nowadays and through reason reaches conclusions that run contrary to
current belief is "prejudiced" while the practitioners, promoters, and
defenders of the status quo are not prejudiced? Ask Halton Arp, or the
late Sir Fred Hoyle, or V.C. Reddish who was belittled in his day (mid
'60s) but whose ideas on first-generation stars (stellar evolution) are now
all the rage, though his name is not attached to the ideas. But at least
Silas isn't prejudiced in the least, right?

Come on, now; every last one of us is "prejudiced" one way or another.
Bias is necessary to think and act. Don't believe it? I'll bet you're
biased towards entering a room through a door rather than a window.

No, thinking outside the box is wonderful. Hoyle, Zwicky, Bethe (I think it was), lots of wonderful scientists have been renowned for it. Sloppy thinking, incorrect facts, refusal to accept disproof--this is bad science. From what I've read Hoyle was exceptional in that he was capable of doing rock-solid research and also pursuing speculative, even outrageous ideas. Bouw's claims are well outside conventional astonomy, but he also admits that he is guided by theology and not science.

Say, for a tour of the loony side of pseudoscience, check out Crank.net. The people listed are also 'outside the box' but I'm not sure how clearly some of them are thinking...*grin*

--Don Stahl

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: DStahl on 2002-03-25 20:32 ]</font>

Stahl says that Bouw suffers from a "Refusal to accept disproof?" - But by definition of Mach & Einstein (and the Bad Astronomer!), there can be no physical, dynamical or observational "disproof" of geocentricity, heliocentricity of acentricity from within this universe. Unless maybe, shock, horror, Stahl is an anti-Relativist perchance? In which case, how does he explain the zero mph MM result?
Check out Bouw's references on the absolute equivalency of the Geocentric model! http://www.geocentricity.com/papers.htm

Some of them are not just outside of the box, they are in a completely different box entirely. Probably a cardboard one sitting on the side of the road somewhere baking in the sun.

__________________
...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

Dunash: "Stahl says that Bouw suffers from a 'Refusal to accept disproof?'"

I said that refusal to accept disproof is bad science, as part of my point that thinking outside outside the box should not be confused with just plain bad science. I did not say Bouw specifically refuses to accept disproof, I said that even he admits that theology and not science is his first criterion for truth. In that Bouw himself does not claim to be practicing science at all, I think.

I hope that clarified my post for you, Dunash.

Actually, there's a wonderful proof of geocentricity: we discussed it earlier. When there is an earthquake, the heavens rattle. This is not true when there is a Marsquake, or a Venusquake or a Sunquake (there are such things!) Only when the earth trembles, do the heavens tremble. So, belying our good host, the Bad Astronomer (and myself) we must exclude the possibility of a Mars or Venus or Sun centered cosmos...

All that's required is the surrender of causality...

(Or, of course, we can divorce earthquakes from cosmology, in which case we're back where we began: any object, anywhere, could be the center of the universe, and the earth isn't special in any way whatever.)

Silas

Naw Silas, you don't have to surrender causality. Maybe you've confused the cause and effect.

Otherwise, if the universe is a standing wave (in Hilbert space), what is its Compton mass? And how will it respond to changes originating at its dynamic center or node?

BTW, I'm still waiting for one of you to explain massive superstrings to me.

Super strings are not mentioned in the Bible. Therefore, they do not exist.

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Me? What the heck do I know about massive superstrings?

Isn't Hilbert Space a mathematical construct, and not a cosmological one?

I don't know what a Compton Mass is. And I've never heard anyone claim that the universe is a standing wave.

I've been asking you about earthquakes, and whether it is the earth that trembles (common sense and the standard view of the cosmos) or if the stars themselves tremble. Some of your answers imply that you believe the latter, and I'm interested.

If you're just going to be evasive, then please explain to me the Gower Effect, Toroidal Expansion, and Rectofossal Ambiguity.

Silas

Hmmm. I think your logic has some holes. If I stand on one side of an earthquake fault, and someone else stands on the other, we will move apart during the earthquake. If the earth doesn't move, that is impossible, by your logic, it seems to me.

Just because one portion of the earth surface moves, with me on it, and I observe a relative motion of the stars, that doesn't mean that the stars are shaking.

The Bible no where refers to any diurnal or annual motion of the Earth. But that does not rule out lesser motions: Job 9:6, Psalms 99:1, Isaiah 13:13, 24:19: quiver, quake, shake and tremble.

Grapes, I believe you are missing a bit of ironical sarcasm in Silas' post. Irony is good for you, it strengthens your immune system.

Again, I haven't kept up on the cutting edge of the geocentrism conjecture, but I think Bouw has hypothesized superluminal propagation of effects like earthquakes from the center of the universe to the cosmos at large. The ring-laser interferometer at Canterbury, New Zealand, has measured changes in the Earth's rotation due to earthquakes, so for the geocentric conjecture to be supported it is necessary to explain how the effects of these Earthly quakes spread to the most distant reaches of the universe in very short order.

I think that would be the case, anyway. I find the whole geocentrism thing so silly it's not worth researching--that's a personal opinion and I don't want to debate it, Dunash! *sigh*

--Don Stahl

These people are HBs too, of course.

__________________
~AstroMike

Alas, basically true. The International Flat Earth Research Society holds that there has been no space program at all. None. No Vanguard, no Mercury, no Geminii, nothin'.

For my part, as a modern and enlightened flat earther (yes, this *is* irony!) I can "explain" the photographs of the earth from space as artifacts of the lens effect of the earth's atmosphere...

Now, whoa on before you laugh too hard...

The BA (bless his little retinas!) explained something to me that I hadn't known: the sun appears to set later than the sun has actually set, because of atmospheric refraction. The effect can be as large as two degrees -- or four solar diameters as seen from earth -- in the right circumstances.

I can stand on the beach, and see the sun right on the horizon -- but if the atmosphere were gone, the sun would not be visible at all. It would be below the horizon. The atmosphere, by refraction, has bent the rays of light -- everyone knows about putting a long spoon into a glass of water, right? -- and artificially brought the sun up over the horizon.

So...as a dedicated (make-believe) Flat Earther, I can say -- that from space, the earth's atmosphere acts like a "fish-eye lens" and makes the world appear round, when, really, it is infinite and flat.

NOW -- just because I love the truth more than I love playing games -- the FACT is that atmospheric refraction would make the world appear slightly *larger*, not vastly smaller, than it really is.

So, I must eat my cake, and no longer have it: the Flat Earth fantasy is not supportable. But a guy can "role play," can't he?

Silas

Silas: **Applause**

Now, here's a bit of Dunash's writing from the Bouw/Faulkner thread:

Quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


On 2002-03-21 12:27, Dunash wrote:
In Geocentricty we basically reverse cause and effect.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To which I replied:

Violating the causality principle must be the surest sign of an illogical argument.

Now that Dunash has done a backflip to avoid critique of his position, perhaps I should modify that to "the surest sign of a DISHONEST argument".

JB

__________________
Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. ...in the principles of evolution we have had our answer: of men elsewhere... there will be none, forever. - Loren Eisely, The Immense Journey, 1956.

I am amazed that I am coming to the defense of a geocentrist, but Dunash was basically responding to "A causes B" by saying "No, we believe B causes A." This is not a violation of the causality principle (though the notion that cosmic forces cause earthquakes may violate any number of other things).

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Unquestionably this has value. However, the contention loses its value when carried on and on in spite of manifold contrary evidence.

For example, one Mr. Pell, a member of congress, was convinced that ESP and other psychic phenomena should be used in operations by the government. He spent some of his time and that of the congress trying to get appropriations for this purpose. All of the evidence from controlled tests regarding psychic phenomena to date has been negative. The time Pell used would have been better spent trying to do something about the real problems that are extant.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: David Simmons on 2002-04-01 07:24 ]</font>