http://conspiracies.bounceme.net/

This guy sent e-mail to Clavius wanting to know what we thought of his site. Well, ladies and gentlemen, what do we think of his site?

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Bounce him. Hard.

First of all, Ken Polsson is surely happy about the first part. Funnily, I just saw Ken's page the first time a few days ago and immediadetly recognized it.

On the on-board computer:

Bruahahaha =D>



Bruahahaha =D>
Bruahahaha =D>

Oh my god, stop it. Bruahahaha =D>

ROTFLMAO

If this guy thinks he is serious. Yeah. He has a serious problem.

Bruahahaha =D> Bruahahaha =D> Bruahahaha =D> Bruahahaha =D>

Well...the very first thing I noticed was this turkey-butt mis-quoting what is perhaps the MOST FAMOUS quote ever. If he can't even get that right...it certainly calls into question the veracity of his other claims.

The Moon is ALOT CLOSER than it looks, only a few hundred miles!!!
No picture of the lander with the Earth in the background? That's just plain WRONG. Without going to the ALSJ, I recall one picture showing the back-side of the LM, looking almost straight up, and guess what...THERES THE EARTH.

Now I'm not trying to poke fun at a person whose primary language might not be english...but...my favorite part of the site is when he says, "Why you not there!!!"

AS11-40-5924.
As Eagle landed pretty close to the center of the visible moon disk, Earth was pretty close to the zenith, making it hard to spot.

needs more salt

__________________
'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

All your moon base are belong to us!

Thats the one I was referring to. I knew that someone else on the board would have it readily available. Thanks, Kucharek.

Is the "no picture of the lander with the Earth in the background" a new claim? I don't specifically recall seeing that one before. Other than that laughably weak argument, I don't see anything new on the whole site. It looks like he has been reading the big conspiracy sites and simply reprinted the claims he found most impressive. Throw in a dash of CAPS LOCK for legitimacy purposes, and that's it. Jay, when he asked you to review his site, he hadn't bothered to read your's, had he? Just out of curiosity, was he polite and serious in asking, or was it like one of the usual HB first-posts on here?

Aporetic
www.polisci.wisc.edu/~rdparrish

The URL was sent to webmaster@clavius.org, but it refers to something I said on Usenet (where I give the above address as my contact info), so it's not a given he has read the Clavius site.

The note which accompanied the URL doesn't give any indication of being written by someone speaking English as a second language. It's a laughable run-on sentence, but the author uses English colloquialisms correctly, if not punctuation. I believe the poster may be fairly young and accustomed to using Internettish (non-)grammar.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

MY brain is shrinking. At least he knows hoiw to seperate paragraphs and change the font colour.

There are some new things i have never heard of before (mentionewd above). But Jay i do not think that you should waste your time making pages to devote to this person.

I think a few paragraphs would do much more than he needs.



He might be using you to get hits throught your site. If you link to his site and give him a debunking, people will visit it to see what you are talking about. Looking at the script for his site you see alot of javascript and cookies being made from his site. So he could be profiting by every visitor.

But that is just a guess, not verifiable.

A litle knowledge is a dangerous thing! :roll: Go get 'em Jay!

But, I think you may be ... ](*,)

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

T. Anderson

First of all lets start with actual facts NASA!

Keep this in mind while the author substitutes rumor and innuendo for what has been published by many sources.

Hollywood has much better backlighting techniques now.

The techniques of backlighting (i.e., illuminating a subject from behind in order to create an nimbus or outline) haven't changed since the late 1800s.

1969 Computer technology - " IBM's " THIS IS WHAT WAS AVAILABLE!

The odd citation format puzzled me, so I dug a bit and found

http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/c...t/comp1969.htm

which is undoubtedly the author's source for this section. The reference format is a device particular to the original author.

It doesn't appear to be a publication of IBM, which our author alleges. The original title describes it as a chronology of desktop computers beginning in 1969, which makes it of limited utility when discussing special designs such as guidance systems. Of course digital guidance systems had been around since the late 1950s, but they evolved according to a fairly different family tree than personal consumer computers.

Just because the first landing happened in 1969 doesn't mean that's where you look for the state of the art. (Even if the author had looked at the right art.) You have to look at the entire development process through the 1960s.

INTEL ONLY HAD A 1 KILOBYTE CHIP IN 1969 FOR GOD SAKES 460 kb NASA?

This bit of incoherency is how the author sums up his plagiarized analysis of computer technology. This reflects the standard youngster's failure to understand how computers are made. There were computers before there were standardized integrated circuit chips, and there were IC-based CPUs before there were single-package CPUs.

Any electrical engineer can tell you how to wire up demultiplexers and chip select wires to create a fairly large address space out of nothing but 1-kilobyte chips, but that's fairly irrelevant because the memory in the AGC was not made from integrated circuits, nor is memory size a good indication of the capacity of an embedded system. In short, this author is pretty ignorant about computers. Nevertheless he continues.

THIS IS WHAT NASA CLAIMS WAS IN APOLLO 11 LUNAR LANDER IMPOSSIBLE AT THE TIME!!!
...
...a project manager of NASA's lunar lander will say later that is was a miracle that the lander ever came in the neighborhood of the moon. But knowing how software engineers are this could be taken with a "barrel" of salt.

Software engineering in the mid-1960s was almost completely unlike software engineering today. Today's software engineering schedules are driven by market forces and are orders of magnitude more demanding than software production 40 years ago. The digital autopilot segment of the software -- comprising but a few instructions -- was developed by a team of dozens over an entire year.

IBM delivered the guidance computer.

The author has confused the Saturn V guidance computer with the Apollo Guidance Computer. The Saturn V guidance computer was built by IBM and installed in the vehicle's Instrument Unit. The AGC was designed by MIT's instrumentation labs and built by Raytheon.

IBM is not a good benchmark during this period. IBM was a Johnny-come-lately to the IC world. They couldn't figure out how to make them. Their first attempt was a set of microminiaturized discrete components potted together on a very small circuit board, and this was the "integrated circuit" they offered to NASA for the Saturn V. At any rate IBM had never had the slickest or most efficient computers. Their sales were based more on reliability and good salesmanship. That's why the Saturn V computer was a dinosaur compared to the AGC.

All systems were replicated in triple. And the answer that came from the computers would be the "most" correct one. ; the so called "Majority Ruling". With this setup a small mistake can not cause a big accident.

There's no magic to voting logic. While it does tend to mitigate the effect of a component failure in the control system its best application is in dealing with "ratty" data. Even a perfectly good computer will make a mistake if given bad data. Data coming from external sensors will often contain "noise" momentarily, which can be mistaken for useful data. Because of the way computers "poll" these sensors, it's very hard for multiple computers to get the same ratty data.

Because in space any accident is fatal.

No. Space is less tolerant of error, but not completely intolerant. You can see what's happening: the author is trying to set us up to dismiss the singularity of the AGC by saying only redundancy can solve the problems of space travel.

THIS IS WHAT IT ACTUALLY HAD REVEALED BY A SOVIET SPY THRU CONFIDENCE

I don't understand why this author has to refer to an anonymous "Soviet spy" when the information he provides about the AGC is essentially correct and has been fairly common knowledge for decades. I suppose every author has to make some claim to "insider" knowledge, but in this case he's only shooting himself in the foot. The notable error is

Disk: 512k floppy drive

Of course there was no disk drive on the AGC, nor would one have been useful. The latency of a floppy disk would be far too great to use it as a RAM storage, and the susceptibility of the floppy disk to magnetic fields would make it unwise to use as a ROM storage. The RAM and ROM were provided by tried and tested magnetic core storage.

The real shot in the foot comes when you recall that IBM invented the floppy disk in 1971. They used it as a means to load microcode into their intelligent peripherals. Ironically the IBM 3084 my department purchased new in 1990 still loaded its microcode from an eight-inch floppy disk.

The author goes on -- rather amusingly -- to put this all in "layman's terms" for us.

A calculator would have had to weight about say 30 pounds without the advent of a micro processor or !@#$ integrated chip even 1 bit memory was only available at the time.

I'm not exactly sure what this word salad is supposed to convey, but apparently it's an argument that a meaningful computer could not be build within the constraints imposed on the AGC.

So the BS about is that the computer Apollo 11 couldn't of had suffiencient computer power to calculate entry onto the moons surface.

Two obvious mistakes here, one logical and one factual.

The logical mistake is that the author has attempted to measure the AGC's apparent capacity against a specific problem. Only he hasn't characterized the problem. It's pure handwaving: the reader is supposed to understanding intuitively that the guidance problem is a very heinous problem requiring much computing power. And so the author begs the question.

The factual mistake is that the AGC is not the only computer whose power was brought to bear on the problem of guidance. While the AGC could keep track of the state vector, maintain the spacecraft attitude, and perform all the functions of an embedded controller, the real muscle of the Apollo guidance was the impressive collection of mainframes at Mission Control.

Now the pictures baby! * Courtesy of Nasa.gov un-edited *

Image analysis on low-quality JPEGs is rarely fruitful. NASA provides digital copies of Apollo photographs for reference and education, not for research. (The LPI repository even reminds the reader of this.) Bona fide image analysts would know not to try to pick through JPEG pixels.

I will show you the movie to prove that the flag is waving in the movie at the end you can see it WAVE!! No atmosphere on the moon this is proof of my theory!

Yawn.

not to mention look at the 2 light sources !!! shadows are !@#$ up.

The author doesn't mention in what way he believes the shadows in this film are !@#$ up, and I'm not about to guess. I have a good idea, but I'll wait for him to make it plain.

I want to show you something regarding the boot tracks around the flag the patterns are not consistent with normal walking hobbling or any movement that's natural for a human

Hm, I wouldn't expect "normal walking hobbling" in conditions of diminished gravity. "Natural for a human" would presume normal conditions of atmosphere and gravity. What I notice, especially in the foreground footprints, is a pattern of locomotion consistent with the side-by-side kangaroo hops that the Apollo 11 crew sometimes used.

Ok the best example of why this landing is totally faked is Hey Neil your up [expletive] on the moon hundreds of miles from Earth why not a full shot of the lunar lander and the earth as a background shot.

AS11-40-5923
AS11-40-5924

I don't understand the author here at all. He provides one picture and asks why there isn't some other irrelevant picture? And it turns out there is. You can't get much less coherent than that.

And a lunar lander shot with the Earth in the background was beyond the editing abilities of Hollywood producers at 1969.

Codswollop. Any photographer in the 1960s could have created such an effect in-camera. Composite shots of the lunar landscape, spacecraft, and the earth in the background appeared in Kubrick's 2001.

NASA DIDN'T HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY TO HAVE LIVE VIDEO AT THE DISTANCE TO THE MOON IN 1969 THEY COULDN'T EVEN STREAM VIDEO ON THE NET!!!

In the abstract, there's no difference between transmitting television between you and your next door neighbor, and transmitting it between the moon and the earth. The question is simply signal strength and bandwidth.

The comparison with streaming video today is not as absurd as it seemed. The limitation in streaming video today is the slow links (not at NASA's end but at the consumer's end) and the limited bandwidth. It is not NASA's fault that high-quality video cannot be crammed through the average dial-up user's connection.

But NASA did have to deal with limitations in bandwidth. The Apollo 11 television signal had to share the Unified S-Band link with the voice and telemetry traffic, over the small one-meter dish on the LM. Thus NASA very ingeniously devised the means to transmit meaningful television data -- albeit not of very high quality -- through such a "narrow pipe". NASA, in this respect, was a pioneer in low-bandwidth video transmission.

NO WORKING SATELLITES TO CONNECT FOR VIDEO STREAMING!!!

One does not need satellites in order to "stream" video from the moon.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

At least he's not English. I've had enough with the UK's contribution to conspiracism of late.

__________________
Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

Not to mention that he doesn't know the difference between kilobits and kilobytes, going back and forth between the two at will when there's a factor of eight difference.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Can you describe the difference for us?

And Jay: Could you explain this paragraph a little more? I do not understand what you mean.

Thanks to both. :-)

A kilobit is 1,000 (or frequently 1,024) binary bits where a bit (Binary digIT) is the ability to store or transmit a "1" or "0" condition. A kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, where a byte is 8 bits grouped together.

The former measurement (abbreviated Kb) is typically used in communications technology as a measurement of transmission capacity. For example, a single consumer satellite transponder has a capacity of around 30 Mb (30 million bits) per second. The data is typically not grouped into bytes, as is common inside a computer, and so a measurement of "bitrate" is more appopriate.

The latter measurement (abbreviated KB; note capitalization) is typically used in data storage and computer technology where memory space is typically divided into 8-bit bytes that are atomically addressable (i.e., the smallest addressable unit of storage). This is actually fairly meaningless in Apollo technology because the smallest addressable unit of storage in the AGC was the "word" composed of 15 bits.

Many early computers used different word sizes. Word sizes were not standardized to multiples of 8 bits until long after the AGC design had been finalized.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

This site read to me like the rantings of an 13-17 year old with an attitude. Not sure what a good thrashing, however well deserved, would accomplish. Might be worth a point by point dissection, he may not understand or accept it now, but give him 5 or 10 years he may mature enough to accept it.

Thnaks Jay!!! :-)


One more thing: how about this?

Could you explain this a little more too?


Sorry for the questions. I am just curious.

Thanks.