Do those two sets of experts talk with each other very much?

It depends on the context. Design documents serve as working embodiment of the emerging design among those who work on it. Any time you have group design, the design must be kept in an external form (i.e., not locked up in someone's head.)

Design documents -- fabrication and assembly drawings in particular -- serve to communicate appropriate information to manufacturers. Hence at a certain point a design is "released to manufacturing." The documents in that case are expected to be self-explanatory, hence must follow appropriate graphical and written standards. In my case the drawings often go to manufacturers in different companies and in different countries, where interaction is not always possible.

If so, who is responsible for being sure they don't spend too much time talking, revising the design?

Principal engineers and engineering managers. Engineering management is the art of managing expectations, schedules, budget, and design quality in a process Henry Petroski calls "satisficing." The variables that affect design activity are naturally in conflict.

By any chance, do you happen to know who Jack Barkla is? At that, I suppose I might as well ask if you've ever been in Minneapolis.

No on both counts, unfortunately.

I saw a corner of Utah once, but have never been there.

Utah has some very famous corners.

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

So UtahJay, now I have to provide you with vintage 1960's lighting trusses?

Yes. Or photographs of them.

So that's what I need to do to validate it?

Yes. That is the difference between "looks to me like it might be a lighting truss," and "It is a lighting truss." You're making the latter argument, but providing only evidence for the former. That's begging the question.

Photographic interpretation doesn't involve implicitly believing the analyst's identification of a feature when no evidence for that identification has been provided. If you identify the feature as a lighting truss, you must provide evidence that your identification is the correct one.

That's customarily done comparatively. You compare the image against other images of the object you identify, and show a high degree of correlation. There are mathematical and geometric techniques for reasoning objectively about visual correspondence.

You can also do it analytically. Given sufficient detail, you can identify portions of the features and show how that would reasonably implement the design of a lighting truss. You must avoid handwaving, though. The test of the strength of that type of analytical argument is how well it is received by people familiar with the principles of lighting equipment design and construction.

But under no circumstances do you get to simply point to something, identify it, and escape all responsibility for the correctness of that identification.

I would more likely rather you explain to me what that is doing on the moon?

Your automatic assumption that it's "on the Moon" means you don't know a darn thing about photographic analysis. A cardinal rule is that you never assume that what you see in a photograph must necessarily have been an actual object in the scene that was photographed. But that's exactly what you're doing.

It isn't very complicated.

Irrelevant. You imply that I have to alternatively identify the feature in question and provide evidence for my identification in order to properly dispute your specific claim. But in fact you are the claimant and you are the one attempting an identification. The burden of proof is upon you to establish your identification by evidence. And it is not satisfied by your simply attaching a label to it without direct evidence that the label fits.

An identification must be falsifiable. That means it has to be possible to prove it false before you can hold it up as true. "It looks like some sort of lighting truss," is not falsifiable, because for each attempt to show it doesn't match any existing lighting truss design, you can just say, "It must be some other kind, or a kind nobody knew about." Open-ended identifications have no value in photographic interpretation.

If, however, you could show that a well-known type of lighting instrument were shown hanging from it in the picture, then you can make a better case that it's a lighting truss, even a custom-designed one. But that's the degree of proof the real world requires you to advance for some individual identification. If you can't meet that standard of proof, then your identification can't be supported.

Do you think they got it at Sears?

When you can provide a positive identification of "it" then you can quibble about where it came from.

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

Peter J.,

Many people here are familiar with the field of logical analysis. The nature of the debate here emphasizes a rigorous epistemology. You have been subjected to several terms here that refer to specious lines of reasoning, and have misunderstood some of them to be insults. They are not.

In particular, I often respond to statements (which I excerpt in boldface) with a brief identification of which fallacy has been committed by it. I hope by that practice to trim the discussion. However, it sometimes gets misinterpreted as cursory dismissal.

Here's a brief glossary -- by no means an exhaustive one. Keep in mind that there's really no One True taxonomy of unreliable reasoning, so the ideas often overlap and are known by different names.

Handwaving. A uselessly general and incomplete argument, often made in an off-hand fashion. It is meant to head off a detailed discussion. When you respond to specific questions with general or dismissive answers, because you don't know the answer, that's an example of handwaving. Handwaving often fools laymen, who also don't know what detail would be required to satisfy a question. Remember, many of us are experts in space engineering or photographic analysis or other relevant fields; we can tell when someone is faking an understanding.

When you are asked to substantiate your (implied) expertise in something, or to give a more detailed answer, that's a sign you might be handwaving.

Begging the question. Informally this phrase is used to indicate raising a question. Instead in logical analysis, begging a question means generally to ask or expect someone to agree with you without your having to provide an argument. When you imply that everyone ought to see what you see in the photographs and agree with you that they are somehow anomalous, that's begging the question. Your dismissal of the AGC's capabilities would also be considered begging the question. (In logic, the "question" often means a proposition -- a statement, not an interrogatory.) The "question" is the alleged incapacity of the AGC; "begging" it means that you're describing properties of the AGC, but not putting them in any useful context. You just assume that showing the AGC to be weak by some arbitrary standard is enough to claim it was not appropriate to the task.

Straw man rebuttal. This was already explained. Putting words in other people's mouths and attacking those words is the best example. But it can also mean a selective treatment of arguments that actually were made. Formally, it is an attack upon a weakened form of the opponent's evidence in hopes that it will be considered a successful attack of the evidence as it was intended. The name derives from the fanciful scenario of a warrior demonstrating his "skill" in combat by tearing into an enemy made of straw (i.e., who can't fight back).

At the beginning of this debate, Gillianren briefly believe you were suggesting Photoshop was used to manipulate the Apollo photos. Although this was quickly cleared up, you extended that one error by one person to everyone here, ignoring the stronger arguments that were made. Yes, it's easy to take one person to task for a clear error, but the strength of your argument lies not in how well you dispatch the easy responses but in how well you attend the strong ones.

The instance in which you believed yourself to have been insulted arose from your statement, "You think that governments don't lie?" That was identified as a straw-man argument because it implies the reason we accept Apollo as genuine is because we trust the government in all things. That's not our argument, but it would be easier for you to make your point if that was really what we believed.

Poisoning the well. This was your initial tactic. It's a form of ad hominem attack that tries to portray your opponents as untrustworthy or nefarious, as an indirect way of suggesting that what they say ought not to be believed. It falls under the ad hominem family of fallacies because it doesn't really look at whether the alleged facts are true or false, or whether they can be determined true or false. The ability of someone to reason correctly is not affected by their alleged untrustworthiness, because the strength of an inference depends entirely upon the properties of the inference, and not at all upon the properties of who proposed it.

We haven't come to the following, but the pattern of debate in this thread suggests we soon will.

Affirmed consequent. In logic, the "consequent" is the effect of some cause, the cause being called the "antecedent." To affirm a consequent means simply to observe than an effect has truly occurred; the fallacy is committed when the affirmed consequent is used as proof for one desired cause, possibly among many. In cause-and-effect explanations, a falsifiable argument must be given to establish that the identified cause is really the one that occurred, and not some other cause.

Very often, however, an indirect method of proof is chosen. Please read what I've written on that. http://www.clavius.org/holmes.html

Aristotle's classic example is the wetness of the ground being observed and considered evidence of its having rained.

Limited scope. When attempting to explain an observation, a candidate explanation must reasonably explain all the observations of that same ilk. An explanation that address one example, say, of low-gravity locomotion (e.g., "they slowed down the film") but doesn't explain many other examples, is less likely to be true than a single explanation that works for all.

So if you see something that looks like the first sentence fragment is meant to identify the flaw in reasoning: in this case circular reasoning. It is never meant to be any sort of epithet or insult. If you understand what I and others mean by these terms, you can get by with less verbage in the discussion.

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

This sticky at the top of the ATM subforum has several good links on Logical Fallacies.
They are good to read about and understand even for daily living. Even if we can't always practice them. I know that myself and most people around me don't usually intend to use a fallacy- somehow it makes sense at the time you use it, mainly because of personal motivation to win an argument.

This is what you have to do:

You have provided a picture that you claim shows a spotlight rig on the Moon.

You first have to show that it is indeed a spotlight rig. You have to perform whatever enhancement you like on that section of the picture and demonstrate that it matches up with something that is unquestionably a spotlight rig. All I see on that picture is some unexplained and unidentifiable marks. I certainly don't see what I could conclusively call a spotlight rig.

Responses like 'what else could it be' or 'look, it's clearly a spotlight rig and if you can't see it you're blind' are not acceptable, either as a standard of proof or as regards the rules on this forum.

Only when you have shown beyond doubt that there is a spotlight rig in that image is there a case to be answered about what that means for the authenticity of the Apollo landings.

Just for fun, you could try explaining why, if indeed a spotlight rig did get into that image, thus blowing the setup, that picture was ever so widely distributed in the first place.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

I'd like to point out at this point that my pocket calculator can perform over 200 arithmetic and scientific functions, many of which are entirely unnecessary in navigating anything.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

My iPhone contains 16 gigabytes of erasable storage, which is 2,000 times the memory size of the first mainframe computer I programmed as an engineering student. That is astounding to me, but does not negate the work I did on that IBM System/370. That is because I knew the capacity of that machine and did not require of it anything it was not capable of supplying.

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

And my mobile phone may have more computing power than a Saturn, but it doesn't generate a single Newton of thrust.

Hm, Peter J. said he was available only on weekends to discuss Apollo hoax theories. A weekend has come and gone without his having addressed any of the questions on the table. I wonder if we should continue this discussion abandoned.

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

I'll put it in my terms, as a computer animator. Take, for example, Finding Nemo. The movie required thousands of animators and huge banks of computer resources. Does that mean that computer generated films were not possible before such resources?

Tin Toy, a Pixar animated short, was done in 1988! Compare the two, and of course, TT is far more crudely done. But they worked with what they had at the time, and did it.

The general argument is "If we don't have the technology today, how could we have had it back then?". The truth is we do have the technology today, and we did it with what he had back then. When we do return to the moon, we'll do so with better technology (a-la Finding Nemo). When we went with apollo, we did it with the available technology (a-la Tin Toy).

Just like when I go fishing today I can hop on a deep-see charter, and nap in the air-conditioned cabin. My anscestors paddled out in canoes. Just because they couldn't do it they way I do, doesn't mean they couldn't do it.

Sorry, I rarely miss opportunities for drawn-out, overly winded analogies.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

"A long time ago, yet somehow in the future"

My first computer animation was programmed on an IBM 370 mainframe (8 megabytes RAM), rendered frame-by-frame on a Tektronix vector display, photographed with a Pentax K1000 35mm camera, and processed by Miller Labs into a 16mm film strip. This was in the mid 1980s and the equipment I used was already more than 10 years old at the time. Was it a classy animation? No, not particularly -- but it was within the capacity of my means.

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

(just because I think the actual CT here is probably not coming back) ...I was looking through some Pixar credits, and their first listed short was one called WallE and B (or something along those lines). The included frame-grab looked better than about 40% of Comp Animation graduates demo-reels. It was done in 1984.

Anyway the whole point is that you cannot let the misconception of life and technology in the past distort your view of what was possible. I also find it amusing that a good percent of the people who argue that Apollo-era technology was insuffeciant were not even born in that period, let alone working in the field with said technology. *shrugs* Us young'uns are smarter than you old'farts, and since we haven't done it, you couldn't have either!

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

"A long time ago, yet somehow in the future"

I am not dismissing the truth behind the analogy, but I do find a problem with the analogy it self. With Modern CGI we COULD remake Tin-Toy and " The Adventures of Andre and Wally B." today, with likely greater ease and for far less money. And that is precisely the moon hoaxers problem with this issue. I am not saying I agree with them, but this analogy isn't very well thought out. A better analogy might be that I have trouble running many MS-DOS programs natively in Windows XP, does that mean I could NEVER have run MS-DOS programs on a computer with less then 1% the computing power?

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The analogy holds strongly in some cases.

It really depends on the HB in question as their beliefs can vary widely.

As you point out- that analogy might be weak for some HB's. But for others- it holds strong.

A better analogy to the conspiracy line of reasoning would be, "My truck is bigger than your truck, therefore your truck can't haul an upright piano." The conclusion is is simply a non sequitur. The question is whether the piano fits the truck, not whether the truck is as big as another truck.

While Fazor's analogy may fray at the edges, the core is rock solid. You can't look at irrelevant measurements of capacity and pretend they're meaningful. One of those irrelevant measures is whether old technology matches up to knew.

More insidious are the qualitative changes that bear on a question. We use digital computation today for tasks that were previously accomplished by much different kinds of technologies before. You can't limit your thinking of how to solve those problems to the kind of solution that's currently in vogue. There's a difference between the expedience of a solution and its possibility.

Clockmaking first used mechanical potential energy in the form of springs under strain or suspended weights. That energy is expressed through an escapement to a rotating shaft. the shaft drives a precisely coordinated gear train that provides readouts in hours, minutes, and seconds. A purely mechanical solution to clock-based timekeeping exists. However, the problem of accurate rotational velocity is difficult to achieve with ordinary escapements. Thus as soon as it was possible, AC or DC synchronous motors replaced the weights and escapements and provided a completely different technology for achieving precision rotational power. The motor still drives the same precision-milled gear train. Nowadays timekeeping is most commonly done with an integrated circuit that measures the vibratory response in quartz to an electrical input. Readout is by counters attached to electrical pins. One can still obtain mechanical clock actions. But someone whose experience is only with electrical timekeeping may not know anything about mechanical solutions to the same problem.

Believing that control systems must be sophisticated digital systems because that's what prevails to day does not give you appropriate insight into discrete or sequential control systems used from about 1930 to 1960, and upon which much space technology was still based. If you don't know anything about the level of sophistication achieved by that technology, you won't be well positioned to argue what it can and can't do.

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

(Mostly I had been waiting all day for an excuse to express my astonishment about how early some of those CG movies came about )

Anyway, yeah. Abbacus::Calculator. Sundial::Rolex. Fig Leaf::Hanes. Pick your fav.

Just because a particular feat is astonishing, even by today's standards, is not proof that it could not have been done. In my opinion, there's equally or exceedingly astonishing feats achieved by men much longer ago than '69. And just because we don't recreate them today doesn't mean we can't.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

"A long time ago, yet somehow in the future"

Absolutely!

And when modern experts try to recreate some of the feats of history they find that even with today's knowledge of science and materials, there are some things that seem to almost defy explanation! One example might be Archimedes "claw" device for attacking roman ships that were trying to storm the harbour, where only after much trial and error did they (the modern experts) eventually make something that worked, using only materials available to Archimedes time. I am sure there are lots of similar examples, spread through history.

These seem to show that these things could have been done, it is just that as our knowlegde and understanding moves on, there are some (perhaps basic) skills and principles that almost get forgotten under the weight of advancing technology!

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm.... that's funny...'
- Isaac Asimov

Are we alone in the Universe? Are we the only intelligent life? Who knows? But the universe is so BIG, it somehow seems such a waste of space if we are ....