Weren't mirrors placed on the face of the moon by the Apollo astronauts that reflect light pointed from the earth? Doesn't this prove astronauts were up there? I'm curious how the deniers account for the mirrors.
Without being up on the state-of-the-art in this field, I would guess that there are many variant scenarios. Maybe Apollo 8 was real (lunar orbit without landing), but they were nervous about getting Apollo 11 to work on time, so they did another Apollo 8 with some faked telemetry, but they actually did do some real landings later, with Apollo 12 and so on. Or maybe they never did a human landing, but they dumped some crud on the surface so that people playing with telescopes would see something that looked like traces of landings.
The question I would ask is why is it on this particular subject that some people have chosen to treat with aggressive, extreme skepticism. What makes a lunar landing seem so absurd to them that they'd rather believe anything else happened? Needless to say, there's a certain satisfiaction with feeling like you're one of the elite that knows The Truth, but still, there's plenty of those around...
Here's a Truth for you: there really are no lunar landing denialists, that's actually all just a foreign conspiracy intended to undermine belief in the American government and American technology.
It's bad I suppose when conspiracy theorists are flat out wrong, but would a repressive government try to silence them or do repressive governments only bother suppressing people who are telling the Truth?
At last, someone with an interesting question concerning "The Theory of Conspiracy".
I think the answer is that only a very stupid repressive government would bother suppressing conspiranoids, a slicker operation would like having conspiranoids around because no one takes them seriously and they can easily be used to discredit belief in the actual conspiracies that the powers-that-be are engaged in.
Actually they do and can but no one wants to listen. People just want a quick fix. It's called a well balanced diet and exercise.. Reply to This Parent Share
On the contrary, the fix is exercise and a well-balanced diet.
I have a pre-condition: if Lessig can swear that he's not going to hand this cash over to tea-party nutjobs just because they were willing to make noises (that week) about being in favor of "campaign finance reform", I might consider kicking-in.
I believe you're being unfair to our friend Lawrence Lessig.
I don't think he's anything like a "covert neo-con", I think he's a sincere idealist who veers all over the map and tends to piss off everyone eventually through his commitment to doing good in the world.
(By the way, nice handle.)
Last I looked, Lessig had gotten his "root strikers" off to a rocky-start by sucking-up to the Tea Party.
I liked his explanation that they aren't really racist because a poll showed they say they're not. (But you know, dude, they're birthers. Think about that for a second.)
The Lessig solution to me holding my nose and voting Democrat was that I was supposed to join-hands in coalition with the Tea Party.
And now, I guess the idea is that I'm supposed to kick in money for Lessig to influence five House races, but he won't say which ones: Lessig Starts a Super-Pac. Why would I trust his judgement, exactly?
Isn't it obvious that in the near-term, fracking wins?
Let us hope that the methane it leaks doesn't do more damage than the carbon emissions it saves.
Anyway, I just thought for two seconds about what I think people with humanities backgrounds have a better grounding in than techies, and my first thought was that they know a little more about how complicated it is, and have a better grasp on what doesn't quite work.
It's really easy for someone who hasn't thought it through to think that things are a lot simpler than they are... you know, kind of like Nate Silver figuring he can do arithmetic better than a Republican, and hence is probably just at good at climate science as a climate scientist.
Techies often seem to think they know all the answers ("Let the market decide!") when they're just barely getting started on the problems.
I think you're being kind of long-winded about it... The point would be that you can use evolutionary algorithms that get "smarter" without you understanding how they work. So the author's impression that we need to understand ourselves to surpass ourselves gets shot down.
I might just call these "microcosmic god" scenarios, myself-- this has the virtue of pissing off the author by referring to yet-another science fiction story.
As for this call to average the economic damage over industries, I think nuclear power is worth using, if the only alternative is coal.
Damn right. We get something like 20% of our power from nuclear and 40% from coal... wouldn't it be cool if we reversed those two numbers? It's weird that a notion like that is even controversial.
Nuclear is better than coal. But coal is not the only other option. That's another fallacious point I often see in favor of nuclear,
Nope, not a fallacious point: the idea that there's no need for nuclear because "renewables!" is what's completely fallacious. All accounts are the solar enthusiasts have reason to be encouraged, but they're a long way from even being able to do 10% of our power generation... and in the meantime, every time I say "nuclear" and you say "solar", those coal plants keep pumping it out. I've literally watched this paralysis go on for decades. By any reasonable measure, coal should be public enemy number one, and nuclear should be a well-regarded substitute, but instead it keeps dragging on.
There's supposed to be a climate crisis staring us in the face, there are some stunningly obvious things we should be doing in response-- the people who like to think they're the "reality based community" really should try facing reality.
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro