Once again, a panel of scientists has found no evidence that the M.M.R. vaccine causes autism.
The gist of the report?“The M.M.R. vaccine doesn’t cause autism, and the evidence is overwhelming that it doesn’t,” Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, the chairwoman of the panel, assembled by the Institute of Medicine, said in an interview. Dr. Clayton added, “We looked at more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles, and we didn’t see many adverse effects caused by vaccines.”
The report did note, however, that many children injured by other vaccinations already have an immune or metabolic problem that is simply made evident by vaccines. To quote: “In some metabolically vulnerable children, receiving vaccines may be the largely nonspecific ‘last straw’ that leads these children to reveal their underlying”.For example, the chickenpox vaccine can lead to shingles in some adults.
The Institute of Medicine is one of the nation’s most highly respected and authoritative advisers on issues of health and medicine. Their reports can change medical thinking around the world. The government has asked the institute to evaluate the safety of vaccines a dozen times in the past 25 years, hoping the institute’s reputation would put to rest the concerns of some parents and organizations that vaccines cause a host of problems, including autism. As expected, it hasn’t worked.
Sallie Bernard, president of SafeMinds, a group that believes there is a link between vaccines and autism, said the latest report from the Institute of Medicine excluded important research and found in many cases that not enough research had been done to answer important questions. How much research will be enough?
“I think this report says that the science is inadequate, and yet we’re giving more and more vaccines to our kids, and we really don’t know what their safety profile is,” Ms. Bernard said. “I think that’s alarming.” However, the report doesn’t say that the science is inadequate – it says that the M.M.R. vaccine does not cause autism.There’s a big difference.
It goes to show that no matter how much research is done, it will never be enough for the anti-vax movement – and those are precious research dollars that could be used towards finding the true source(s) of autism.
Does 0.999 (repeated) equal "one"? You might be surprised by the answer... which is "yes". I heard this on a couple of podcasts over the last few months, and I still find it hard to accept at face value. However, I am now convinced and here's several simple proofs that .99999 does indeed equal 1...
Method 1:
Let x = 0.9999...
Then 10x = 9.9999...
If we then subtract x from both sides of the equation, then:
10x - x = 9.9999... - 0.9999...
So, 9x = 9
Divide both sides of the equation by 9, and...
x = 1 ... which, when we started, we said = 0.9999...
Method 2:
1/9 = 0.11111...
Multiply both sides of the equation by 9:
9 X 1/9 = 9 X 0.11111...
1 = 0.99999...
Method 3:
We know that 0.9 is not equal to 1; neither is 0.999, nor 0.99999. If you stop the expansion of 9s at any finite point, the fraction you have (like .99999 = 99999/100000) is never equal to 1. But each time you add a 9, the margin error is smaller (with each 9, the error is actually ten times smaller).
You can show (using calculus or other summations) that with a large enough number of 9s in the expansion, you can get arbitrarily close to 1. There is no other number that the sequence gets arbitrarily close to - it is always 1. Another way of saying this is that "the limit is 1".
Thus, if you are going to assign a value to 0.9999..., the only sensible value is "1".
This is what a meteor looks like from the space station:
NASA astronaut Ron Garan was fortunate enough to photograph a Perseid metor through through a space station window.
"What a 'Shooting Star' looks like #FromSpace Taken yesterday during Perseids Meteor Shower..." Garan tweeted from his Twitter account last Sunday. Interestingly, the meteor doesn't look much different from a meteor you would see from the ground, except for one thing: it's falling away from the observer (Garan); whereas for us viewing the Perseids on Earth, they fall toward us.
You can follow Ron Garan on Twitter here... and here's another one of this pictures - Chicago at night:
I had the opportunity to join the crew over at The Beat in Tulsa, Oklahoma for a radio interview for "Conspiracy Thursday", where the hosts invite a guest to speak about various conspiracy theories. I was really honored to be invited onto the show, since Benjamin Radford was a previous guest and I'm a huge fan of his work.
During the interview, we talk about the Moon Landing Hoax, why people believe weird things, the face in the clouds, amazing animals, skepticism in general, and the anti-vaccination movement. It's about 20 minutes in total.
American President Barack Obama’s presented to the National Academy of Sciences on April 27th, 2009. Here is a excerpt from his speech:
“When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik a little more than a half century ago, Americans were stunned: the Russians had beaten us to space. We had a choice to make: we could accept defeat – or we could accept the challenge. And as always, we chose to accept the challenge.
President Eisenhower signed legislation to create NASA and to invest in science and math education, from grade school to graduate school. And just a few years later, a month after his address to the 1961 Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, President
Kennedy boldly declared before a joint session of Congress that the United States would send a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth.
The scientific community rallied behind this goal and set about achieving it. And it would lead not just to those first steps on the moon, but also to giant leaps in our understanding here at home.”
One Small Step
It was on July 20th, 1969, that Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module and took the first small step on the lunar surface, but a giant leap for mankind. NASA beamed back audio, video, and images from the historic mission. Ask most people from that era, “Where were you when we first walked on the moon?”, and they can remember the day as if it was yesterday. It was completely memorable, and not only a historic moment for the United States of America, but for science and all of humanity.
NASA launched six missions that would go on to land on the moon; Apollos 11, 12, 14, 15, 16. They studied things like soil mechanics, meteoroids, seismic measurements, heat flow, lunar ranging, magnetic fields and the solar wind. It was the ultimate laboratory, and we learned much from those trips.
The Conspiracy
But what if the United States didn’t land on the moon? What if there was a conspiracy to give the illusion that they did? What if the public was fooled into thinking that ‘1969 America’ could win the space race? And if the government lied, what else were they lying about? What else do they not want us to know? What if… the moon landing was a hoax?
In February of 2001, Fox TV aired a program called “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?”. It featured interviews with a group of people who believe that NASA faked the Apollo moon landings. The biggest proponent of this idea was Bill Kaysing, who claimed to have evidence for the hoax: images, engineering details, anomalies in the physics, and astronaut testimonies. According to Kaysing, NASA did not have the technical capability of landing on the moon, but since there was so much pressure during the Cold War and space race with the Soviet Union, the USA was forced to fake the whole thing to prove that they had technological superiority. To Kaysing and others believer in the conspiracy, it was easier to fool the public with an elaborate hoax (assumed to be filmed in Area 51, of course) rather than let their Cold War rival strike a huge moral victory by having a non-American step foot on the moon first.
Scan the Internet for “Moon Landing Hoax”, and (other than this site), you’ll find other reasons for the conspiracy, including the following, from MoonMovie.com:
"Why would Apollo fake the first manned moon mission (Apollo 8) and then continue to go back 8 more times? To answer this question, one must understand both history and the future.
Technology is far beyond what the public is allowed to know - in some cases 35 years ahead of public knowledge.
The elite handlers of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) needed a long term distraction from the real space program, for the purposes of covertly building the vast control mechanisms and placing them in Earth orbit.
Bart Sibrel touches on this in his first film, when he includes the real reason for space presence - military domination of the Earth from space. This is the history. Another resource for this documented movement towards worldwide tyranny is Arsenal of Hypocrisy. NASA is a multifaceted tool of the MIC, and the Global Elite who plan to implement world government.
Apollo was in fact, a great distraction."
And so, putting the reason for the hoax aside, let us investigate why some people believe man has yet to step foot on the moon. At the same time, we’ll put on our skeptical hats and let science debunk each of the claims.
Claims for the Conspiracy… and the Facts That Debunk Them
According to moon hoax believers, the list below provides “evidence” for the fact that the moon landing was staged in a studio. (Editors note: For the sake of brevity, I have chosen eleven. If you wish to find more “evidence” and counter evidence (science), please read through the reference material at the bottom of the article. The most comprehensive guide I have yet to find is on Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy site).
1 When the astronauts plant the flag, you can see it flapping as though it’s in a breeze. But there is no air or atmosphere on the moon… so how could this be?
The flag is moving because the astronauts just placed it there, and by twisting and turning the flag pole, they caused it to move. The inertia from when they let go kept it moving, Over time, the flag would come to rest, but the video was taken during and shortly after it was placed into the lunar surface.
2 Buzz Aldrin is seen in the shadow of the lander, but at the same time, he is clearly visible. Many shadows look strange in the Apollo pictures. Some shadows don't appear to be parallel with each other, and some objects in shadow appear well lit, hinting that light was coming from multiple sources… just like studio cameras.
There were multiple light sources: the sun, the Earth's reflected light, light reflecting off the lunar module, the spacesuits, and also the lunar surface.
It's also important to note that the lunar surface is not flat. If an object is in a dip (say, a small crater), you will get a different shadow compared to an object next to it that is on a level surface. Still not convinced? This is easily testable at with a few small props, uneven ground, and a light source.
In addition, the shadows are not parallel in the images due to perspective. You are looking at a three-dimensional scene, projected on a two-dimensional photograph, which causes distortions. When the Sun is low and shadows are long, objects at different distance do indeed appear to cast non-parallel shadows, even here on Earth. Here’s a great example demonstrating this effect – non parallel shadows distorted by perspective. Again, this is easily testable, as the previous link demonstrates.
3 You’re on the moon and there’s no atmosphere. So you should be able to clearly see all the stars in the sky. But where are they? They don’t show up in any of the photographs – it’s just a dark sky.
The moon's surface reflects sunlight, and its glare would have made stars difficult to see. Also, the astronauts photographed their lunar adventures using fast exposure settings, which would have limited incoming background light. According to Bad Astronomy, they were taking pictures at 1/150th or 1/250th of a second. With such a short exposure, the stars simply won’t show up on film. You can try this for yourself. Take a picture of Jupiter or Venus (since they are highly visible from Earth) on a clear night away from light pollution. You’ll have a hard time seeing them, if at all, and you certainly won’t see even the brightest stars. You need a long and steady exposure for that to work.
4 The lander was huge and should have produced a giant crater when it touched the surface. But the module is shown sitting on relatively flat, undisturbed soil.
"Science fiction movies depict this big jet of fire coming out as [spacecraft] land, but that's not how they did it on the moon.". In reality, the lander's engines were throttled back prior to landing, and it did not hover long enough to form a crater or disturb much dust.
5 The radiation in the van Allen Belts and in deep space would have killed the astronauts in minutes.
Kaysing's exact words, when quoted on this claim, were, ``Any human being traveling through the van Allen belt would have been rendered either extremely ill or actually killed by the radiation within a short time thereof.''
The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected human would get a lethal dose of radiation, but only if he stayed there long enough. But according to Phil Plait, the spaceship traveled through the belts very quickly, getting through them in about an hour. There wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose. Additionally, the metal hull of the spaceship blocked most of the radiation.
6 The pictures taken from the Moon were exposed and set. Just about every picture the public sees is near perfect, with the scene always centered perfectly. However, the cameras were mounted on the front of the astronauts' spacesuit, and there was no finder. They couldn't have taken perfect pictures every time!
Nobody claims they did. Thousands of pictures were taken on the Moon, and the ones we all see will tend to be the best ones. If Buzz Aldrin accidentally took a picture with Neil Armstrong partly out of the frame, you probably won't see that image in a magazine.
Further to that, Phil Plait notes that everything done on the Moon was practiced endlessly by the astronauts. Those working on the mission knew that these pictures would be some of the most important images ever taken, so they would have taken particular care in making sure the astronauts could do it with their eyes shut. When fabled astronaut Story Musgrave replaced a camera on board the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, someone commented that he made it look easy. "Sure," he replied, "I had practiced it thousands of times!"
7 The astronauts' footprints are too clear for being made on a dry surface. Those footprints could only have been made in wet sand.
Plait, an astronomer and skeptic, deals with this claim nicely: Moon dust, or regolith, is "like a finely ground powder. When you look at it under a microscope, it almost looks like volcanic ash. So when you step on it, it can compress very easily into the shape of a boot." And those shapes could stay pristine for a long while thanks to the airless vacuum on the moon.
8 We are led to believe that only two astronauts walked on the moon at a time, yet in photographs such as the one below, where both are visible, there is no sign of a camera. So who took the picture?
According to Phil Plait, the cameras were mounted to the astronauts' chests. In the picture above, Plait notes, "you can see [Neil's] arms are sort of at his chest. That's where the camera is. He wasn't holding it up to his visor."
9 There are many strange reflections in the photos. They could only have come from studio lights on a production set.
If NASA spent millions of dollars on a hoax, do you think they would make such an obvious mistake? The reflections are lens flares. The pentagonal flare seen in some photos is of the aperture of the camera.
10 After the “landing”, artifacts from the trip were supposedly left behind: part of the Eagle, the U.S. flag, and several other instruments and mementos. With instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope capable of peering into the distant of the universe, surely scientists should be able to see the various objects still on the moon. But no such pictures of these objects exist.
There isn’t a single telescope on Earth or in space that has a resolution powerful enough to see these objects. In fact, astronomers can calculate this: given the biggest telescope on Earth, the smallest thing you can see on the surface of moon is something bigger than a house.
11 There’s secret outtake footage from the old Moontruth website that shows a bumble when they were staging the landing. You can clearly see it was a production set.
Moontruth.com eventually came out as a parody, publishing a disclaimer stating that the clip was a fake. This doesn't stop people from believing that it still supports the hoax, however. In fact, in true conspiracy theorist fashion, the admission that it was a fake video is seen as “part of the conspiracy”, or “what they want you to think”.
From NASA, With Love
After the show on Fox aired, NASA felt compelled to respond. On their web page, they present the most compelling piece of evidence as proof of the moon landings. Actually, they present 841 pounds of evidence in the form of moon rock. Moon rocks are absolutely unique, and there’s no process on Earth that could simulate their creation. That is, they can only be created on the moon itself. To learn how they differ from Earth rocks, and how their creation is different, visit NASA’s rebuttal on their site.
Dr. David McKay, Chief Scientist for Planetary Science and Exploration at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) is quoted: "I have here in my office a 10-foot high stack of scientific books full of papers about the Apollo Moon rocks. Researchers in thousands of labs have examined Apollo Moon samples -- not a single paper challenges their origin! And these aren't all NASA employees, either. We've loaned samples to scientists in dozens of countries [who have no reason to cooperate in any hoax]."
Even Dr. Robert Park, Director of the Washington office of the American Physical Society and a noted critic of NASA's human space flight program, agrees that humans have indeed landed on the moon. He was quoted by NASA in saying, "The body of physical evidence that humans did walk on the Moon is simply overwhelming."
Conclusion
Conspiracy theories like the Moon Landing Hoax can be debunked, torn apart, shredded, and thoroughly disproved with hard science every day, but that usually won’t make a difference to true believers. The Mythbusters, a television show on the Discovery network, dedicated an episode to the Moon Landing Hoax and tackled several parts of the myth. Like me, the cast members held no illusions that they would be able to sway the diehard moon hoax believer to the “other side”.
"The thing that I've found over the years is that there is always a certain segment of people out there who will refuse to believe despite overwhelming evidence. Those diehards will never be convinced, while everyone else will have fun watching us take on the hoax," said cast member Imahara.
Savage and Hyneman said they found similarities between the hoax and the other myths they have tested. "There seems to be a common tendency among conspiracy theorists, as well as among a lot of people with entrenched belief systems, to get stuck on an idea and never give up.
Conspiracy theories are not really a special category -- maybe you can call them myths, but I look at them as an obsession that people want to maintain, like being abducted by aliens, Bigfoot and so on. You can't really expect that reasonable evidence will change anyone's mind if they are determined," observed Hyneman.
And so, we fight the good fight with science, reason, and rationality – chipping away at conspiracy theories like the Moon Landing Hoax with the hope that at least some hoax believers, when presented with the evidence, will let go of their belief and choose to accept the facts.
References:
Interview with Bill Kaysing: (Editors note: I left out Kaysing's claim that NASA murdered three astronauts via the Apollo 1 fire because they were afraid the hoax would be exposed. You can read more about this accusation in the interview, and on Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy article).
YouTube user "denisfarmer" took a fantastic video of a rapidly approaching storm front in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, Canada. As the clouds twist and churn in the sky, they eventually take upon the shape of a face - and it really does look like a face! However, this is not God, or Zeus, or anything other deity for that matter - it is simply a great example of us humans finding a pattern we are very familiar with (faces) among random noise (quickly moving clouds)... otherwise known as "pareidolia".
Since the clouds change shape so quickly and frequently, it increases the probability that some combination of bumps, puffs and wisps will emerge to look like a face. Also, it looks as if the face might be composed of multiple layers of the cloud front that come together to look like a face from only his vantage point.
I simply cannot wait to post on this blog on December 22nd, 2012. When the world hums along like it usually does, what will the doomsayers say? Will they realize they 'made an error' in their calculation and pick a new date? Will they argue that the "we were spared" at the last moment? What will the authors of all the 2012 "end of the world" books do - refund their money?
The End of the World As We Know Ithas been proclaimed on hundreds of occasions before, and has never proven to be true (obviously, or you wouldn't be reading this). Of course, the world *will* end, at some point, far from now. But it won't be on December 21st, 2012, and it won't be due to Nemesis, Nibiru, or Planet X.
Jet Prepulsion Laboratory's Donald Yeomans dispels the myths surrounding this doomsday prophecy and discusses some real science behind it in the video below:
Credit: NASA/JPL
Some scientists suggest that a star exists, known as "Nemesis", which helps to explain a perceived periodicity in mass extinctions on Earth. As Nemesis travels through space, it supposedly regularly disturbs comets in the Oort Cloud, sending large numbers of the icy projectiles on a collision course with Earth.
As read on Space.com, the problem with that idea, according to a new study, is that Earth shows no evidence that giant impacts have occurred with any regularity or periodicity. The pattern appears to be a statistical artifact.
"There is a tendency for people to find patterns in nature that do not exist," said study author Coryn Bailer-Jones, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, in a statement. "Unfortunately, in certain situations traditional statistics plays to that particular weakness." This is another example of "patternicity".
Earth has, of course, been impacted by asteroids and comets throughout its 4.5-billion-year history. As many of us know, it's believed that a massive impact is thought to have destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Back in the 1980s, scientists reported seeing a periodic cycle in these catastrophic events, noting that they appear to have occurred approximately every 26 million years over the last 250 million years. It was proposed that a companion star to the sun - dubbed Nemesis - could be responsible for this pattern if it made regular passes near the Oort Cloud.
Some studies of Earth's craters have supported the Nemesis idea, finding evidence of periodic variations in the impact rate. Every so often — the numbers vary between 13 million and 50 million years — the impact rate seems to go up.
The new study, however, contradicts those claims, finding that Nemesis — like the rogue planet Nibiru that some conspiracy theorists say will destroy Earth next year — is probably a myth.
Bailer-Jones used Bayesian analysis — a different kind of statistical technique — and found no such pattern. His results show a different trend: From about 250 million years ago to the present, the impact rate, as judged by the number of craters of different ages, increases steadily.
There are two possible explanations for this apparent increase, according to the study, which was published online in June in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
1 - Smaller craters erode more easily, and older craters have had more time to erode away. The trend could simply reflect the fact that larger, younger craters are easier to find than smaller, older ones. "If we look only at craters larger than 35 kilometers (22 miles) and younger than 400 million years, which are less affected by erosion and infilling, we find no such trend," Bailer-Jones said.
2 - The increasing impact rate could be real. For example, analyses of impact craters on the moon— where there are no geological processes that can cover up, erode, or fill in craters — show a similar pattern.
Whatever is causing the apparent increase in impacts, the new study casts doubt on the existence of Nemesis.
"From the crater record, there is no evidence for Nemesis," Bailer-Jones said. "What remains is the intriguing question of whether or not impacts have become ever more frequent over the past 250 million years."
And so we must conclude that it is still possible that the sun could have an undiscovered large companion lurking far away, perhaps a red dwarf star or a brown dwarf... but it's not likely that this companion has ever wreaked havoc on Earth in the past, or will spell our doom in the future.
UFOlogists are all a-flutter with the buzz that an ocean exploration team led by Swedish researcher Peter Lindberg has found what might be a crashed flying saucer.
Lindberg's team was using sonar to look for ship wreck hat went down carrying several cases of a super-rare champagne. Instead, the team discovered a mysterious round object that might (or might not) be extraterrestrial. Round object? Yes. Extraterrestrial? Hmmm...
Lindberg explained to local media that his crew discovered, on the 300-foot-deep ocean floor between Finland and Sweden, "a large circle, about 60 feet in diameter. You see a lot of weird stuff in this job, but during my 18 years as a professional I have never seen anything like this. The shape is completely round." Lindberg also said he saw evidence of scars or marks disturbing the environment nearby, suggesting the object somehow moved across the ocean floor to where his team found it.
As one might expect Swedish tabloids and Internet UFO buffs are basking in the glory of this report. Some suggest the object is a flying saucer of extraterrestrial origin and that the seafloor scars were dug up during the crash.
Let's quickly invoke Occam's Razor before going further. It might be a crashed UFO, OR It might simply be a natural feature formation, or possibly a sunken, round man-made object. Which is more likely?
Lindberg's claim that the object "is perfectly round" might not even be accurate; the resolution of the sonar image was not high enough to verify that it is indeed round (and we've seen these type of low-resolution error many times on Mars). And while the lines that appear to be leading to or from the feature may suggest some sort of movement, it's also possible they have nothing to do with the circular object.
Lindberg himself did not offer an extraterrestrial origin, though he did speculate it might be a "new Stonehenge." Again, a bit of a stretch, but at least a man-made structure is more plausible.
This story is reminiscent of "Bimini Road," a rock formation in the Caribbean near the Bahamas that resembles a road or wall. Many New Agers and conspiracy theorists claimed the rocks are too perfectly shaped to be natural, and either were made by an unknown civilization or are possibly a relic from the lost city of Atlantis.Geologists have identified the blocks as perfectly natural, weathered beach rock.
It's also worth noting that UFOs may not be saucer-shaped. The famous "flying saucer" description of the very first described UFO has since been revealed as a reporting error. For more on that, read James Randii's "Flim Flam", where he thoroughly explains and debunks the "shape" claim.
Finally, Lindberg said his team has neither the interest nor the resources to further investigate the "UFO". Deep ocean research is time-consuming and expensive. If the object were indeed a flying saucer, recovering it could potentially be worth millions or billions of dollars. If it's a natural formation, on the other hand, it would probably be a waste of time and money.
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