Thursday, September 29, 2011 ~ Have your say...

Interview With 92.1, The Beat: Zombies, James Randi, and The Million Dollar Challenge

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Today, I was interviewed by 91.1 The Beat on their Big Mad Morning Show (you may remember the previous interview about a month ago) for Conspiracy Thursday.  They're based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma.  

Listen to the interview below to see why we don't need to worry about the Zombie Apocalypse, learn all about James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge, a flyover of planet Earth, and sneek peek about of upcoming post we'll be doing on "performance-enhancing bracelets".

Download and listen to the interview HERE. 

Thursday, September 22, 2011 ~ Have your say...

James Randi to speak in Toronto

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Noted skeptic and magician James "The Amazing" Randi will be giving a talk on September 27th in Toronto.  I will be attending and blogging about the event.
 
James Randi exposes popularly accepted fakery by discussing with his audience everything from UFOs to the Bermuda Triangle, from the Von Däniken “Chariots of the Gods” fraud to the notion of a lost continent named Atlantis. Randi reveals what really took place in the last three decades in the labs of various prestigious “think tanks” that verified a series of simple magicians tricks as genuine miracles, thus launching a world-wide plague of misinformation, the repercussions of which can still be felt today.

This unique and provocative lecture is not only educational but also highly entertaining. It attracts persons of all educational and social backgrounds and provides a rational perspective on the seemingly paranormal and otherwise unexplained happenings in our day-to-day life.

Mr. Randi illustrates how a “politically-correct” attitude has blinded scientists — who should know better — to the fact that they are not proficient at detecting fraud, often managing to fool themselves, when the prize is sufficiently attractive. Randi offers a million-dollar award to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal "powers".

The Million Dollar Challenge

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) is committed to providing reliable information about paranormal claims. It both supports and conducts original research into such claims.

From the JREF website:  At JREF, we offer a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. The JREF does not involve itself in the testing procedure, other than helping to design the protocol and approving the conditions under which a test will take place. All tests are designed with the participation and approval of the applicant. In most cases, the applicant will be asked to perform a relatively simple preliminary test of the claim, which if successful, will be followed by the formal test. Preliminary tests are usually conducted by associates of the JREF at the site where the applicant lives. Upon success in the preliminary testing process, the "applicant" becomes a "claimant."

To date, no one has passed the preliminary tests, and major psychics like Syvia Browne have declined to take the challenge.

Sunday, September 18, 2011 ~ Have your say...

Flying Over Planet Earth: as seen from the ISS (video)

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Below is a an incredible time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet Earth at night. 

According to the creator, on his YouTube channel, "this movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. 

Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy. Raw data was downloaded from The Gateway To Astronaut Photography of Earth "http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/mrf.htm "."

Saturday, September 17, 2011 ~ Have your say...

The Best Optical Illusions (so far...)

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Back by popular demand (and because our web metrics indicate that our readers love these illusions), we have another 8 of the best optical illusions to trick your brain.

First, the Spinning Spiral... which is a static jpeg and there's no animation taking place, but if you move your eyes to look in any direction or blink, then the spiral spins.
  

This is a picture taken directly above many camels walking in the desert at sunset. Look, closely, because the camels are actually the white lines in the image. The “silhouettes” you are seeing are actually the camel’s shadows. 
  
The image below it is similar, only with zebras instead.
 
The green and the blue in the spiral below are the same color...
It is believed that the reason why we are perceiving one color as two different colors is because of the other colors surrounding the stripes. Each eye has six to seven million cones, which are concentrated in a central yellow spot known as the macula.  These cones measure color in different wavelengths, where some of which overlap. Our brain then compares by measuring the differences in wavelengths between the colors. When certain colors are combined, the brain can't process the data from the cones correctly and we get confused. [gsu and Techi]

The QR Code Illusion... sort of.  It's not a QR code, but look at at the "shimmering" in this image:
The two orange circles are exactly the same size; however, the one on the left seems smaller.  This is known as the Ebbinghaus Illusion.
Two straight and parallel lines look as if they were bowed outwards - known as the Hering Illusion:
And at last, the following image represents a pattern of squares, but there appears to be a spherical bulge coming out of the centre of the image:

Do you know of any other optical illusions that should have made this list?



References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delboeuf_illusion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebbinghaus_illusion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hering_illusion

http://www.livescience.com/4950-key-optical-illusions-discovered.html



Friday, September 16, 2011 ~ Have your say...

A Video of Vesta Rotating in Space

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The Dawn team over at NASA has published a simulated flyby of Vesta produced from a topographic model. The model is based on imaging performed during August 2011, when Dawn was in high-altitude mapping orbit. 

At the time, Vesta's north pole was in winter darkness, so the shape model does not quite reach into the northern polar regions. 

The animated gif (upper left) does not do this video justice - watch the high def video below to see the unprecendented level of photographic accuracy we now have available to look from the comfort of our own homes... while this giant rock is barelling through space.  Pretty amazing.




Embedded video from

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology

References:
Credit: NASA / JPL / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA

Friday, September 9, 2011 ~ Have your say...

A Map of the 'Flat' Earth

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A Map of the Square and Stationary Earth

In June of 2011, the Library of Congress acquired an old map which was created by Prof. Orlando Ferguson in 1893.  The information it contains is a bit out of date...  but it is very interesting to look at nonetheless.

The text can be a hard to read, so here it is, verbatim:

Header:  Map of the Square and Stationary Earth.

Subheader:  Four hundred passages in the Bible condemn the Globe Theory, or the Flying Earth, and none sustain it.  This map is the Bible Map of the World.

Caption (right side):  These men are flying on the globe at the rate of 65,000 miles per hour around the sun, and 1,042 miles per hour around the center of the earth (in their minds).  Think of that speed!  (this caption was clearly meant to be a sarcastic jab to the Globe Theory)

Footnote:  Send 25 cents to the author, Prof. Orlando Ferguson, for a book explaining this Square and Stationary Earth.  It knocks the Globe Theory clean out.  It will teach you how to foretell eclipses.  It is worth its weight in gold.

The Flat Earth Society (yes, it's actually real)

The Flat Earth Society is a real organization led by a Virginian man named Daniel Shenton. Shenton believes in other scientific principles and facts, such as evolution and global warming, but he and his followers also believe that the Earth is a disc that you can fall off of.  In other words, that it's flat.

"I haven't taken this position just to be difficult," Shenton told The Guardian news a while back. "To look around, the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove decisively that it isn't. And I don't think that burden of proof has been met yet."

In fact, the validity of the organization as come in to question so often that it's immediately addressed on the first line of the FAQ:

Q: "Is this site a joke?"

A: This site is not a joke. We are actively promoting the Flat Earth movement worldwide. There are members who seriously believe the Earth is flat, and their research is located in Flat Earth Believers.

Read through their FAQ, as they "explain" the seasons, sunrises, sunsets, and other phenomena.

Here's a map of the flat Earth that they present:


I'm not sure where to start when debunking the notion of a flat Earth, because the theory seems so unrealistic.  So I will only present one piece of evidence for the round Earth, and it's a simple picture:


'Nuff said.

  • To see more images of Earth, our Pale Blue Dot, click here.


References:
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/11651
http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/
http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=11211.0

Saturday, September 3, 2011 ~ Have your say...

Milky Way Creation Simulation (video)

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For decades, astrophysicists have attempted to recreate the formation of spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way as realistic as possible. 

Recently, a groupd of astrophysicists from the University of Zurich demonstrated the world's first realistic simulation of the creation of the Milkey Way galaxy.  The simulation was done in collaboration with astronomers from the University of California at Santa Cruz. 

The new results were partly calculated on the computer of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) and show, for instance, that there must be stars on the outer edge of the Milky Way.

"The simulation follows the interactions of more than 60 million particles of dark matter and gas. A lot of physics goes into the code--gravity and hydrodynamics, star formation and supernova explosions--and this is the highest resolution cosmological simulation ever done this way," said astrophysist Guedes.

Just how complex was this simulation? It was calculated in 8 months at the Swiss National Supercomnputing Centre at Manno, Switzerland. It would take 570 years of comptuational time to run the same simulation on a personal computer.

And here it is - the formation of our Milky Way galaxy:

Thursday, September 1, 2011 ~ Have your say...

Tempest Milky Way: a stunning example of time-lapsed photography

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Produced by Randy Halverson and shot in central South Dakota, this is a stunning example of time lapsed photography of our Milky Way galaxy with a backdrop of electrical storms in the background.


From the Vimeo page:
"One of the challenges in making this video, was trying to get good storm with stars shots. The opportunity doesn't come along very often, the storm has to be moving the right speed and the lightning can overexpose the long exposures. I had several opportunities this summer to get storm and star shots. In one instance, within a minute of picking up the camera and dolly, 70mph winds hit. One storm was perfect, it came straight towards the setup, then died right before it reached it."
Visit his page to see more: http://vimeo.com/28040685

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