Further Assimilations

By an odd coincidence, I've had to deal with the "No, we didn't land on the Moon!" claim three times in the last few days. My views on it ought to be pretty obvious: if you really want a conspiracy theory, there are far more plausible ones than that.

My current favorite argument against the Hoax: There were thousands, if not millions, of Very Very Smart people involved in the Apollo program. Either they were in on the secret or they weren't; if they were in on the secret, then it wasn't much of a secret, really. It's like the "we test unusual stuff at Groom Lake" secret - the details may be foggy, but the whole world knows that it's a government testing base.

If they weren't on the secret, then you have all these Smart People being well paid to develop what they honestly believe will be a moon rocket - to the tune of several billion dollars. These people all think they succeeded, and they aren't idiots - they would have noticed things like "Hey, there's not enough radiation shielding in our design." So, since all these people think we have a moon rocket, and we spent the money to make it, why just go ahead and make the landing? Hmmm?

As an aside - the Soviet Union at the time definitely had the technological ability to detect whether we really went or not - they were quite close to managing it themselves. If we didn't really go, the Russians of the late 1960's really didn't have much motivation to help us cover it up. Unless you believe that the One World Government was already up and running by then, and the Soviet space establishment was also ordered to lie; in which case, I will choose to bow out of the discussion at this point and move on to another World of Warcraft post of some kind. Circy's level 60 now! Woo!

The essential Moon Hoax links:

Quick and simple: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html

In-depth and pretty: http://www.clavius.org/

Question: Are you, the reader, familiar with both the recording artists a) Shirley Bassey and b) "Pink"?

If you are a member of that exclusive club, you would only be punishing yourself by not clicking "play" on the associated video.



Otherwise, you may still enjoy it, but you will sadly be unable to perceive the true levels of awesome presented here.

This one's been on my mind for a few days. I blame the alignment of the planets.

Situation: you have a shiny-new Starfleet food replicator, the kind that takes molecular building blocks from storage and makes any kind of food you want based on patterns you've loaded or scanned in.

( Poll cut to protect the squeamish )

I know. I'm a weirdo.

I got a forwarded email about ip addesses today. The subject line was "fwip". This is brought to you by the Easily Amused Association.

I saw the screener for the new Doctor Who this week, and really liked it. The episode was fun, and avoided Fox's mistake of trying to cram too much continuity down a new viewer's throat - though there were a few tips of the hat to we long-term fans. I was going to post some specific opinions behind a spoiler cut, but I can wait until after Technicon to do that. I imagine that TV torrent sites are getting more queries on "rose" right now than the last time "The Bachelor" got pre-empted. I'm looking forward to more!

I've been spending a lot of time lately reading the archives at http://www.randi.org/ - some of the anecdotes are pretty wild. I can't honestly say I'm likely to attain the level of skepticism displayed by Randi or the late Carl Sagan, but I did work out at an early age that there are a lot of charlatans out there waiting to take advantage of anyone they can. I'm a tongue-in-cheek adherent of Discordianism partially because it doesn't want my money and would be disappointed in me if I started doing everything it told me to :)

Part of the fun of being Tech Support here is getting to play legitimately with the Developer Preview of OS X 10.4. Shiny beta plaything!

Since most of us have long forgotten (though I can name specific people on my friends list that I know haven't), today is the 35th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon.

Of course, the Apollo missions were all complete fakes, as reputable psychics and conspiracy theorists will tell you. The truth is that both Americans and the Soviets have been on the moon since the early 50's, where we have established a diplomatic post for our continuing negotiations with the Xothar Dominion. There is, however, no truth to the rumor that German war criminals escaped Earth around that time to set up their own base in the southern hemisphere of the dark side. Fnord.

In the beginning there was flour and water, and it was said, "Let there be 450 degrees for 8-10 minutes", and there was, and it was yummy. - The Book of Muffin 1:1

Found this while looking up some furry info:

Furry fan to web columnist: I'm offended by how you bid for cheap laughs by portraying furries as sexual deviants in your previous column. Some of us just suit up and role-play for the experience of being a fur!

Web columnist to furry fan: Chill out. The Trekkies learned to accept being made fun of years ago, you'll have to also. Besides, wearing a fursuit for the purposes of kinky sex makes more sense to me than wearing one for any other reason...

Why am I referring to this? It's beginning to seem to me that openly, honestly weird folk seem to get a lot more back-handed respect than the timidly weird, the "weird only on weekends", the "weird as a form of social protest" types. When one's cheerfully, openly different, yet basically functional in society, they'll still be made fun of, but there'll be an undertone of sneaking admiration for someone brave enough to take a different path and make it work.

On the other hand, the posers, the people who only act different 'cause they're not getting enough attention, the ones who need to constantly defend their differences to people who really don't care, seem to draw more honest scorn.

Hmmm...

My LiveJournal "interpreted":

Nothing like getting ready to Lisa and Vond's Leaving for a whirlpool jacuzzis to avoid unnaturally repetitive motion And Halloween costumes to post my Borg parts I probably can probably hover walked two of my car, I miss costuming pics of my hip. Walked a location. Nothing like I'm going still under Gene Roddenberry's inflexible hand, told me? The copies I already have to catch up with what I'd like some of.

Soon, I'll be an air conditioned, level track to the combined Books.

(Try it yourself at: http://www.antispin.net/~martine/cgi-bin/insanity.cgi?mikailborg - you'll probably want to replace my username with yours)