http://tinyurl.com/2hcjlt

Thanks.

Personally though, I don't give a rats arse whether we went or not, I just want to know IF we're going there in the future.

You want to know somethign really interesting? When they left the surface and released the main engine body of the craft it fell back to the moon and when it hit the surface the earth'moon'quack that resulted set of a ring that lasted an hour - leading many scientists at NASA pondering the moon is hollow.

they also deduce the Earth may be hollow, and thats the reason why on a smaller Earth, like a deflated baloon, ALL the continents fit perfectly together.

nonetheless Mori I agree with you that htis generation has lost it's sense of wonder when it comes to space exploration. I remember my dad getting me up early in the morning or late at night to watch shuttle launches. The same man who introduced me to Star Wars and Star Trek, and Close Encounters, and Logan's run, who loved all things sci-fi, also loved the real deal, telling me about Sputnik and looking up at the stars with me through my cheap JC Penny telescope and laying out by the lake and watching the sattilittes fly by. I remember seeing the challenger explosion and the first shuttle launch after that and then the Columbia(?) one that happened several years ago. I don't know if it's a growing "ADD" complex among our youth where verything must be presented to them in quick flashes and sound bites, if it's the readily available information at their fingertips, if it's the CNN instant news updates of everythg and anything, or even if it's NASA for scheduling more day launches and landings and more launches period, but there lacks among the younger generation a sense of wonder and excitement about when a shuttle is launched and when it comes to space exploration in general.

This is what keeps my sunny demeanor. :)

Man up or fuck off.

http://tinyurl.com/d4s5v

I still remember the time you thought you had "fallen victim" to the "AICN conspiracy" and been banned (which you - oops - apparently hadn't). The first thing you did was run off to fucking zfisk/homewrecker's blog to commiserate. If that's not the definition of a whiny bitch, then I don't know what is.

that's just great comedy...

Incidentally, I’m involved with a space visionary and multi-disciplinary scientist, Howard bloom, who has been working with Buzz Aldrin to organize conferences working to bring space back to the collective forefront. Bloom is among the great minds around the globe right now that are, and among other things, interested in unifying the sciences and ways of knowing to create a meaningful culture for the global family, and their ideas need to be spread and actions supported. They see the loss of the space ideal as emblematic not just of the sadness of lacking purpose, vision and imagination, but also a keystone to the much larger picture of interconnected global problems. Thus, having the final frontier once again seize the imagination of a new generation is one of the weapons in the arsenal against global stagnation.

For instance, Bloom argues persuasively that we should consider the lessons of an evolutionary imperative: the combined will and power of a social unit is stronger than the abilities of lone-gunners, a principle which drove single-celled organisms to network over time into the organism and drove people to organize in culture’s and societies and now toward globalization, but it is the social goals in both groups that provide the motivation and benchmark for collectively organized behavior and thus is the life blood of communal harmony. The same reasons parents who lose children or don't have them at all are statistically likelier to have relationship-problems and split apart is the same reason we need a global imagination for the future - social goals are the key to social problems. We need something the world can collectively support working toward so we can all feel the benefits of the collective. We need a utopian world-model to envision what the solution to global problems should look like, a model based on a meaningful scientific framework that comprehends how all human systems interact to anticipate what the pinnacle of systems design should look like, the spirit of the goal of politics.

Read the books of Howard Bloom (The Lucifer Principle or Global Brain are both amazing) or just get into system’s theory as a good start to a new way of thinking globally. Bloom is working on making this happen and he could use support. If you are already into this way of thinking and want to help, e-mail me (morgan.kinney@gmail.com) to get involved with what Howard is doing. And, oh yeah, I know this is often a place for cynics who could give two shits, I was one once too you know, but Howard Bloom is definitely a writer for cynics who want to believe in something. Anyway, I was just talking with Howard about Buzz Aldrin and I couldn’t resist posting this.

http://tinyurl.com/yvsg82

But I understand your criticism; there are many reasons to have that criticism, so I'm hard pressed to know which one exactly your talking about.

If you are talking about the attempts to compromise science and religion by combining both into science cults, like Scientology or Intelligent Design, than I can tell you it's not about that. Looking for "meaning" is a scientific exercise on its own; every culture around the world generates meaning, and despite our limited capacity for reason, we've always needed to replace gaps that science tears in our meaning structures by creating pseudo-sciences. On the flip side, a science that exposed underlying realities would necessarily interface with the functions of meaning creation and quantify that as well. For instance, the evolutionary imperative I mentioned above that living systems will tend toward social networking because groups are stronger than we are as individuals, validates love, friendship, purpose and even a spiritual connection to the whole as hugely important, because they are the glue that hold us together and keeps our big engine running.

Or maybe you are referring to the subjectivity built into science, the battle of egos looking for their own niche and battling down ideas based on their challenges to their own investment. Or the fact that even scientists identify strongest with the theories that most validate their own brand of experience. Because if there is one golden rule, it's that all people's experiences color which cultural or intellectual frameworks they will identify with, which will then organize their experiences so that they don't see counter-indicative problems with that ideology. But one of the cores here is that with that principle in mind, you can use every scientific and even non-scientific method to get outside the box and extrapolate patterns outside of experience, higher patterns that are only validated if they fit into a structure with all the other scientific methods and theories. That was used to make the system the primary unit of analysis, because then you can [epistemologically and ontologically] draw from every field, ala, psychology, anthropology, sociology, biology, physics, etc., and use every method in all of these to get outside our individual experience while understanding the permutations of every person’s experience, which draws on the traditions of more than just science, but also art, literature, film, philosophy and more.

Or maybe you are talking about the seeming limitations of scientific explanation. After all, humanism, theology and philosophy and regular ole' culture have had insights that science hasn't reflected. But I'd submit that's because science hasn't organized into larger patterns of greater explanatory patterns, inclusive patterns across disciplines that would provide a three-dimensional quality to the scope of science like humanism was good at even if it lacked quantification and progress. For instance, the latest switch is that we are going back to a directional evolution, and back to a superorganism metaphor of evolutionary trajectory. That even superficially makes sense (wiki it) of biology, psychology, anthropology and sociology in light of one another, and what's more, creates ways to account for more meaning than the more narrow sciences that are primarily interested with deconstruction of cultural meanings. A superorganism metaphor creates a natural trajectory in the universe that humans support by virtue of being nature incarnate. Thus, human globalization efforts are something that we naturally work toward because there is the promise of a system in harmonic equilibrium, just as the cells in the body struck before, and molecules in cells before that, atoms in molecules before that. That also has the effect of creating a universal human purpose toward something greater than ourselves, which is a theme common to all cultures, by creating the scientific foundation for working toward bettering our collective lot by working toward a global goal. The social structure of the cells in the human body is a parallel for the kind of stable system the world is trying to reach, which albeit has controlled competition, battles of ideas if you will. It is a sobering, but optimistic view of the future.

By the way, I say scientology is a "mix of science and religion" in the sense that when Catholicism started being questioned by scientific findings, people's void of meaning turned them to religions with a faccade of science to appease both at the same time. That's all; your right, there is no science in scientology.

And theory can't be proven, that's why it's always called theory, and never fact. Science never tries, and can't try, to prove something, it can only disprove until there is nothing left to disprove but the truth. It's a basic tenet of science, but nice try.

And finally, what I said about meaning is that it is a challenge in the information age to combine truth and meaning which results in both science and personal and cultural meaning suffering as a result. I mean, you would know this if you were at all a deep thinker. No one benefits when science pretends like it can replace our way of knowing without appealing to our emotional realities, something many scientists understand well. William James became depressed because of the percieved lack of free will; all I'm saying is that I find it exciting when I find a framework for all the sciences, a structure with a scientific integrity, that also validates the basic elements of our needs for meaning, because it has the promise of actually striking a blow for truth if people will accept it as a meaningful contribution to their lives. Otherwise, people will just plug their ears and not listen, because people don't value truth if it does more damage than good. I've always been committed to truth at any cost, I'm just excited to find in the end that the truth wasn't as hard to take as previous scientific theories have made it out to be.

Are you total idiots? Seriously, if you genuinely believe that, then you know nothing about science, and you nothing about history, which basically means you know nothing at all.

Of all the crackpot conspiracies, yours is the most derided, but the worst of it all is that you are primarily ungrateful bastards. Ungrateful because decades ago, men braver and better than you volunteered to strap themselves onto the top of what was basically a massive high explosive, to propel themselves into the most hostile environment man has ever visited.

And why did they do it? Money? Fame? Self aggrandisement? No. They did it so that we could find out a little bit more of our place in the universe. A little bit more about how the universe came to exist. They did it for science, and they did it for what was then non-applicable science: there was no financial outcome to what they did with a patent in mind, they did it because we wanted to know what was out there.

And decades on, when there should be statues to these people in every fucking city, what do they get? Pricks on the internet whining about ridiculous conspiracy theories that they didn't actually go. You ungrateful shits. How dare you impugn what people better than you did FOR you. You should look in the mirror and be utterly ashamed of yourselves, members of a nation which pioneered the moon landings now denying it. Jesus wept, how pushing back the frontier of science - a pure unfettered science - has devolved to irrational doubt which ignores actual scientific principle astonishes me.

And by the way Darwyn - this:

"And theory can't be proven, that's why it's always called theory, and never fact. Science never tries, and can't try, to prove something, it can only disprove until there is nothing left to disprove but the truth. It's a basic tenet of science, but nice try."

is batshit bonkers, another fierce misreading of hypothesis/theory bent to your own end. A theory is a theory when scientific method ellicits the same result from replicated experiment. A scientist is open minded enough to continue calling it a theory because new horizons always open, but it's brainless fools like you who turn that into "the science isn't in yet" when it is. Gravity is part of theoretical principle, are you going to say we're not sure it exists, or are you going to be a rational human being and accept its existence?

Bender: your hollow earth theory is just about the funniest thing I've heard all day. Did you even take any kind of remedial science class at school?

I can't even argue with you because you made my point right in your counter-point! That is, we haven't taken calling gravity, electricity or evolution facts, even though any intelligent person would consider them so, because there is always room to tweak them. We call them theory because in science, theory isn't a hunch, but an esteemed category that is very difficult to attain, and one that is not necessarily at odds with the word fact. But if you have a dogged commitment to the scientific method, you would know that unlike mathematics where you submit "proofs," science is based on falsifiability, a principle outlined by philosopher of science Karl Popper, who said that it is not science's goal to prove what is, but to try to disprove what isn't. This is done through falsifiable experiments and the process of deduction, through which science as a whole over many generations, comes to find out what “is.” While we do always try to formulate new theories based on a greater understanding of what has been disproved, we never try to assert what has been proven. That is what makes science great, because even scientists are subjective and what can appear obvious to them, like anybody, can be purely a facet of their own experience and perception. By disproving instead of proving, we get around subjectivity as a whole, which is why it's not the scientist that is the paragon of truth, but the scientific method. Any basic college-level science course would tell you the same thing, just as they told me in any number of classes. Besides, read my other posts - I clearly use and believe the scientific method, so obviously I'm not trying to poke holes in it.

Apologies, I totally misread your post. Oops.

I read it as I read a lot of ID nonsense about how evolution is 'only a theory' with the emphasis that it is de facto wrong, which is a particular bugbear for me!

Still, regarding gravity, it proves something can be theory, fact and law at the same time, and highlights the difference between theory and fact: fact denotes something is real and present in the scientific world, theory denotes the mechanics of that fact. Thus evolution is, scientifically, a fact, and the theory - and any valid scientific disagreement therein - is about the mechanics of evolution, not about its actual existence or not.

Last thing about the moon landings (fact, by the way) and the poor quality video of Armstrong stepping onto the surface: A lot of people have talked about the mounted poor quality camera on the leg of the module, but I don't think anyone's mentioned that it deployed upside-down. The footage of Armstrong therefore was upside down, and NASA actually filmed a TV screen at Mission Control of the upside-down footage with *another* upside-down camera so it would be broadcast right way up: giving another take on why the footage was so bad.

What's the weather like in Stupidville?

Seriously, pony up with some actual proof rather than inane bleating, and we'll watch actual science beat the snot out of your ridiculous conspiracy theory. Like I said before, people like you are ungrateful bastards. You should be in awe of these pioneers, instead of sniping from the back row because you grew up dumb.

It must be tough to try to compartmentalize the ways your friend is intelligent, like, smart in this way, but not that one; 53% smart but not in a mentally challenged way; half great IQ, half abysmal; left brain hemisphere good, but right hemisphere bad.

That's a tough one.