Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Mike Bara: "I never said that"

        In his preamble to yesterday's angry blogpost, Bara included this:

"As you will see, I never said that orbital eccentricity was measured from the Earth, that centrifugal force makes you heavier,..."

        So what, pray, is this, if it isn't a statement measuring the orbital eccentricity of Mars from the Earth??
 "Because of its highly "eccentric" ... orbit ... Mars' distance relative to Earth varies a great deal. In fact, Mars' orbit is so elliptical that its distance to the Earth can be as much as 249 million miles at its farthest to as little as about 34 million miles at its theoretical closest approach." --Ancient Aliens on Mars, p. 42

        ....and what, pray, is this, if it isn't a statement  that centrifugal force makes you heavier??

"Without the Moon's calming influence, the Earth would spin so fast that the centrifugal force would most likely flatten us all like pancakes."  --The Choice, p.32
        I must admit I LOL'd  -- maybe even LMFAO'd -- when he deliberately misquoted himself on p.1 of Ancient Aliens on the Moon:
"As I put it in my previous book The Choice .... Without the Moon's calming influence,the Earth would spin so fast that the winds caused by the centrifugal force would most likely flatten us all like pancakes." [emph. added]
         I think that counts as a triple lie, doesn't it? Lie #1 in The Choice, Lie #2 in Ancient Aliens on the Moon, Lie #3 in his blog.

12 comments:

Binaryspellbook said...

I believe the internetz term is PWNED !!!!!

Dee said...

Perhaps we should discuss now if the lack of tidal break (the Moon) and any increased rotation speed and winds could really "flatten" anything. Probably it would be rather hard to go for a walk in those winds. But flattening?

Perhaps this Barror can still be Saved by shifting the topic to the equatorial bulge? Would the Earth as a whole not be flattened slightly further over time?

But that still isn't a pancake, not even American pancakes (being fatter and bulgier).

The barrror is bad enough but that last attempt at saving it by adding the winds is just lame. The bar(a) has been lowered yet again!

Dee

expat said...

I'm not even sure that increased rotation would create winds. I think the planet would drag its atmos around with it, just as it does now.

Dee said...

Expat, I was referring mostly to the Coriolis effect.

I'm not a meteorologist but Wikipedia suggests that gradient as well as geostrophic winds would change. It's of course difficult to predict the complete new energy and pressure balance of such an intricate system.

Here's a qualitative article on it which sounds informed, although written for high school audiences: Life without the Moon: a scientific speculation.

Surely Bara once really believed the centrifugal force of an accelerated earth would be able to push us over but compared to gravity it will still be close to nothing, even without Moon. Or worse he confused it with some extreme centripetal force (Wiki writes: "Centrifugal force is often confused with centripetal force").

Dee

expat said...

The sentence would have been better written "What is described as centrifugal force is usually the equal-and-opposite reaction to centripetal force."

Indeed that is true -- think fairground rides that make you dizzy. But the force opposing gravity due to rotation of the planet is genuinely centrifugal.

Unknown said...

Has anyone seen this? NASA tests some hyperdimensional space drive. Hoagland posted an article about this "controversial" technology (that the US Govt was covering up of course) a while back. I can't find the link anymore on his site. (I guess that means he's actually updating that site now - at least removing stuff).

http://rt.com/usa/177204-nasa-space-drive-emdrive/

The article links to an inconclusive paper at NASA called "Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF [radio frequency] Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum".

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20140006052

It's not the first time RT has published woo articles as fact. There was this gem a recently:

http://rt.com/news/173152-india-prehistoric-aliens-paintings/

expat said...

Of course Mike Bara is crowing about this story because it supports his contention that there are no laws of physics.

I considered blogging about it but stopped myself. Being ignorant about the subject matter, magnetoplasmadynamics, doesn't stop Bara from commenting but it does me.

Binaryspellbook said...

Wow. Bara is wetting himself on twatter. Can't wait for the toldya.

It's like he's been drunk and spamming the keypad.

As usual, he finds something that he can shoehorn into his flummery, pees his breeks. And even though he cannot possibly hope to understand what is going on with the physics and mathematics declares himself and his buffoonery validated.

Enter Hoagland ? - Will he break cover to aggrandize himself and grandstand as he usually does.

Binaryspellbook said...

NASA has conducted long-awaited experiments to prove that the fabled space drive, capable of generating its own thrust and breaking a fundamental law of physics, works. If the find survives fresh scrutiny, space ship construction will be revolutionized.

I guess for Mikey boy fresh scrutiny isn't necessary. After all his mentor Richard C. Hoagland is on record as saying, "extraordinary claims DO NOT require extraordinary evidence."

Pinching and spinning an Expat observation. Bara only requires it to look like a duck and it's a duck. No need for the quack and the walk.

Dee said...

It's funny how Bara cheers about this when even the inventor denies any law being broken or "falsified".

And it would perhaps be better to wait for a test where the whole set-up would float to prevent momentum to be partly transfered to anything attached to the wave guide. In space this would mean nothing at all would end up happening :-)

The NASA paper summary also has this discouraging passage: " Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust. Specifically, one test article contained internal physical modifications that were designed to produce thrust, while the other did not (with the latter being referred to as the “null” test article)."

It's very likely then that the torsion pendulum displacement was caused by something else in the set-up of power-supply and wave-guide, for example a resonance.

Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost said...

After reading some of his most recent MyFace posts, it looks like he's added "Expert on the Middle East" to his resume and is now wearing that hat over his comb over.

expat said...

I think actually the label reads "Swallower of the Fox News party line."