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September 27, 2021 Archives
Monday, September 27, 2021
Add category: Cat Earth
people are largely unaware of the cat earth and its implications pic.twitter.com/RX78MTCEQq
— Dog Two 🌊 (@surf__dog__) September 23, 2021
Perhaps this explains what is happening to Australia.
Posted at
14:51
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: How Virtual Worlds Work
Amidst the growing hype and proliferating scams about the “metaverse”, virtuoso game designer Raph Koster (“Ultima Online”) is writing a superb series on “How Virtual Worlds Work”. Here is part one: https://t.co/QCp1LAAk30
— John Walker (@Fourmilab) September 27, 2021
Posted at
13:42
CONTEXT: Did an Asteroid Impact Destroy the Biblical City of Sodom?
Yes, I am well aware of Betteridge's Law.
A recent paper published in Nature, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea” (full text [PDF]), argues (from the abstract) “… in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. … Tall el-Hammam may be the second oldest city/town destroyed by a cosmic airburst/impact, after Abu Hureyra, Syria, and possibly the earliest site with an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis).”
How plausible is this? Well, we know that the Tunguska event occurred, and its interpretation as having been caused by a cosmic impactor that disintegrated in the atmosphere is consistent with analysis of smaller, more recent, and better documented impacts such as the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor. The analysis in the Nature paper covers a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines including geology, archaeology, bioarchaeology and analysis of human skeletal remains, mineralogy and shock formation, agronomy, and small body planetary science. But in this age of widespread and deep corruption in academic and institutional science (as the replication crisis spreads from the squishy into the harder sciences), publication in a prestigious venue does not ensure the reliability of the work, and specialists in the relevant fields have been quick to respond, “Not so fast.”
For example, Mark Boslough, four of whose papers on the Tunguska event were cited as references, responded on Twitter as follows:
“Pseudoscience is like spoiled food; you don't have to eat it all to know something is badly wrong. Just a few bites will do." (David Morrison). I immediately saw that the Figure 53 caption was a badly wrong: a complete misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of my model. pic.twitter.com/151GozRh6J
— Mark Boslough (@MarkBoslough) September 27, 2021
beginning a long thread which you can read by clicking the message above.
Scott Manley surveys the claims in the paper and other objections raised to it in this video and suggests that readers “Take these claims with a pillar of salt.”
Posted at
12:21
CONTINUITY: Galileo Observed and Drew an Occultation of Θ Libræ in 1610
Ewen Whitaker 1st to notice post occultation of 4th mag star Theta Librae depicted in wash drawing F7👇inserted in #Galileo's own copy of Sidereus Nuncius enabling accurate dating of the🔭 observation~IOTA software rendering shows occultation occurred Padua 5:44:16 UT 19/Jan 1610 pic.twitter.com/KL13f6oRmU
— Lunar Heritage (@Lunarheritage) June 27, 2019
Posted at
11:53
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: The Subtle Physics of Bowling
Did you know that bowling lanes are not only oiled, that the oil is responsible for the behaviour of the ball, but that there are dozens of different ways to do it?
Posted at
11:23