So the other day I started making a list of videos I have planned (which are at various degrees of development).
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Interview with Lawrence Krauss (postponed)
How to spend a billion dollars.. What can you really buy with a billion dollars. Hubble cost average American 3 bux
Climate change videos
1) how much bioenergy to run man kinds biology compared to civilization compared to global warming flux
2) heat flow on planet earth
3) changing the volume of the oceans
Debunk Laci green feminist bullshit on feminism
Why do people laugh at creationists
1) giants – nephilimfree
2) Atmosphere -ian juby
3) What is science -ken ham
Noah’s arc theme park
Debunk radioactive bullshit
1) Depleted uranium
2) is it safe off Fukushima
How does a drinking bird work
sodium potassium alloy stuff
1) potassium exploding on ice
2) ultra high speed footage of explosion
3) large scale potassium, sodium and cesium explosions
4) ACTUAL mechanism of nak/water explosion
5) is it possible to get lithium to Explode
Make cesium thermometer- need to sort out high vacuum kit
Scientific research on Noah’s Flood- what happens to a plant under water for a year
Watching the go around the Sun (year in time lapse)
Time lapse of tracking telescope over several days (+ with without moon)
Debunk homeopathy (pico second qm simulation of water)
Who is thunder foot – scientific research
Getting drunk science – monitor blood alcohol level in resting and physically hard working thunderf00t
Comparison of sleep pattern while drunk and sober
Remaster why do people laugh at creationists videos
Anita sarkeesian master’s thesis and why having a ponytail is sexist
-Full reason why having gender bias in top field is probably nothing to do with sexism
Solar system in perspective. What if the solar system was all water
Death by meteorite impact…. Will you live long enough for your ears to go pop?
1) energetic of car crashes and statistics
2) comparison of car crash stats and rules and regulations with guns
call rationalwiki out on its comical degree of social justice warrior BS.
Well considering God was only doing this such that Joshua could have light to continue his butchery of a fleeing people (man woman and child), this has to be the most inefficient use of military force ever. The Earth rotates once a day (ish, it actually depends on how you define days, when the Sun is in the same place again (solar time) , or the stars (siderial time)). Just to give that some perspective, the people at the Earth surface on the equator are travelling about 1000 miles per hour (1.4x the speed of sound in the frame of reference of the Earths center of mass), those at temperate latitudes are doing about half of that, and those at the poles are doing zero! This means if God merely stops the Earth, the people on the surface will be doing about half the speed of sound relative to the surface. Given that it generally hurt to fall over, hitting objects at the best part of the speed of sound is probably going to sting!
Just so you know, this is what it looks like for something to hit a wall at about the speed of sound!
However to truely ‘Stop the Sun in the sky’ you need to stop the Earth in it’s orbit. Here the calculations are actually very easy. The Earths orbit around the Sun in about 30 km/ second. Given the speed of sound is about 1/3rd km per second, this means the Earths orbital velocity is some 90 times the speed of sound. So in order to stop the Sun in the sky you need to reduce the Earth velocity by 90 times the speed of sound, which in a frictionless environment is the same energy it would take to accelerate the Earth from rest to 90x the speed of sound.
So how much energy would this take?
Well kinetic energy is given by 1/2 x mass x velocity^2 (thats velocity squared)
So lets take a unit mass (1kg), and accelerate from rest to 30 000 meters per second (30 km/s the orbital velocity of the Earth around the Sun)
KE = 0.5 x 1 x 30 000^2 joules (1/2 mv^2)
KE = 225 000 000 joules = 225 000 kJ
So how much explosive would be needed to accelerate a unit mass to his velocity.
That means it will take about (225 000/3 000) kg of TNT to accelerate a kg to the orbital velocity of the Earth around the Sun. Give or take, it requires about a 100 times an objects mass in TNT to accelerate it to this orbital velocity. So to stop the Earth in its orbit would require about 100 times its mass in high explosives.
Lets just take a look at this in terms of total war. Historically it turns out bombing is not a very efficient way of killing people, such that in WW2 it would typically take about 1 ton of bombs to kill one person. Some ball park numbers,
So modern(ish) warfare takes about a TON of explosive to kill one person. That might sound inefficiency till you compare to to God!.
God expends 100x the mass of the Earth in high explosive (~100 x 6 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 tons)
So lets say God killed 10 000 people by doing this, this means that God expended about the same energy as 6 000 000 000 000 000 000 tons of high explosive per person killed. The biggest atom bomb ever was the Czar bomb at some 50 megatons (50 000 000 tons of TNT). This means that Gods expenditure of energy here was about the same as 100 000 000 000 (ONE HUNDRED BILLION Czar bombs per person he killed).
So, lets see, God, determined to wipe out a fleeing people, first tries throwing rocks at them, and manages to kill some of them, and then when Joshua wants some extra daylight to continue with this religious genocide, God obliges by stopping the Earth in its orbit at an energetic cost of 100x the Earth mass in high explosive, when the same effect could have been had with a truck load of flares. Given that people can be killed simply by simply stopping the electrical current that regulates the heart, stopping the Earth such that Joshua can continue to kill man, woman and child by stabbing them with sharp pieces of metal seems to be both EXCEPTIONALLY inefficient and psychologically VERY messed up.
It is just so very VERY strange watching yourself sleep. Watching yourself helpless and unconscious. It’s one of those things that you only usually sleep with people you really trust (with or without sex), and so I was really surprised to get a v. similar response to watching myself sleep as watching someone who trusts you enough to sleep with you, sleep (an emotionally bonding experience!!!). I know that sounds WTF!!! narcissistic, but I don’t think it is…. I’m guessing its more of that there are no biological mechanisms to determine how to respond to yourself when you are unconscious: this isn’t like seeing your reflection or similar!
However the other reason I was doing this is I was testing audio setup. Now I’m still a *NOOB* at this sort of thing, so your feedback would be appreciated.
Of the people I talked to at The Reason Rally, (of the stuff I’d done) this was mentioned more than anything else as the key factor in ‘saving the saved’. Two more episodes were meant to be put out before the Reason Rally (they are all scripted, just need a couple of weeks to put them together), just all the distractions that WLCs DMCA abuse and Dawahfilms flagging harassment took up all my spare time. The Reason Rally, above all else convinced me that this is an area to focus on. I am hoping to get 1/3 to ½ the time devoted to this (probably means somewhat under half the videos will be WDPLAC).
“OMG, The Bible says WHAT?!”
The bible is batshit crazy. Most Christian have never read it, and so Im going to make the media. I may even start this up as a guest spot for people read their favorite crazy bible verses. This may take the form of a ‘mid-week short’.
SCIENCE BITCHES, IT WORKS
I’ve already got permission to get the footage from within a nuclear reactor for an experiment (~June). Last year I showed you how close the edge of the unknown was and even demonstrated, for the first time as far as I can tell, that gaseous potassium is evolved when the metal is thrown into water, and its GREEN! This year I’m going to show you the REAL face of the unknown, and how it could affect your life. Yup going to go inside a nuclear reactor to look at something a billion times smaller that your typical human!
Nailing the religious types in the 2012 elections.
I would have liked to have been more active here, but regrettably I got sidetracked into DMCA and flagging complaints.
Build the community.
The secular atheist community on YT emerged strongly, quickly overtaking all the religious communities. In order to maintain and take full advantage of this position we need to increase the number of people producing good media regularly. I will be moving towards facilitating that goal. There will be two mechanisms, 1) A (biyearly?) competition for people who have produced at least 3 good videos in three months. This way promotional effort is focused on those who are both committed to, and capable of producing the goods 2) donation of equipment (green screen, cameras, sound equipment etc) to active folks who are making quality content videos, but that have the amateur-ish look that doesn’t fly so well on youtube these days. Basically, imagine if someone had supplied ZOMGitscriss with a camera, green screen and other kit early on how much this would have helped.
-Deploy the resources where they will have greatest benefit for the community.
Create a DVD.
This is another project I’ve been trying to get done for about a year, to create a dvd of the work, if not for sale, then simply so it can be hosted and torrented. Indeed I had wanted to get a thousand or so pressed (several kgs) to give away at the Reason Rally. Sadly again event overtook the aspirations.
This year I’m not going to get enough time to go touring, so sadly no touring or dark sky astro video. I might yet be able to get a good timelapse of Mars though! Hope for clear skies 🙂
To be honest when I first got the take down notices, about 6 of them in an hour or so (4 content inappropriate with no chance of appeal, and two privacy complaints) I thought,
‘another harassing and minor annoyance in running the channel. A quick email to YT should sort it out.’
I was then simply stunned when youtube claimed these videos had been reviewed by professional and impartial moderators and were removed for either hate speech or privacy violation. The more so as some of these videos constituted some of the milder things I’ve said about religion. The bottom line was, if this really was the new bar for hate speech, not only would it in an instant render the Thunderf00t channel unviable, it would render virtually every rationalist channel unviable. Youtubes actions were simply unintelligible. Indeed if someone had told me these were youtube actions, I simply wouldn’t have believed them. But there were the words on the screen in black and white.
I had no option but to make the video “Youtube starts banning ‘religiously offensive’ videos“. There were simply no other alternatives. A fairly high stakes game given that youtube could easily have said my action violated the terms of service and just killed the account. But then again, if the words I had in black and white on the screen were correct, then channel was already dead, and the only thing left to do was give a good accounting of itself before the inevitable banhammer.
By coincidence this happened about one week after the Hamza Kashgari incident.
Kashgari made about 3 vanilla tweets mildly critical of Islam only to find himself in fear for his life. He fled Saudi, only to be arrested in Malaysia. There he was deported back to Saudi with no due process to face a potential death sentence over three tweets. That’s fucked up beyond ALL recognition. But it really underscores the problem that religions find arbitrary things offensive. Given this simple observation, having a clause in the Terms of Service about not offending religions is simply incoherent.
If youtube really is willing to give religion this latitude of freedom, and to further scale what they consider ‘hate speech’ by how offended people are, then youtube would inevitably find itself in thrall to the Imams. Many of them find anything that is not Islam offensive beyond comprehension, as was demonstrated by the Imam crying over the three tweets of Kashgari calling them ‘the worst thing he’d ever read’.
So it was that I wrote potentially my last email to youtube asking them to apply whatever policy they had uniformly, which, taking ‘The Best emotional PORN‘ as the benchmark, would mean either about 7/10 of my videos would be hate speech, and they should delete them and ban my account, or reinstate the videos (which are vanilla compared to some of the videos on my channel).
The BEST emotional PORN, the new bar for ‘hate speech’, Really?
Thankfully, some 48 hrs later, with over 17000 thumbs up, well over a thousand mirrors and ~160k hits Youtube had a change of heart over what constituted hate speech.
Now I have mixed feelings about this. The Churchill quote about ‘The United States will always do the right thing…. once all other options have been exhausted’ kept coming to mind.
Sure Youtube had done the right thing, and had the humility and plasticity to correct their previous mistake (a fairly honorable and humble act), but only once all other options had been exhausted. You then look at what other options youtube had on the table (banhammer, ignore or stick to original judgment), and this is BY FAR the most dignified thing they could have done.
So all things considered, I think this is as happy an outcome as could have been hoped for. For the strong response of the community (and yes, it was the communal action that made this possible, for I as an individual had tried to take this to a sensible resolution and failed (I have the gut feeling it was not my email that swung the balance here)) ensured that free speech is maintained on this forum.
Many Thanks to all who made this outcome possible!
For those who have been paying attention to the sky over the past few months, you will have seen Venus crawl out of the evening twilight, and Jupiter sink towards it. These two VERY naked eye planets (both outshine even the brightest stars) are now only about 15 degrees apart (about the spread of your fingers held out at arms length), with that value set to shrink to about 3 degrees over the next 3 weeks. Get the popcorn is ‘cos its gonna be a fantastic show!
The ballet is highlighted in the sequence below.
Venus Jupiter conjunction of 2012 (click to enlarge)
A) t= 0. Jupiter and Venus hang in the evening sky. Venus, by far the brighter of the two lies below Jupiter, and the pair are separated by about 15 degrees. For reference, the Moon and Sun are about half a degree in diameter, and your outstretched fingers at arms length are about 15 degrees in angular size.
B) t= 5days. The moons orbit takes it out of the solar glare and by the 26th it resides between Venus and Jupiter. This will be a spectacular sight for those who get to see it, with the 2nd, 3rd and 4th brightest objects so close together in the sky. The angular distance between the two planets has now closed to about 10 degrees. Most of this apparent motion of Jupiter is due to the Earth moving around the Sun, while with Venus, about half of the apparent motion comes from this planet orbiting the Sun.
C) t~21 days. The Venus, Jupiter conjunction of 2012. The two most spectacularly bright planets appear at their closest (~3 degrees).
D) t~33days. The Moon has now made a complete orbit since it last visited these planets. When it last did, Jupiter was the higher, and Venus the lower. The second time the moon visits these planets the order is reversed! Venus the beguiling bright is now the higher of the two objects! The objects are again separated by about 10 degrees.
For those who want to see what this looks like in animation form, take a look! Download the free solar system visualization software Celestia (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/)
You don’t have to think about it long to realize that the future of mankind relies on the effective combating of pseudo-science.
That is the future of mankind relies on an increase level of knowledge. When the rate that knowledge is being lost, or polluted by pseudo-science equal that where it is being gained, to a first degree approximation, equilibrium is reached and mankind stagnates.
Combating such disinformation will at some point therefore become as important as research.
Sadly as we get to know more and more, it becomes easier and easier for bullshit merchants posing as scientists to go undetected or unchallenged, and the harder it becomes for Joe Public to distinguish real scientists from increasingly slick impostors. Arguably there is no field where this is more true than in climate change, where a small and very well funded group of ‘climate change deniers’/ pseudo-scientists seek to dis-inform society about the impact of the anthroporgenic release of carbon dioxide.
Thankfully, the National Center for Science and Education (The NCSE), who have done such sterling work in keeping creationism out of the class room are now moving to keep such disinformation on climate change from being dissemination in schools.
Firstly you need to understand the orders of magnitude of energy. Imagine a kilogram of explosive. Blow it up and you get a lot of energy. In fact that energy actually comes in the form of accelerated atoms/ molecular fragments, and the pressure and temperature from these is what causes damage. Okay, so when you blow up explosive you are releasing chemical bond type energy, and that’s typically in the eV (electron volt) range per nuclei.
Now imagine a fusion type event. This typically releases MeV (a million times as much energy) per nuclei. This is why 10kg warhead, when releasing its energy all at once, can give kilotons of chemical explosive equivalent energy. Bear in mind that for chemical explosive, you have eV type amounts of energy per nuclei (about the energy of a chemical bond), while with fusion you have a million times that. So you fragments from fusion type events typically have a million time chemical bond energy, and this is why they are so dangerous. That can make a mess of your DNA and kill your cells. The bottom line is it really doesn’t matter if your fusion takes place at room temperature or millions of Kelvin, the products still have CRAZY amounts of energy.
This is why if you really did have cold fusion on your desktop, you would be a gold plated idiot to be in the room while the reactor was running. This is apparently what our Italian scientists are doing while running their ‘cold fusion reactor’. However for some strange reason our Italians don’t find any high energy radiation. This was also the problem with Pons and Fleischmanns claims of cold fusion. They were claiming to get enough energy out to boil water. Hmmm well if they had had that sort of fusion energy flux, everyone in the room would have died from the radiation.
Cold Fusion, normally turns out to be a poorly calibration thermocouple.
This is where the whole thing goes into the category of bullshit. Fusion is great ‘cos you generate MeV per reaction. If you don’t have those high energy particles, then whatever you are doing is not fusion! Even more perculiar is if you wanted to work out what sort of fusion you had going on, the first thing you would measure would be the energies and fluxes of the radiation coming off the sample. Not only have our Italians not tried the obvious analysis (well how can they when they have no high energy radiation) but instead they focus on the bloody silly metric of ‘excess energy’. That is they claim to put X energy in, get Y energy out and ascribe the difference to fusion, even though it’s bloody obviously from the lack of high energy particles that its not fusion. The nearest analogy I can think of its like lighting a firework, watching it generate more energy than was put in, then concluding that the ‘excess energy’ must have been cold fusion.
Before next year (2012) is out, I plan to have taken you to the edge of the unknown, and give you vision beyond mere sight. To guide you up the more accessible foothills of the unknown on a voyage of discovery leading to an intellectual vantage point from which you will understand why, given nothing but natural processes, emergent self replicating life seems inevitable, rather than improbable.
-Damn straight! If you are going to do open n accessible science, make it interesting! Shining the magic light of knowledge on the hidden origin of life seems to be a pretty entertaining place to start 🙂
The first footstep on the journey of discovery
Further, now that many know my real name, I can openly link up with other high profile groups promoting science education (to be announced) to publish this work in the peer review literature. And sure, why not, let’s be bold and set a goal of getting this work published in one of the top research journals like Science or Nature.
How does this work start? Why with a good drink of bacardi of course!
And I can fully assure you that by this time next year, you will see SOO much more than an amber, highly volatile liquid that is well know for its intoxicating properties on many carbon based life forms!
DON'T PANIC, IT'S ONLY SCIENCE!
….and yeah, if anyone’s got a wizard name for this epic endeavor, I’d love to hear it it the comments section below 🙂
Well the supernova sure has brightened a lot over the last week!
Supernova in M101, August 25th 2011, about a 3 hr exposure with an 11in scope and 2500 iso on a canon D60.
From the night of the 3rd sept. 1.5hr exposure comprised of 20s unguided exposures (chosen frames) of a cpc1100 with a canon 60d at prime focus (f6.3 reducer).
It now easily outshines the galaxy core and is the brightest thing in the field.
So it turns out one of the reasons I had the Pine Mountain Observatory to myself to do ‘supernova LIVE’ (Sept 1st) was because some of the folks had drifted off to the Oregon Star Party. I too was advised to go, in part for the great skies of the ochico, and part for the company.
Getting there was a bit of a nightmare in that I set the wrong GPS coordinates (a combination of relatively little sleep the night before, and just drifting along with the scenery). Either way, by the time I worked it out I was 50 miles down the road, and the GPS kept on trying to send me down dirt roads to nowhere to get back. The tricky thing about dirt roads, is if they are good, you can get up to 45 mph-ish. If they are not good, not only will you be doing well to make walking speed, but 10 feet can make the whole thing utterly impassable to a polite little underpowered low clearance suburban car like mine! (or the even more devastating, can get the car stuck!) Thus it was after an hour or so detour down a road that started like a ‘freeway’, then it narrowed and narrowed and eventually turned into a road where I might as well have been trying to drive down a rough rutted river bed. I think I did well to survive the turn around! Especially seeing as I was miles in the middle of nowhere by this point, with no apparent traffic on the road! Eventually I decided to retrace my steps down the black top and do it right!
Thus is was that it was about 5pm by the time I arrived at the Oregon Star Party. I had a brief exchange with the staff, who insisted on a 75 dollar registration fee. I told them I was there just to take a look around- ’75 dollars’, that I probably wouldn’t even be there a full day ’75 dollars’, and so it went on. Just for the record, that would make visiting the Oregon Star Party significantly more expensive than Disneyland, which is some 85 dollars for a day pass. Apart from the OSP is just a bunch of guys sitting out under the stars ontop of a hill. Now I was actually interested in talking to some of the vendors they had there, particularly Celestron and Orion (the latter about their crappy capture device on their deep sky video camera), but I was knackered. So I put up my feet in the car and dozed a bit, trying to recover some strength and in part to work out what to do. Eventually the organizer came out and said they were ‘locking the gate’ at 7pm. This was bullshit, there was no gate. Shit what were they going to do imprison everyone ontop of the hill for the night?. I got his message thoguh, so at that I rolled back a mile or so down the road and found a place with a good northern horizon and set up the scope. The ochico is notorious for having a fine dust that gets onto and into everything, including optics, and so I was quite happy to not have folk around disturbing the dust. Set the scope up on M101 and cooked myself some ‘ramen noodle’ soup type stuff. Hunger and a bad day are by far the best cooks, and it was the best meal I’ve thus far had on the road, snarfed down with butter and bread! Ahhhh! Then I basically went to sleep for a few hours till M101 effectively set before packing up the scope. Skies were, I have to say good!
Next day, I meandered over to the John Day fossil beds. They were on the map and I had no real idea what the hell it was all about. Turns out there are some fairly reasonable badlands here, full of fossils. Regrettably however the fossil museum was an hour down the road in the wrong direction, and a tired thunderf00t wasn’t really up for it. The sedimentary stuff here coincidentally is from the primitive cascades, and goes back 20 million years! Yeah, exactly to when the supernova overhead capped off…..ooooooh!
Some of the 'Badlands' near the John Day Fossil Beds Oregon.
Picked up wifi and power at Prineville and processed the acquisitions of the night before, as well as a video of supernova so far. By that time I had really only enough light in the day to make it back to Pine Mountain, where fortuitously, the deep sky forecast was near perfect! Plus this really the last chance before the moon becomes a serious issue for a couple of weeks to get a good piccie of the supernova.
On Saturday night on Pine Mountain they do outreach, so I agreed to give them a hand: that night many a person was put into perspective with the Cosmos! 🙂 The odd thing was, all of this was apologetically put into perspective with distance and years in the millions, and of the hundred or so people I talked to, there wasn’t so much of a sign or a peep from anyone expressing the young earth creationist view!
Thunderf00t 