Patrick M Brennan

I’m grateful to Republican State Representative Ben Bridges of Georgia for pointing out some interesting facts which I had somehow never heard of.

It seems that this “Evolution” thing – you know, the idea that plants, animals and people are descended from older forms which evolve over geologic time – isn’t just untrue. No, friends, it’s much, much worse. The ideas that, for example, the universe is billions of years old, that it is billions of light years across, even, apparently, the idea that the Earth moves in space – are all lies. And not only that, there is a sinister conspiracy to spread these lies and fix them in our minds.

Who do you think is spreading these lies? That would be the Jews.

Oh, and this “Gravity” thing is a Jewish lie, too.

You know, it’s one thing to come across some crank’s web site. Honestly, I’d rather just talk about that, because, Jesus Jones, is it hilarious. We’ll come back to it.

But here we have a really scary brew: we have a lunatic who has a crackpot theory of the world, driven to invent an evil conspiracy which is suppressing his theory. And where does he turn to supply the bad guy? To the closest little nub of hate he has in his heart, naturally. But then he gets support from not one, but two elected officials in two different states. The mixture of fanatic belief, conspiracy theories, scapegoating minorities, and government power, even though it is sort of small and comic in this episode, is something to keep a careful watch over. It’s like a pile of paint-soaked rags in your basement – you don’t want to tolerate it, even if you think the risk is small. You can expect that if there ever is a fire like that in America, this will be the place it starts.

The two elected officials in question are scrambling to backpedal their support for the kooky crank. They didn’t mean for a lot of people to notice that they were endorsing the view that Mathematics is a conspiracy to destroy Christian America. Just the kooky cranks in their districts. It’s entertaining to watch little men twist themselves into pretzels trying to pretend they don’t actually agree with this view, while putting out the wink to show the True Believers that, yes, actually, they do.

It goes without saying that they’re Republicans, doesn’t it? I think it’s probably true that the majority of Republicans would admit that the Earth moves, but in every important way, they truly are the party of reality-denial. We have been and will continue to pay the price for having them in office, as we shoulder the burdens of bad decisions based on delusions and lies.

But enough of that. Let’s get back to FixedEarth.com, a product of a gentleman named Marshall Hall.

I had thought that the battle between actual, enlightened, reality-dwelling people and kooky fanatics had moved off of the question of whether the Earth moves around the sun, and had moved into the issue of how human beings came to evolve into their present form. That’s what I thought the last time I wrote about this issue. It seems that, at least as far as Mr. Hall goes, I was wrong. He wants to take up the battle against Copernicus all over again. It’s too bad he’s about 460 years late to the party. His site (which is incidentally, a masterpiece of clueless Web design), shouts:

The Earth is not rotating…nor is it going around the sun. The universe is not one ten trillionth the size we are told. Today’s cosmology fulfills an anti-Bible religious plan disguised as “science". The whole scheme from Copernicanism to Big Bangism is a factless lie. Those lies have planted the Truth-killing virus of evolutionism in every aspect of man’s “knowledge” about the Universe, the Earth, and Himself.

Marshall Hall is a wheel in the political effort to remove evolution from the public schools in Georgia. Since he’s a fundamentalist, he’s gone back to the fundamentals. He feels he needs to demolish Copernicus in order to topple Darwin. I suppose he’s on to something, although it seems to me the facts of biology would remain the same if the Sun went around the Earth. But never mind that, and never mind the fact that even though Darwin is bedrock biology, Copernicus is even more deeply embedded in astronomy. In another part of the web site, he proclaims:

…the Copernican Model of a rotating, orbiting Earth is a factless, observation-denying deception that is the keystone which is holding up all of modern man’s false “science” and “knowledge". It’s time for the truth.

See? He’s right! There are no facts and no observations which support the idea of a rotating Earth! Stellar parallax? Poppycock! The retrograde motion of Mars? A Kabbalist illusion! Foucault’s Pendulum? A clever trick. There really is an entire section of the website devoted to showing how any observations which support the motion of the Earth are, in fact, lies and deceptions.

He even explains why geosynchronous satellites prove that the Earth does not move, and it’s such a mishmash that’s it’s damn near impossible to figure out. I don’t think he quite understands how geosynchronous satellites work in the first place, and comes really, really close to disavowing that there is such a thing as Gravity. (He also confuses gravity with atmospheric pressure, which is very funny if you’re a nerd like me.) As best as I can reckon, his explanation for why geosynchronous satellites prove that the Earth does not move is :

1. The Earth doesn’t move.
2. Geosynchronous satellites rely on the “earth-is-moving” hypothesis to work the way they claim to be.
3. But since the Earth isn’t moving, there can’t be any geosynchronous satellites.
4. If this gets out, it will expose The Conspiracy.
5. Therefore the Earth doesn’t move!

(Actually, it’s right there on his page, right after his paragraph which begins “Five things are certain at this point:"… I’ve just clarified the language.)

I also think it’s fun to note that his web site only vaguely implies that the Earth might be a sphere. Nowhere does he set that out explicitly.

At what point do you think Mr. Hall will admit that the Earth moves, and is more than 6000 years old? Let’s ask Thomas Kuhn:

During the century and a half following Galileo’s death in 1642, a belief in the earth-centered universe was gradually transformed from an essential sign of sanity to an index, first, of inflexible conservatism, then of excessive parochialism, and finally of complete fanaticism.

Well, Galileo’s been dead for more than three hundred years now…

I’ve rekindled my enthusiasm for Orbiter recently. I had stopped playing Orbiter for a while, not so much because I lost interest in it, but because I had to explore some other games. (Oh, and also, contrary to what you might think after reading this post, I do have a real life.)

“Astronaut” isn’t the only fantasy I have. This past year, I also wanted to play “Gangster” for a while, so I played through The Godfather; and I took another couple of turns as “Badass“, so I played through Quake 4 and F.E.A.R.; and even now I take an occasional sojourn into being a “Zombie Apocalypse Survivor", so I am playing through Dead Rising. I’m also quite enthusiastic about Second Life, but I’m not sure exactly what I’m gratifying when I’m playing Second Life – my inner Libertarian/Capitalist/Sprawl-Dwelling/Gambler/Chat-Addict, perhaps.

In the end, though, my strongest fantasy is still “Astronaut", which is also why my lovely wife gave me a fantastic Christmas gift: she sent me to Florida to participate in the Astronaut Training Experience at the Astronaut Hall of Fame. ("Just think,” I said, “I get to hang with a bunch of middle-aged white male nerds just like me! When do I ever get a chance to do that?") It was actually a lot of fun, and I ended up participating in a “simulated Space Shuttle mission,” and even though I didn’t get to “fly” in the “shuttle", and was relegated to “Mission Control,” it was all actually pretty good – but not as interesting or as detailed as Orbiter. (Well, you know, they have to cater to their market. Make it too hard and you turn away potential customers, like the family who were there – Mom, Dad, and three teenagers, who were all acting like they’d rather be at Universal Studios.) All in all, the trip engendered in me an even greater desire to download the latest version of Orbiter and lose myself in it again. (But I don’t get a cool polo shirt from playing Orbiter.)

My new fling with Orbiter was also catalyzed by the recent NASA decision to build a new generation of space hardware, called the Constellation system. Constellation will be used to return to the moon by about 2020, and establish a permanent base on the Moon’s south pole by about 2024.

I don’t know if Constellation will ever fly. There will be four presidential and seven congressional elections between now and then. It seems to me that the moon base, while technically feasible, may not get the kind of sustained political support it will require. However, just because it may never come to pass, that doesn’t mean I can’t “fly” the proposed hardware; so I turned back to Orbiter. Orbiter has recently been updated, and there is an extensive online community of fans and modders, contributing add-ons which make it a very rich environment for the space flight enthusiast. As luck would have it, there exist a couple of add-ons which implement NASA’s Exploration System Architecture Study, a 2005 precursor to Constellation. That was close enough for me.

Orbiter is a very complex program - it’s not a game. It’s a lot of fun (if you’re a space nerd like me), but it doesn’t hold your hand, and there’s no guarantee it’ll even work, let alone that you’ll be able to do what you want to do. Sometimes, you even need to do a little math. (Horrors!) Although I’d flown a lot of Orbiter scenarios previously, I’d never done it with a vehicle as realistic (read: as limited) as Constellation. What a difference the realism makes! Flying these vehicles is difficult, but I have managed to do it pretty well. In the process, I got stuck once, trying to figure out how to launch toward the moon when it seemed as though the rocket I had didn’t quite have enough fuel to do the trick. It turned out that I’d only had Astronaut 101, and I needed the 201 class in order to pull off the maneuver. (But that points out another great thing about Orbiter: there’s a very friendly on-line community of sympathetic folks who are always willing to help you out.) Being able to fly to the moon has given me a real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment which I don’t really get from games.

You might be saying: “Accomplishment? What accomplishment?” And I take your point. See, beating a boss in a video game isn’t an accomplishment - games are purposely designed so that 10-year-olds can do them with just a little practice, after all. On the other hand, in Orbiter I’ve guided my boosters from launch into orbit, performed orbital rendezvous and docking maneuvers, left the Earth, entered lunar orbit, and landed, only 1.7 km away from where I intended to land, near the lunar south pole (In Shoemaker Crater, actually). Do these things really count as accomplishments? I’d argue they do, because I learned a lot about how these things are actually done in practice, even if Constellation never flies.

I’ve learned something else new: getting to the moon is actually pretty easy, compared to getting back. Every step of this trip has been more difficult than the previous step – and I’m told that reentry is the hardest part of all! I’m looking forward to it.

(PS - My wife also gave me “The Godfather,” “Quake IV,” and “F.E.A.R.” How cool is she?)

It’s the 36th anniversary of the first moon landing, and Google is celebrating by debuting Google Moon. This is just the thing when you need driving directions from Mare Tranquillitatis (site of the Apollo 11 landing) to the Descartes Highlands (where Apollo 16 set down). Just don’t look too closely at the moon…

John Pultorak is my kind of nerd. This guy has built a replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer, the computer that flew on the Command Module and Lunar Module of the Apollo manned missions to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s.

Pultorak built the replica over the course of four years of nights and weekends, with some assistance from his son and a lot of understanding patience from his wife.

Recreating a 40-year-old computer is not an easy task, even if the hardware isn’t exactly cutting-edge. Pultorak didn’t just simulate the AGC (although that’s what he did as a first step). He didn’t even just emulate the AGC (i.e. build a modern computer and program it to pretend to be the AGC). He built real hardware which works just like the original. He didn’t replicate the original in all respects, because he discovered that some of the parts which were used to build the original AGC weren’t available any more. (Just try to find core rope memory these days.)

The AGC was definitely cutting-edge for its time (roughly 1962). It was the first digital computer to replace discrete transistors with Integrated Circuits, which were new and risky. It also was the first digital autopilot for any kind of piloted vehicle, and its user interface (the Display and Keyboard Unit or DSKY) was far ahead of its time, even if it seems a little quaint to us, and is one of the earliest examples of a real-time interactive user interface. In the 60s, after all, most computer users interacted with the machine via punch cards and printouts.

Others have implemented simulations of the AGC/DSKY. The Virtual AGC Project is one such effort, and the NASSP Project has implemented a DSKY in their Orbiter add-on (See this image). A more accessible, but less complete, partial implementation of a DSKY can be found here. I recommend it to anyone who is curious but doesn’t want to be overwhelmed. It’s a nice introduction, but it only works in Internet Explorer.

All of these efforts to replicate the space flight experience inside our modern computers are commendable, but for sheer geeky bragging rights, nothing really beats being able to say, as Pultorak can, “I built the real thing myself.”