Richard Hoagland On Martian Revelation 2-5-05 - Page 3

Doug, go to the Enterprise Mission website and go from there to the "Captain's Blog" - I mentioned this in a Deep Impact thread. One of the entries begins with a montage of the front pages of papers from last Friday showing the aftermath of the bombings, and the blog entry itself describes the bombings - among other news stories - as a "distraction" from all the various "truths" Mr Hoagland is intent on revealing to the world. he refers to the bomb victims as "truly clueless", which I took great exception to and told him so in the Comments section of the blog. He did, to be fair, reply to my posting, expressing his regret at the bombings and sympathy for the victims, but he insisted that because the people killed were unaware of the truth behind all his various conspiracy / alien theories they were "clueless", like most other people in the world. I replied again that what he had done was truly inexcusable and disgusting, but no second reply was forthcoming. Imagine my surprise.

I like to think I'm a pretty fair live and live kind of guy. In the past I've read Mr Hoagland's essays with a mixture of amusement, disbelief and genuine interest. I admire people who have passion about their subject, and he certainly has that. I have also made allowance for the fact that he has, in the past, contributed to space research through his work on the Voyager missions etc, and although it obviously wasn't his aim, he has helped raise the scientific and public profile of Mars through his "Face" and "pyramids" beliefs, which we have all benefitted from I think. But having read that Blog entry, and his smug defence of it, and having had my concerns and protests waved away like an "unworthy" I see him in a totally new light now. He should be ashamed of what he said, and for how he disrespected the victims of the bombings. I shudder to imagine the net backlash there would have been on 9/12 if a British UFO expert had posted a Blog entry suggesting the victims in the Twin Towers had been "clueless" and that the attacks were a "distraction" from other more important things.

And yes, I'll admit it, it sickens me that the name "Enterprise", which has unintentionally, for decades, thanks to a naive but well-meaning science fiction serial, come to represent the very best of our values - exploration, equality etc - is being used and corrupted by someone who could say such things.

In my opinion.

forest gump wrote: After all logic occupies exactly half of the human fontal lobes; the other half is working entirely on intuition!

Do you have evidence to back this up? Or did you intuit it?

Are you kidding stu? Have you never heard of the different hemisphres of conciousness? Left and right brain? Lobotomy? why are you posting on a science website? gooooogle people, google! do some frickin' research! Incidentally I agree that Ricki H. leaves something to be desired in his approach to "science" and I would be quite sickend to read such a chilling post as the one you have described.

P.S. I am not an M.D. nor have I ever performed any lobotomy or research on subjects who have been lobotomised. Consequently, I have not published any workts on this subject. the evidence you require would be found in medical journals written by trained professionals who know what picante sauce is supposed to taste like. I did however intuit from your question that you are not using your full human potential, But logically speaking, you could just be of low intelligence.

I've just read his blog entries. He really is a vile creature.

I dont wish pain and suffering on anyone, but I actually hope that he is near a terrorist attack at some point - I hope he has to feel the fear and the panic of the situation first hand. I hope he actually has to see the people running with blood pouring down their faces, people ripped limb from limb lying on a road.

I hope he one day has to see that with his own eyes.

Doug

Forest,

First of all, if you'd checked you'd have seen that I didn't actually ask you a question; that anonymous poster beneath my post wasn't me. I never post anonymously, so I'm assuming you wish to apologise for rudely questioning my intelligence in your reply #43.

As for why am I posting on a science website? Hmmm. Maybe because I have 20 years of experience writing books about space for kids; giving public lectures about astronomy; writing in SKY & TELESCOPE; running an astronomical society; giving talks in hundreds of schools to many thousands of kids, from the Shetland Islands to northern California. Dunno.

My impression of Hoagland is that of a pompous and arrogant windbag and this article reinforces that opinion.

--Bill

Newsflash: Moon to explode in 6 months!

This is what we're up against. This is the kind of rubbish that some people actually believe, thanks to glossy websites proclaiming we're secretly ruled by alien overlords, or comets are really alien generation ships, or Iapetus is an extraterrestrial death star.

I despair sometimes, I honestly do.

And I'm of low intelligence...

didn't know that kinda stuff existed..
'surrounded by morons' (a book I'm writing)
Nico

if you spout up enough nonsense.....some will believe. But this is what makes the world go round, less boredom sets in. The only thing you have to worry is if the people of nonsense take power. Other then that let them have their say, at the entertainment of the rest.

"Mr Hoagland is a gifted writer and obviously a very skilled persuader."

I disagree. His claims are so outlandish that all power of persuasion are lost. When someone makes that many claims that are downright stupid, they lose all credibility. It takes a person of limited intelligence to believe him.

A skillful persuader can sway people of average and higher intelligence. Hoagland can't do that.

"all power of persuasion are lost."

Well - clearly not - look at the replied to most of his blog entried "OH THANKYOU RICHARD FOR TELLING ME THE TRUTH"

People ACTUALLY buy his crap - and that's a dangerous situation.

Doug

Forest said: "Are you kidding stu? Have you never heard of the different hemisphres of conciousness? Left and right brain? Lobotomy? why are you posting on a science website? gooooogle people, google! do some frickin' research!"

Google says (at, forinstance, http://www.answers.com/topic/cerebral-hemisphere )

"In most people, the left hemisphere of the human brain dominates, and specialises (in very broad terms) in speech, writing, detail perception and language. It is quite unclear that the right hemisphere has equivalent broad associations with spatial abilities, coherent form recognition, emotional recognition, wholistic perception and visual face recognition. "

Unclear!

Further:

"Pop psychology and popular myths about the brain simplify these distinctions into a very crude binary system whereby a person appears pre-dominantly "left-brained": logical and less "right-brained": creative or vice versa, "

See also http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/brainhemisphere/index.htm

Sometime googling isn't the best way to research things where long held beliefs are currently in flux, there's a lot of unresearched stuff on web pages.

Cordially yours,
Not Stu.

Sorry Stu. There is no need for you to defend a position you did not take. To the anon poster....calling themselves ....Not Stu.....the statement "gooogle people, google" was obviously jockular! additionally your response does not quite refute anthing I have stated and therefor I would say that rather than wierdos who believe in the absurd posing the threat to true science it is otherwise intelligent people with years of scientific background trying to one up one another which bogs down the progress of intellectual debate. Any thoughts on this, or any other actual concept which I has so far mentioned?

"Sometime googling isn't the best way to research things where long held beliefs are currently in flux,"` Not Stu

when is this not the case?

So, forest, it seems you cannot cite a scientific source for your assertion: After all logic occupies exactly half of the human fontal lobes; the other half is working entirely on intuition!

Google!

in·tu·i·tion:
1.Knowing something instinctively
the state of being aware of or knowing something without having to discover or perceive it, or the ability to do this

log·ic:
5.inescapable relationship and patern of eventsthe relationship between certain events, situations, or objects, and the inevitable consequences of their interaction

"Each hemisphere of the brain is dominant for other behaviors. For example, it appears that the right brain is dominant for spatial abilities, face recognition, visual imagery and music"(these qualities are generally associated with intuition)
"The left brain may be more dominant for calculations, math and logical abilities. Of course, these are generalizations and in normal people, the two hemispheres work together, are connected, and share information through the corpus callosum. Much of what we know about the right and left hemispheres comes from studies in people who have had the corpus callosum split - this surgical operation isolates most of the right hemisphere from the left hemisphere."

[link]

"Roger Sperry (who won the Nobel prize in 1981) and Michael Gazzaniga are two neuroscientists who studied patients who had surgery to cut the corpus callosum. These studies are called "Split-Brain Experiments". "
example:
"So, say a "typical" (language in the LEFT hemisphere) split-brain patient is sitting down, looking straight ahead and is focusing on a dot in the middle of a screen. Then a picture of a spoon is flashed to the right of the dot. The visual information about the spoon crosses in the optic chiasm and ends up in the LEFT HEMISPHERE. When the person is asked what the picture was, the person has no problem identifying the spoon and says "Spoon." However, if the spoon had been flashed to the left of the dot (see the picture), then the visual information would have traveled to the RIGHT HEMISPHERE. Now if the person is asked what the picture was, the person will say that nothing was seen!! But, when this same person is asked to pick out an object using only the LEFT hand, this person will correctly pick out the spoon. This is because touch information from the left hand crosses over to the right hemisphere - the side that "saw" the spoon. However, if the person is again asked what the object is, even when it is in the person's hand, the person will NOT be able to say what it is because the right hemisphere cannot "talk." So, the right hemisphere is not stupid, it just has little ability for language - it is "non-verbal.""

Please understand that my post was based on an assertion that logic was superior to and therefor more reliable a tool than intuition. the reality expressed in these observations is that with out one the other would undoubtedly be insufficient for social and scientific progress.

So.... Uhh.... this kinda proves my point....

Further scientific evidence can be found here:http://autism.about.com/cs/behavorialissues/a/emotions.htm

Here are some qoutes which outline this new discovery:

"2003 issue of "Neuropsychology," published by the American Psychological Association, has an interesting article about a study done in Belgium by psychologists interested in how emotions are processed by our minds"

"[they]concluded that in dealing with emotions we are whole-brained."

"The left side focuses on the "what" of the emotion and then the right side goes to work on the "how" as in, how it feels."

"At Ghent University, Guy Vingerhoets, Ph.D., Celine Berckmoes, M.S., and Nathalie Stroobant, M.S., knew that the left-brain is dominant for language, and the right-brain is dominant for emotion."

"Participants in the study, while hooked up to the ultrasound machines, were asked to listen to a set of messages that had been recorded for the study. The sentences were ones that actors spoke in two ways. One way was factual without inflection and the other way was with the appropriate emotional tone for the emotion being expressed"

"processing emotional language?"

"The brain as a whole processed what the emotion was and what the proper reaction to that emotion would be. It took both sides of the brain to correctly connect with that specific emotion."

"More research will need to be done but it is clear that we are more than a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere. We function as a whole as the two halves of us ratchet up their functions to mesh with each other. And that is exciting; no matter what side of the brain you think with!"
~Adelle Jameson Tilton,

http://autism.about.com/mbiopage.htm

reply 57 is also mine. Sorry for the lack of claim

stu i would be interested in such books about space for kids. i have one. kid interested in space. (interested not obsessed like his dad). and what's up with all the bickering? mars getting under your skin? anywho getty lee (rush) explains all that hemisphere stuff in the songs Cygnus X-1 and Hemispheres. Balance!!!!!!!