Does Anybody STILL Think That The Moon Landing Was Fake?

no stars in the background..fake!

6% of Americans believe that the Moon Landing was faked, while another 5% are undecided—according to a poll by Gallup in 2001. Then again, since only 40% of Americans believe in evolution, I guess that doesn’t really matter.

Sadly, I used to doubt that the moon landing was real too. I was still in high school, and during that rebellious period it was almost a pre-requisite to believe in cospiracy theories.

It was all too easy to believe that in order to win the Space Race from the then reigning Soviet Union, the USA faked a moon landing by staging and filming it in an undisclosed location (most probably the infamous Area 51). The proponents of the hoax then put out a number of so-called proofs such as the waving American flag and the absence of stars in the background.

Ray Villard, from the Discovery Channel had posted an article in the ongoing campaign to once and for all squash the notion of a fake landing. His rebuttals are clear, and by the end of the article, only the most die-hard conspiracy theorists will still believe in the hoax.

He hit the mark on the complexity of staging a believable landing:

The hours of astronaut moonwalk video are far too complex to be faked with comparatively stone-age 1960s special effects technology. For example, all the effects in the 1968 landmark film 2001:A Space Odyssey required complex, time consuming, and cumbersome optical printing techniques costing the equivalent of $54 million today. The Apollo billions of dollars would have to have been spent on building a time machine to bring back from the 21st century an image rendering supercomputer and powerful animation software – not to mention kidnapping a computer animation artist from the future.

On the waving flag:

Finally, the American flag doesn’t wave because a fan on the set is blowing! The flag appears to wave after an astronaut touches the pole. The vibration takes more time to dampen out than on Earth because the flag material is moving without air resistance in a vacuum and in 1/6th the pull of gravity.

With these kind of scientific explanations, it’s a wonder if anyone would still cling to the notion of hoax.

Nevertheless, a more amusing and famous rumour about the moon landing is that Neil Armstrong heard the azan (Muslim prayer call) while he was on moon, and decided to convert to Islam right after that. Oh, how proud the kids must feel when their ustazs mentioned this almost miraculous trivia!

Can somebody please tell these ustazs that this didn’t happen at all?

Physics’ Who’s Who

A late session of StumblingUpon led me to this cool photo of what seems to be the crème de la crème of nuclear, theoretical and quantum physics (originally found here, click below for larger size):

I don’t have any idea where or when this was taken, only that there are a lot of names who stirred up my memories of First Year Higher Physics. Here are some that I’ve heard of:

• E. Schrödinger: of the famous Schrödinger’s cat
• W. Heisenberg, of the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
• P. A. M. Dirac, of the Dirac equation
• L. V. De Broglie, of the de Broglie equation
• N. Bohr, of the Bohr atomic model
• M. Planck, of the Planck constant
• Madame Curie, as in the Marie Curie.
• H. A. Lorentz, of the Lorentz transformation etc.
• and last but not least… A. Einstein, as in Albert. Heh.

I’m too lazy to wiki the rest of them, so if you know them please let me know.

Man, how I miss fundamental physics.

“Cooties” is Malay in Origin

It surprised the heck out of me. The word “cooties” came from the Malay word “kutu” (lice). This is just one of the few English words of Malay origin that I stumbled upon while researching for my last post.

Well, I can’t really vouch for the etymologies because I got them from Wiktionary, but another article by Michael Quinion who works with the Oxford Dictionary should lend a much-needed credibility.

Some of the words are quite obvious, since they refer to regional nouns, such as “mangosteen” (manggis), “durian” and “orangutan”.

Some are deeply ingrained as being Malay, like “amok”, “kris” and “sarong”.

I have always suspected that “ketchup” came from kicap (and it does), but I’ve always thought that these came from English, and instead it was vice versa:

• “Agar”, from agar-agar
• “Paddy”, from padi
• “Junk”, from jong
• “Tea”, from teh (yep, they used the Malay variant rather than the Chinese!)

And my favourite: “compound” from kampung. Who would’ve thought of that?

Speaking in Tongues

Pitchfork announced that Sigur Rós’ new album will feature a song in English, and music-lovers over the world rejoiced.

Mindboggling? Not, when you consider that all this while they have been singing in Icelandic. Moreover, a few other songs and the whole of album ( ) was sung in their invented language Vonlenska! (roughly translated as “Hopelandic”)

In the recent Eurovision song contest, Belgium’s representative Ishtar sang the song “O Julissi” which lyrics are in an invented language. It is a well-known fact that Belgium has a cultural clash with parts of the country speaking in Dutch and the other in French.

John Naisbitt would be proud to know that his global paradox is more and more becoming apparent. In a world where you are more or less expected to know English, why is everyone striving to use invented language?

An obvious advantage of invented language can be found in literature and fiction, where alien civilisations are abound—obviously they don’t speak English. Klingon language is one of the most famous alien language, with quite a number of fluent speakers (Guiness World Record 2006 certified it as “the most spoken fictional language by number of speakers”). It was created in the Star Trek series, and now is an almost certain stamp of geekness, with quite a number of Trekkies’ weddings done in it and books like Hamlet translated.

Another notable examples are the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin. To my embarrasment, I could actually speak a number of Sindarin phrases during the LOTR hype—who could forget mellon? Tolkien was teaching English in Oxford, and he put a lot of details into the construction of the languages’ grammar and phonology. His works wasn’t finished though, which left Quenya and Sindarin as incomplete languages not fit for casual usage.

Talking realistically, the biggest project so far to use an invented language as lingua franca that replaces English is the language Esperanto. It boasts around 1-2 million fluent speaker, with numerous organisations using it almost exclusively. It has however, yet to be adopted as official language of any country, but efforts have not abated.

On the other side of the story, while these invented languages are popping out into existence and usage, a lot of ancient languagess have perished or on the brink of disusage. Latin, which was once widely used, and was the language of the elites in the West is now only officially used by The Church and relegated to use of its phrases in specialised discipline such as law and medicine. Earlier this year, Marie Smith Jones, the last speaker of Eyak, an extinct language historically spoken in southcentral Alaska died, reigniting the fight for extinct languages.

It is a well-known saying in Malay, “Takkan Melayu hilang di dunia” (Malays shall not perish on this world). I wonder how long the Malay language will survive. It only took a few decades for the language to change and lose its lustre, while government keeps pondering whether to call it Bahasa Melayu (Malay language) or Bahasa Malaysia (Malaysian language).

what if we had followed the Greeks?

The modern world nowadays know our planets by their names in relation to the Olympian pantheon. The Greeks and Romans mythologies are intertwined with each other, with each deity having their equivalent in the other culture. However, we now follow the convention of Roman names due to the expansion of Roman empire and the Catholic Church.

What if we had followed the Greeks instead?

Our solar system then will be known as a collection of these planets, starting from our parent star Helios:

• Hermes
• Aphrodite
• Gaea
• Ares
• Zeus
• Kronos
• Uranos
• Poseidon

And our beloved dwarf planet:

• Pluton. I wonder, shouldn’t it be Hades instead?

Of course, if we had followed Ptolemy as well, the earth is the center of the system, not the sun. That culprit set us back 1500 years of progress.