Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Howling at the moon

Published on Monday 13 February 2006 07:35

If you want to appear like you're at the cutting edge of net culture but can't be bothered to spend hours online, then never fear. Scotsman.com's pathetic team of geeks, freaks and gimps will do the hard work for you. While you sip wine, read a book or engage in normal social interaction, they will burn out their retinas staring at badly designed web pages and dodge creeps in chatrooms to prepare for you: Scotsman.com's lazy guide to net culture.

I love conspiracy theories. I have long felt there was something funny going on that we needed to know about.

Of course, I have long since realised that the funny thing that's going on

is an economic system that puts profits above people and the planet. I don't really need to invent mysterious covens of Masons, aliens and Illuminati to explain the bad things that happen in our world. They're done by people who work in advertising and marketing. Of course, avaricious companies and craven, venal politicians have their role too. It's not always a popular point of view but it happens to be true.

Anyway, one of my favouritest ever conspiracy theories is the one that claims the moon landings were faked. I love it because it is so determinedly, utterly and wackily, dancing, singing and Highland flingingly insanely preposterous.

You can imagine the thinking. "All governments are liars." (OK, I am actually with you at this point. "All governments are liars. The US government said it put men on the moon. It was lying."

You could push the reasoning further: "It's cheaper and easier to make a film about landing on the moon than to actually go there. Therefore the landings were faked." Throw in something about Kennedy, Masons and Area 51 and there you go.

You can find the theory in its purest form The Moon Shots Were Faked. The spinning alien heads at the top of the page undermine its credibility somewhat but, without recourse to JFK or Freemasonry, the site offers commentary on various photos from the moon landings to show that they were faked. Here's a sample:

if you will look at section 3 you will notice there are no stars in the sky. In fact, you will never see any stars in any NASA Moon photographs, or hear an astronaut mention anything about the glorious stars that are visible when out of the earth's atmosphere.

Equally compelling commentary can be found on the "Moon Landings Were NOT Faked" pages. It takes the text from the conspiracy page and rebuts it line by line. On the above, it has this to say:

This is perhaps the favourite argument of the [landings were faked] crowd. "There are no stars to be seen in any of the NASA Moon photographs." It is also one of the most easily countered arguments. The lunar photographs show no stars in them because they were exposed for the daylight lit lunar scenes! This badly underexposes any stars in the sky. Try setting up a manual camera (the autoexposure cameras won't easily allow you to do this) for a typical daylight exposure - use the "sunny 16" rule where you set the f-stop of your camera to f/16 and then set the exposure length to the reciprocal of the ASA film speed - if you use ASA 100 film, use 1/100 of a second (or 1/125 which is more typically available). Then take a picture of the sky at night. To be sure you're simulating the lunar situation, be sure to light up a foreground object with full daytime lighting so that the printing process will be sure to expose that part of the image properly and not super stretch the dark sky. You won't find a star image there either.

While this is a knockout blow, it's not very funny. Much more humour can be found at StuffUCanUse.com. It makes compelling points about the whole conspiracy theory by using the standard narrative ("The image on the left clearly shows the supposed 25,000 of thrust generated by the lunar Lander to arrest its descent. Yet in the image on the right, where is the giant crater this would have created?") but illustrating it with stills from The Clangers. It makes its point very well while entertaining you.

If you want to check things out for yourself, you could try Google's latest toy. The search engine company has modified its Google Earth product to include maps of our satellite and unveiled Google Moon. Of course, given Google's craven kow-towing to Chinese censorship, we have no guarantees the images have not been retouched at the behest of the Secret World Government.