ApolloHoax.net

Apollo Discussions => The Hoax Theory => Topic started by: NthBrick on April 18, 2020, 09:35:16 PM

Title: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: NthBrick on April 18, 2020, 09:35:16 PM
Hi all, I'm currently in the middle of an argument with somebody over on Reddit surrounding several moon landing hoax claims, and wonder if anyone would be willing to lend some expert knowledge on the "missing fiducials" claim. This person redirected me here: https://moonlandingtruth.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/photo-authenticity/

To a large degree, his argument is already weak because he hasn't demonstrated the provenance of the two fiducial-related images or verified that detail hasn't just been lost to JPEG compression, but I'm not well-versed enough in the subject to reasonably explain what is happening here. Is there some particular reason why the small black lines of the fiducials tend to get washed out in bright, white, sunlit areas of the photos (or, at least, in some copies -- the photos from Project Apollo Archive on Flickr capture all of these details beautifully as nearly as I can tell).
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: Peter B on April 18, 2020, 10:06:45 PM
The expert photographers on the forum can probably explain better than I can, but my understanding of the reason the fiducials wash out against bright backgrounds is to do with the way photographs are developed. I don't think colour changes are instantaneous in adjacent parts of a photograph; so where you have a very bright object on a photograph next to a very dark object, there's a very narrow band between them of intermediate brightness. So when the dark object itself is also very narrow, it gets caught in that narrow band of intermediate brightness and so appears lighter than it objectively should. Then, add on low resolution scans of the photos and fine details such as the unusually lightened fiducials disappear.

As for the photos themselves, I can't identify the first one except that it's obviously from one of Apollos 15, 16 or 17. The second one I think is from Apollo 12, as that was the mission where the horizontal bar of the flagpole didn't work.

If you'd like to find the exact photos, here's my preferred method. First go to the Lunar and Planetary Institute. They have moderate quality versions of every photo, individually labelled for their unique codes, and grouped by magazine. If I know which mission a photo was taken on, it rarely takes more than a couple of minutes to find the photo, and thus its unique code. Then I go to the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal and search their photo lists for that photo, as they some very high resolution scans of photos. These scans are pretty much always able to show the fiducials, regardless of background.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: NthBrick on April 18, 2020, 10:54:26 PM
Thanks for the response Peter, that strikes me as entirely reasonable and is in line with what I've read so far. I found this shot from Apollo 12 (AS12-47-6953) especially interesting:

(https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/images/print/AS12/47/6953.jpg)

The notable thing here is that you have the same bleed-through over the brightest white surfaces of the flag, however the crosshairs still appear on the less-bright areas of the flag, which pretty neatly debunks the claim that the flag was photoshopped in after the fact. The common denominator for all of these is that they happen where the fiducial should be in front of a bright, white surface, which I would think supports the explanation of overexposure.

Being clear, as valid as these points are, he's been unwilling to grasp that the reason no manned missions to the moon have happened in over 40 years might have something to do with NASA's low funding and lack of cohesive objective by congress, so I doubt this will be convincing. I just don't like to leave claims on the table where someone could see that because I didn't bother to refute it, it's irrefutable.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: Allan F on April 19, 2020, 09:13:45 AM
It is the reproductive process, which degrade the analog picture. Each generation of reproduction washes details out.

What you do when you make a copy of a picture in analog form, is taking a photograph of a photograph. The process is vulnerable to sideways tranmission of light, reflections in the equipment which will lower the contrast, different types of film which will affect the dynamic range of the resulting picture.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: Allan F on April 19, 2020, 09:24:58 AM
Also, each picture from the Apollo mission Hasselblad cameras contain more than a GIGABYTE of information. If somebody takes a JPG of less than 100K off of the internet, they have less than 0.1% of the original picture.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: JayUtah on April 19, 2020, 10:35:41 AM
I experimented with an actual Hasselblad fitted with an actual reseau plate, shooting on modern Ektachrome developed in a commercial lab using the E-6 process and scanned professionally to a lossless digital format at 8000 dpi.  I specifically tested fiducial washout on bright backgrounds.  I was able to get fiducials to appear fainter against a bright background, but not to disappear completely.  Duplication by enlarger to a (cropped) 8x10 print on my home enlarger made them even more faint, but they still did not completely disappear.  Originally I thought the effect could have been explained entirely by halation, but the data I collected does not support that hypothesis.  I then scanned the prints at 300 dpi using an Epson home scanner.  This was to duplicate the process most likely used to create the first web versions of Apollo photography.

The two processes that made the bright-background portions of the fiducials disappear entirely (individually, and also together) are shrinking the digital image to web-compatible dimensions and using JPEG compression.  This occurred on both the scan from the original transparency and the scans of the duplicated print.

Incidentally, the optical duplication process lost a lot of tone in the image.  I've seen film-resolution scans of the original transparencies of roll 39 from Apollo 11 and compared them to scans of dupe masters.  The difference is glorious.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: apollo16uvc on April 19, 2020, 10:52:37 AM
I have been thinking of doing that with my mamiya 6*7 and ektachrome 100 film.

If I get a thin glass plate with etch markings.

Jay i would be interested in pictures of your tests, documentation. I have been looking for something like that for a long time.

Did you make slide duplicates with Kodak Edupe film? Because all prints would be made from several generations of copies.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: apollo16uvc on April 19, 2020, 11:00:12 AM
If you had access to several generations of slide duplicate generations, i Imagine the markings got fainter and fainter with each generation?
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: JayUtah on April 19, 2020, 11:43:29 AM
Jay i would be interested in pictures of your tests, documentation. I have been looking for something like that for a long time.

I've been looking for them for a long time too.  They were on a hard disk that has gone missing.  I'm sure I still have it -- somewhere -- because I don't throw those kinds of things out.  The same hard disk had the high-quality roll 39 scans I mentioned.  I did the tests in the mid-1990s when I was doing the bulk of the research for clavius.org, and all my stuff has been packaged and repackaged several times and moved among various storage units.  It's good to know there is greater interest that just mine.  If my search is fruitless, maybe I can arrange to duplicate the experiments.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: JayUtah on April 19, 2020, 11:49:38 AM
Did you make slide duplicates with Kodak Edupe film? Because all prints would be made from several generations of copies.

Correct.  The originals went into the vault after making only a handful of dupe masters.  The thin ESTAR base is amazingly flimsy.  You don't want to run it through any more machines than you have to.  However, I wasn't able to fully simulate the likely commercial distribution workflow that NASA's photo contractors would have employed.  Which is to say, I did not make transparency dupes and then print to paper from there.  I printed to paper from the camera original.  Any actual process would have involved more generations and thus more loss.  So I figured if loss occurs with the minimal print-to-paper process, it can only get worse if you're printing to paper from a multi-generation dupe master.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: NthBrick on April 19, 2020, 01:45:03 PM
I experimented with an actual Hasselblad fitted with an actual reseau plate, shooting on modern Ektachrome developed in a commercial lab using the E-6 process and scanned professionally to a lossless digital format at 8000 dpi.  I specifically tested fiducial washout on bright backgrounds.  I was able to get fiducials to appear fainter against a bright background, but not to disappear completely.  Duplication by enlarger to a (cropped) 8x10 print on my home enlarger made them even more faint, but they still did not completely disappear.  Originally I thought the effect could have been explained entirely by halation, but the data I collected does not support that hypothesis.  I then scanned the prints at 300 dpi using an Epson home scanner.  This was to duplicate the process most likely used to create the first web versions of Apollo photography.

The two processes that made the bright-background portions of the fiducials disappear entirely (individually, and also together) are shrinking the digital image to web-compatible dimensions and using JPEG compression.  This occurred on both the scan from the original transparency and the scans of the duplicated print.

Incidentally, the optical duplication process lost a lot of tone in the image.  I've seen film-resolution scans of the original transparencies of roll 39 from Apollo 11 and compared them to scans of dupe masters.  The difference is glorious.
Thanks for the informed take on it, Jay. If you're able to find them, I too would be interested in seeing the results of your experimentation. If nothing else, given how moon landing hoax claims seem to be proliferating these days, they'd be a helpful addition to the Clavius website.

Otherwise, if I'm understanding things correctly, the "missing" fiducials are probably due to a combination of overexposure in the original shots taken on the moon (consistent with only occurring on very bright, white surfaces) and loss of information between the scanning of the original photographs (especially the first-generation scans) and the conversion to lossy JPEG format for the Internet. That seems entirely reasonable.

I've also located several other examples (like the one in my second post on this thread) that have the whole fiducial covering an object like the flag, but only a part of it disappearing over very bright surfaces. Obviously, this severely calls into question the tacit claim that examples of "disappearing" fiducials are due to having other in-frame objects pasted in over them.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: Abaddon on April 19, 2020, 02:44:09 PM
Hi all, I'm currently in the middle of an argument with somebody over on Reddit surrounding several moon landing hoax claims, and wonder if anyone would be willing to lend some expert knowledge on the "missing fiducials" claim. This person redirected me here: https://moonlandingtruth.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/photo-authenticity/

To a large degree, his argument is already weak because he hasn't demonstrated the provenance of the two fiducial-related images or verified that detail hasn't just been lost to JPEG compression, but I'm not well-versed enough in the subject to reasonably explain what is happening here. Is there some particular reason why the small black lines of the fiducials tend to get washed out in bright, white, sunlit areas of the photos (or, at least, in some copies -- the photos from Project Apollo Archive on Flickr capture all of these details beautifully as nearly as I can tell).

It's called "bleed" and it is the simple fact that the bright colours tend to wash into the surrounding image. It is a effect that has been known for over a century. Anyone arguing "missing" fiducials is talking ignorant BS.

Bleed is even used intentionally in artistic photography. Either by over exposure or over development. (examples if you need them).

The reverse is also true. Under exposure and under development can produce other interesting photographic effect such as "ghosts".

Your antagonist is talking a bucket of abject ignorance.

Next, he will go the non parallel shadows route which is also easily disproved. Be ready for that.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: apollo16uvc on April 19, 2020, 02:46:04 PM
I am working on acquiring a 70mm slide duplicate of the infamous Apollo 11 photo that has a 'missing' fiducial on the walki-talkie looking apparatus (I think it was for closeup surface photography?)

I imagine those slide duplicates, sometimes on big rolls with hundreds of photos that are currently circulating around collectors would be something used by commercial distributors. 

I'll make a scan of it on my nikon supercoolscan 9000 at 4000DPI and see how it holds up. I actually suspect it will have a clearer fiducial than as seen on prints of that photo. The contrast in slide film is so high that no print medium has enough dynamic range to capture it all.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: apollo16uvc on April 19, 2020, 02:48:05 PM
Did you make slide duplicates with Kodak Edupe film? Because all prints would be made from several generations of copies.

Correct.  The originals went into the vault after making only a handful of dupe masters.  The thin ESTAR base is amazingly flimsy.  You don't want to run it through any more machines than you have to.  However, I wasn't able to fully simulate the likely commercial distribution workflow that NASA's photo contractors would have employed.  Which is to say, I did not make transparency dupes and then print to paper from there.  I printed to paper from the camera original.  Any actual process would have involved more generations and thus more loss.  So I figured if loss occurs with the minimal print-to-paper process, it can only get worse if you're printing to paper from a multi-generation dupe master.

It would not surprise me if a lot of mass distributors of slides and prints sold at shops to tourists actually just photo-copied NASA prints, instead of using 70mm slide dupes as a source for their distributions.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: NthBrick on April 19, 2020, 03:16:22 PM

It's called "bleed" and it is the simple fact that the bright colours tend to wash into the surrounding image. It is a effect that has been known for over a century. Anyone arguing "missing" fiducials is talking ignorant BS.

Bleed is even used intentionally in artistic photography. Either by over exposure or over development. (examples if you need them).

The reverse is also true. Under exposure and under development can produce other interesting photographic effect such as "ghosts".

Your antagonist is talking a bucket of abject ignorance.

Next, he will go the non parallel shadows route which is also easily disproved. Be ready for that.
Oh, I've been around the block enough times to know how this usually goes -- just wasn't quite as familiar with the fiducials business as I wanted to be. I generally take pride in aiming to make complete, accurate, and reliable answers to ridiculous claims.

Anyway, we've already hit "Nixon called the moon on a landline!" and he's claimed that restarting a moon program should be as easy as it'll be for people to go back to work after COVID-19 lets up, so you can see what I'm dealing with. My moon landing hoax bingo card is filling up quite rapidly. :P

I swear though, these guys can get really emotional and aggressive. Having checked his Reddit profile, the guy claims he's a "targeted individual", e.g. a victim of "gangstalking", so maybe there isn't much to do against that level of delusion and paranoia.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: smartcooky on April 19, 2020, 06:29:58 PM
I do wonder about the mentality of HB's. I mean what exactly is the claim here as regards to the fiducial thing.

I presume  it "looks wrong", but what is the claim here? That NASA deliberately "photoshopped" the fiducials behind stuff in the pictures for... err reasons?

Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: JayUtah on April 19, 2020, 07:17:17 PM
In the past, the claim was that pre-computer photographic compositing techniques were used to compose the Apollo photos from background and foreground elements.  That's only if the claimant managed to think at all beyond the "looks wrong, therefore fake" position.  If reasons are given, it's along the lines of a workflow that allowed for better compartmentalization, or an overall lower number of participants.  They can argue, for example, that the landscape backgrounds came from unmanned landers, and that they could reuse the same backgrounds for a number of photos.  And then other photographers could be employed to take photos of foreground elements in other surroundings, telling them it was for editorial purposes.  And a few photo guys working in a secret darkroom cutting the photos together would involve fewer people that whole crews operating an all-up photo shoot.

But the problem is still that it's a stupid way to fake photos, if that was the intent.  The key argument in all cases was that the fiducials were on the background plates to begin with, and therefore had to be worked around when adding foreground elements.  If you want fiducials in the image, and you want the whole image to be consistent and coherent, you put the reseau plate in the final process camera and leave the fiducials out of everything else.  It takes all of a few seconds to think of that.  The problem remains only if the backgrounds were convenience resources, obtained from a source NASA didn't control.  But there would have been countless other ways to get what they wanted, without the fiducials.

And of course the hoax claimants always cherry-pick the photos and leave out those that don't conform to their claims, such as those where the fiducial is only faded and not obliterated entirely, or where the fiducial is selectively absent only in the bright areas of some individual foreground element.  I think the funniest counterexample is one where a fiducial overlays the U.S. flag, and the fiducials are missing over the white stripes but visible over the red ones.  Did we really need to composite in only the white stripes?
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: NthBrick on April 19, 2020, 07:28:32 PM
I do wonder about the mentality of HB's. I mean what exactly is the claim here as regards to the fiducial thing.

I presume  it "looks wrong", but what is the claim here? That NASA deliberately "photoshopped" the fiducials behind stuff in the pictures for... err reasons?
I was going to write something, but Jay just covered the subject in spectacular detail. The whole concept effectively hinges on NASA composing a fake photo, adding the fiducials as the last step, realizing "Crap! We forgot 'x' piece of equipment!", and then sloppily editing it in over the fiducials.

...And then, of course, they don't bother to correct the photos that relatively few people have seen before releasing them onto the freaking Internet. It's not a great method of debunking a given claim, but sometimes evaluating the underlying necessary conditions of a claim can be helpful in determining how reasonable the claim is.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: JayUtah on April 19, 2020, 07:51:02 PM
I've phrased the need to look at underlying necessary conditions as the difference between reasoning backward and reasoning forward.  Reasoning backward is to note missing fiducials, assume a hoax occurred, and then to hypothesize what happened.  Reasoning forward is to present the problem as it would have appeared to people wanting to perpetrate a hoax, and then trying to determine how likely it is that the hypothesized process would have been the one employed.  I've always purported that any plausible process has to be evidentiary attractive in both the forward and backward directions.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: smartcooky on April 20, 2020, 01:46:30 AM
OK, to what is being argued here is that the fiducials are used asa sort of compositing alignment mark, right?

If so, I have some bad news for HBs. I used to do some low level photo manipulation in the BC era (Before Computers) - alignment marks were outside the edges of the image! They would not even be visible on the final print.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: apollo16uvc on April 20, 2020, 05:43:51 AM
In the past, the claim was that pre-computer photographic compositing techniques were used to compose the Apollo photos from background and foreground elements.  That's only if the claimant managed to think at all beyond the "looks wrong, therefore fake" position.  If reasons are given, it's along the lines of a workflow that allowed for better compartmentalization, or an overall lower number of participants.  They can argue, for example, that the landscape backgrounds came from unmanned landers, and that they could reuse the same backgrounds for a number of photos.  And then other photographers could be employed to take photos of foreground elements in other surroundings, telling them it was for editorial purposes.  And a few photo guys working in a secret darkroom cutting the photos together would involve fewer people that whole crews operating an all-up photo shoot.

But the problem is still that it's a stupid way to fake photos, if that was the intent.  The key argument in all cases was that the fiducials were on the background plates to begin with, and therefore had to be worked around when adding foreground elements.  If you want fiducials in the image, and you want the whole image to be consistent and coherent, you put the reseau plate in the final process camera and leave the fiducials out of everything else.  It takes all of a few seconds to think of that.  The problem remains only if the backgrounds were convenience resources, obtained from a source NASA didn't control.  But there would have been countless other ways to get what they wanted, without the fiducials.

And of course the hoax claimants always cherry-pick the photos and leave out those that don't conform to their claims, such as those where the fiducial is only faded and not obliterated entirely, or where the fiducial is selectively absent only in the bright areas of some individual foreground element.  I think the funniest counterexample is one where a fiducial overlays the U.S. flag, and the fiducials are missing over the white stripes but visible over the red ones.  Did we really need to composite in only the white stripes?

I would like to see a few guys in a darkroom composite tens of thousands of 16mm frames and literally hundreds of thousands of TV frames of the lunar surface.

The darkroom supplies for one mission alone would be off the charts.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: JayUtah on April 20, 2020, 09:23:59 AM
I don't recall that any claimant tried to say what the fiducials were for, either as part of the hoax or as purported to be part of a real mission.  Of course they're really to detect mechanical distortion in the image (i.e., stretching of the transparency).  The locations of the fiducials on the reseau plate were known to a very high precision.  Thus the positions of the fiducials in the exposed image could be used to rectify the image such that dimensions in image space could be corrected to extract accurate data photogrammetrically.  Hence their ordinary use as a data acquisition camera.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: apollo16uvc on April 20, 2020, 10:38:22 AM
I heard they could (are already?) used incase the film starts to shrink.

After 40-50 years it likely already happened to a miniscule degree. This is a problem motion-picture preserves face when trying to scan films from that era.

I dont know how much cold-storage would slow this down.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: JayUtah on April 20, 2020, 12:38:44 PM
I heard they could (are already?) used incase the film starts to shrink.

Sure, anything that causes the film to change shape, for any reason, temporarily or permanently.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: Abaddon on April 22, 2020, 09:25:21 PM
OK, to what is being argued here is that the fiducials are used asa sort of compositing alignment mark, right?

If so, I have some bad news for HBs. I used to do some low level photo manipulation in the BC era (Before Computers) - alignment marks were outside the edges of the image! They would not even be visible on the final print.
Ah, right. We used to refer to those as "printers marks". Typically, two marks at each corner marking the image extent and a colour calibration bar. Plus some text indicating date, source and suchlike bumph. In the print game, these would typically be chopped off in the finishing process.

It is the same principle in the apollo photographs, as it provides a reference, but it is different in that it was intended to be retained, not discarded.

ETA: I immediately thought that I could provide a sample image because a friend and customer of mine operates in that space. Then I remembered that he is all shut down so I can't.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: Abaddon on April 22, 2020, 09:33:17 PM
I heard they could (are already?) used incase the film starts to shrink.

Sure, anything that causes the film to change shape, for any reason, temporarily or permanently.
That's a good point. I can't say I have seen anything about the current condition of the original film. Have you any idea as to it's current condition?
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: robot1000 on April 27, 2020, 05:59:57 AM
The left-hand image on the linked site purporting to show an object covering a crosshair is a detail from AS16-107-17446.

I have downloaded the high resolution scan from NASA's website and placed it next to the reproduction for comparison:

(https://i.imgur.com/WV3vB5V.png)

There is a noticeable difference. In the reproduced image the white object seems to extend further past the crosshair. Also in the reproduced image the crosshair is completely invisible where it crosses with the object, but in the original, the crosshair is still faintly visible over the object, as if partially transparent. The fact that it's still visible at all would seem to disprove the idea that the object had simply been pasted directly on top (in which case the crosshair would be completely obscured).
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: jfb on April 30, 2020, 12:43:50 PM
There's a reason most hoax sites use low-quality images (my favorites are flatbed scans of printed images from a book or magazine and then compressed out the wazoo), and it ain't to save disk space or bandwidth.  Such images are chock full of artifacts that look "suspicious", blocked crosshairs being a prime example. 
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: JayUtah on April 30, 2020, 02:27:23 PM
Indeed, anything that can be conjured into existence by wiggling random sliders in Photoshop seems to be the order of the day.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: Abaddon on May 01, 2020, 06:01:35 PM
Indeed, anything that can be conjured into existence by wiggling random sliders in Photoshop seems to be the order of the day.
Yes, I have noticed that the mere act of installing Photoshop magically confers expertise on a certain kind of person, for some reason.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: Northern Lurker on May 09, 2020, 06:19:55 PM

I swear though, these guys can get really emotional and aggressive. Having checked his Reddit profile, the guy claims he's a "targeted individual", e.g. a victim of "gangstalking", so maybe there isn't much to do against that level of delusion and paranoia.

Claims of being the victim of gangstalking activity are associated with schizophrenia. If that guy really is schizophrenic, you cannot reason with him. I know from experience, the death of my grandmother triggered schizophrenia in my mother when I was seven...
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: JayUtah on May 09, 2020, 08:21:32 PM
If that guy really is schizophrenic, you cannot reason with him. I know from experience, the death of my grandmother triggered schizophrenia in my mother when I was seven...

I'm loath to attempt an amateur diagnosis from someone's social media.  But I do agree -- also from experience -- that there is no reasoning with someone suffering from schizophrenia.  Their beliefs don't stem from a reasoning error.  Many times they reason defensibly from "facts" that are all too real to them, but only to them.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: Abaddon on May 10, 2020, 06:14:32 AM
If that guy really is schizophrenic, you cannot reason with him. I know from experience, the death of my grandmother triggered schizophrenia in my mother when I was seven...

I'm loath to attempt an amateur diagnosis from someone's social media.  But I do agree -- also from experience -- that there is no reasoning with someone suffering from schizophrenia.  Their beliefs don't stem from a reasoning error.  Many times they reason defensibly from "facts" that are all too real to them, but only to them.
It's a downside of the internet. There are many legit schizophrenics, and convincing those to seek treatment is not easy. Sometimes not even possible, tragically.

There are also buffons on the internet who intentionally imitate such symptoms. That is how they get their jollies apparently. Those people never consider that they are harming the genuinely afflicted. Because they don't care.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: Northern Lurker on May 10, 2020, 06:56:23 AM
If that guy really is schizophrenic, you cannot reason with him. I know from experience, the death of my grandmother triggered schizophrenia in my mother when I was seven...

I'm loath to attempt an amateur diagnosis from someone's social media.  But I do agree -- also from experience -- that there is no reasoning with someone suffering from schizophrenia.  Their beliefs don't stem from a reasoning error.  Many times they reason defensibly from "facts" that are all too real to them, but only to them.

Yeah, me too. I just lack the English chops to express it succinctly. I'm 42 now so my mother has been schizophrenic for the last 35 years. She is currently in her third (that I know of) involuntary hospitalization. The earlier stints were 1-2 months but now she has been there for almost 2 years and I think she won't be returning home. It is frightening when she alone is odds with the rest of the world, she thinks the rest of the world is crazy and she is the only one sane. She is completely incapable of self-reflection.

It's a downside of the internet. There are many legit schizophrenics, and convincing those to seek treatment is not easy. Sometimes not even possible, tragically.

There are also buffons on the internet who intentionally imitate such symptoms. That is how they get their jollies apparently. Those people never consider that they are harming the genuinely afflicted. Because they don't care.

It's scary what some people do when they are shielded from repercussions by the anonymity provided by internet.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: JayUtah on May 10, 2020, 11:28:34 AM
It is frightening when she alone is odds with the rest of the world, she thinks the rest of the world is crazy and she is the only one sane. She is completely incapable of self-reflection.

I think it would be terrifying to suffer like that.  But yes, it explains a lot of behavior that schizophrenics exhibit.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: gillianren on May 10, 2020, 12:52:07 PM
There is a condition I learned about some years ago called anosognosia, which is the inability to know that there's anything wrong with your brain.  If I remember correctly, some 40% of mentally ill people have it.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: JayUtah on May 10, 2020, 02:37:37 PM
That would explain why diminished meta-cognition is spoken of in the DSM for so many otherwise different conditions.  The study of conspiracy theories is, to a certain extent, the study of human thought.  I can speak forever on how to build and operate spacecraft.  But that's not really the interesting thing when it comes to conspiracy theories.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: gillianren on May 11, 2020, 12:08:21 PM
I am, as so many others are, unwilling to do much in the way of internet diagnosis, but there are a few people we've encountered over the years where I could definitely see the anosognosia working.
Title: Re: Yet Another Fiducials Claim
Post by: apollo16uvc on October 10, 2020, 04:50:02 PM
I've bought an old 70mm slide duplicate of AS11-40-5931, bad prints of which are infamously used by hoaxnuts to claim crosshairs were pasted in later.

If it is a NASA duplicate, it should be several steps closer to the original film and retain more detail in the highlights.

When it arrives I will post a HQ 4000 DPI scan made with a professional film scanner.