Phil Plait, the author of the Bad Astronomy blog is leaning towards this being real. http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/04/05/close_call_video_of_a_skydiver_almost_hit_by_meteoroid.html

>> ^swedishfriend:

joe rogan is watched by over a billion people every ufc event (yes over a billion people watch each UFC event). He still does stand up and he is a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu, had a great part on one of the best sitcoms of all time, News Radio. He is an open cannabis user (brave for media personality). He is teh roxxors.


He's also a moon hoaxer, i.e. he thinks the Moon landings were faked. Unless he's retracted those statements and admitted he was very wrong(some time later) after being completely dismantled and destroyed by Phil Plait, of Bad Astronomy fame, on I think it was Penn & Teller's radio show. He made a huge fool of himself; I can only hope he's learned something from that experience.

The swirling water myth is interesting, Phil Plait writes about it in Bad Astronomy, and thoroughly debunks it of course, he mentions that there are places around the Equator where deliberate scammers show off on either side how the direction is different on the northern and southern hemisphere, but its all baloney. The swirl is subject to all sorts of other local forces before the spin of the earth has any effect at all, and even if it did, it never actually spins around the sinkhole, (unless the sink is directly on top of the north/south pole)

phil plait...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/30/youtube-suspension-of-the-jref-account/

>> ^charliem:
A yank tellin the rest of the world how to pronounce a metric measurement ?
THIS IS MADNESS!


Madness?

THIS IS METRIC!

^--- I'm sure Mythbusters picked those points that made for the best video demos in the time they had. But they are not your only source for moon-hoax debunking. The classic for that is Phil Plait, who goes point by point through that bogus Fox documentary and kicks its ass on each one here:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html

His explanation could be a bit better. The key to the answer to the viewer's question is that the universe doesn't recognize macro objects like stars, planets, etc; as far as gravity is concerned it's all just particles. He comes close to this when he talks about getting closer to the black hole because it's smaller, but he should have taken it a step further. If you were standing on the surface of a star, only some of the particles that make up that star would be close to you, most of them hundreds of thousands to millions of miles away from you. Since gravity's strength is dependent on distance, those far away particles would have relatively little effect on you. If you were standing on the surface of a black hole, those particles would all be only a couple miles at most away from you. That's ignoring the issue of what a black hole is really made of, which isn't relavent here; to be more accurate we could just replace of the concept of "x number of particles" with "x amount of mass".

That said, Phil Plait is good stuff. I check his blog daily.

The Bad Astronomer is really a great blog. I'm looking forward to seeing Phil Plait in the new show The Skeptologists. Does anyone know if this show is really coming to tv?