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Since I quite enjoyed the talk I'm willing to overlook that fact He did also have some good examples of actual cold welding.

NASA has an interesting lessons learned article about the Galileo high gain antenna failure, which also seems to be more nuanced than "it was cold welding" - http://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/492

p.s. I got curious about the reference to Gemini, and I'm not 100% sure but I think it might come from a 1991 paper "On-Orbit Coldwelding Fact or Friction?" by Dursch, H. & Spear, S. (Bibliographic Code: 1991NASCP3134.1565D) or else it's from the paper it references as ref 5 (I. Stambler "Surface Effects in Space", Space/Aeronautics, Vol 45 No. 2, 1966 pp. 63-67).

That paper gives the opposite impression to the start of Derek's talk, rather than cold welding being discovered around the time of Gemini, it was often thought to be a problem around that time but as he says later was subsequently found to be quite rare (Dursch and Spear found no actual cases of cold welding causing spacecraft issues, they were usually friction issues due to fretting or galling caused by loss of lubricants, but still recommended taking precautions to avoid coldwelding).

I'm not joking. I've gotten into heated debates on multiple occasions with people on Google+ who honestly believe there is no way the Earth is not flat. At first, I couldn't believe they weren't fucking with me, but they were SERIOUS. Terrifyingly so.

You go and look at their other posts, and there are whole communities filled with certifiably crazy people talking about some seriously demented theories. NASA photos from ISS are simulated; the round earth theory is a sophisticated psy-op meant to enslave our minds; the entire universe is flat, rotates around the Earth, and gravity is somehow a lie, and every photo and video showing a round Earth is a fake.

These people are breeding, dude. In 2016. I'm terrified.

I agree it's fair to argue there is an incentive in science, fudge statistical methods so your findings are more significant and warrant publishing in a scientific journal. But this is an incentive across science, and it hasn't stopped scientific progress as by nature, the process is self correcting when contradictory studies come out especially in a busy area such as climate science. The cost of falsifying studies or having your study contradicted is also significant however.

If you want to talk incentives though, consider the benefits to spreading doubt about climate change by the fossil fuel industry. 7 out of 10 of the largest revenue generating companies in the world are in oil. The industry stands to lose some $30 trillion from climate change in the next 25 years. Paying a PR firm to promote an agenda, paying researchers to dummy up research with a pre-determined anti-climate change conclusion is chump change to them. The cost to them are negligible if they disguise the source of funding sufficiently (e.g. funnel it through a business lobby).

Meanwhile any impropriety on the part of some climate scientists has not shaken the 97% consensus on climate change.

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

and people like this are in charge of things...
NASA is corrupting the data.

Ummm MOTIVE?

The great scientist Al Gore C02 correlation is is wrong min 22

The Sun is the driving force of global change. min 36

False Co2 correlation was driven by politics min 39

Interplanetary Climate Change NASA's Hottest Secret

Katherine Johnson Biography http://www.visionaryproject.org/johnsonkatherine/

Katherine Johnson loved to count https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/a-lifetime-of-stem.html

Talking to a conspiracy theorist about either the moon landing or the flat earth theory is exasperating. They discredit a scientific theory on the slightest technicality in your brief retelling of it, but if you baulk at their vague one-sentence alternative you're brainwashed.

You can tell them about the retroreflectors, or the satellite images we have of the landing site. You can tell them about sundials, the phases of the moon or constellations.

They don't care - anything can be faked and their definition of "proof" boils down to seeing it with their own naked eye.

It's totally impractical to take everyone up in a Red Bull balloon to see the curvature of the Earth for themselves. Presumably you'd have to take everyone up twice at two locations to show that the circular horizon is not an edge. Or kill two birds with one stone and take them to the moon landing site and back again because nothing less will suffice.

Because if I take them to the most advanced telescope in the world and focus it on the moon landing site - the image could be faked. You could show them how the telescope works, but each component could produce a faked output. The only way they would accept the telescope information is if they built it themselves from raw materials - oh you used a standard electronic device such as a basic motor? Illuminati dude, that thing can produce EM waves that fake the image. You're going to use a Macbook to read the USB output? Are you a shill?

Literally nothing is good enough but they are all, without exception, too fucking lazy to go and prove it to themselves from first principles.

Which is called "getting a degree in physics", where you are also taught to question every step, AKA being "brainwashed".

It sounds like a bunch of Videosift regulars are from the SF bay area. I grew up in SJ, worked at NASA/Ames for a few years, had friends at Berkeley and IBM research and Cisco and Apple and... yeah, small world.

IBM Research? located in south SJ in 1952, 'cause of Stanford, Berkeley (HATE how he says it), UC Santa Cruz , & Moffett Field (NASA-Ames Research, but at the time was NACA).

Personally, I think Facebook is outside of Silicon Valley Proper, instead in AMPEX territory. Menlo Park (Stanford/HP) is the northern-most edge of Silicon Valley, whereas IBM marked the southern-most. and don't forget about Cisco & Silicon Graphics, whose machines were the bomb.

I grew up blocks from IBM and half my friends parents worked there (mine for NASA). I'm back here again in the Santa Cruz Mtns, Los Gatos.

I wish NASA did shots more like this. I always hated when the shuttle got past a certain point they always switched to that extreme zoom closeup view where you can see the shuttle great but could get no sense of perspective on it's height or the scale of the achievement at all.

This only applies to the metric system. For the empirical system, it gets even more confusing. Here's a simple quote from NASA's Pre-Jesus era website:

The effective acceleration of gravity at the poles is 980.665 cm/sec/sec while at the equator it is 3.39 cm/sec/sec less due to the centrifugal force. If you weighed 100 pounds at the north pole on a spring scale, at the equator you would weigh 99.65 pounds, or 5.5 ounces less.

Whenever we talk about weight in pounds, we need to define where with respect to the center of our little bluey.

No i'm fairly sure your right... brought to you by a LOT of the same people.... same ones who don't want NASA studying the earth etc....

the "brain" itself will be ~$30K min. you need lenses, batteries/power supplies, drives to record to, viewfinders, cables, etc. on top of that. a steadicam rig will cost $50K+ too. the famous zeiss lens kubrick used (borrowed from NASA) cost over $23M (adjusted for inflation).

professional cameras are expensive. alexa and red are super cheap in comparison to traditional film camera set ups.

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