2012hoax

Jupiter was impacted again (see Bad Astronomy, The Planetary Society and Sky and Telescope Magazine). So, brace yourself for a new wave of YouTube videos claiming this as further evidence of something.

Ignoring the spikes (the big spike was the release of the movie), the base usage of 2012hoax.org has been consistently upward over the last 15 months. We are now averaging close to 1,000 unique visitors per day.

I recently interviewed Tiare Rivera of SETI.cl for the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. The episode aired on August 6th.

Here is the transcript of that episode:

This is Bill Hudson with 2012hoax.org, once again talking about the great 2012 doomsday hoax, and the need for the amateur astronomy community to respond to it.

Last time I spoke about thinking outside of the box, and looking for opportunities to take the message into places you might not normally think of, and I used the example of my daughter who had taken it upon herself to write an article about the 2012 doomsday hoax for the sparklife blog at sparknotes.com.

This time I’m going to talk about how the message that the “2012 doomsday” is a hoax is going out even farther afield.

I was recently contacted by Lourdes Cahuich, who identified herself as being with the website http://seti.cl . She was asking for permission to translate the pages from http://2012hoax.org into Spanish. I immediately agreed, and by the way if anyone out there wants to translate the site into other languages, you should know that the entire site is published under the Creative Commons, non-commercial, share-alike license, and you do not need specific permission to republish it, so long as you reference 2012hoax.org.

Within a few days, the first page went up, and soon after that the second, and then the third. Now, seti.cl Is hosting several pages from 2012hoax.org, translated into Spanish by volunteers.

I began poking around at that website, and I found that in addition to the pages from 2012hoax.org, the site also had translations of numerous pages from other websites.

I became intrigued, and contacted Lourdes to ask about doing an interview regarding the response to the 2012 doomsday hoax in Latin America. Lourdes politely declined, but put me in contact with Tiare Rivera, who is the founder of the website. We had a delightful conversation in which we each explored how we each got started on our respective paths of “astronomical activism”. Here is a portion of that interview:

[Begin Interview]

Bill: Hello, how are you?

Tiare: I’m doing fine. We have a sunny day here in Chile, a very… a little bit cold, but everything’s fine here.

Bill: How did you decide to start seti.cl, and what’s the relationship between seti.cl and the seti institute?

Tiare: Well, I started the idea of seti.cl… I was looking for seti communities here in Chile and in Latin America, but I wasn’t able to find any of them. So I found a website called SETI.cl, but it was actually dead. There was no one there. So I decided to create this idea again, of this SETI community, of science, and science outreach. So I started to look for websites who were talking about this subject, and I found one on overclockers.cl. And, well, I found Claudio Jerez and Oliver Prostran, who help me with the idea of creating, or recreating seti.cl . We started the website in 2008, and now we have a new design, and we have translators. They are volunteers who use their time and their efforts to make translations into Spanish of many scientific websites.

Bill: Oh, very nice! So that is the primary purpose of seti.cl, to translate scientific websites into Spanish for the Spanish speaking communities?

Tiare: Yes, we have permission from many websites to translate, we have Universe Today, Bad Astronomy dot com, Ciencia Kanija which is a Spanish website, and they help me with free translations too, (science for citizens dot net, or planet quest from NASA, so we are trying to make more access, more information available to our spanish speakers. We also create interviews from scientific or from [amateur] astronomers who want, or who are interested in science, and we try to make a more human side, we try to show a human side, of what are their dreams or why are they doing what they do. Sometimes they don’t even earn too much money, we have amateur astronomers who give free talks, and we try to understand why are they interested in science and why kids should follow their path.

I had the opportunity to work in a school last year, it was an incredible experience. I started as a secretary, I started doing a replacement there. But the director, the school principal, saw that I was very interested in astronomy and in science, and she let me work on the school library, and you not only give books there, you can also give classes. So I got very interested in teaching science, with fun videos, I don’t know… “The Big Moon World”… that’s kind of old, but I showed them those videos to kids, astronomy videos too, so kids were very interested. We even made a school project where 15 kids were able to make a question to Astronaut Jose Hernandez from Mexico, and he was able to answer this question in orbit. So as you can see there are many scientific projects you can do, and there are many ways to encourage kids to learn more about science. And you know, in a classroom, well in public schools here in Chile we have 45 kids in one classroom, many of them are very encouraged by the schools to be taught in arts areas, like dancing and singing or … i don’t know… choreography or cheerleaders in your country, but science, it’s not very popular here, so we need to encourage a few kids, maybe there’s one kid or two kids interested in science, and we need [to] take them and teach them.

Bill: Are you also an amateur astronomer? What is your background besides working at the school?

Tiare: Well, I’m an accountant, which is nothing to do with science, but when I was eleven years old I watched the movie “Contact”, and I got interested in SETI and astronomy. Then I started to read and watch documentaries about SETI, and I used to see the SETI guys with huge radio telescopes behind, and I used to think “Wow, that must be a really cool job”, but then I started my accounting studies, but always with this science curiosity. And now it’s getting stronger, so I have this website SETI.cl and it’s becoming part of my life. An d now I realize that I need to go to this path, to this road of science and education.

Bill: That’s excellent, I think more people need to follow that example.

Tiare: You can make a big change in a kid’s mind. It’s incredible to see them get interested in science, and in astronomy, and it’s very important to create and to encourage science outreach around the world, and especially here in Latin America.

Bill: So I was very happy to have some of the people associated with your website contact me and request to be able to translate our website, 2012hoax.org, into Spanish, but I was curious, what has been the feedback, or the concern from Chile about the 2012 rumors?

Tiare: Well in Chile we have a lot of American culture. We see your American movies, and we have TV/Cable and we see a lot of your TV shows, so there is the same concern that you have in America about the subject, especially kids are very [sensitive] about this, so we mst take action about this subject. There are a lot of people who don’t have access to scientific information to see the other side of the coin. So, it’s very important for us to do this scientific outreach. So we must take action and teach kids that nothing’s going to happen, there’s going to be another calendar in a few more years, so we must take action about all this. Here in SETI.cl, everything’s for free, they can take our articles, our translations, and do the science outreach wherever they are. It’s very important for us to create this totally for free. We have very good translators here. It’s amazing because they could charge me for doing what they do but they don’t because they know the purpose of SETI.cl, and it’s very important to continue this amazing job.

Bill: What do you see happening as far as the future of the 2012 debunking over the next couple of years?

Tiare: Well I think this is going to get worse, I mean, the concern is going to keep going, TV shows are going to keep showing the bad side, that
we’re going to die, and the earthquakes, and all these things that have happened to us are part of “2012”, which is not true! Because as you may know I lived [through] the earthquake here in Chile, it was 8.2 in my city, and it looked pretty much like the end of the world, I must say! It was a very traumatic experience. But we know that Chile, for example, it’s an area of earthquakes, and we must note that this is normal here, and this is not the end of the world [or] any sign of it. But we must do much more outreach, we need to do it, because things are going to get more serious and people are going to be influenced by TV and popular media.

Bill: Yes, I think it was only a few minutes after the earthquake hit that I started seeing commentary on twitter that obviously this was a sign of 2012, this massive earthquake in Chile is obviously a sign of 2012, so they didn’t wait long before blaming it on 2012, and completely ignoring the fact that that area has had huge earthquakes, as a matter of fact the largest recorded earthquake belongs to Chile, it was the 9.6 in 1960.

Tiare: That was in Valdivia, in Southern Chile, it actually swallowed entire families, the ground opened beneath their feet and swallowed them, and I thought it was going to happen to me, I thought I was going to die beneat the ground, and yeah, that looks like the end of the world, but it’s not the end of the world, it’s just a tragedy that we have, and it will continue here in Chile, and we have several quakes, there was another big one just this morning, so this is not the end of the world, and we need education, education and science are together in all this.

[End of Interview]

If you’d like to hear more clips from this interview, please stay tuned to 2012hoax.org. I’d like to thank Tiare Rivera, and the folks at SETI.cl for translating various valuable websites into Spanish. They’re doing a great service.

That’s all for this time, this is Bill Hudson with 2012hoax.org.

Written by Tiare Rivera from Seti.cl

Something unusual happened yesterday: I attended to an astronomy talk in my city. Considering that I live in Chile that should be normal, but most of the astronomical excitement is concentrated at Northern Chile and I live at the center.

The young astronomer who gave this talk is called Rodrigo Herrera and he was born in my city, Rancagua. He is studying his doctoral degree in Maryland US, and he took a few days off from his summer holidays to come back at these southern lands. Thanks to the efforts of the local municipality he was able to give a talk about the "Invisible universe" to some students and general public, and of course, some local educational and cultural authorities.

His talk was focused on 3 main areas: The construction of the ALMA Observatory, the study of our universe at different wavelenghts and the scale of the universe, which was very inspiring and impressive for those young students. But, solar flares and the end of the world at 2012 was inevitable. His first warning was a full page cover from the most popular newspaper in Chile mentioning a "solar tsunami" coming toward us, on which he explained the bad use of the phrase and how media tends to scare and exagerate these astronomical and normal phenomenona; being able to calm down the increase of questions that started to arise after watching the newspaper cover.

Then, he started to debunk the arguments about 2012 issues, explaining that most of this industry is moved by money supported by false "scientific facts". Rodrigo has studied some of the old Mayan references, so he was more than prepared to calm down this anxiety. Then, he gave me the microphone to be able to talk to students, about the alliance between my site seti.cl and 2012hoax.org and the free spanish material they will be able to find to increase the "real" scientific knowledge about this area. Besides, I recommended to always search, investigate about everything they have a special curiosity and not just to claim as true the first thing they hear from popular media.

Fortunately, Chile is not under such a paranoia yet, most of the questions at the end of the talk were about multiuniverses, black holes, the twin paradox and an incredible interest in science and physics.

Science is still part of young people minds, which is an inspiring impulse to continue our job.

--
Tiare Rivera Taiba.-
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http://www.seti.cl
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arroway
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I received two 'tweets' from two separate people, who informed me that our good friend David Morrison has once again identified 2012hoax.org as "the best resource" to get 2012 information from.

The first one was a direct message from one of our site members, who said:

website got press at Morrison's talk at ASP meeting. Put in #ASP2010 in twitter search to see lots of comments from astronomers re 2012.

The hashtag #ASP2010 did indeed reveal several astronomers talking about 2012. I messaged them, and hopefully once they recover from the after-conference party they'll make contact with us.

The second message was a public message from Nancy Atkinson from Universe Today, which said:

@2012hoax David Morrison just promoted your website as the best resource for questions about 2012

David, if you are reading this, I am personally honored and humbled, and I'm sure that all of the contributors to this site feel the same way.

Every once in a while an amazing letter appears in the inbox of one of the "debunkers". David Morrison has posted a letter he received that represents a new monument to the power and allure of pseudoscientific thinking.

The author of that letter is sadly deluded. He begins with an accusation of lying against Dr. Morrison, cites a brief segment of Dr. Michio Kaku's appearance on Fox News four years ago, and then launches into a tirade about secret alien bases on the moon, the "real" history of Jupiter and Venus, a rant about how Velikovsky was right, about suppressed evidence of UFOs (meaning alien spacecraft, no doubt), about how Morrison (and presumably me, although the government doesn't pay me) resort to "fluoridating water and dumbing down and drugging the population", "hot spots" at "tetrahedral angles" showing "other-dimensional physics", Hoagland's "artificial monuments" on mars, etc., etc., etc.

What can you say to someone this immersed in pseudo-science? How can you possibly get through to them? The answer, sadly, is that you probably can't.

We have seen this in our own forums here, where people hold forth as the absolute truth the most inane nonsense imaginable, and when confronted with the lack of evidence for their ideas, immediately jump to the "paid disinformation site" card.

One tactic is argue against it, in the hope that our rebuttals change the minds or ease the fears of people who run across this nonsense and might be tempted to believe it. However, Dr. Morrison has chosen another tactic, which is to simply post the letter, and point out how deluded the author is. As Dr. O'Neill pointed out in our interview last night on Just Another Day one sadly under-utilized tactic is ridicule. Penn & Teller effectively used ridicule against the entire 2012 doomsday nonsense in their show and Stephen Colbert held the doomsday bunker advocates up to ridicule on his show with his call of "Nibiruuuuuuu!!!", while shaking his fist at the sky.

Perhaps we debunkers need to go to comedy school?

Just so members know, the mailer at wikidot seems to be sending multiple notices when someone adds a post. I'll be talking to them about that issue.

Just a play on words associating our show on Astronomy.FM Radio to the site, and to let you all know that I just plopped down the $50 for another year of 'Pro Lite' here at Wikidot.com.

Of course this reminded me of all the people who have (1) Accused us of being on the payroll of NASA (or FEMA, or the Illuminati, or whoever) or have (2) accused us of being hypocrites by making a profit off of this website.

Yep, my income from this website must be just great considering it has no ads and asks for no money. In fact, it's so great I've been able to afford to not upgrade my 16-year old car yet again. It has no heat, but that's only a problem in the winter.

A significant shift in our opinion on John Major Jenkins has occurred due to the receipt of additional information linking Jenkins to Jonathan Zap, a so-called "Dream Worker", and a close friend of Jenkins. Jenkins wholeheartedly supports Zaps bizarre opinion that people who oppose Jenkins on the 2012 issues are "mind parasites" and "energy vampires".

Read the new essay at http://www.2012hoax.org/energy-vampires, and our rewritten page on Jenkins at http://www.2012hoax.org/john-major-jenkins

When we set up this website, there was the consideration of how to license it. This is not a small consideration… proper licensing of material published online governs how it can be used, and whether the author can retain financial stake in the material.

The result of that consideration is that we have published the entire site under a very open 'Creative Commons' license, which only requests that the material be attributed back to this website, and that any work derived from our material also be released in this same manner.

The reason why we have selected this very open licensing scheme is simple: We do not expect to make money off of this website. I have made that clear over and over again, and the contributors to this website all know this and have agreed up front that their material, once published here, could quite possibly show up anywhere on the 'net' without our specific permission… because we want people to read it.

So, it was our great pleasure to be contacted by one of the authors on http://www.seti.cl, and asked if they could translate parts of the site into Spanish. We agreed immediately (of course), and today we are happy to unveil the first two pages that have been translated:

1. The main page (in Spanish) can be found at http://www.seti.cl/desenmascarando-el-apocalipsis-del-2012/

2. The Reality page can be found at http://www.seti.cl/predicciones-para-2012-que-realmente-ocurriran/

In addition to our pages, a Spanish language translation of David Morrison's article in the Skeptical Inquirer is here: http://www.seti.cl/el-mito-de-nibiru-y-el-fin-del-mundo-en-2012/ and a reprint of a Seth Shostak article is here: http://www.seti.cl/apocalipsis-2012-la-verdad-sobre-el-fin-del-mundo/

To the fine folks at seti.cl, keep up the good work, my friends.

As many of you know, I am an amateur astronomer. When I get the chance to observe, I prefer to do it at Fremont Peak Observatory near San Juan Bautista, California. Every year FPOA has a 'StarBQue', combining a barbecue, kids' crafts and entertainment, an auction of various astronomy items, and a raffle, where one or two grand prizes (usually telescope equipment) is given away.

The evening is capped off by some presentations of awards, and then a presentation by a guest speaker. In the past we have learned about black holes, tracking near earth objects, and various other topics in astronomy.

This year we are going to take a step back in time, and learn about the astronomy of the ancient Maya.

Dr. Van Stone will be talking about the Maya, their astronomy and mathematics, and how their beliefs are being misused, and how modern "new age" beliefs are being projected upon them, with regard to the "end-date" of 2012.

Dr. Van Stone's facebook page for his book

Our facebook page is now even more easily accessible. It now has the address of http://facebook.com/2012hoax, tying in very nicely to our "brand".

Today my daughter and I gave an astronomy presentation to three classrooms of 3rd grade students at a local elementary school. This equals about 90 students.

The presentation went fine… since it was third graders we decided to give three demonstrations of the topic (sizes and distances in the solar system) rather than give a powerpoint presentation. This worked out well. We did a scale model of the earth-moon system, a scale model of the solar system (on a 15 foot long roll of paper towel) and a demonstration of why the textbooks give an incorrect impression of how close everything is (they have to, otherwise they'd run out of paper!)

At the end of the demonstrations we did a question-and-answer period, which I thoroughly enjoy every time I do it. There are some smart kids out there, asking very sharp questions!

However, I was dismayed when one of the kids asked about 2012.

I seriously thought I could get away without talking about my least favorite topic for one afternoon, but it was not to be. Without going into a lot of detail, I managed to convey that there was no evidence for anything like the doomsayers were claiming, and that many of them were doing it for money.

When people ask me why I'm so emotional about 2012, why it makes me angry, I explain to them what the 2012ers are doing to kids that they don't even know. It is also interesting to watch some 2012ers try to explain to us why exactly they feel that scaring kids is fun… I have to assume it is fun, because I'm also assured by some that they are not doing it for money, which is my basic assertion.

The daughter of Astrogeek has written an article on the Sparklife blog, a part of the SparkNotes.com study guide website.

This is excellent news, because this site, and its blogs, are read by thousands of teen and young-adult readers… just the audience that this site seeks to reach.

Already at least one comment was posted thanking her for writing the article.

Where can you make a difference?

Dr. Kristine Larsen, Ph.D., a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Central Connecticut State University, and a contributor to 2012hoax.org, has been giving public talks discussing the 2012 hysteria in local libraries. Her talks are well received and she gives them frequently. Her next talk will be at the Levi E. Coe library in Middlefield CT on April 14.

Further Reading:

http://www.bristolpress.com/articles/2010/03/25/news/doc4bac1d2c6bff0895724675.txt

http://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local-beat/2012-Doomsday-Theory-Debunked-89271402.html

"Just Another Day: 2012 Debunked" episode #2 will air live on Astronomy.fm radio at 19:00 PDT, 21:00 EDT on March 28th. We will be discussing Planet X and Nibiru, and will have a special guest join us!

Previously I told you about our new radio program on Astronomy.FM. The show is titled "Just Another Day: 2012 Debunked!", and it premieres on Astronomy.FM radio at 1800 PST, 2100 EST Sunday February 28th, or 0200 UT Monday March 1st.

In the premiere episode, we are going to dive right in and tackle the central claim made by the 2012 proponents: That 2012 is a doomsday predicted by the Mayan Calendar. There will be a call-in segment, and I'd encourage you to get on Skype and give us a call on Sunday. I'll be announcing the call in number and account on the show.

Visit the show page for more information.

We're adding some new links to our site in response to some comments we've received in our forums. Specifically, the idea that people who believe in a 2012 doomsday, and by extension any other pseudo-scientific beliefs, have failed to educate themselves, and should be left to their own devices.

The website What's the Harm has a list of 368,379 people killed, 306,096 injured and over $2,815,931,000 in economic damages that have occurred from people believing in various pseudo-scientific ideas. Many of these are anecdotal, but there is an entire section devoted to cases backed by scientific studies and data.

The site has a section titled What's the harm in fearing the apocalypse?, showing 1,810 people who were harmed, most of them killed, because of their fear of the apocalypse.

In addition, the section links to A Brief History of the Apocalypse which details many apocalyptic predictions going back thousands of years.

Kate Sherrod, a friend of ours, and a supporter of this website, took the picture below at a bookstore in Cheyenne, Wyoming, showing an end-cap dedicated to "2012" books.

So, what's the harm? Shouldn't we leave these people to their own devices? My answer is a resounding "NO!".

Well, this is exciting!

I have been in discussion with the folks at Astronomy.FM radio, and just recently have worked out the arrangements to go on the air their, as one of their 'Sky Guides'. I'll be talking 2012 on the fourth Sunday of every month at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, 9:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. The premier show will be on Sunday February 28th. The station actually runs on Universal Time, so the show date is actually listed as March 1st at 0200 UT.

Please visit the show page for more information.

Oh, and for those who are curious: No, this is not a paid position. All of the "staff" at astronomy.fm are volunteers.