Wednesday, October 31, 2007

UFO: The Greatest Story Ever Denied - Moon Bases (Grigory)

Many may think that there is no life beyond earth and that even a theory such as this is preposterous. However, is it really true? In my knowledge claim, there has been sufficient evidence that there is indeed life out there and much closer than we expected- the moon. We have seen a number of unidentified structures on the moon, which look like some sort of ‘houses’, these realistic structures show that life is inevitable. A number of top NASA researches have studied this incredible phenomenon extensively and were bewildered by their findings. There were a number of photos taken of these objects, and only recently have they been revealed to the public. Scientists published a 50 page report explaining that they saw a few signs of life around the area of these structures.

Also ABC news (a very reliable news channel) reported on these findings to the public, saying this had been a major breakthrough in life outside the earth, this was 30 years after it was discovered, as there was a massive public cover up. It was also found that the back side of the moon was covered with a number of various shapes, some representing outlines of objects we know on earth such as cooling towers. It is obvious that there is life on the moon with such evidence provided, and that the American government covered such information up. This information was all realistic, which was picked up by special cameras both on earth in the NASA basis and on the International Space Station. In general, all this evidence presents to us that there is indeed some form of life on the moon, as the moon is still significantly unexplored and we are just starting to find such intriguing information out.

UFO: The Greatest Story Ever Denied, Moon Bases - James

In the past, people thought that there's only life on earth. From the video above, it's uncertain. In this knowledge claim video, it shows alien bases which exist on the moon. The photos taken have been blurred by American Agencies to prevent the secret from leaking, causing a public paranoia based on this. However, on many of the picures, there are still clear traces of the general shapes of the bases. This has never been spotted by us on earth before because that certain section of the moon barely ever rotates towards the earth.

Why Smell is the Dominant Sense - James

Why is the sense of smell the most dominant sense?

The sense of smell is extremely important to us because sometimes other senses such as sight and sound are limited. Cases like this could happen commonly at night. The most obvious reason people use dogs to track down drugs and explosives in airports is that dogs have a stronger sense of smell than humans. In war situations such as cases in the Second World War, the Germans couldn’t see where the Russians were but was able to track their general location through the smell of smoke.

Smell could also protect us from having to taste something before determining if it is poisonous or not. It could also let us detect the general content of anything we smell. If anything poisonous releases poisonous gas, it would be less damaging to smell than to taste it since there are more filters in our body to protect against what we inhale. Part of what we inhale is also breathed out, leaving less chance of the poison taking affect through smell. The state of gas is also the least compact compared to liquid and gas, therefore, least dangerous when inhaled.

It also helps us determine whether to eat something or not by telling us the general content of the food. Sometimes, for people who have allergies, it would also alert them to not take certain food due to detection of the content which they are allergic to.
Compared to other senses such as sight, the sense of smell covers everything around us while sight only covers 180°.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Why Vision is the best sense compared to the rest of our senses (Steven & Krisch)

First, a quick experiment: close your eyes and read what is on the board. After the experiment is conducted, we have proven that this is not possible. Without vision, we would not be able to coordinate ourselves. Although other senses could complement vision to help us coordinate ourselves, that sense alone could not guide us. With vision, we have the power to focus on direction. Without direction, there would be no such thing as exploration; everyone would be isolated to their own vicinity.

Vision is also our first warning of danger. For example, if there were someone to strike you, our vision would be the first and foremost sense to warn us, and thus we would move away.

Vision also makes it possible for us to interact with other people. For example, if someone was deaf, their vision and hand-eye coordination would enable them to use sign language to communicate

In conclusion, we have shown that vision is the most important sense in order to survive. It provides us with communication, coordination and acts as a warning for dangers and threatening situations.

Moon Landing Hoax (Steven & Krisch)

This video obviously shows that the moon landing in 1969 by the Americans was a hoax. The video shows us that a massive pole hits the actual space shuttle (which is again, a hoax). The mis en scene might demonstrate an alien surface, but as the video shows, this ‘alien area’ is obviously fictitious. Also, from the latter video, it shows us that the flag which has been planted on the move is moving. Clearly, there is no air, nor atmosphere in space. Thus, there would be no breeze on the moon; thus it is fake. Thirdly, there is about 1/6th of the gravity on the moon compared to the earth. That means that if the Americans were to be on the moon, their speed would be immensely slow and bounce would be higher because the gravitational pull wouldn’t nearly be strong enough.



Ruby's sense perception (Touch)

There are five fundamental senses humans use everyday in life - sight, sound, taste, smell and touch. I believe Touch is the most important sense of all, touch is the sense which allows yourself to connect and make contact with the outside world. Without your nervous and sensory systems, humans cannot possibly live their everyday life in a normal way.

Without touch, we can very easily get hurt. Touch, i believe, is essential to protect ourselves. Touch is the most common sense we use to confirm what we sense with our other four senses. For example, if we see a red object and was unsure of what it was, the first thing most people will do is to Touch the object and feel what it is. Touch, although is often not noticed as being important, plays an essential supplement role to our other senses.

Nick & Joe (9/11 Conspiracy Theory)



This carries on from the presentation that we recieved at the start of the year.

To summarise, the video discusses the possibilies of a plane causing the collapese of the Twin Towers. It rasies the points that the buildings were specifficaly designed to withstand multiple crashes. Furthermore, it highlights inconsistant details in videos of the plane contacting the towers such as a sudden explosion Before the plane even touches the face of the building. It goes on to to eye witness accounts of hearing multiple and systematic explosions inside the first tower after the plane struck.

Many people will question the motive of such a conspircy. The following video gives a plausable explaintion, referencing a scene from the Popular NBC show "Heros":


It shows that the government may have "Let it happen on Purpose" for their own benefit. It suggest that in such a disasterous event, when people are afraid, hopeless and terrified, they will blidly place their trust in the government, allowing them to control the public without question or resistnace.

Sight is the most important (Jungwoo Park)

I believe that sight is the most important sense out of our 5 senses. With sight, we can see everythin there is to see, we can see our surroundings and environment. Because we can see our environment, we can adapt to it. Also with sight, we can actually see whether we are in a dangerous position or place and we can escape that dangerous situation. Although we only have a nearly 180 degree vision field, we can easily fix it by turning around every now and then. With sight, we can communicate, because we can use sign language but even better, we can send letters at each other or emails. Most of the inventions today were invented because of sight, because we can see what we are going to make.
Sight is also one of the most important and biggest form of entertainment. Even the movies before 1940 (where sound movies were not made) people were still entertained because of the text it showed.

Nick' Sense Perception (Touch)

The sense of touch is referring to physical contact with the outside world through the single largest organ in our bodies – our skin and our nervous system.

I think that our sense of touch is the most important sense of all. This is because out of all the senses it is the most difficult one to fool. There are many known ways to tick our brains through our other senses- sight, sound, taste and smell. For example, photo and video editing, sound effects in movies, artificial flavouring and even artificial smells like ‘stink bombs’, perfumes or pleasant smells that some supermarkets are known to release in certain areas to attract customers.

There are very few known illusions that trick our sense of touch, even the few that exist usually only make you experience odd things such as your arms feel as though they are reaching underground. However, illusions like this, though intriguing, do not have a big impact in the way we perceive objects.

Also, in order to use our sense of touch, the object has to be up close and available for thorough inspection, unlike the sense of sight or sound which can be easily experienced through photo graphs and videos which can be altered. Touch is intimate and is a guarantee of primary information with very little probability of it being altered or distorted by anything. That is why a lot of people say they rely on ‘first hand experiences’, referring to being somewhere in person and actually physically touching it with their hands.

Joe - Touch

Touch is the feeling we recieve from the world, weather it be physical contact or a sensation such as heat or pain.

I think the touch is the most important since of all as it is most important for survival. The since of touch is one of the best indicators of danger. When we touch a hot ember or spark, we feel pain and automatically recoil. This automatic reflex is one of the basic survival instincts. Furthermore, touch and the skin help us know what the body is doing. For example, when you stand in a cold wind we can feel that the body starts to cool, something that all the other senses cannot do, you can’t see yourself getting cold until your extremities turn blue. You certainly cannot hear, taste or smell yourself becoming cold, so we can see that the sensation of touch is the most important.

Wht is the sense of smell the most important? Astrid

OLfaction refers to the sense of smell. There are 2 typpes ofolfaction. Pleasant and unpleasant. Pleasent ones often refer to odors that give you pleasure. E.g. Perfume can give people sensation/ sexual attraction. The smell of the freshly baked cookies from Mrs Fields Cookies store in the MTR will also attract customers to byu their products. However, unpleasant smell usually associaltes with danger.

Here are some scenarios which show that smell is the most important sense. When your toast is burning, your brain interpreted the smell first and a problem and you knew to check on your toast, especially when you are in another room and you can't see or hear and you can only detect it through smelling. In a laboratory, the sense of smell prevents you from danger- ti makes you aware of harmful, transparent gases by detecting their smell. Of course, it could be that th gases are odorless, but at least this is the only way you can detect it. The sense of smell can also keep you safe, it can warn you not to eat something that smells rotten or help you detect smoke before you see a fire.
In march 20th, 2007, a freshman at Purdue University has been fuond dead inside a hifh voltage room of a dorm that he was apparently trying to enter to retrieve his coat after a party. The student appears to have entered the utility room through an exterior door that was not locked, and was electrocuted to death in an nistant when he touched a ilve part of the room's electrical system. Again, his body wuoldn't have bbeen so quickly found if the students didn't smell the strong odor coming from the rotten body.
Despite the fact that how human beings are oriented by other senses, we still think that the sense of smell is the most important amogst all because it plays the most sginificant role when sensing anger- under a condition which other senses are limited. e.g. people say "I smell danger", instead of "I see danger". It is also interestnig that most people can loose their sight and their hearing, but least people lose their sense of smell, This may suggest that people can still live without their other senses, but not without their sense of smell.

9/11 conspiracy, It was never a terrorist attack. (Jungwoo Park)

The Twin Towers that were destroyed in the 9/11 tragedy, was actually a controlled demolition by the American Government that was made to look like a terrorist attacks. The American Government was willing to kill hundreds of people and then lie to everyone in order to wage war with Iraq. A lot of people believe that the American Government is hiding a lot of facts, and a lot of people believe that George Bush wants to steal Iraqs oil.
There are numerous suspicious points about the 9/11 attacks itself and some of them seem too unreal. The World Trade Centre was supposed to be a megastructure, and would not have toppled so easily by a plane. The WTC has a steel skeletal internal frame inside and according to the chemical properties of steel, the steel frame could not have melted so easily by the blast of the plane. Another strange point is that the tower sort of crumbled into itself, but this effect usually only happens in controlled demolitions. In some videos, it shows smaller explosions coming out of the window and some witnesses of the attack said they heard small bangs and explosion sounds.
The attack on the Pentagon seems quite suspicious as well, because the Pentagon is supposed to be the most well protected building in the world, but if it was so well protected, could it have let a plane simply crash into its wall? Also, where was the debris from the plane and why was the hole so small in the pentagon?
I believe that it was all just a planned demolition to scare the people and let them trust the government more and also another reason to wage war for personal gain.

9/11 conspiracy

tok response essay Astrid

Perception is the understanding of things through our 5 senses. These are the "windows" between us ourselves and the outside world (reality). I agree with the claim "Our senses are not impartial windows between otuside world and ourselves- they are biased"because it is proven that our interpretations are influenced by factors such as intensity, contrast, interest, our mood and expectations.\
In everyday life, our minds interpret the sensations thta flood into our senses subcnociously. Although out senses are important source about the world, they dont reflect reality. Our 5 senses/ wnidows act like a filter, which structure or twists the reality; so therefore our senses are sometimes unrealible.
Richard van de lagemaat points out that "Perception consist of 2 elements: sensation adn interpretation, but we are often not conciously aware of the latter element." By looking at visual illusions, we are aware that interpretation plays an important role in perception. E.g. we have a natural tendency to look for meanings in what we see and goup our perceptual experences together into shapes and patetrns. Perception is also selective in a way how our mind treats "less engaging" things as the background against which what we are interested in stands our (we usually notice intense and contrasting stimulus). What we see also depends on subjective factors like oru interest, mood, feelings and emotions. All these factors can determine what show up through our perception, as the pattern of our interest changes, so does what we perceive. As a result, we are all seeing only what we want to see and therefore uor sense are partial and we can't simply take the evidence of our snese as the absolute reality. Not only that our senses cometimes mislead us, they are also selective and can be altered by our beliefs and discriminations.
To get a better understanding of the relationship between perception and realiy, we need to look at 3 different theories. (1) Common-sense realism; which believes "what you see is what is there." That means the way we perceive the world reflects the way the world is. (2) Scientific realism; which believes in "atoms in the empty space." Scientists think that reality is a colroless, soundless and odorless realm of atoms dashing around in a void. (3) Phenomenalism; which believes "to be is to be perceived." That is, al knowledge must ultimately based on experience. For example, Gailleo once said "The tickle is not in the feather." What jhe means is that tyhe tickle is simply a subjective experience that results from the niteraction between your skin receptors and the feather. Some people are not even afraid of tickling at all.
In conclusion, I believe our 5 senses are partial windows between reality and ourselves. The culture we come frmo, our past experiences, the environemnt aruohd us, the things we do everyday all affect the way we see the world. For our senses to be unbiased, we would have to strip away the interpretation that our sense-organs inflict on it.

Sound - Edward R, Ben, Edward T

Hearing is the universal alerting sense in all vertebrates. Sound is so important because animals are able to hear events all around them, no matter where their attention is focused. Sound is also a vital transportation / communicaiton method used by humans / animals alike. Bats pick up ultrasound emmited by themselves to travel and hunt. Dolphins identify prey and objects by using ultrasound. Humans communicating by using sound which becomes the basis of all language.

Sound is a 360 sense. It has the most coverage out of all the senses eg. you may hear an explosion from a long distance away but you may not be able to see it, smell it, or taste it. It isn't primarily focused in one certain direction at one time. For example if a car was coming at you from behind and you were deaf you wouldn't know that it was there and you would be run over. But with sound you would hear it coming and dive out the way. Sound is also a vital part of music as it is very influential to the sub-conciousness of the human mind. If you only had 1 sense left, sound would probably be the most effective sense to live off of. eg. blind people can hear the world in strange ways.

FUN FACTS :D D: :D

- In Africa, a tribe of people call Maabans live in such quiet that they can hear a whisper from across a baseball field ‹ even when they are very old.
- Sound travels at the speed of 1130 feet per second, or 770 miles per hour.
- At 115 dB, a baby's cry is louder than a car horn.
- It does not matter if you like the sounds you are exposed to. An orchestra playing Mozart at 120 dB will damage your hearing as quickly as Metallica playing at 120 dB.
- The hearing of a dog is more sensitive than humans. Dogs can hear much higher frequencies, which is why they respond to "silent" dog whistles.

Ruby's knowledge claim



This is a knowledge claim about the creation of the world, according to the Chapter of genesis in the Christian Bible. God was the one who created the whole world, in six days, from the universe, then earth etc... There are six different areas to consider to examine whether this claim is a reliable one.

1)Logical consistency - Although this video is from a book written by men, i believe this story is still very reliable. According to the bible, God first created the heavens and earth, then the landscapes, then plantations, then animals and finally humans. I think this is a very logical sequence of how the world could have been created. If there were no plantations, animals won't be able to live. If there were no heavens and earth, landscapes cannot be created. Therefore the whole order of how the world was created is very logical in my opinion.

2)Observational reliability - Firstly, the video is an anime, therefore there is no reality observations availiable. However, by lookin at the world we are living in today, everything mentioned in the bible created by God is extistent today - trees, sea, animals, humans etc... We can at least confirm the story was not crazily made up, there're observational proofs in the world to support the claim.

3)Awareness of value, judgments and propaganda - This claim's value is based upon christianity, perhaps in some ways it is propaganda as it is one of the most fundamental basis of the christian belief. Since religious events has no definite proof, it can be argued that this claim is therefore a ofrm of propaganda.

4) Authority/ citation/ peer review - this claim is from a strong powerful authority - the christian bible which is the best selling book ever. The christian faith is also a long religion and affects many in the world. It would be wrong to say this claim is simply a story made up randomly.

5)Awareness of source, intention and audience - The intention of this claim is to make people believe in the omnipotent power of God, and the audience is for people who are non-believers or also believers of God.

6) Awareness of knowledge selection, priotization and editing - In this particular anime, the full details of the genesis story wasn't shown. The more interesting parts were selected and priotized to perhaps make the anime and story sound more interesting and attract the audience.

In conclusion, although there are certain areas where this claim may not be reliable; it is still important to note that this claim is from a very powerful authority and religion, and that the story is not random but is logical and makes sense.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Knowledge Claim Astrid + Edward R

Moon Landing: Fake or Fact?
Moon Landing.

We are claiming that the moon landing is a hoax. Bill Kaysing was a librarian/writer of technical publications and advanced research at Rocketdyne Systems from 1956 to 1963. He states that it was estimated in 1959 that there was a .0014 chance of landing man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. This took into account the effects of radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. He could not believe in 1959 that man could go to the Moon.

Evidence states that an important factor to take into consideration is the great variations in temperature that the film would have had to endure whilst on the lunar surface. The temperature during the Apollo missions were recorded as being between -180F in the shade and +200F in full Sunshine. How could the film emulsion have withstood such temperature differences? The astronauts can be seen to move between the shadows of the rocks and then into full sunlight in some shots. Surely the film would have perished under such conditions? If the film used during the Apollo missions had such qualities as to withstand such differences in temperature, why are Kodak not publicly selling them in today's market?

There are other series of evidence expanded in the video's content.
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Edward's Optical Illusions( sorry abit late)

impossible structures in real life:



another one:







Guess the Famous Physcist in this picture

Monday, October 8, 2007

Harvir' optical illusions



Ruby's Optical illusions



Steven's Optical Illusions

Do you see any grey dots where the black lines intersect? In fact, there is nothing.


3 Perfect Squares:

Joe's "Still" Images

No explation need.

Like the above illusion, move your eyes across the Still image. Don't look for too long, or you will become nauseous.


Ben Lau's Optical Illusions



The length of the green table equals the width of the red table. Unbelivable? The width of the green table also equals the length of the red table. Measure it.






You dont' want to look at this for too long. Prepare:























Jungwoo's optical illusions


Nick Tsao's Optical Illusions







Stare at the center of this spiral and move your head in and out. You'll see that it rotates.


Look at square A and squre B, which one's darker?


In reality, there're exactly the same shade of grey. You can check it if you want.








Wednesday, October 3, 2007

ASTRID - Visual illusion

The Image of Jesus

Stare at the four dots in the center of this page for about 30 seconds. Try not to blink. Then lean back, look at the ceiling and blink your eyes a few times. Did you see Jesus?



Man playing horn.. or woman sillhouette?


James' Optical Illusions