Blogger discredits claim Amelia Earhart was taken prisoner by Japan | Hacker News Reader

Blogger discredits claim Amelia Earhart was taken prisoner by Japan

theguardian.com

131 pointsdanso89 comments

I thought the History Channel was already widely considered non-factual. Aren't half the documentaries about space aliens?

"Source": http://www.cracked.com/funny-5720-the-history-channel/

And the rest are mostly about Hitler, Hitlers dog, Hitlers secretary, Hitlers lunch.

Hence "Hitler Channel".

"Hitlery Channel"

There's also the overlap with Hitler's flying saucers.

I almost miss the days when everything was about Hitler. At least then it had the veneer of being historical.

Now it's about ice road truckers, pawn shops, and things hillbillies like.

They also went full on Jesus some years back. They're firmly in the blue collar reality TV camp now, its mostly truck drivers, pawn shops, and surprisingly, blacksmiths.

Sorta like how the Sci Fi channel was all about pro wrestling, fantasy, action movies, pretty much anything but science fiction.

When I was a little kid (a long time ago) the snarky wisdom was if a country had "democratic" in its name, it wasn't. The snarky wisdom today is a cable TV channel broadcasts everything except what its name would imply. So the History channel never broadcasts anything factually historical, the sci fi channel never broadcasts science fiction, or The Learning Channel only broadcasts fashion and style never anything educational. "Home and Garden" TV is endless real estate "FIRE sector" complimentary copy, containing no garden shows. Even the weather channel pretty much stopped weather forecasts and replaced it with agitprop documentaries that the faithful don't watch because they're already faithful and the unfaithful don't watch because they're nonbelievers.

Don't forget Music Television.

And Fox News

Yeah... no news about fox... sad but true.

...the original offender.

Similarly, if you have science in the name, no science is generally involved: Political Science, Computer Science, Exercise Science...

The scientific method is a core part of research design in poli sci. We have entire classes dedicated to Karl Popper and fun topics like that. We do real research with hypotheses, testable results, and conclusions. It is science, even if it isn't hard science.

Dunno why it matters....back to your rant.

Not trying to turn my original joke into an argument, but does applying the scientific method make something a science in your mind? By that definition, couldn't any subject be a science?

Joke flew over my head. Sorry too touchy these days...

What is science other than the application of the scientific method?

Computer science at least in my experience of it, definitely involves lots of science. I can't speak for the others.

This one also illustrates that if it has "science" in it, it can't get a joke...

Are you sure the parent was joking? Also, are you sure I wasn't? ;)

In which way - interested - does it involve science or what is your definition of science?

I'm not the OP, but effective debugging makes use of the scientific method.

Not OP, but maths, maths again, and still more maths.

Type systems, algorithm proof, complexity, boolean logic...

And if we go into CS applications: games are maths, bioinformatics is maths, accounting is maths, ...

Or in the implementation: electronics, semi-conductors physic, eletrical engineering, ...

I wouldn't think math is science. Otherwise, the acronym STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) would be awfully redundant. And yeah, I'd say CS is closer to math than science, except maybe when you look at things like manufacturing processes and such, which is more of an engineering or materials science track.

I was thinking of science in terms of "uses the scientific method." This is a pretty loose definition, but I think it's a reasonable one. I find I regularly apply the scientific method in terms of the observe, hypothesize, test, revise cycle.

The quote is of Hal Abelson and one of his lectures at MIT disagrees with you [1]. The introduction is amusing and opens with Computer Science has nothing to do with Computers and little to do with Science. It's really a poorly named field. I believe it's a bit tongue in cheek and not defining science entirely by "uses the scientific method".

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hal_Abelson

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY

At least Literary Studies were honest enough not to call themselves a science (in English anyway).

AE Housman called it a science. Of course, the way Housman did it _was_ a science.

(If you haven't read Housman's prose, incidentally, it's a fine as his poetry, and very different.)

BBC America is going in the same direction as it morphs into the "Star Trek and action movies" channel.

Not that I can really complain, though, since it's gradually becoming what the SciFi Channel could've been before it got renamed to SyFy.

Syfy recently started broadcasting excellent programming: The Expanse, KillJoys, DarkMatter...etc.

They go through quality boom-and-bust cycles. They had an excellent shared universe of Warehouse 13 and Eureka a number of years ago.

I'm reluctant to trust the brand...

I think the main driver of this is simply the changing demographics of TV viewers. Ever since the rise of the Internet, social media, and smartphones, traditional television viewing hours have been plummeting for some demographics.

The young and affluent are moving away from TV, and the poor and aging are not. Programming reflects that demographic shift.

> I think the main driver of this is simply the changing demographics of TV viewers. Ever since the rise of the Internet, social media, and smartphones, traditional television viewing hours have been plummeting for some demographics.

No. This trend predates the full development of most of that. IIRC, TLC ("The Learning Channel") went from educational stuff (like videos of surgeries) to full-on home improvement over the course of the 90s. The internet in 1999 was GeoCities and email, not social media and smartphones.

What really happened was these channels started out programming to a little niche audience, then they realized there was a lot more ratings and money programming to the lowest common denominator. In TLC's case, I think it started with some husband and wife home improvement show and snowballed from there.

When I go thru Netflix UK, their catalogue listings would make me think they have something for Hitler. I mean, sure he had great negative impact n the UK, but it seems overboard. Or maybe it's me overreacting. I mean, seems so obsessive.

As a German, it always seems like Brits are even more obsessed with Hitler than Americans. I guess it has something to do with Germany actually having bombed the UK in WW2 and it all therefore being a bit more personal than what the US went through.

I mean, it's a critical time now for Germany and Europe, also globally. Economically we're pretty good. We have been better, but we're very vibrant in the theatre and arts and so on. And Hitler Hitler Hitler Hitler Hitler Hitler...[0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTCIbtyTy7Y

Hitlers ufo..

At least it was interesting when it was the "Hitler Channel" now it seems to be mostly pseudo-science and quasi-reality TV - like National Enquirer on the air.

The History Channel's Hitler obession happened because the last WWII vets were dying off so the History Channel rushed to interview them, putting out a bunch of WWII documentaries

Who doesn't like "ancient astronaut theorists"?

http://chronicle.su/wp-content/uploads/tsoukalosaliens1.jpg

That's pretty much what I think of as a non-American when I hear "History channel".

Is the European version pretty much the same?

I think the ancient aliens theories are fun little 'what if' dips into scifi, but treating them seriously like History does is just stupid. And people who buy into that are equally stupid, if not more so.

It used to be a decent channel. Modern marvels was great. Discovery, NatGeo, Animal and History Channel used to be good a times. They all sold out for cheaper to produce reality shows.

PBS and BBC docs are still hanging on and pretty good. NOVA and Planet Earth series are great.

Nova is one series I've been continually excited about since being a small child. Fantastic stuff.

Another nifty example of how search engines and digitization are improving research. How would anyone have ever discovered that one super-obscure Japanese travel book happened to include one old black-white photo? This reminds me of another Japanese-related example of search-engine-driven historical research, the castaway Australian sailors: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/may/28/austr... Or more literarily, the recently-discovered Walt Whitman novel https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/arts/in-a-walt-whitman-no...

Indeed. Moving to the opposite direction though I wonder when will we discover the first pseudo-historical artifacts generated by AI (speeches, art, photos, and even videos).

This is the greatest weapon ever, the ministry of truth would never dream of something like this!

Not on mobile anymore, some examples:

- https://github.com/junyanz/CycleGAN (drawings to photorealistic images and perhaps videos)

- https://lyrebird.ai/demo (inflamatory or incriminatory speeches)

- https://deepart.io/ (forgotten works of art)

i remember watching ww II battle documentaries, and they would be talking about a battle, say battle of the budge. and I would be like 'wait a second, that stock video footage was a corsair shooting a drone.

then it hit me that almost all of the video shown on these things is just for aesthetics / effect and not actual footage from the topic in question.

then it hit me, the news was actually doing the same thing! like they would be talking about an event concerning the nimitz and would show stock video footage of the JFK

It's the equivalent of tech's hacker baddie wearing sunglasses and a hoodie in a dark room with menacing green letters on the monitor.

Why waste time on finding a perfect colour scheme, when you can simply put sunglasses on? Same with shampooing, put on a hoodie. That's a true hacker mentality.

It certainly explains why we so often see the same inappropriate language or pattern applied to every other problem.

Think about how much inaccuracy and nonsense you can point out (because you are an expert) any time you see/read mainstream reporting on technology. Now extrapolate that to other areas of reporting. It's hard to know what to believe or who's credible.

Gell-Mann Amnesia effect?

http://www.omsj.org/blogs/gell-mann-effect

Ignoring a discussion of good vs evil, I've spent a lot of time in server rooms staring at green letters on black backgrounds in a hoodie with sunglasses either on my head or clipped to my hoodie. Usually a plain black hoodie, because they are available for cheap.

Somebody tried to explain evil mode to the writers but they didn't quite get it.

If you watch enough WW2 documentaries, you start to see the same clips across multiple documentaries. A lot of them don't seem to put much care into matching the visuals with the audio, but the ones that do seem to do a really good job.

At least it's not footage of the Liaoning.

In German newspapers often pictures of planes are plain wrong.

I believe it's referred to as infotainment. The History Channel isn't news any more than Fox News is news. That it then made it onto mainstream media, "because it's out there", is another indication of the problems with Ad revenue based media seeking clicks.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/5497862627001/?#sp=show-clips

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/amelia-earhart-survived-plan...

It's telling that HISTORY is also being transparent: https://twitter.com/HISTORY/status/884781394861469696 and that is also news.

p.s. thanks criddell!

Not entirely unrelated, there once was a time when the way to get news information was to be right there, at the source. Now, the way to get news information is to have it delivered electronically directly to the newsroom. It can then be passed back to a reporter standing outside the building from which that news originated, who has no idea what's going on, to be fed the lines to say over an earpiece and repeat them back into camera. This is what happens.

That's been going on since the invention of the telegraph.

PS: Those reporters aren't actually standing in front of the building, either.

Besides a couple national newspapers I pretty much don't read or watch anything online or on TV anymore that purports to be factual. This kind of thing is just too common, I've completely lost trust in a lot of the media available to me.

Isn't that s very serious issue? I absolutely agree that journalistic/non-fiction integrity has collapsed in the post-print world, but what can we do about it?

When your choice is Vox or Breitbart, that's kind of a turd sandwich.

The best part is the photo credit:

>> The woman said to resemble pilot Amelia Earhart is seen sitting on the dock in the centre of the picture. Photograph: Reuters

So Reuters is falsely taking credit for a photo when they didn't know its origin. Journalistic integrity is long dead.

Oh shit there's this:

>> The documentary, hosted by former FBI executive assistant director Shawn Henry, also alleges a cover-up, claiming that the US government knew of her whereabouts but did nothing to rescue her.

So (former) government officials are promoting false notions of government conspiracies. It's all theater folks. We are being manipulated by everyone.

Reminds me of South Park's episode on the 9/11 conspiracy.

Interestingly enough, Shawn Henry was the head of the FBI Cyber division and, after leaving, became President of Services at CrowdStrike which was involved in investigating the DNC hack by the Russians.

Isn't that the Guardian misassigning credit to Reuters?

I assume most of this story was written up by Reuters, picked up by the Guardian and regurgitated:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-amelia-earhart-idUSKBN...

I wonder if History Channel will update their website with this information? It seems like if they actually give a damn about history, they should.

spoiler alert: They have not given a damn about history in a looong time.

It was never about giving a damn about history. It was about turning a cheap source of content into a channel when cable service providers were looking for new channels to air.

Yeah, I wonder if they'll say aliens aren't real and it's embarrassing for grown men to be endlessly fascinated with Hitler when they don't know who their state representative is.

Just checked their Twitter feed and they are on it:

https://twitter.com/HISTORY/status/884781394861469696

Thank goodness. It's really unpleasant to see such history-rewriting claims made in the global press based on such flimsy evidence.

Not just flimsy. Complete trash. There is more resolution in the typical forum emoji than in the face of the man claimed to be Noonan. And the person claimed to be Earhart has their back turned. It's not even clear that it's a woman. All the people involved in this should be ashamed.

The proof was stupid. It shows the back of some person and the photo concludes that its Amelia.

About this topic, its amazing how many people claim that its pro-science but never ask for proof, or scientific method.

Most depressing: "Kota Yamano, a military history blogger who unearthed the Japanese photograph, said it took him just 30 minutes to effectively debunk the documentary’s central claim."

It was shoddy evidence, but it was also trivially disproven. Just... no one cared.

Worse than that, the host wasn't a "common" investigator (and later executive assistant director) at the FBI, he was a specialist in computer crime, his bio:

https://www.crowdstrike.com/shawn-henry/

>... is credited with boosting the FBI’s computer crime and cybersecurity investigative capabilities. He oversaw computer crime investigations spanning the globe, including denial-of-service attacks, bank and corporate breaches, and state-sponsored intrusions. He posted FBI cyberexperts in police agencies around the world, including the Netherlands, Romania, Ukraine and Estonia.

There's no particular mystery. Navigation in those days was rudimentary - not good enough to fly long distances across the Pacific and try to hit a tiny island at the limit of your fuel.

She missed the island, ran out of fuel, and crashed into the Pacific.

I saw a documentary on her long ago, and she was known to be sloppy in navigation, careless in handling the airplane, arrogant in dealing with her navigator, and would take unnecessary risks with the weather. It's all a recipe for disaster when taking a high risk flight.

It's all too easy to die in an airplane if you don't have a mania for doing it perfectly every time. People also had a hard time believing JFK Jr died because of a perfectly mundane mistake on a routine flight.

This reminded me of a passage on pilot checklists from The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande:

> Commercial pilots have been using checklists for decades. Gawande traces this back to a fly-off at Wright Field, Ohio, in 1935, when the Army Air Force was choosing its new bomber. Boeing's entry, the B-17, would later be built by the thousands, but on that first flight it took off, stalled, crashed and burned. The new airplane was complicated, and the pilot, who was highly experienced, had forgotten a routine step. > > From http://old.seattletimes.com/html/books/2010737113_br08checkl...

Lindbergh, on the other hand, was extremely careful and meticulous. He knew exactly where the risks were, and minimized them as much as possible. His only mistake was not taking some amphetamines along (he fell asleep and nearly crashed).

There are always so many jokers making money speculating on things like this, it's nice to see some taken down a peg.

Is this suggesting that the same TV network which airs a show called "ANCIENT ALIENS" would have some completely inaccurate and poorly researched easily debunked claim on one of their TV shows?

What's next? Is some blogger going to reveal to the world that Seinfeld and Star Trek aren't real too??

>What's next? Is some blogger going to reveal to the world that Seinfeld and Star Trek aren't real too??

On the contrary, this means that the episode of Voyager where Amelia Earhart was revealed to be transported to the Delta Quadrant can still happen.

Give us the 37s!

It's kind of funny how the "History" channel is turning into the "Unsolved Mysteries" channel. Maybe they'll buy up the rights to re-air that old show and go full retro with UFO conspiracies and the like.

Now there's a clickbaity title.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com