Long time coming

It does seem that I have been neglecting my duties here on photogabble and subsequently the number of visitors the site has been receiving has taken a hit. The reason for my slight departure is as per usual work based, I have a lot of work to be doing as well as a fully fledged social life – going out every day, working hard to asitain a 2:1 average and seeing my wonderful Camilla as much as possible has caused me to forget about the website. Unfortunately the neglect is beginning to show seeing as my last post was late in October and wasn't even a fully fledged post; more simply just an announcement.

Dear Coffinman

Recently the website received several comments by the alias Coffinman on one of my posts I wrote a while back. I must admit it came to me as somewhat of a surprise that he found this website and read the post which I admit unfairly slated him – however I agree with what he had said with respect to where I chose to slate him. I believe that he would much rather I had directed my anger towards him on youtube rather than exert it here on my personal blog. I feel that my choice to publish my frustration here rather on youtube was a smart one as I didn't wish to at the time argue with him I simply wanted to expel my anger in a positive manor – however what I should have done is re-read and edited what I wrote, because it is quite obvious that what I had written was thought up on the spot and under the influence of anger and frustration.

Since Coffinman got in touch with me a couple of days ago, I replied to him with an email essentially agreeing with him that my comments at the time where harsh and apologizing for calling him an idiot. It has been a couple of days and he has still neglected to get in touch with a reply.

The dispute itself was about one of the films on his channel which attempted to disprove the moon landings, one of the reasons they stated was that you wouldn't have been able to travel though the Van Allen Belts due to the radiation found within them – I disagreed with and called up as an idiotic suggestion based on my knowledge of science. As far as I am aware the Van Allen belts are made up of alpha radiation and beta radiation caught in Earths magnetic fields, both forms of radiation are easy to shield against and at most you would only require a few millimeters of stiff card to block them. This can be proven in a laboratory and I have carried out this experiment before where you have a beta radiation source such as tritium and a Geiger counter you shall pick up a lot of radiation coming from the source on the geiger counter, however as soon as you place some stiff card inbetween the source and the counter it will pick up nothing, the card is effectively shielding the counter from the source, if this happens with beta radiation then alpha radiation which has less power is going to require less shielding. It must also be noted that clothing provides some protection against beta radiation.

With this knowledge the notion that the moon landings couldn't have happened due to people not being able to survive the radiation in the Van Allen Belts appears to sound absurd. Not only did the craft at the time provide adequate shielding, but the space suits themselves provide adequate shielding, therefore we can come to the conclusion that the Van Allen Belts posed no threat to the astronaut's lives.

I don't know if Coffinman actually believes the conspiracy theory and even if he did I should not have called him an idiot simply because I think the moon landings conspiracy theory is stupid – for that I do apologize and hope that Coffinman does get in touch with a reply to the email I sent him.