Fun With Science  /  Globe Deconstruction  /  Mislabels

Mislabels, Not Arguments

Slips in the book and the site that are worth fixing whatever he makes of the rest of this review.

Every long document has these: a QR code that points at the wrong video, a question numbered twice, a caption naming the wrong body. This is the list of the ones we have hit, kept for the author’s use as much as the reader’s; the book is still prerelease, so they are cheap to fix.

None of this is an argument. A book can have every code in it wired to the wrong page and still be right about the sky; the claims are answered on their own pages. These are the errors that are errors on his terms: they would want fixing if he is entirely right about the shape of the Earth and we are entirely wrong. That is the whole test for whether something belongs on this page. Scope is the book and shapedebate.com. Slips in this review’s own pages get the same treatment in reverse: fixed in the page that carried them, where a reader meets the claim, with attribution where the correction came from outside.

1 · The three QR codes labelled SUN, MOON and STARS were rotated by one

Fixed at the site end. The codes now resolve to their printed labels, and the p. 167 code reaches the solar-eclipse upload its label promises. The printed page is unchanged, so a reader working from the prerelease still meets the state recorded below.

The prerelease state

Each of the three codes is a shapedebate.com short link that redirects twice — number, then topic slug, then the video. Followed directly, the destinations did not match the headings:

CodeLabelledResolved toWhat was there
55SUN/moon“moon observations” — a lunar eclipse
56MOON/starsFour star-scintillation videos
57STARS/sun“sun observations” — the solar eclipse of 8 April 2024

The labels were shifted one position against the site’s own slugs — the signature of a list that got out of step during layout, not of anything meant.

Why it was worth fixing. The slide’s caption reads that heliocentric solar eclipses are debunked near the end of “the Sun video”, and two different videos answered to that description depending on whether you followed the printed label or the site’s routing. From the book’s side, the QR at p. 167 is introduced as the Sun video and led to an upload titled moon observations, about a lunar eclipse’s shadow direction, with the Sun rising in the east while the Moon is in the west — lunar-eclipse geometry, not solar. A reader could not tell which was meant, and the two do not make the same argument. Code 57 was the one actually about a solar eclipse, and the correction bore that out: SUN now resolves to /sun.

A credit rather than an error: the opening title card of moon observations names its original creator, Steve Matthews of the YouTube channel Teeth of the Lamb; the Shape Debate copy is a repost. It is easy to miss; this review cites Matthews for the footage on the selenelion page, where frames from that upload are used.

2 · The numbered questions run Q1, Q2, Q4, Q4, Q5

The question cards in the prerelease draft skip Q3 and then use Q4 twice in succession — first for the equator flight challenge at p. 46, then for the reflections question at p. 47. There are twelve questions; the numbering has eleven labels for them and one of those does double duty.

A reference to “Q4” is therefore ambiguous between two unrelated questions on facing pages. This site indexes the equator challenge as Q3 to keep twelve questions in twelve slots, and says so where it does it — a patch for the reader’s benefit, not the book’s numbering.

3 · The flat-surface video has been retitled since it was answered

The pond experiment was published as Can an object disappear over a flat surface? first attempts and now reads Can an object completely disappear over a flat surface? first 3 attempts. Not an error — an author is entitled to retitle his own work — but recorded because a citation to the original title no longer matches anything, and because completely is a slightly stronger claim than the first title made. That page cites the current title and notes the earlier one.

4 · The Team B list runs to #103 but has 102 entries

The “optimized approach” chapter (pp. 208–231, and the standalone PDF linked from shapedebate.com/social-proof) numbers the heliocentrists’ claims 1 to 103. Number 88 is absent in both: #87 (fluid shift in microgravity) is followed by #89 (the ISS as a microbial lab). The headline “100+ positive claims” still holds; a tally of the list gives 102. The Optimized Debate, Mapped uses the printed numbers throughout so that every row can be found in the PDF.

What would change this page

Any of these being corrected in the published edition: the entry then says so and stays as a record of the prerelease state. Or any turning out not to be a slip — if the second Q4 is intended, the entry goes.

Sources & further reading