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 points at the wrong video, a question gets numbered twice, a caption names the wrong body, a sentence says does not where it plainly means does — the sort of thing that survives proofreading because nobody reads a book by scanning its codes in order. This page is a list of the ones we have hit, kept for the author’s use as much as the reader’s. The book is still prerelease; these are all cheap to fix now and expensive to fix later.

None of this is an argument, and none of it is offered as one. 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, on their merits, and nothing on this page is cited against any of them — no verdict anywhere on this site rests on a single item here. 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. Where this review gets something wrong, the correction goes in the text of the page that carried it, which is where a reader meets the claim; it is not collected here, and this page is not a scoreboard.

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

Fixed. The mismatch has since been corrected, and the codes now resolve to their printed labels. The entry stays below as a record of the prerelease state, which is what the foot of this page said would happen. Nothing on this site rested on it. The pages that use the footage identify it by its contents, its title card and its description rather than by which code points at it, so the correction changes a tense on those pages and nothing else.

The slide carrying three codes heads them SUN, MOON and STARS. Each is a shapedebate.com short link that redirects twice — number, then topic slug, then the video itself. Resolved directly rather than inferred from the labels, the destinations do not match the headings:

CodeLabelledResolves toWhat is actually 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 are shifted one position against the site’s own slugs. It is the signature of a list that got out of step during layout, not of anything meant.

Why it is worth fixing. The slide’s caption reads that heliocentric solar eclipses are debunked near the end of “the Sun video” — and two different videos answer to that description depending on whether you follow the printed label or the site’s routing. One is about a lunar eclipse and one about a solar eclipse. A reader chasing the citation cannot tell which was meant, and the two do not make the same argument. Our reading at the time was that code 57 is the intended target, since it is the one actually about a solar eclipse — inference from content, and not assumed anywhere a conclusion depends on it. The correction has since borne that out: SUN now resolves to /sun, the solar-eclipse upload.

2 · “The Sun video” at p. 167 is a lunar eclipse

Fixed at the site end. This is item 1’s routing slip seen from the book rather than the slide, and the same correction settles it: the p. 167 code now reaches the solar-eclipse upload its label promises. The printed page is unchanged, so a reader working from the prerelease still meets what is described below; the entry stays as the record of it.

The same slip, reached from the book rather than the slide. The QR at p. 167 is introduced as the Sun video; it leads to an upload titled moon observations, and its content is a lunar eclipse’s shadow direction. The upload’s own description says so plainly — it calls the selenelion “the biggest debunk of all” and describes the Sun rising in the east while the Moon is in the west, which is a lunar-eclipse geometry, not a solar one.

Worth adding, because it is a credit rather than an error: the upload’s opening title card names its original creator, Steve Matthews of the YouTube channel Teeth of the Lamb, and the Shape Debate copy is a repost. That attribution is on the video and easy to miss; this review cites Matthews for the footage on the selenelion page, which is where frames from that upload are used.

3 · 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.

This one has a consequence for anybody writing about the book, us included. A reference to “Q4” is ambiguous between two questions on facing pages that have nothing to do with each other. This site indexes the equator challenge as Q3 purely to keep twelve questions in twelve slots, and says so where it does it — but that is our patch for a reader’s benefit, not the book’s numbering, and the two will not agree.

4 · 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 at all — an author is entitled to retitle his own work — but it is recorded because a citation to the original title no longer matches anything, and because the word completely was added, which is a slightly stronger claim than the one the first title made. That page cites the current title and notes the earlier one.

What would change this page

Any of these being corrected in the published edition, in which case the entry says so and stays as a record of the prerelease state. Or any of them turning out not to be slips at all — if the QR rotation is deliberate, or the second Q4 is intended, we would rather be told than keep the entry.

Sources & further reading