Debunked: Video claims to show that perspective is non-linear [Table not flat]

B

Bonn

New Member
A flat earther showed me this video where Eric Dubay builds a small scale model consisting of block towers of the same size, and from a certain angle it does not appear to obey linear perspective, and the block towers appear to curve downward, despite apparently being in a straight line on a flat surface.



(Dubay also places the camera below the edge of the table so that it obstructs the block towers, and claims that this is due to "perspective", even though it's clearly not analogous to objects appearing to sink behind supposedly flat water when seen from above.)

What stood out to me most was that Dubay never included a side view of his model. Something about the diagonal view looks weird to me, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Is there some kind of trickery going on here?

Attached is a wigglegram of the spot that I find weird. Particularly, the strange parallax of the towers on the far right.

View attachment wiggle.webp
 
It really looks as if his table is NOT flat, especially when viewed in your wigglegram. There's a definite horizon line in the middle of the tabletop, and you can see it as a distinct line that suddenly occludes the lower part of the blocks as he pans the camera. It begins with the tower with the black block on the bottom, and the ones from there on back don't even show the reflection of the bottom of the stack. I can't tell if it's pure fakery on his part, or if it's a table where two leaves come together but are not quite aligned.
 
Ann K said:
It really looks as if his table is NOT flat, especially when viewed in your wigglegram. There's a definite horizon line in the middle of the tabletop, and you can see it as a distinct line that suddenly occludes the lower part of the blocks as he pans the camera. It begins with the tower with the black block on the bottom, and the ones from there on back don't even show the reflection of the bottom of the stack. I can't tell if it's pure fakery on his part, or if it's a table where two leaves come together but are not quite aligned.
Click to expand...
The wigglegram gives me the impression that the line of Lego (tm) towers is also not a straight line , but curves away as it goes into the distance. Anybody else see that? Most noticeable along the upper line of the top of the towers...
 
This is some laughably bad video throughout. He has some warped concept of what he calls "perspective", but if you look at about 50 seconds in, he draws a circle and complains that it doesn't match the curve ...and doesn't realize that he should be looking at the circle in perspective. He also argues that the earth is flat because transmission towers cannot bend down due to curvature "and water is always flat", thus using an assumption to try to prove the assumption.

I'm speaking (charitably) as if he is just wrong and doesn't understand, but that doesn't preclude the other interpretation, that he is just a con man doing this nonsense for fun and clicks.
 
Ann K said:
This is some laughably bad video throughout. He has some warped concept of what he calls "perspective", but if you look at about 50 seconds in, he draws a circle and complains that it doesn't match the curve ...and doesn't realize that he should be looking at the circle in perspective. He also argues that the earth is flat because transmission towers cannot bend down due to curvature "and water is always flat", thus using an assumption to try to prove the assumption.

I'm speaking (charitably) as if he is just wrong and doesn't understand, but that doesn't preclude the other interpretation, that he is just a con man doing this nonsense for fun and clicks.
Click to expand...
Petitio principii fans thank you!
Yes, given my confusion at his optics, I just shrugged when his attempt to slip "water is always flat" in
as "evidence" that Earth--a sphere with ~71% of it's surface covered in water--is actually flat.
 
Ann K said:
I'm speaking (charitably) as if he is just wrong and doesn't understand, but that doesn't preclude the other interpretation, that he is just a con man doing this nonsense for fun and clicks.
Click to expand...
The fake table picture shows he's not doing it for science, that's for sure.
 
Bonn said:
Click to expand...


~30-48 s in
"The first thing to notice when considering this this footage is that the curvature is not at all uniform as it must be on a globe. Instead there is almost no apparent curvature in the foreground, and far too much curvature appearing in the background, near the horizon."

Which is just plain wrong.

Here's my great circle approximation (what a "straight" bridge would do on the globe):
http://fatphil.org/tmp/curve_side.jpg

And here's what it looks like from a fairly shallow angle, though no where near as shallow as the lake footage (what angle would you eyeball that to be?):
http://fatphil.org/tmp/curve_oblique.jpg
Yes, I promise I will do some dusting this afternoon.

His premises are false. If his arguments are based on those premises, then his conclusions are ill-founded.

I've not continued past that point yet, as it's lunch time and I'm late...
 
Mick West said:
Yeah, his table is not flat. If you use a known flat surface, like this level, then you get a straight line.
Click to expand...

how are your pieces equal height and size? items further away are smaller. But note in this FE vid, we still see the feet of his clothes pins at all times (so yea dubays table is not straight.)
1672846390457.png


ps. i know we've had this dubay vid here before and Rory did experiments, but i can't find the thread now :)
 
deirdre said:
how are your pieces equal height and size? items further away are smaller. But note in this FE vid, we still see the feet of his clothes pins at all times (so yea dubays table is not straight.)
Click to expand...
Presumably Mick's photo was taken from some distance, so, relatively, they're at a roughly similarish distance from the lens. It reinforces the "straight lines parallel to a table/floor" message, but alas could be criticised by the bunklords for not doing quite the same thing as the original. The nice thing is that it's utterly trivial to reproduce with almost any span/ratio of distances. In fact - let the bunksters name their distances!

It's pretty obvious his table's not flat, it just looked like a crooked table before he even got right down really close to the surface. I feel like I'm going to uselessly veer off into motivation again, as there's nowhere further to go in debunking him - did he not know his table was warped? did he even check? did he deliberately not check? If he knew, thus making it a deliberate falsehood intended to deceive, did think he could get away with the lie? I just don't understand what would make someone do something that's so obviously wrong. Genuinely.
 
FatPhil said:
did he not know his table was warped? did he even check? did he deliberately not check? If he knew, thus making it a deliberate falsehood intended to deceive, did think he could get away with the lie?
Click to expand...
Well... he did show it in a very brief clip among all the rest of his word-heavy title cards. He was preaching to the choir. It's not a thing that might have been obvious to someone who watched only his video, only once, with an uncritical eye.
 
Look at the tabletop in the wigglegram. The four towers nearest the camera all show a patch of bright tabletop surface at their bases throughout the wigglegram. There is a group of towers further on (fifth to eighth) that do not show that bright patch initially, but suddenly all display it at the same point in the video. The bend in the table surface is probably between the fourth and fifth towers. If the table was flat then perhaps the illuminated tabletop might become visible one tower at a time, but for it to happen to all at once suggests that group are on a flat surface, that is not perfectly parallel with the flat surface the first four on on.
 
Ann K said:
Yours are not in a straight line. The last one is offset to the right.
Click to expand...
it's not gonna change its size if i move it to the left. I guess i just dont understand what Mick's pawns are supposed to be demonstrating to us.
 
deirdre said:
it's not gonna change its size if i move it to the left. I guess i just dont understand what Mick's pawns are supposed to be demonstrating to us.
Click to expand...
He is demonstrating what it looks like on a FLAT surface, the spirit level. The original video from Dubay pretends that they look curved on a flat surface ...but his surface is demonstrably NOT flat. Dubay is trying to claim that the earth's curvature, seen in the Lake Pontchartrain towers, is really what he calls the effect of "perspective" (on a flat earth), which it isn't.
 
Ann K said:
He is demonstrating what it looks like on a FLAT surface, the spirit level.
Click to expand...
but that's not what they look like on a flat surface. grab some pawns and put 'em on your diningroom table.. the pawns far away are smaller. Mick's pawns stay all the same size.
 
I think Mick might need a longer level to demonstrate much size change due to perspective. But I THINK what he was trying to show is that on an actual flat surface they dont seem to curve like Dubay claims. To create the curve, you need a curved surface like Lake Pontchartrain or a surface with a couple of non-paralel plains like Dubay's table... or set your pawns/legos/towers in a curved line, which I think Dubay did as well.
 
JMartJr said:
I think Mick might need a longer level to demonstrate much size change due to perspective.
Click to expand...
nah the back half of my table with the 3 lighters is shorter than his level and i have big size change. i looked at Mick's original thread link and he is talking about "extreme compression"..i guess like the President FOrd looking like a munchkin in front of the Clintons thing. I just think that confuses the issue for FEers. well...it confuses the issue for me :)

Dubay thinks he's proving something because the feet disappear. which as the other FEer with the clothes pins (comment #14) shows: the feet dont disappear if your table is flat.

But in fairness half the time i don't know what the FEers are talking about, or the debunkers :)
 
Ann K said:
...that doesn't preclude the other interpretation, that he is just a con man doing this nonsense for fun and clicks.
Click to expand...
And/or money.

Dubay seemingly takes in dollars in many ways: Books, music, YouTube, etc.
After reading thousands of words of his virulent anti-semitism and Holocaust denial
[did you know Hitler "wanted nothing but peace" ?]
(on his site: https://ericdubay.wordpress.com/category/history/)
I'm inclined to believe that he is dim enough to actually believe FE...
but I never assume that to be true...when money is being made.

This $2.17 mil net worth estimate seems high to me...but what do I know?
https://peopleai.com/fame/identities/eric-dubay#faqs

I don't mean to veer off-topic...but his entire financial life seems to be wrapped up in this...

(and I sure didn't expect to get saturated with racism as I merely sought to
sort his numerous revenue streams)
 
JMartJr said:
The wigglegram gives me the impression that the line of Lego (tm) towers is also not a straight line , but curves away as it goes into the distance. Anybody else see that? Most noticeable along the upper line of the top of the towers...
Click to expand...

Definitively. The farther blocks curve to the left. It can be seen very clearly at the video starting on 1:11, the timestamp included in the first post here, and for more frames than those shown in the wigglegram. As he moves the camera to the right, more blocks are exposed, that were previously hidden behind the ones to the front.

I don't believe this is a mistake: this guy must know he's lying. I never heard of him before, btw. I don't really follow the flerfdom, much.
 
Gaspa said:
Definitively. The farther blocks curve to the left. It can be seen very clearly at the video starting on 1:11, the timestamp included in the first post here, and for more frames than those shown in the wigglegram. As he moves the camera to the right, more blocks are exposed, that were previously hidden behind the ones to the front.

I don't believe this is a mistake: this guy must know he's lying. I never heard of him before, btw. I don't really follow the flerfdom, much.
Click to expand...
Eric Dubay converted a lot of people to FE, starting in 2014.
 
I did my own research :)

I have a 60 cm spirit level on which I made five marks every 10 cm (left picture).

The image on the right shows the familiar characteristics of a perspective image: Parallel lines converge to the vanishing point VP and equal long line segments get shorter with distance.

We can compare my spirit level test with Eric Dubay's table test. The bottom of spirit level is Dubay's "perfectly flat table" and the red dots are the tops of Lego towers. The towers are "all equal height" (and presumably also on the same straight line, although Dubay does not mention it).

1.jpg

In any perspective picture, a straight line segment in space looks still straight regardless of the viewing angle. So the red dots (tops of the Lego towers) must be in the same straight line in the photo – and they are in my photo.

The screenshot from Dubay's video shows that the tops of the Lego towers are not in a straight line. The conclusion is that the table is not perfectly flat or the Lego towers are not on the same straight line or both. QED.
2.jpg
 
deirdre said:
but that's not what they look like on a flat surface. grab some pawns and put 'em on your diningroom table.. the pawns far away are smaller. Mick's pawns stay all the same size.
Click to expand...
This is a normal perspective effect that happens when you're far enough from something and zoomed in. Objects shrink proportionally to their distance from the camera, not proportionally to their distance from the previous object.
 
deirdre said:
but that's not what they look like on a flat surface. grab some pawns and put 'em on your diningroom table.. the pawns far away are smaller. Mick's pawns stay all the same size.
Click to expand...
No, they really aren't. Go ahead and measure them. It's not an enormous difference but on my device it's about 65 mm for the nearest one, 56 mm for the one at the rear. It depends upon the distance from which they're photographed, and a zoom lens adds some distortion of its own. If you look at a rectangular building from across the street, the difference between the apparent height of the front corner and the back corner is a certain amount. But if you walk right up close to the building, the difference in apparent height is much more extreme.
 
Ann K said:
No, they really aren't. Go ahead and measure them. It's not an enormous difference but on my device it's about 65 mm for the nearest one, 56 mm for the one at the rear.
Click to expand...
Yeah, sorry, I took that photo from a long distance with a zoom lens, so the perspective is compressed (i.e. there's less perspective) Still there though, as you note.

JMartJr said:
I think Mick might need a longer level to demonstrate much size change due to perspective
Click to expand...
No, I'd just need the camera closer.
 
This is a great experiment! Simple to do, simple to grasp, straight to the point.
Pertti Niukkanen said:
The circular segment looks like a segment of an ellipse when seen from a shallow angle.
Click to expand...
The tilt of the ellipse depends on the observer height. (I've been looking at the rim of a drinking glass held sideways in the air to figure that out.) This is logical, as the ellipse has to be vertical when looking ahead, and horizontal when looking up or down, with a continuum in-between.
 
Last edited:
NoParty said:
And/or money.

Dubay seemingly takes in dollars in many ways: Books, music, YouTube, etc.
After reading thousands of words of his virulent anti-semitism and Holocaust denial
[did you know Hitler "wanted nothing but peace" ?]
(on his site: https://ericdubay.wordpress.com/category/history/)
I'm inclined to believe that he is dim enough to actually believe FE...
but I never assume that to be true...when money is being made.

This $2.17 mil net worth estimate seems high to me...but what do I know?
https://peopleai.com/fame/identities/eric-dubay#faqs

I don't mean to veer off-topic...but his entire financial life seems to be wrapped up in this...

(and I sure didn't expect to get saturated with racism as I merely sought to
sort his numerous revenue streams)
Click to expand...
After visiting Eric Dubay's wordpress.com site listed above, and scanning through it (it's long) I am quite confident in disregarding everything that he ever posts. Nothing but nonsense, misinterpretations, quotes out of context and tall tales. No, I did not try to track down all of the sources he claims, his dedication to falsehood at every turn is impressive. It's not worth my (and your) time.
 
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