phil wrote:
The interaction itself can be interpreted as legitimizing their claims, and it is futile since the pseudos do not operate by rules of logic and use selective mining of the observational evidence.

Alex writes:
Indeed, as I mentioned these are the main reasons many of my colleagues, who normally would love nothing better than to engage in a good argument for hours on end, avoid such exchanges with the pseudos. Ironically, this is why I believe Robert's suggestion for a point-by-point rebuttal, while good-intentioned, is somewhat naive. At any rate, there are already long-accepted mechanisms in place for scientific discourse (e.g. publication in peer-reviewed journals, submission of extended conference abstracts, etc.) with rules of behavior on the participants. Simply throwing a speculative "paper" online doesn't even come close to this higher standard and shouldn't even merit comment. As a representative example, I only posted the blatant error that Hoagland and Bara wrote about the southern highlands of Mars being "on average" 30 km higher than the northern plains, which is demonstrably false. There are others, such as on page 4 where they assert (apparently derived from Van Flandern) of a "1-km thick" crust underlying the northern plains. Homorously, they are off by several orders of magnitude; a factor of about 40, which is obvious from their own references. See http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/internal_paper.html

Alex R. Blackwell
University of Hawaii