Honesty is the best policy. (Part I)
25Oct. 09
There is very little in life that I get seriously riled up about. Frequently I find myself in frustrating situations, yet I generally manage to stay calm enough to state my case; if I encounter a black hole of stupidity I prefer to walk away and let it consume itself, rather than getting sucked in. Overall my attitude is that beyond a certain point, debate only serves to lend unwarranted credibility to intellectually vacuous ideas.
I try as hard as I can to stick to that rule, but I am only human and, as for anybody, occasionally a particular topic will get under my skin enough to move me beyond irritated frustration and into full blown rage. My particular Hulk trigger are 9/11 conspiracy theorists, or ‘truthers’ as they are ironically called.
I’m the one on the left.
Recently, there have been a small influx of 9/11 conspiracy theorists commenting at YAS thanks to two articles I wrote, one debunking a very, very stupid video by David Chandler, the other taking apart a piss-poor attempt at an academic paper from the incorrectly named Journal of 9/11 Studies. This series of articles is my ‘final response’ to these commenters, and I feel I should warn people in advance that the series will loosely be divided into two sections. The first section will be the ‘facts based’ section, and will focus on the actual claims and charges that have been put forward in the comments. The second part will be a more personal explanation of why I am calling this my ‘final response’; it will most likely be NSFW. Consider yourselves forewarned.
— — — — —
First, I may as well deal with Tony Szamboti. For those who are unaware, Tony was one of the authors of the non-paper I wrote about in my second article. Rather than address the criticisms I raised, he decided to bring up another, equally moronic, section of his paper. If you want details of that particular exchange, it starts here…I really can’t be bothered to flesh out that particular bit of nonsense again, especially as the rebuttal consistently seems to be, “You clearly don’t have the credentials or understanding of the science involved to rebut this.”
Speaking of that particular canard, I’d best make my position on this known. For starters, no, I’m not a structural engineer. Nor am I a structural engineering student. I wouldn’t for a minute think that I was qualified to perform an engineering analysis on how the towers fell. Luckily for me, a large contingent of people who do have the relevant expertise conducted a massive investigated and produced a comprehensive report on WTC 1, 2 and 7. At over 10,000 pages, it’s not exactly light reading…
Now, even though that’s true, that doesn’t mean that I’m unable to pick apart Tony’s drivel like a vulture with Prader-Willi syndrome. For one, Tony is guilty of exactly the charge he levels at me — he lacks the relevant expertise required to properly analyse the collapse of the towers. His co-author is no more qualified, unless the structure of an Asian literature PhD is drastically different from how it sounds. However, I don’t have to rely on Tony’s lack of expertise to dismiss his paper. The fact of the matter is that the paper contains fundamental physical errors, and contains omissions that would make a high school science teacher squirm.
Since Tony still doesn’t seem to understand why his mistakes are so cringingly bad, I’m going to try one more time, but using very simple words. First, the conservation of momentum equation. Despite Tony’s patronising tone, I understand very well what the conservation of momentum equation is. The reason his use of the conservation of momentum equation is wrong is because he fails to conserve momentum.
Even if you’ve never studied physics in your life, you should be able to spot the issue with that.
To be a bit more specific, Tony takes the initial velocity (v1), the mass of the falling block before (m1) and after (m2) collision with the floor below it, and comes up with a final velocity (v2). So far so good. But then, he takes v2 and subtracts even more from it, to obtain a the drop in velocity he says should have occurred on collision (v3). The problem with this should be clear: v3 doesn’t appear anywhere in the conservation of momentum equation, and is in fact significantly smaller than v2. In other words, if you plug this value into the conservation of momentum equation you’ll get different values for the ‘before’ and ‘after’ momentum.
That’s called ‘breaking the laws of physics’, and is generally frowned upon in polite society.
The other thing I thought I’d comment on here is Tony’s piss poor excuse for why there’s no error analysis:
“Your error analysis nitpick is silly on it’s face, as it is obvious the error can only be +/- 1/2 pixel which would be +/- 0.44 feet. This is in the noise and would have no effect on the findings.“
Again, he puts on display his complete ignorance for all the world (well, this blog anyway) to see. Tony’s paper contains a lot of assumptions, measurements, and calculations — faulty assumptions, incomplete measurements and flawed calculations, but assumptions, measurements and calculations none the less — and each and every one of those has a degree of error associated with it. For example, he states that each pixel in the video is equivalent to 0.88 feet — a result he arrives at by examining five photos of the tower, taking an average height to width ratio, taking an estimated value of the width of the tower, and using that in conjunction with the average ratio to estimate the height. He then takes that height, measures the ‘height’ pixels in the video, and uses the two of them to come up with a value 0.88 feet/pixel. Yet nowhere in any of those estimations and averages do we see a single estimation of error.
To be perfectly blunt (or blunter than normal), the paper is a piece of crap. It’s unprofessionally presented, and so chock full of errors I’d give you twenty bucks if you threw a dart at it and hit a nugget of truth. If Tony Szamboti disagrees with me, I happily invite him to submit his paper to a peer reviewed engineering journal and let me know how it works out for him.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
[…] previous two parts of this series can be found here and […]
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Richard thinks the energy drain from column deformation must be part of any conservation of momentum calculation. Well it isn’t Richard.
You didn’t really have to tell us you weren’t an engineer Richard. The type of comments you make in your blog here are more than adequate to make that point.
What is ridiculous here is that you make blatant errors like this and in the same paper have the audacity to say that while you aren’t an engineer you feel qualified to judge the work of those who are. It should be obvious to anyone who is that you aren’t.
You apparently don’t even know enough to be embarrassed at what you are saying.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Holy Vishnu.
Look, it’s not that hard. You used a conservation of momentum equation, and you failed to conserve momentum. You could have said, “Blimey, that was stupid. Maybe I’d better rethink my analysis.” Instead, you’ve opted to walk the path of, “None of you are engineers, so you wouldn’t understand.”
That’s not going to fly here, and it’s not going to fly in the professional and academic community.
November 3rd, 2009 at 9:12 pm
I will explain in case anyone else reading here has a problem understanding what was done in the Missing Jolt paper.
When an impulse occurs momentum is transferred and is conserved.
In the case of WTC 1 the momentum is transferred from the upper section to the lower. However, the velocity loss of the upper section is not quantifiable in this situation as one cannot measure the velocity of the lower section.
The use of energy methods, by calculating the energy dissipation due to column deformation is quantifiable and that is what we did.
The addition of the mass of the 98th floor slab to the upper section, and it’s contribution to velocity loss due to conservation of momentum, was quantifiable, and it can be added as a separate component.
The use of energy methods for column deformation and adding the conservation of momentum contribution of the 98th floor slab is valid for determining velocity loss of the upper section. The fact that you did not understand does not constitute a valid reason to criticize it. You should have asked somebody who would understand before talking out of your hat and embarassing yourself.
November 3rd, 2009 at 9:51 pm
[sarcasm]By gosh, you’re right. If only I lived with a horde of civil and mech eng students…[/sarcasm]
January 17th, 2010 at 5:49 pm
We are supposed to be impressed by the NCSTAR1 report because it has more than 10,000 pages?
So why can’t it specify the total amount of concrete in the towers? It has the total for the steel in three places.
What about the total weight of a complete floor assembly? You know the 205 foot square concrete floor slabs, plus the corrugated pans and the 60 foot and 35 foot trusses and the rebar mesh that was embedded in the concrete? How many millions of words have been written about whether or not those things did or did not pancake? So when have you ever heard a total weight for one of them?
So it seems we are supposed to BELIEVE a lot of experts because they have credentials, but those experts are free to leave out any information they want.