Ten Years Of Murderous Nonsense

WTC6 was hollowed out. What did this?

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the last happy day of my life.

It was an ignorant sort of happy, but I remember it fondly nonetheless.

I may as well; tomorrow will mark ten years of murderous nonsense. The official story of 9/11 is impossible to believe, yet it is promoted more brazenly than any contemporary truth.

My effort to avoid the anniversary propaganda having failed, I started trying to mark the biggest, stupidest, 9/11-related lie I can find.

There are plenty of candidates for the honor.

WTC5 had multiple holes. What did this?

Some serious 9/11 researchers have been trying to compile a list of all the "holes" in the official story: the distortions, the omissions, the contradictions, the outright lies, and all the other bits and pieces of evidence which suggest that the real story behind 9/11 is not the one we have been told.

These people remind me of the Renaissance mathematicians who spent their whole lives trying to find all the prime numbers.

The mathematicians were working for the royal courts, in many cases, whereas the 9/11 researchers are working against the powers of our day.

But the fields of research are more or less equally infinite.

Being somewhat less ambitious, I started a list of the people who used to be, or used to be considered, investigative journalists, or at least honest dissident writers, but who have shown quite clearly that their primary interest in the truth about 9/11 is in bashing those who seek it.

What burned these cars?

My list would certainly have been finite, but I lacked the discipline required to keep adding to it.

At last I settled on a smaller task: finding the undisputed facts in the official story.

My list now contains the date, as well as the names and locations of some of the buildings which were damaged or destroyed on that day.

I do not see any possibility of adding to this list in the future.

And that's the state of play.

Jerome Hauer

What drilled huge holes in WTC5 and WTC6?

What burned hundreds of cars, some more than half a mile away from the WTC?

Why are such questions not allowed even at so-called '9/11 Truth' sites?

I could write at length about such matters, and if I were healthy I would probably do so. But I can't.

Instead I can only point out that the people who disseminated the official story of 9/11, the people who have fabricated new "research" to support it, and the people who mount vicious attacks on those of us who don't buy their murderous nonsense, are all -- by their own choice -- mortal enemies of everything that is true and just and righteous, and therefore of all humanity.

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Engineer Accused of Coverups On 9/11 And Katrina Wants An Investigation -- Of Those Making The Accusations

The Associated Press reports that the American Society of Civil Engineers is being accused of serious corruption, and that the "expert" who led investigations into 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Oklahoma City Bombing is calling for investigations -- into the people accusing him!

I am not making this up. Gene Corley [photo], the "forensic expert" most implicated by these very serious charges, is quoted by the AP's Cain Burdeau as saying:

"I hope someone looks into the people making the accusations"

Most honest people would like to see investigations of the accusations first. Then -- if and only if the accusations appear to be specious -- an investigation into the people who made them would be in order.

As for the accusations themselves, Cain Burdeau explains:

The professional organization for engineers who build the nation's roads, dams and bridges has been accused by fellow engineers of covering up catastrophic design flaws while investigating national disasters.

After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the levee failures caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the federal government paid the American Society of Civil Engineers to investigate what went wrong.

Critics now accuse the group of covering up engineering mistakes, downplaying the need to alter building standards, and using the investigations to protect engineers and government agencies from lawsuits.

The name "American Society of Civil Engineers" and the acronym ASCE are familiar to regular readers of this page, because of the ASCE connection to the Journal of Engineering Mechanics (JEM), which recently published a "research paper" by Keith Seffen [photo] concerning the "rapid and total" destruction of the two World Trade Center towers which "collapsed" on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Seffen's paper came to our attention via the BBC, which reported on its conclusions in an article of September 11, 1007, which said Seffen's "findings are published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics".

The BBC article also quoted Seffen as saying some remarkable things:

"One thing that confounded engineers was how falling parts of the structure ploughed through undamaged building beneath and brought the towers down so quickly," said Dr Seffen.

He added that his calculations showed this was a "very ordinary thing to happen" and that no other intervention, such as explosive charges laid inside the building, was needed to explain the behaviour of the buildings.

BBC even went as far as to say that

Dr Seffen's research could help inform future building design

even though his conclusions seem ridiculous on their face, and even though his motivations appear much more political than scientfic, as Seffen explained in a press release from the University of Cambridge which was issued on the same day (9/11/07), and which says:

engineers continue to speculate about the speed and totality with which the buildings were demolished during the fateful attacks.

Some have even dared to suggest that the catastrophic events that followed two planes being flown into the buildings were the result of a conspiracy that extended to the top of government itself.

Dr Seffen, a Senior Lecturer in the Structures Group in the Department of Engineering, was moved to find a scientific explanation for the collapse when he heard about reports of possible insider involvement. Claims of "controlled demolition" were being suggested, in order to explain the speed, uniformity and similarity between the collapses of both towers.

"I thought immediately that there had to be a rational explanation for why collapse happened as it did, one which draws on engineering principles," he said.

In other words, Seffen recognized that "controlled demolition" was proof of "insider involvement" which would suggest "a conspiracy that extended to the top of government itself". He rejected this potential explanation of the day's events as "irrational", saying "there had to be a rational explanation", and then he set out to find that explanation -- one that draws on engineering principles, rather than evidence from the scene of the crime.

Suffice it to say that honest scientists don't usually start their investigations by ruling out explanations which appear to fit the observed evidence; nor do they usually proceed by developing mathematical models to demonstrate that their "rational explanations" are correct. But rather than speculating as to Dr. Seffen's honesty, let us focus on an undisputed fact: back in September of 2007, when both the BBC and Cambridge were saying Dr. Seffen's "findings are published", the opposite was true.

The paper had not been published, as a search of the purported publisher's website revealed.

Seffen's paper -- obvious trash which has been debunked over and over and never seriously defended -- was eventually published by the JEM, which -- just coincidentally -- is a publication of the ASCE, the organization which is now accused of covering up rather than investigating, and protecting government agencies, as detailed in the report from Cain Burdeau linked above:

In the World Trade Center case, critics contend the engineering society wrongly concluded skyscrapers cannot withstand getting hit by airplanes.
...

The Federal Emergency Management Agency paid the group about $257,000 to investigate the World Trade Center collapse.
...

In 2002, the society's report on the World Trade Center praised the buildings for remaining standing long enough to allow tens thousands of people to flee.

But, the report said, skyscrapers are not typically designed to withstand airplane impacts. Instead of hardening buildings against such impacts, it recommended improving aviation security and fire protection.

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a structural engineer and forensics expert, contends his computer simulations disprove the society's findings that skyscrapers could not be designed to withstand the impact of a jetliner.

Astaneh-Asl, who received money from the National Science Foundation to investigate the collapse, insisted most New York skyscrapers built with traditional designs would survive such an impact and prevent the kind of fires that brought down the twin towers.

He also questioned the makeup of the society's investigation team. On the team were the wife of the trade center's structural engineer and a representative of the buildings' original design team.

"I call this moral corruption," said Astaneh-Asl, who is on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Moral corruption" isn't the half of it.

The AP article also mentions some details regarding the ASCE's investigation of Hurricane Katrina:

In the hurricane investigation, it was accused of suggesting that the power of the storm was as big a problem as the poorly designed levees.
...

The society got a $1.1 million grant from the Army Corps of Engineers to study the levee failures.
...

The society issued a report last year that blamed the levee failures on poor design and the Corps' use of incorrect engineering data.

Raymond Seed, a levee expert at the University of California, Berkeley, was among the first to question the society's involvement. He was on a team funded by the National Science Foundation to study the New Orleans flood.

Seed accused the engineering society and the Army Corps of collusion, writing an Oct. 20 letter alleging that the two organizations worked together "to promulgate misleading studies and statements, to subvert appropriate independent investigations ... to literally attempt to change some of the critical apparent answers regarding lessons to be learned."

As mentioned above, the AP piece notes the reaction of

Gene Corley, a forensics expert and team leader on the society's report

who

said the society's study was peer-reviewed and its credibility was upheld by follow-up studies, including one by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

"I hope someone looks into the people making the accusations," Corley said. "That's a sordid tale."

A sordid tale, indeed!

W. Gene Corley, according to Wikipedia, also led the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing, after which

Corley explained about the design of the Murrah Building, "if a critical element fails, it may start a chain reaction of successive failures that collapses the whole building. "A majority of the fatalities were caused not by the force of the bomb blast itself, but by the progressive collapse of the building's floors which depended on the support of a few key columns that the bomb destroyed."

The problem with all this, apart from its eerie foreshadowing the "progressive collapse" of the World Trade Center towers, is that we've had credible reports of multiple bombs in Oklahoma City that day, and an "investigation" that looks an awful lot like a cover-up.

A piece written by Gene Corley and published on September 11, 2002, by the UK's Guardian, reveals that Corley's team was "fascinated" with a notion that could easily have "distorted" their approach:

The question that fascinated our team was not, "Why did the towers fall as quickly as they did?" but, "Why did they stay standing for so long?" The buildings really did extremely well. The most important thing to note is that the impact of the aircraft hitting the towers did not cause the collapse. We believe that the towers would have stood indefinitely until a second large event - such as a hurricane or an earthquake - hit them.

Focusing on the question "Why did they stay standing for so long?" would certainly divert attention from the matter of "Why did the towers fall as quickly as they did?" ... not to mention "Why did they fall at all?"

And of course, the question Corley was avoiding -- and the one Seffen tried to finesse -- remains: Why did the towers fall as quickly as they did?

Corley continues:

In this instance the second large event was the fire that broke out following the planes crashing into the buildings. It was this combination of the damage done by the aircraft followed by a major fire that could not be fought that led to their collapse.

The assertion that "the damage done by the aircraft" was followed by "a major fire that could not be fought" is unsupportable, in light of the evidence from the firefighters on the scene, who were recorded telling their supervisors just the opposite:

"Battalion Seven ... Ladder 15, we've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines. Radio that, 78th floor numerous 10-45 Code Ones."

But Corley equates these "two isolated pockets of fire" with "a second large event - such as a hurricane or an earthquake." Why? Because evidence of what actually happened was of no value -- or, rather, negative value -- to Gene Corley and his friends at the ASCE.

It's no wonder they're being accused of covering rather than investigating.

And it's a very sordid tale, is it not?

Published At Last: Keith Seffen's Reality Reversal Hits The Bigtime

The 9/11 Lie Movement got a big shot in the arm when "Progressive Collapse of the World Trade Center: A Simple Analysis" -- Keith Seffen's horseshit "research paper" about the "collapse" of the World Trade Center -- was finally published, nearly five months after it was first described as such.

As we have discussed previously on several occasions, this paper purports to prove that the destruction of the WTC towers was "an ordinary thing" requiring only airplanes, heat and gravity -- certainly not explosives or directed energy weapons -- and that the collapse, once it began, was "destined to be rapid and total".

Now that Seffen's fecal matter has hit the peer-reviewed fan, we can expect to see little bits of it flying all over the place.

Keith Seffen [photo] is a Senior Lecturer in Engineering at Cambridge. On September 11, 2007, the University issued a press release saying Dr. Seffen's 'findings are published". But they weren't, and it was obvious to anyone industrious enough to search the purported publisher's website.

Cambridge never corrected the erroneous press release, even after the error was pointed out to them by several individuals. At least they don't have to put up with any more criticism on that point. Hooray for small mercies.

As for the paper itself, I found the abstract at the publisher's site through a post at Digg dot com, which also provided a link to the paper itself (which, strangely enough, is hosted at one of my other sites).

The post at Digg says:

Peer-reviewed paper refuting 9/11 Truth theories published

Debunk this, Truthers.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but ...

Seffen's paper may be peer-reviewed but it doesn't refute anything!

And it's already been debunked.

In "Dr Keith Seffen's paper - "Progressive Collapse of the World Trade Centre: a Simple Analysis"", Exodus2006 shows that Seffen's model of the collapse describes an event absolutely unlike what happened that day.

Arkadiusz Jadczyk explains in "Keith Seffen's WTC Collapse Folly: Not Even Wrong" that Seffen's paper isn't even a good honest attempt; thus, in Jadczyk's opinion, Seffen is "not even wrong"!

My review of the paper is here: "Keep Your Hats On: Keith Seffen's "Mathematical Model Of The WTC Collapse" Is Incoherent, Inappropriate, And Almost Meaningless". The title is self-explanatory.

A few knights of the keyboard have taken a run at defending Seffen's murderous nonsense. I highlighted their best arguments in "Rebuffed! Conspiracy Theory Destroyed By Unsung Internet Heroes". In this case the title is entirely ironic.

The fact is: nobody has so far advanced a coherent argument in favor of Seffen's paper, nor will anybody do so, ever. I am certain of this because it's not possible. In order for it to be possible, Seffen's paper would itself have to be a coherent argument, and it's not. It's not even close.

But then, it wasn't designed to be coherent. It was designed to be deceptive. You can tell because Seffen writes about how his model predicts the conditions observed in the "collapse".

The word "predict" comes from two bits of Latin. "Pre-" means "before", and "dict" comes from "dictare" which means "to speak".

To "predict", literally "to speak before", means to say what will happen before it happens. Thus we might wonder about people who can apparently "predict the future" in some cases. But nobody ever talks about predicting the past. By definition, nobody can predict the past, because it's already happened.

But Seffen's entire paper is written in terms of his mathematical model "predicting" the effects observed when the towers disintegrated. (They didn't exactly "collapse", by the way. "Collapse" means to fall over, or fall apart, now that we're using the dictionary -- another descendant of the latin dictare by the way, but let's not get lost in the details!)

In eight separate places, Seffen's paper talks about his model "predicting" certain aspects of the "collapse"; and this is really quite extraordinary, since his model was created many years after the collapse whose characteristics the model purports to "predict".

How pre-posterous! The model was designed after the event and is said to have predicted that event! In the absence of a time machine, this is utterly impossible! So why all this talk of "prediction"?

Force of habit, I would guess. People build mathematical models because they can predict the future. Or at least the good ones can.

Don't laugh; it's true. If you understand a system well enough to describe it as a series of mathematical equations, then it's quite possible -- easy, in some cases -- to predict the future with a model made entirely of mathematics.

Here's a simple example, and I hope you will take it as a "thought experiment". In other words, you don't have to do this, although you could:

Drop a coin from a height of one foot and measure how long it takes to hit the ground. Repeat with heights of two feet, three feet, four feet, and five feet. Plot the data on a graph, and try to get a sense for what it's trying to tell you. Can you extrapolate from the data you've collected? How long would it take a coin to fall six feet? Ten feet? Twenty feet? Sixty feet?

You can test a mathematical model by doing some extrapolation, and then some further experiments. In other words, you would use your model to calculate how long a coin would take to fall six, ten, twenty, and sixty feet. Then you'd drop the coin those distances and measure the time that passed before it hit the ground in each case.

If your observed times and your predicted times matched, then we'd say your model has "predictive value"; in other words, it can predict the future. It can tell you how long it would take a coin to fall eight feet, or eighty feet, and if you trusted the model, you wouldn't even have to do those experiments. But you could do them anyway, just to check your model further.

If, after a large number of tests, your model continued to show predictive value, you might start to trust its predictions. And at that point you could rightly say your model was "useful".

Any useful real-life example is bound to be much more complex than the "thought experiment" we've been discussing, of course, but the principle is the same -- when a mathematical model is used in an honest way.

Mathematical models can be used in dishonest ways, of course -- just like anything else.

To illustrate, I will tell you how I prepared my tax return when I was young and single. My wife's brother is a specialist in tax evasion ... sorry, I meant tax preparation ... so he does our taxes now. But before I knew him, I did them myself. And I never had any money, and I had never organized any of my receipts, so I did the only thing I could think of -- I fudged it.

I would set up a spreadsheet whose structure and function duplicated that of the form I was filling in. And I would enter the numbers that I could document, guess at the rest, and then wiggle it for a while, changing my "guesses" until the bottom line said what I wanted it to say! In my case, I was trying to find out how much expenses I would have to claim in order to get a little money back. I wasn't trying to cheat the government; I was just trying to find out how many receipts I needed to dig up. And I've been paying a lot less in taxes since my brother-in-law started figuring them out "the right way", so all in all I probably won't go to jail for it. But that's beside the point.

The point is: My spreadsheet was a mathematical model; it could figure out how much I would have to pay in taxes given various income and expense totals. But it didn't really predict the future. I never had a chance to test it against unknown outcomes, nor did I wish to do so. It was simply a mathematical tool for fudging results.

I built it because I needed a way to jiggle the numbers around until they told the story I wanted to tell. And without getting excessively technical about it, I think Seffen's mathematical model of the WTC "collapse" is that kind of a model. It's not meant to predict the future. It can't be tested cheaply or easily -- or at all! So its "predictive value" can never be measured.

But that's all right by Keith Seffen, because he's not interested in predicting the future anyway. He's only interested in fudging the past. And he doesn't even do that very well.

Seffen couldn't even be bothered trying to find a better word than "predict". Instead he rattles on and on about predicting something that happened six years earlier, as if that somehow made any sense at all. What an insane level of reality-reversal. What a putz!

Seffen's paper might convince people who don't know the difference between before and after. But I don't know too many of them.

For some reason, whenever I write a post about Keith Seffen and his 9/11 Lies, it seems to attract trolls.

Bring 'em on!

Come and get me, trolls! Try to disprove anything I've been saying. Try to find a hole in any of the reviews I've linked here. And try to do it without lying.

Oh. Sorry. You can't, can you?

Well you're gonna have to do better than the chumps who wrote (at Digg dot com):

"Troofers aren't going to bother with that, it goes against everything they believe, so it was obviously written by a paid government shill."

And you're gonna have to do better than this liar, too (same Digg link):

Isn't this the paper that the truthers denied ever existed or ever would exist? Looks like they were wrong again. I wonder if any of them will read it.

For the record, no truthers denied the paper ever existed. Some truthers denied it had been published when in fact it hadn't been published.

One "truther" in particular questioned whether the paper existed (an entirely reasonable question, since no evidence of it had been made public except the press release describing it, which contained an obvious lie), and he raised enough of a stink that he got a copy of the paper, and posted it -- with an introduction stating that the questions concerning the existence of the paper had been answered.

So the entire line about how "truthers claimed the paper never existed" is a straw-man argument. In other words, it's a "refutation" of a "statement" that nobody has ever made.

Using a straw man to try to prove a point doesn't take much in the way of brains, and that's probably why the 9/11 Liars do it all the time. For many of them, it's the only rhetorical trick they know. But that's not surprising, because they don't know much of anything else, either.

Unfortunately for the liars, intelligent people can see their idiot tactic a mile away, so nobody is impressed when liars destroy straw men, except maybe some other liars, who are already idiots anyway.

Bring it on, trolls. I've read the damned paper!

It's based on reality-reversal, and it's full of shit; and so are you.

Prove me wrong, you stupid fools ... if you can!

No Detectable Respect For Science: False Claims Regarding 9/11 Research Reflect Badly On University Of Cambridge

On September 11, 2007, the BBC published an article describing an unpublished paper by Dr. Keith Seffen of the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Seffen, the BBC said, had constructed a mathematical model of the World Trade Center collapses which showed that "once the collapse of the twin towers began, it was destined to be rapid and total."

According to the BBC, Dr. Seffen proceeded from this mathematical model to describe the destruction of the twin towers as a "very ordinary thing to happen".

The BBC also reported that Dr. Seffen's findings "are published" in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics (JEM), a publication of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

But this claim -- which the BBC apparently never checked -- was false.

The BBC's article was based on a press release from the University of Cambridge which begins as follows:

A new mathematical analysis of the collapse of the World Trade Centre has been published by a Cambridge University academic, with results that challenge conspiracy theories surrounding the September 11th attacks.

Unfortunately, Dr. Seffen's paper had not been published at the time of the press release, and it has not been published to this day. (Earlier this month, the ASCE announced that Dr. Seffen's paper is scheduled to be published in the February 2008 issue of the JEM.)

Professor Alison Richard is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

According to her web page,

The Vice-Chancellor is the principal academic and administrative officer of the University, and Professor Richard is the first woman to hold the position full-time.

The University of Cambridge is among the world's foremost universities [...]

The University's academic staff of some 1,700 are globally recognized for the excellence of their teaching and research.

It is most unlikely that the University's reputation for academic excellence will have been enhanced by this incident.

The author of the paper, Dr. Keith Seffen, is a senior lecturer in the Structures Group of Cambridge's Engineering Department. The head of the Structures Group is Dr. Chris Burgoyne.

According to the page describing the people of the Structures Group,

Chris Burgoyne is Head of the Structures Group and a Reader in Concrete Structures. His interests are prestressed concrete, advanced composites, MRI imaging of concrete and structural properties of bone. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College.

Tel: 01223 332698
Email: cjb@eng.cam.ac.uk

Drs. Chris Burgoyne, Alison Richard and Keith Seffen will soon receive the following email:

TO: Dr. Chris Burgoyne
Head of the Structures Group
Department of Engineering
University of Cambridge
cjb@eng.cam.ac.uk

CC: Dr. Alison Richard
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge
v-c.office.online@admin.cam.ac.uk

CC: Dr. Keith Seffen
Senior Lecturer in Structural Engineering
University of Cambridge
kas14@cam.ac.uk

Dear Dr. Burgoyne,

More than two months ago, the University of Cambridge published a press release whose opening sentence falsely claims that an unpublished research paper written by Dr. Keith Seffen of the Engineering Department's Structures Group "has been published". [1]

The subject of the paper was a controversial one, and the press release was echoed by the BBC and several other news providers. [2, 3, 4, 6]

The false claim in the opening sentence was pointed out shortly after the BBC article was published [5], and the BBC changed its online report within a few hours. [6]

Today, more than two months later, Dr. Seffen's paper remains unpublished. [7] Yet the press release is still online, with the original wording intact. [1]

Curiously, the press release contradicts itself in its eighth paragraph, saying Dr. Seffen's paper "will be published". The conflict between this statement and the assertion in the opening paragraph has never been explained, satisfactorily or otherwise.

Dr. Seffen has declined to answer any questions submitted to him by email. [8]

As you well know, one does not normally expect to see the conclusions of an unpublished paper discussed in the major media, especially when the topic is controversial.

Much less does one expect to see an article representing an unpublished paper as having been published.

If this had been an honest mistake, a prompt and apologetic clarification could have been granted a long time ago.

The lack of any such clarification, along with Dr. Seffen's subsequent failure to answer any questions, embodies no detectable respect for science nor any hint of a quest for truth.

Quite independent of the merits of Dr. Seffen's paper, this incident reflects badly not only on Dr. Seffen and the Structures Group but on the entire University of Cambridge as well.

It would be a shame if such conduct were to become the norm for Dr. Seffen and his colleagues.

Therefore it seems quite reasonable to ask:

• Why has the University not yet posted a correction nor issued an apology?
• When does the University intend to do these things?
• Is this the sort of conduct the University expects from the Professors who represent it?
• And if not, how and when does the University intend to make its wishes known?
  

Your attention to this not inconsiderable matter is most appreciated.



Sincerely

[ ... ]


Notes:

[1] University of Cambridge: 9/11 "conspiracy" theories challenged by Cambridge research

[2] Cambridge Evening News: Lecturer dismisses twin towers blast theory

[3] Business Weekly: Zero Grounds for Ground Zero conspiracy theory

[4] Winter Patriot: Seffen's Folly: Attempted 9/11 Hoax By Cambridge And The BBC Was A Failure

[5] Winter Patriot: UK Engineer: WTC 'Collapses' Were 'A Very Ordinary Thing'

[6] BBC: 9/11 demolition theory challenged

[7] Winter Patriot: WTC 'Collapse' Research Cited In September Is Scheduled To Be Published In February

[8] Winter Patriot: Where's The Paper? Did The BBC And A Cambridge Don Commit Fraud To Cover Up Mass Murder?

I have no doubt that Drs. Burgoyne, Richard and Seffen will enjoy hearing from me on this matter.

They will probably enjoy hearing from you, too.

And if you click here, you can send email to all three of them at the same time -- just like I did!

Rebuffed! Conspiracy Theory Destroyed By Unsung Internet Heroes

Defenders of Cambridge's Dr. Keith Seffen [photo] and his paper, "Progressive Collapse of the World Trade Centre: a Simple Analysis", are popping up everywhere. Well, not everywhere, but they're popping up in a few places. And with one reasoned rational argument after another, they have taken me apart.

On Sunday, I posted a review of Dr. Seffen's paper, and based on the reactions that piece received, I thought I had done a fairly good job of treating it calmly and rationally. But it turns out that I have been deceived by yes-men and weak-kneed courtiers. The review was shoddy, full of holes, politically motivated and shameful in the extreme.

After excerpts from that review were posted on usenet, at sci.physics, R. Steve Walz explained what was wrong with my analysis:

Dr. Seffen assumes that a constant force, supplied by the suddenly unsupported top of the tower, was pressing down, crushing each story, one after another, all the way down to the ground. An elementary understanding of physics would tell you that this is not possible, unless the top section of the building -- the part doing the crushing -- were made of much denser material than the bottom section -- the material being crushed.

No, the force even increases, being the sum of the total collapsing material, and since it is not limited by air resistance, being an internal air explosion, it can achieve near the speed of sound and not just some speed limited by some modified terminal velocity.

So Dr. Seffen and I were both wrong. The total force increases! And it's not even limited by air resistance! I've always thought some truthers were off in fantasy land with claims that the towers collapsed "faster than free-fall speed". How could that happen, I wondered, unless a force were pushing down on the falling concrete?

It's a shame both Dr. Seffen and I missed such a basic fact!

It was an internal explosion. It wasn't limited by air resistance. And it reached speeds well in excess of terminal velocity.

A single brick could crush a huge stack of paper cups and emerge intact. And this is the sort of situation Seffen's paper models. But that's not what happened to the World Trade Center.

In the case of the WTC, the material being crushed was nearly identical to the material doing the crushing. In fact, the structural steel was thicker at the bottom than the top, in which light Seffen's model appears even less appropriate to the event (not that this makes very much difference in the long run).

As I said, the mass collapsing continues to increase as it collapses.

And therefore all the debris that went whooshing down the streets ... it was actually still pushing down on the towers at the very same time!

The point is: If the top of the building had crushed all the stories below it, then the damage to the top portion would have been significant: we would naturally expect that the amount of damage to the top would be similar to the amount of damage to the bottom. Or, thinking about the thickness of the steel, we might expect the damage to the top to be even greater than the damage to the bottom.

You're completely misunderstanding all the physics behind the non-conspiracy understanding of the 9/11 collapses. The model surely involves the sum of the collapsing material at any instant, and does so by considering the effect of one story on all the stories beneath it, adding the stories above it which collapsed on it when the frame bent.

The frame bent! That's it!! I've always thought the frame snapped into pieces, like we see in the pictures.

But if the frame bent, it makes perfect sense that the buildings collapsed the way they did.

The "bent frame" is not shown in any photographs or videos of the collapse, but that's irrelevant.

But in Dr. Seffen's model, the top section of the building is not destroyed in the process of crushing the stories below it; instead, its entire mass is still available to crush even the lowest stories.

The MASS doesn't disappear if it itself is crushed!!!

If post-collapse photos from Ground Zero had showed the top 20 or 30 stories of each tower, virtually intact and sitting on the ground, then Seffen's model could perhaps be considered appropriate. But according to all the video and photographic evidence, it's not even close.

More nonsense, those hit the pile beneath at much more than any typical terminal velocity, and the whole thing releases quite enough energy to do the melting of aluminum seen in the wreckage, and the sub-red glow of the iron.

Steve almost had me confused for a while. He's quite right that "the mass doesn't disappear if it itself is crushed." But some of it rose up in a huge cloud, and some of it poured out horizontally (or even up and outward) in all directions, billowing down every street, depositing toxic dust and other debris in nearby apartments, and so on.

And it simultaneously remained in place to crush the stories below it!

Furthermore, the crushed material cascading down "hit the pile beneath at much more than any typical terminal velocity" which makes perfect sense. And of course "the whole thing releases quite enough energy to do the melting of aluminum seen in the wreckage, and the sub-red glow of the iron"!!

I especially like how this explanation explains the appearance of molten metal flowing from the towers before they collapsed!

The collapse generated the heat that melted the metal that flowed out of the building just before it collapsed. It makes perfect sense if you repeat it often enough.

In light of this new explanation, we're apparently very fortunate the collapsing towers didn't bore a hole in the Earth all the way to China!

If the Chinese thought we had done it on purpose and chose to retaliate, we'd be finished in no time.

Fortunately that didn't happen, and with Steve having cleared up the technical end of things, we're now in a better position to appreciate the non-technical comments...

PatColo (Pat from Colorado?) threw in a link to the same review at the Gold and Silver Forum:

Keep Your Hats On: Keith Seffen's "Mathematical Model Of The WTC Collapse" Is Incoherent, Inappropriate, And Almost Meaningless

But Juristic Person quickly found all the weak spots in that review.

...one tangent after another, after another, after another.

Seffen's article is only a SUGGESTION.

The 9/11 Troof Movment has certainly presented it's fair share of "suggestions", hasn't it Patcolo?

The Truth Movement is so presumptuous in it's conviction that there is a "missing link" (bombs, thermite, thermate, mini-nukes, space-beam laser, etc) that anyone who presents an alternative suggestion that doesn't fall in line with the pre-purchased philosophy of the 9/11 Truth Movement, is automatically chastised.

Such is the way of the emotionally charged paranoid frenzy called "The 9/11 Truth Movement"....

BaaBaaBaa found substantial merit in Juristic Person's post:

Nail hit.

If George Bush said tomorrow "I ordered the planes to hit the WTC." And gave all the details on how he did it and why. And in fact showed video tapes of the "911 war room". Yet he denies the use of CDs. The "truth movement" would call him a liar.

The Truther movement should be called the controlled demolition movement. Their purpose TODAY is to squash any theory that does not support the theory of CDs. They are not injecting any new evidence just rehashing old speculation.

Forget talking about the 19 Arab hijackers. Forget talking about how these guys who where under surveillance from the FBI pulled this off. Forget about how these guys where funded. Forget about how these extremist Islamic groups got their start. All that is buried by the so called truth movement.

What I do believe is that 19 Arab Jihadist assisted by certain covert agencies planned and implemented the events on 911. This scenario fits the facts as we know them. And more importantly the events after 911. CDs would fit into such a scenario. But I see no evidence for CDs. So I chuck the CD theory out the window. until new evidence is found.

Sure there are missing pieces to the puzzle. But that is no excuse to manufacture a puzzle piece. When you pull this crap you lose credibility.

I am sorry to say the real perpetrators got away with 911. And while we can find fault in the MSM. Some blame should be shifted to the alternative media. Especially the controlled demolition movement. Who is so dogmatic about CDs. And so focused on this speculation that any new evidence that does not have a direct bearing on the CD theory is swept under the floor.

That about covers it, I'd say.

It's precise, detailed, factual ... everything you could ask for in the way of scientific criticism.

There's certainly no excuse to manufacture a puzzle piece, and I guess that's exactly what I did when I pointed out that Dr. Seffen's model made no sense on a number of levels. But it also important to note that I never talk about how Islamic radicalism got its start, and in particular I never mention anything about Pakistan.

All the rest -- from the hypothetical analysis of what I would think if Bush "confessed" to the accusation of manufacturing evidence, must certainly apply to me personally, otherwise Juristic Person would never have said any of it!

Thus, it was all starting to make sense to me. And then Peter Lemkin started a thread at Education Forum, writing

To all the 9/11 Official Version Borg elements, with love!

Where's The Paper? Did The BBC And A Cambridge Don Commit Fraud To Cover Up Mass Murder?

The two main points of the post to which Peter linked were (1) that the BBC had called Dr. Seffen's research published when it wasn't, and (2) that Dr. Seffen and Dr. Ross Corotis, the editor of the Journal of Engineering Mechanics (which had reportedly published the paper), had failed to answer any questions concerning the status or even the existence of the paper.

Len Colby gave a fantastic response, hitting all the right notes and finding all the weaknesses in what was, after all, a rather shoddy report:

This is the kind of silliness that could only impress a “truther”. Perhaps the BBC worded the article badly. The author [...] indicated he visited the Cambridge Engineering department site so he should have seen the press release, which said “Dr Seffen's new analysis, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Society of Civil Engineers' Journal of Engineering Mechanics”

“will be” and “forthcoming” as in ‘in the future’ presumably the journal doesn’t list papers that haven’t been published yet. I assume Dr. Seffen and the editor of the journal have better things to do than correspond with misinformed paranoids.

http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/stories/2007/twin_towers/

If we go to the current page of the blog it turns out that yes indeed the paper will be published as advertised and is even currently available.

http://winterpatriot.blogspot.com/

The blogger claims to “have taught college maths” see Peter’s link but since he doesn’t tell us where or even his name there is no way to confirm this. He mocks Seffen’s conclusions but they passed peer review in a prominent journal and are inline with the conclusions of other highly qualified engineers.
...

It's amazing how little research is needed to show that most truther claims don't stand up to scrutiny.

Amazing indeed.

It's also amazing the sort of hoops people can jump through.

The paper has still not been published, but it's available because I obtained a copy, which I then posted and publicized. This proves that my original research was incorrect. Since the paper is available, I must have been lying when I said it wasn't.

Similarly, the original article published by the BBC was badly worded, as the press release from Cambridge says Dr. Seffen's findings "are to be published in an upcoming issue".

Presumably the journal doesn't list papers until they are actually published, and you can easily see that I am not only making a mountain out of a molehill, but lying about it too -- especially if you forget the first sentence of the Cambridge press release, which says:

A new mathematical analysis of the collapse of the World Trade Centre has been published by a Cambridge University academic, with results that challenge conspiracy theories surrounding the September 11th attacks.

And Dr. Seffen could have cleared up all the confusion by replying to a single email, but he chose not to do that because he really does have better things to do than than correspond with misinformed paranoids.

All of which provides a perfect illustration of everything I have done wrong with this story, and with my blogging in general.

I admit it: I've been a truther. I've been a misinformed paranoid. I've been concerned with whether the news was true or false. I've failed to see that it really doesn't matter. But it doesn't.

It doesn't matter whether articles in the media are well-written and tell the truth or so badly worded that they actually invert the truth and say exactly the opposite.

Who cares? It's all ink on newsprint, or pixels on a screen. The medium is the message. You're not reading me, you're sitting at your computer. And so on. You're not watching BBC; you're watching the television. Change the channel; it doesn't matter. Still the same medium. Still the same message.

In other words, content is irrelevant. Accuracy in content is something only a truther could get excited about. And anyway, I was lying.

The paper is available which means it's been published and that means it's been peer-reviewed which means we can believe every word of it, even the parts where the author acknowledges fudging his model by saying things such as

The precise variation does not matter...

Do you see how simple that was?

It's amazing how little research is needed to show that most truther claims don't stand up to scrutiny.

So I'm finished. But that doesn't mean everybody is finished.

James B. of Screw Loose Change started a thread at the James Randi Educational Forum this way:

Keith Seffen WTC Paper Out

It is via a troofer site, but I have no reason to doubt it is not [sic] valid.

R Mackey found the paper most satisfactory:

My compliments to Dr. Seffen, for a straightforward paper and a closed-form solution. The guy even gives us a Lagrangian.

That's one more peer-reviewed paper for the good guys. The opposition still stands at, let's see... carry the two... zero.

Is there anyone out there who still thinks the Truth Movement hasn't forfeit the contest?

Apollo 20 had the gall to disagree!

Dr. Seffen is another engineer who is apparently so enamoured of his own model that he fails to make the distinction between a theoretical/calculated result and a real-world observation/measurement.

Thus on page 18 of his paper we read:

"The actual time for collapse of WTC 1 ranges from 8.3 seconds to 12.0 seconds, and for WTC2, from 7.3 seconds to 12.1 seconds..."

It turns out that these collapse times are not the observed times but the calculated times!

But then Dr. Seffen goes on to claim that his "actual" collapse times "embrace the observed period for both towers."

Where has anyone claimed to have observed a crush down time of 8.3 seconds for WTC 1 or 7.3 seconds for WTC 2?

This is complete BS and is being dishonest to say the least!

Engineers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But SDC had the perfect comeback for that particular complaint -- indeed for all such complaints.

Well, for heaven's sake, it is your responsibility to send a detailed criticism to the journal in which the article appears. Please get on it!

Seriously.

I suppose some of my readers will get on it, as seriously as possible, if and when the paper is published in a journal.

In the meantime, I'm going to start paying more attention to pomeroo, who had it all figured out a long time ago:

Predictably, conspiracy liars are reduced to parading their ignorance of science and their crude anti-Semitism to rail against an authoritative paper that explodes their pernicious and baseless fantasies. As the alternative to spewing more mindless venom is to acknowledge that their evil movement is dead, the dunces must be excused for a redundant demonstration of their intellectual bankruptcy.

Posting all this marks a fitting end to a blogging career, I should say.

I'm tired of being predictable. I'm tired of spewing mindless venom. I'm tired of being a conspiracy liar. I'm tired of parading my ignorance of science, and my crude anti-Semitism is starting to make me sick, to tell you the truth. I'm tired of railing against an authoritative paper which says things like "the precise variation is unimportant" and thereby explodes my pernicious and baseless fantasies. And rather than spewing more mindless venom, I choose to acknowledge that my evil movement is dead.

I will never tell the truth again. Ever, ever, ever. It wasn't doing me any good anyway. It was only an evil habit brought about by my imaginary membership in an evil movement, and I promise not to do it any more. Now perhaps I may be excused for this demonstration of my intellectual bankruptcy.

Speaking of intellectual bankruptcy ...

I never meant to get into this 9/11 stuff. I never meant to get political at all. I never even meant to start a blog. One day I was just sitting here, drooling all over my keyboard as usual, and trying to figure out how to tie my shoes. And the cat walked across the keyboard, and she did a little dipsy-doodle, and the next thing I knew the computer was saying "Thank you for starting a blog."

I never have anything to blog about so I make stuff up, and I can't tell whether it's true or false because the sad fact is: I can't even read! And I can't spell too many words, but I have a spell checker. I just type random keystrokes and backspaces until the spell checker is happy; then I move on to the next word. I've been doing this for three years now, and even my regular readers haven't noticed that I don't actually know anything at all about anything!

I don't know what I'll do when I quit blogging. After all, I'm not smart enough to get a job, or civil enough to have any friends. I may find I have nothing to do all day but drool on my keyboard and try to figure out how to tie my shoes. Such is life.

Well, I've kept you long enough. I promise I will never say another word about any of this ...

or anything else ...

until next time. ;-)

The 9/11 Hoax That Didn't Quite Work

This page provides an annotated table of contents for the series of articles on Keith Seffen and his WTC collapse research. It will be updated as appropriate.

On September 11, 2007, the BBC published an article called "9/11 demolition theory challenged", which described a research paper written by University of Cambridge senior lecturer Keith Seffen.

Dr. Seffen, the BBC said, had constructed a mathematical model of the World Trade Center collapses which showed that "once the collapse of the twin towers began, it was destined to be rapid and total."

According to the BBC, Dr. Seffen proceeded from this mathematical model to describe the destruction of the twin towers as a "very ordinary thing to happen".

The BBC also reported that Dr. Seffen's findings "are published" in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.

The Journal of Engineering Mechanics (JEM) is a monthly publication of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). A search of the ASCE website turned up no mention of a Keith Seffen, nor any mention of any "Seffen".

I wrote a brief item about this that morning.

1) September 11, 2007:
UK Engineer: WTC 'Collapses' Were 'A Very Ordinary Thing'

Shortly after my piece was published, the BBC page was changed to say that that Dr. Seffen's findings "are to be published" in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.

I noted the change in an update to my item, where I also provided a link to two different mirrors of the original text. I also noticed the distinctive smell of manure. So I kept digging.

It became apparent obvious that the BBC piece was based on a press release from Cambridge, which said (in the opening paragraph) that Dr. Seffen's findings were "published", and (much later) that they were "to be published".

Apparently this self-contradiction didn't raise any eyebrows. But it was not the only problem with the press release.

Virtually every paragraph was either misleading or downright false. And it showed very clearly that Seffen's approach was not scientific, but political. I wrote about the press release three days later.

2) September 14, 2007:
Bad Science: Keith Seffen And The WTC 'Collapse'

Nearly eight weeks later, after repeated requests for clarification (from myself and others) had been ignored, I posted a compendium of the coverage Seffen and his paper had received, noting that it had been largely uncritical but remarkably sparse.

3) November 5, 2007:
Seffen's Folly: Attempted 9/11 Hoax By Cambridge And The BBC Was A Failure

The following day I noted some of the many unanswered questions and documented a series of requests for clarification which had been ignored by Dr. Seffen and by Dr. Ross Corotis, the editor of the JEM.

4) November 6, 2007:
Where's The Paper? Did The BBC And A Cambridge Don Commit Fraud To Cover Up Mass Murder?

Several readers of the latter two stories joined in the effort to obtain further information. Some of them had academic credentials, and their requests stirred Dr. Corotis to action.

Two days later, I was pleased to report on a message from the ASCE, saying that according to their records, Dr. Seffen's paper is scheduled for publication in the February 2008 JEM.

5) November 8, 2007:
WTC 'Collapse' Research Cited In September Is Scheduled To Be Published In February

This was good news for two reasons. It marked the first public commitment from the ASCE to publish the paper. And it provided confirmation of the fact that the paper had not been published when it was cited (and referred to as published) by the BBC and others.

Then another reader -- one with even more impressive credentials -- started digging in a different place, and unearthed a copy of the paper itself.

The following day I posted the first few pages of Seffen's paper (in HTML) on my website

6) November 9, 2007:
Introducing Keith Seffen's "Progressive Collapse Of The WTC: A Simple Analysis"

I also provided a link to the entire paper (a small PDF file).

http://winterpatriot.pbwiki.com/f/seffen_simple_analysis.pdf

True to the description provided by the press release, the paper turned out to be worthless as science, but not entirely meaningless.

7) November 11, 2007:
Keep Your Hats On: Keith Seffen's "Mathematical Model Of The WTC Collapse" Is Incoherent, Inappropriate, And Almost Meaningless

Responses to the paper in general and to my review in particular were utterly devastating.

8) November 15, 2007:
Rebuffed! Conspiracy Theory Destroyed By Unsung Internet Heroes

Nearly five months after the author claimed the paper had been published, it was finally published.

9) Saturday, February 2, 2008
Published At Last: Keith Seffen's Reality Reversal Hits The Bigtime

Keep Your Hats On: Keith Seffen's "Mathematical Model Of The WTC Collapse" Is Incoherent, Inappropriate, And Almost Meaningless

Dr. Keith Seffen's long-awaited "research paper", "Progressive Collapse of the World Trade Centre: a Simple Analysis", is available for review.

The paper has been the subject of much conjecture, here and elsewhere, since it was cited by the BBC in an article published on September 11, 2007.

According to the BBC, Dr. Seffen had constructed a "mathematical model" of the collapses of the towers. The article quoted Seffen as saying his research showed that once the collapse got started, it was destined to be "rapid and total" and that in "all senses, the collapse sequence was quite ordinary and natural."

Strikingly, the BBC described Dr. Seffen's paper as "published", even though it had not been published at that time. A search of the publisher's archives found no mention of the paper, or its author, and after I pointed this out, the folks at the BBC changed their report, which now says Dr. Seffen's paper is "to be published". (Copies of the original text were preserved here and here).

Articles published elsewhere propagated the error. And it turned out that the confusion stemmed from a press release put out by the University of Cambridge, where Dr. Seffen is a senior lecturer. The opening paragraph of the press release says that Dr. Seffen's paper is "published", but much later it says the paper is "to be published".

On September 14th, I wrote a long and very critical article about the press release, in which I said:

I may be reading too much into this press release. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and we won't know for sure whether Keith Seffen's paper contains any proof -- or anything approaching proof -- until we see it.

If the paper [...] proves that "in all senses, the collapse sequence was quite ordinary and natural", then I will tip my frozen cap to the paper, and to its author, and I will encourage the world to do the same. But if it doesn't, then the world and I will have no choice but to consider Keith Seffen a willing accomplice, an accessory-after-the-fact in a most despicable case of mass murder.

I've read the paper, and here's my report:

At no point while reading it did I even think about reaching for my cap.

I read Dr. Seffen's paper with two main questions in mind:

First: Is the model coherent? In other words, is it internally consistent? Does it respect the laws of physics? Does it follow the principles of mathematics?

Second: Is the model appropriate? Does Dr. Seffen's mathematical model accurately describe the physical reality it attempts to model?

These two questions were intended to help clarify the third line of questioning that has been rattling around in my brain for two months: What if Seffen were correct? What would that mean?

On a more specific note, if the paper were coherent and appropriate; if it showed logically, physically, mathematically, that the towers could have come down as fast as they did, in the way that they did, without explosives or cutting charges or directed energy beams or anything else other than gravity: Would it really demolish all the conspiracy theories surrounding the attacks of 9/11 (as claimed and/or hinted in the coverage Dr. Seffen's story received two months ago, especially the article in Business Weekly)?

To answer the final question first: NO! There are hundreds of unanswered questions about 9/11. One of them concerns the reason for the collapse of the twin towers. So even if this particular question were answered satisfactorily, it would still leave hundreds of other unanswered questions. In other words, those who claim that Seffen's paper puts an end to the debate are dreaming -- even if he's absolutely correct!

It is also important to note that even if Seffen has it right, his paper does not explain the collapses of the towers. It only covers -- and it only claims to cover -- the continuation of the collapse once it began. Whether the collapses began without assistance is still an open question in my mind, and I am certainly not alone in that.

But even then, even if Seffen is correct, this paper wouldn't prove that gravity-driven collapse was the way it happened; it would only prove that the gravity-driven explanation is theoretically plausible.

In other words, far from confirming the official story on this point, it would merely position the official explanation among several other explanations which a neutral observer might call "worthy of consideration".

None of the articles in the news media (and none of the blogs I know) have presented Seffen's paper in this context. It's been "Zero Grounds For Conspiracy Theory" and "Bad News For Truthers" and so on, but the practical impact of the paper -- even if it were correct -- would actually be fairly insignificant.

You may feel inclined to argue with me on this point, but the argument would be irrelevant, because Dr. Seffen's mathematical model is incoherent.

Dr. Seffen assumes that a constant force, supplied by the suddenly unsupported top of the tower, was pressing down, crushing each story, one after another, all the way down to the ground. An elementary understanding of physics would tell you that this is not possible, unless the top section of the building -- the part doing the crushing -- were made of much denser material than the bottom section -- the material being crushed.

A single brick could crush a huge stack of paper cups and emerge intact. And this is the sort of situation Seffen's paper models. But that's not what happened to the World Trade Center.

In the case of the WTC, the material being crushed was nearly identical to the material doing the crushing. In fact, the structural steel was thicker at the bottom than the top, in which light Seffen's model appears even less appropriate to the event (not that this makes very much difference in the long run).

The point is: If the top of the building had crushed all the stories below it, then the damage to the top portion would have been significant: we would naturally expect that the amount of damage to the top would be similar to the amount of damage to the bottom. Or, thinking about the thickness of the steel, we might expect the damage to the top to be even greater than the damage to the bottom.

But in Dr. Seffen's model, the top section of the building is not destroyed in the process of crushing the stories below it; instead, its entire mass is still available to crush even the lowest stories.

If post-collapse photos from Ground Zero had showed the top 20 or 30 stories of each tower, virtually intact and sitting on the ground, then Seffen's model could perhaps be considered appropriate. But according to all the video and photographic evidence, it's not even close.

But that only stands to reason. After all, mathematics is abstract; it can model anything. As a modeler, you can always choose to model something that's not possible, but in that case your model will never be an accurate description of reality.

In other words, having failed the first test makes the second question irrelevant. Since the paper is incoherent, it could never be appropriate.

Having failed the first two tests makes further discussion almost irrelevant. In one sense, the paper is meaningless. It shows nothing with respect to the collapse of the towers.

But on the other hand, it's not entirely meaningless. because it shows how implausible the official story really is.

If a Cambridge University whiz kid with a PhD and a list of papers a mile long can't make a better attempt than this ... but no! he couldn't!

Keith Seffen has not bolstered the official explanation of 9/11 in any way; in fact -- and as can be seen by all who read his paper with an open mind -- he has discredited the official story even further.

The paper also shows quite a bit about Dr. Seffen, and it brings great discredit upon him personally, upon his career, and upon the University of Cambridge, which he represents, and under whose auspices this very shady venture was publicized and continues to be protected.

As supporters of Dr. Seffen have pointed out, he is very bright and well educated. He holds a large number of impressive degrees, and he has published an impressive series of papers.

But this makes his transgression all the worse, in my estimation. He is clearly bright enough and well-enough educated to realize that his paper is incoherent. And as clearly pointed out by Arkadiusz Jadczyk, Seffen's attempt to circumvent logic is readily apparent.

Seffen "explains" that certain simplifications in the model were "essential" in order to bring the equations into a "closed form". That's math-speak for "We had to do it this way to get the results we wanted." In this respect, as Jadczyk points out, Seffen's paper is "not even wrong".

It's also a huge red flag for anyone with mathematical modeling experience, because it often requires a complex model to represent processes which seem simple.

But on the other hand it is never possible to explain a complex process by means of a simple model. Anyone with enough skill to design such a model certainly knows this. And with the awesome power of today's computers at our disposal, there's no need for "closed form" models anymore. The elegant equations so beloved by mathematicians throughout history have lost some of their sparkle in the past half-century, as number-crunching has become less and less onerous. So there's almost never any need for "a simple analysis", especially when the process being analyzed is so complex.

In other words, the term "unwitting" does not apply here.

A similar argument could be made, of course, about the BBC. But that's no surprise; we've already seen the BBC's true colours (with their Conspiracy Files hit piece, and of course their precognitive reporting of the collapse of Building 7).

In my opinion we should never be surprised to see this supposedly respectable news organization spinning.

All of which brings me back to my previous statement:

If the paper [...] proves that "in all senses, the collapse sequence was quite ordinary and natural", then I will tip my frozen cap to the paper, and to its author, and I will encourage the world to do the same. But if it doesn't, then the world and I will have no choice but to consider Keith Seffen a willing accomplice, an accessory-after-the-fact in a most despicable case of mass murder.

So ... tell me about the UK: Do they have laws against murder? Do those laws include provisions pertaining to accessories-after-the-fact? How about mass murder? Wouldn't that make it worse?

Where's Scotland Yard when you need them?

They still can't all be weeping over their conviction in the Jean Charles de Menezes murder, can they?

Somebody needs to wake a few of them up or drag them out of the pub and get them moving.

It shouldn't take very much effort to get them headed in the right direction.

After all, the University of Cambridge News Centre says:

Journalists seeking further information about the University can contact the Office of Communications at:

* Telephone: +44 1223 332300
* Fax: +44 1223 330262
* Email: communications@admin.cam.ac.uk