Kookery Comes a Knockin’

I’m quite used to encountering conspiracy kooks nearly everywhere on the Internet–and occasionally in public places–but never this close to home.  Apparently my neighborhood harbors not only a 9-11 Twoofer, but one willing to drop some change at the local printer and go door-to-door hanging these brochures.

Something a crazy person hung on my doorknob

And it’s not just your run of the mill “it was an inside job!” claim.  It’s heavy on Dr. Judy Wood, a “former assistant professor of mechanical engineering”.  She asks “where did the towers go?”, claiming that the debris piles were too small to account for the mass of the towers and that “directed free energy technology” must be behind the “missing” mass.  That’s one I hadn’t heard before, and even more evidence-free than most other ridiculous claims out there.

I’m not going to get into it a critique of her “theories” here, and I’m not going to provide a link as you can find it yourself if you are so inclined.  But as a civil engineer I see no need for non-existent weapon systems, thermite charges, or any other nonsense to explain how the towers collapsed.  My limited perusal of her website revealed nothing but unsupported speculation, evidence taken out of context, and any number of other logical fallacies including special pleading. Oops, I said I wasn’t going to get into a critique.  Old habits…

It’s interesting to note that on her website she claims “Sadly, this case had no support from the ‘Truth movement’…”, meaning, it appears, that her claims are too ridiculous for other Twoofers to accept.  I had a hard time believing that until I came across efforts by the frauds at “Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth”  to debunk her.  Splitter!

Anyway, while it makes for a compelling study in psychology, the question I find more interesting is: what would it take to pull off a hoax like this and actually fool the experts?  I’m quite certain that with millions of eyewitnesses, and the fact that it took place right here on Earth in one of our most densely populated cities, that it would be phenomenally difficult to fake (and by “fake” I mean to fool ACTUAL experts, not crackpots on YouTube).  Like the fact that it would be MORE difficult to have faked the Apollo landings, than to actually have gone to the Moon in 1969.

The Trouble With Science Popularizers

More people are starting to notice the problems with Bill Nye:

The trouble with science popularizers in general is that by nature, the job entails talking about a wider range of technical topics than any individual can fully comprehend at the level necessary to discuss them competently. While an expert in one field can speak intelligently about closely-related fields, the further away from one’s own expertise one travels, the more difficult that task becomes. And it’s even worse if a man in that role is a textbook example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, so assured of his superior intellect that he is incapable of recognizing that he is in fact a fool.

Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson inspired a character in another “Dispatches from Mars” story Carl and I are trying to finish up – a character who as a science popularizer and a man is the opposite of these two.

The big difference between the fictional Silas Hudson and these two is that he learned very early on, when he fell into a career as a public personality on the back of a book and related video series, that it’s easy for any expert to fall prey to the temptation to speak authoritatively about fields of which he has lesser, little, or even no knowledge. After publicly embarrassing himself, he redeemed his image by hiring a research staff to vet his scripts and books with true subject matter experts, and by conscientiously acknowledging the limits of what he personally understood. In other words, he started off as a young man with an enormous ego, humiliated himself as a result of that ego, and learned a bit of humility and ethics from the experience – humility that improved his ‘product’ greatly.

I’m actually disappointed that we have to kill him off. But when you’re writing a murder mystery, someone has to be the victim.

Springfield Needs a Hyperloop

Just in time for Christmas, it’s the hot new hip and happening toy that all the technocrat kids want this year: Hyperloop!

By way of pitching the Arrivo system, Colorado DOT officials speculated that a network of tubes filled with high-speed trays to carry cars could cut a one-hour and ten minute drive from downtown to the airport down to a 9 minute Arrivo ride. A one-hour slog down the state’s busy Boulder to Denver highway corridor would take 8 minutes.

Ironically, given that in the past year RTD has opened the airport light rail line from Union Station to DIA and CDOT has finished widening and adding express lanes to the highway running from Denver to Boulder. Those multi-million-dollar Big Digs and monorail projects that were absolutely necessary five or ten years ago and would fix all our traffic problems hereabouts? Yeah, forget those. All the cool technocrats are getting Hyperloops!

“We’re the tech partner in what would be a big partnership involving lawmakers, real estate people and others, but our job is to show that we can help provide a positive ROI (return on investment),” BamBrogam told USA TODAY. “Traffic is something people are very eager to solve.”

Except when it comes to I-70. Why bore a new half-mile tunnel or two to alleviate multi-hour backups that plague a major freeway for four months of the year when you can bore dozens of miles of tunnels under Denver for a solution that doesn’t solve the problem there? But…but…all the cool technocrats are getting Hyperloops!

BamBrogan said the idea is to use existing highway right of ways to install above ground tubes to help commuters cheat traffic by granting them express trips in their own cars to popular destinations.

Uh huh. Hyperloops at 200MPH between 16th Street Mall and Highlands and Cherry Creek and DTC? Not only is there not enough space for the access stations at those “popular destinations”, there isn’t enough parking there for the cars that get Hyperlooped in, nor is there office space enough to accommodate the vast army of chiropractors that will be required to readjust cervical vertebrae dislodged by the acceleration and deceleration involved. (Note that Denver’s light-rail obsessed urban planners have been on a crusade against adequate public parking for years now.)

But Mommmm! All the cool technocrats are getting Hyperloops!

Why not just build a train? “I have a young son, and my car is filled with everything I need for him so not taking my car often isn’t a great option,” he said.

Yet we’re told by the light rail cultists that this is selfish and people just need to get over their obsession with and addiction to convenience! If you just socially reengineered yourself, Mr. BamBrogan, you’d discovered enlightened social interest and set aside your petty self-absorption with your own needs and that of your child. Not every child has the privilege of a comfy child seat and Disney DVDs on the in-car entertainment player and plush toys and sippy cups at the ready while running errands with daddy – why should yours, comrade?

Seriously, though, while something like Hyperloop might be technically feasible over long distances, using it as a subway or suburban commuter train is overkill and just plain stupid. It’s the kind of stupid that it doesn’t surprise me to see John Hickenlooper embrace, but an aerospace engineer should know better. An engineer should be aware of the practical limitations and consequences of using a given technology in a suggested application – he might as well be suggesting rockets or jumbo jets for the purposes he’s listing off for Hyperloop.

But, it’s the newest, hottest toy for technocrats. And that’s all that really matters. (That, and the potential for graft.)

Electronic Noses for Sniffing Disease

This is something I suggested to Lockheed Martin five years ago as an application of the cabin air monitoring technology we were developing for Orion: New Technologies Smell Sickness

We’ve long known that sickness has a smell. Service dogs can smell and be trained to alert humans to seizures and even cancer.

Now scientists are using technology to ‘smell’ diseases that the human nose can’t.

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology team behind the Na-Nose, which is designed to detect up to 17 diseases, claims that its new technology can a wide range of diseases on a person’s breath.

Each person’s breath is made up of a number of chemical compounds, unique to us. They may be dependent upon gender, age, race and a host of other biological factors.

The Na-Nose’s developers claim that it can smell diseases including some forms of cancer, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s. So far, it has proven to be 86 percent accurate at detecting diseases.

We’ve actually had this idea on the back-burner for a while for use in an Ares Project story, but the need hasn’t yet come up. While the obvious applications are in health monitoring, the same technology could potentially be fitted to a robot and used for prospecting, by sniffing out trace volatiles and airborne “contaminants” indicating the presence of certain useful minerals.