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The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-opened Part II

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You claimed to be a scientist! What the hell else is that if not a claim of direct expertise?
 
Vixen said:
Wrong. https://www.durham.ac.uk/study/courses/fgc0/

You are now arguing against someone with first hand knowledge.

Oh I see, so because you wouldn't call yourself something nobody else must either. So you are a control freak who thinks you can define others.

Just because you had no scientific laboratory experience in your degree doesn't mean I did not either. I had laboratory experiments thrown in.
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So did I... in fact I recall a chem lab where the building was evacuated after a rather scary alarm went off. Some sort of leak on another floor, and we got to leave early. Literally that and the instructor was the first Russian I ever met is all I remember. God knows how many labs I completed... 15? Probably more. The idea that that makes me in any way a scientist is laughable.

ETA: no one is denying your claim that you completed science labs in school. We are disagreeing with your opinion that this makes you a scientist.
 
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LondonJohn said:
Exactly. I happen to have been thrown into the Irish Sea in springtime, wearing a survival suit*, before being "rescued" by a Sea King helicopter in a training exercise. I can report that after 15 mins in the sea, even with the protection of the suit, you start to get so cold that breathing becomes difficult and your cognitive abilities get impaired. Without any sort of survival suit, it'd be hard to be much more than a dead weight in the water after that length of time, and you'd certainly be dead well within the hour.

And as you say, there are excellent - and obvious - reasons why crew should don survival suits as soon as they realise there's a fair chance they're going to end up immersed in cold seas.


* though in aviation they're termed "immersion suits", but they're the same thing.
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On the assumption the higher more senior officers having completed naval school and studied the theory side of navigation and maritime principles would they not have been the first to don the survivor suits and not the boatswain seen sitting in the Admiral Pub when he was supposedly on his watch...?
 
Vixen said:
One of the passengers - one with a seemingly dodgy background - was also ready and waiting in a life raft in a survivor suit. He claimed he 'found it in the life raft provisions'. How likely is that story?

It is very interesting.
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Quite likely. It would depend on what had been specified from the manufacturer.

All commercial life rafts have to be SOLAS compliant which specifies a minimum level of equipment aboard each raft.
Extra equipment can be specified when they are leased. For operations in the Baltic I would expect the spec to include at least survival bags and suits of a basic type would not be unexpected.
 
Vixen said:
In addition to this, a couple of the surviving crew claimed they were running up and down from deck 0 to deck 7/8, but their cabins were quite high up so if they really were sorting things out on deck 0, they must have taken time out to make their way to their cabins to change into them, not trying to rectify matters. Yet the passengers were in the dark the whole time.
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Why do you think survival suits would be in their cabins and not stowed in equipment lockers around the ship?
 
JayUtah said:
Dragging this back to the original point, the question is what scientists mean when they say or write a certain formulaic phrase in public. That has nothing to do with what other aspects of a scientist's daily practice might be mimicked in other occupations. Familiarity with the communicative conventions of science generally requires actual experience in the occupation of science, not merely academic experience that might fall under the broader umbrella of science.

You wrongly interpreted "is consistent with" to be an argument about statistical uncertainty in the outcomes. Science certainly deals with statistical uncertainty in many areas, but that's simply not what's being alluded to by the phrase. Your argument was essentially, "This is what a scientist means by this." But that's not what a scientist means by that. He means something totally different -- importantly different. And you were wrong because, not being a scientist, you didn't have that particular knowledge.

Statistical significance is expressly about causation. When you perform a well-formed experiment and apply the appropriate statistical analysis and controls to the observations, you come up with a p-value that explicitly says, "I can state to this computed level of probability that A caused B." In contrast, the statement, "Observation B is consistent with hypothetical cause A," on the other hand, expressly disavows that any test has been made to see whether A is the actual cause of B. It is a statement of prima facie premises only. Scientists go to great lengths to communicate their findings accurately, and it causes them no end of distress when non-scientists undermine that and attribute to them conclusions they have not drawn.
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Then it is lucky this is just a chat forum so no distress caused to anybody. :rolleyes:
 
JayUtah said:
Having also been bitten along these lines, I admonish my American colleagues not to assume that our experience in the organization of American education at various levels translates directly to the U.K. system. It appears we use many similar words and conventions that nevertheless have different meanings in the two systems.
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Bear in mind, some US degrees are often only the equivalent of a couple of A-Levels in the UK.
 
Vixen said:
Nobody knows as it has remained classified but it is claimed to have been reported in the diver's debriefing on submerging. All the Rockwater divers were under contracts of great confidentiality (gagging clauses) and the Rockwater firm itself had to make an undertaking to destroy all copies of the video and lodge the original with the Swedish JAIC. The Estonian and Finnish arm of the JAIC were only allowed to view a heavily edited version circa 2.5 hours long (the original one is about 17 hours IIRC).
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Would 'gagging clauses' prevent you reporting a potential murder?

If it is all confidential and 'gagged', how do you know about it?
 
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So the Estonia sank after the bow door fell off in heavy seas due to accumulated metal fatigue. Any scientist in a relevant field have any compelling evidence to the contrary?
 
Vixen said:
Then it is lucky this is just a chat forum so no distress caused to anybody. :rolleyes:
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The bigger point is that you're still wrong about what scientists mean when they say "is consistent with." I was kind enough to give you a full paragraph explaining the important difference between what you thought was meant and what actual scientists mean. Do you have a rejoinder? Do you concede the point? Or are you simply going to sweep it under the rug like all your other many mistakes in this thread and pretend it never happened?
 
MarkCorrigan said:
I'm of the understanding that it was reality back in the days where a defeat on the battlefield would have caused the losing general to blow their brains out for the sake of honour, or in cases where the loss f the ship was solely due to the captain's failure and the idea of staying on it was to save the time of the trial and execution.
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Nope, mostly myth although there are examples of the captain 'going down'

A captain would certainly want to be one of the last to leave a ship though.
 
MarkCorrigan said:
I studied psychology for my A-levels. I am not a psychologist. You may or may not have studied science as part of your degree, that does not make you a scientist.
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I was a psychologist for a short time as a member of the British Psychological Society. If you practise your field you you can call yourself by the term you are professionally recognised as. I am no longer a member of BPS and no longer call myself a psychologist. However, that doesn't mean I have forgotten all my scientific training.
 
Vixen said:
Fair point. However, on the second issue, I was pointing out that the wreck should have been examined closer, not just concentrating on the bow area. I would have thought the JAIC would think the bridge important if only to understand what was going on with the captain.
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Why? what would it tell you apart from where he died?
 
LondonJohn said:
* though in aviation they're termed "immersion suits", but they're the same thing.
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Interchangeable term to an extent.
It depends on their levels of insulation and flotation. There used to be distinct differences but it is a lot more blurred these days.
 
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