Cont: Luton Airport Car Park Fire III

[Mojo]

No need to listen to me. Take a look at what a couple of car experts say.

First, Auto Expert John Cadogan...

What evidence do you have that he has expertise relevant to the causes of car fires?

 

[zooterkin]

What evidence do you have that he has expertise relevant to the causes of car fires?

How could you doubt him, or YouTuber Geoff Buys Cars? Surely they are more reliable than some random official statement from the Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service?

 

[JayUtah]

The fact you cannot see it proves how successful it is.

Or more parsimoniously, it proves how wrong you are. Your rhetoric is laughable. You make stuff up from a position of wanton ignorance, then when others show evidence that you're wrong, you cite their unwillingness to agree with you as further evidence that you somehow have superior insight and judgment.

It almost never occurs to you that you're simply wrong and that everyone else can see so.

Yes, just look at the sheer numbers of Brits in this thread urging people to trust the initial report that the initial vehicle, within minutes of the the blaze coming under control, that it was NOT an EV of any sort.

...and Americans, and all other manner of people with no interest in deferring to the upper class. The initial reports are believed in spite of unbridled speculation and conspiracy-mongering to the contrary because that's where the evidence points.

 

[JayUtah]

As the model make and year of the vehicle has not been confirmed, nor even confirmation as to whether the widely-publicised video is genuine, then it retains plausible deniability that it ever lied.

Straw man. The engine type has been identified and reported repeatedly by competent authority. You have no evidence that these reports were made insincerely, or in the absence of pertinent evidence, or with the intent to deceive. To try to get around this bulwark of evidence, you invented all by your lonesome a new requirement that you insist must be satisfied in order for evidence to be considered genuine.

Although it's not on the Bingo card, I can cite examples from a number of other popular conspiracy theories to demonstrate how this particular form of ad hoc revision exemplifies conspiracy-theorist thinking.

 

[ferd burfle]

That was one I almost nitpicked and then just lost the will.

Ethylene glycol will actually burn, but when it's mixed 50:50 with water, it's kinda hard to light. A bit like anything, really. Newspaper? Flammable. Newspaper soaked in its own weight of water? Not so much.

You're right, of course, just some low-hanging fruit I couldn't resist.

 

[JayUtah]

'Conspiracy theory' has come to mean 'ridiculous lunatic theory' of the David Icke/Dan Brown type, purveyed to make its authors a lot of money.

Straw man. It has come to include that, but not be limited to it. The research shows that only a small percentage of conspiracy theorists are motivated by making money. The vast number want attention and accolades. They're trying to accumulate a following, not a fortune. They are enjoying the feeling that they have been clever enough to figure things out despite efforts to hide it, and the position of authority they achieve by conveying those feelings to others, whether for pay or not.

Conspiracy theorists also include people who believe they can make a fully rational case, and whose conclusions are not as farfetched as shape-shifting reptilian aliens. Most conspiracy theories propose things with a priori plausibility (e.g., the Moon landings were faked), but which still fail when examined according to the evidence.

However, that does not mean that people genuinely interested in the logistics of what exactly happened are also loonies who must be censored by any means necessary.

You are a conspiracy theorist. You are not being called a loony, and you are not being censored by any means, necessary or otherwise. You are simply being held account for your claims according to the evidence. Your claim is that there is a conspiracy to conceal that the cause of the Luton fire was an electric vehicle.

You are not genuinely interested in what happened. If you were, you'd pay more attention to facts and evidence and the people who understand them, rather than just making stuff up and then whining about how shabbily you're being treated when people catch you. Your behavior here is more consistent with attracting attention and expanding your page count than it is with actually determining the cause of the fire an the circumstances of its progression.

In the case of the Luton Airport car park fire there are many experts and commentators who are sceptical of the initial claims...

No, there aren't. You have cited merely social media figures whose measure of success is based on eyeballs on their media. They are motivated to tell stories that attract attention, not stories that accurately reflect the truth.

This does not make it a 'conspiracy theory' along the lines of 'the Covid virus is a hoax designed to force people into taking jabs which contain silicon chips connecting to the nearest mast in order to enrich Bill Gates'.

Another straw man. If you or anyone else is proposing that there is a conspiracy to conceal the allegedly true nature of the car in order to hide that it was an EV, then that is a conspiracy theory.

 

[JayUtah]

Otherwise some kind of catalyst is needed, such as compression or heating up to 500ºC, which won't happen of its own accord.

Empirically false.

 

[LondonJohn]

Do you really not see how obviously desperate you are when you pretend that inconvenient information just doesn't exist? You even telegraph that you know you're ignoring further evidence by referring to it as "the original press release" rather than simply "the press release".

And it wasn't even a press release. What Vixen is referring to is a press conference given by the CFO of BF&RS the day after the fire, in which he spoke those words. Of course his words have by now been significantly superseded by a number of legitimate press releases confirming that "Car Zero" was definitively an ordinary diesel car and not any form of EV - a fact which everyone apart from the CT nutters can see and understand.

 

[Mojo]

You are a conspiracy theorist. You are not being called a loony, and you are not being censored by any means, necessary or otherwise.

Possibly Vixen is confusing being censored with being censured.

 

[JayUtah]

Surely you can observe all of this for yourself? You do not need a third party to validate your own observations.

Begging the question. You are claiming the ability to extract evidentiary data from a photographic record. We know from considerable experience the problems associated with doing so, and we have accumulated an arsenal of knowledge and techniques to help us solve those problems. You demonstrate absolutely no understanding of either the problems or their solutions. You simply ignore it all and assume that your uninformed intuition is all that's required here.

Imagine a picture of a naked guy (tastefully posed of course). What do you see with your own eyes? A butt naked guy.

Irrelevant. The interpretation of photographic observations to extract evidence such as you're claiming requires more than simply looking at a representation and identifying what it depicts.

Your intuition is not sufficient to provide the evidence you claim you can extract from the photographic record.

One person is a realist and describes what they see, the other is dependent on Murdoch and/or the government telling them what they are seeing.

No. Correctly pointing out that you have merely assumed your way past all the well-known problems in photographic interpretation is not solved by emphasizing that intuition is sufficient in unrelated cases.

Look at the videos.

Your uninformed intuition and rampant question-begging is not evidence.

 

[catsmate]

I reckon some kind of fakery, even if only the claim they can read the numberplate. Just someone trying to be 'helpful', 'smart' or mischievous.

It's one thing faking a photo but a video is a bit harder, especially with details showing a sign, 'to the airport entrance' or some such wording on the wall above the car.

Will you be supporting these claims with evidence?

 

[catsmate]

Comes from catsmate's own pdf about fire in parked cars.

Have you found a source for your claim it was a RR Sport 2014, yet? Preferably not an anonymous blogger or tweeter.

 

[catsmate]

Conspiracy theory' has come to mean 'ridiculous lunatic theory' of the David Icke/Dan Brown type,

Which is what you're spouting.

In the case of the Luton Airport car park fire there are many experts and commentators who are sceptical

Names and qualifications?

 

[catsmate]

No need to listen to me. Take a look at what a couple of car experts say.

Oh this will be interesting....

First, Auto Expert John Cadogan, who brought out this video shortly after the fire:

Oh look Vixen is lying. Cadogan is not an "Auto Expert", he's a journalist with no qualifications who uses YouTube to make money from idiots.

Geoff Buys Cars:

Another idiot with no qualifications and a near pathological hatred of EVs.
And a pro-Putin agenda. Absolute imbecile.

So, let's summarise. The "many experts" Vixen claims support her opinions have become a couple of YouTube grifters.

Utterly pathetic, but equally expected.

 

[Carrot Flower King]

Possibly Vixen is confusing being censored with being censured.

How about "censered", as something about this thread smells.

 

[catsmate]

According to one comment I saw, someone claiming to be a fire fighter said that in his training a detonator was added to a bunch of diesel fuel and it never caught fire.

More drivel.

 

[Mojo]

According to one comment I saw, someone claiming to be a fire fighter said that in his training a detonator was added to a bunch of diesel fuel and it never caught fire.

Where did you see this comment, and who made it? Does it have any more basis in reality than the newspaper story about an unidentified firefighter from Harpenden that you claim to have seen?

 

[JayUtah]

By the way, Vixen, I'm still interested in knowing exactly how you established the precise orientation of the cameras in those images so as to be able to calculate the slope of the floor relative to true level. Maybe they took those photos with theodolites?

Indeed, her claim that she can just intuit the effective slope because she's seen art that uses perspective is comically desperate and naive.

Ironically, rotation about the optical axis is the only affine transformation that is preserved in the projection. You can literally apply the same transformation to the projected data and obtain the same result as rotating about the optical axis prior to projection.

Affine space is the three dimensional space in which objects nominally exist. Affine transformations are those we apply to affine measurements which preserve the "affinity" of the data. Moving a car one meter to the left does not change the distance between the points of the car. And it changes the distance from all the points of the car to some reference plane by exactly and only a linear function of the parameter of the transformation. Ditto scaling and rotation. Affine transformations can be accumulated, and the affinity is a function of the accumulation—again linear.

What we see in photographs is projective space. The projection transformation is not an affine transformation and is not affinity-preserving. Transformations of the measurements in affine space are not preserved through the projection. For a simple lens, the projection is governed by a scalar parameter. For most lenses used today, the projection parameter is a function. This is referred to in the literature as the "lens model."

Photogrammetric rectification is the process of inverting the projective transformation. This is difficult in some cases because projection is not theoretically invertible. Several points in affine space will project to the same point in projective space. Thus the inversion of a point in projective space is a line in affine space. This is all linear algebra—points, vectors, and matrices. The projection matrix is a 4x4 matrix. The photogrammetrist's job is to populate this matrix for some photographic frame with actual numbers. Then by inverting the matrix insofar as possible, we can obtain a line in affine space that corresponds to a point in projective space. We use other cues to locate a desired point along the line. Only then can we say that we have points in affine space derived from a photograph that you can then use to reason about angles in affine space that provide such practical information as terrain slope.

Numbers, points, and vectors are not Vixen's strong suit. Pretending that she can perform this exacting calculation in her head simply because she's seen art that uses perspective is as arrogantly presumptive as claiming one can produce an accurate recipe for soup by seeing a photograph of a bowl of it.

 

[JayUtah]

According to one comment I saw, someone claiming to be a fire fighter said that in his training a detonator was added to a bunch of diesel fuel and it never caught fire.

I don't believe you.

 

[catsmate]

It has a flash point which is very high and most likely will occur in the tank as vapour.

Otherwise some kind of catalyst is needed, such as compression or heating up to 500ºC, which won't happen of its own accord.

Bollocks. The flash point of diesel is between 52 and 96°C.