The sinking of MS Estonia: Case Reopened Part VII

Vixen said:
The metric of m/s IMV is best because - and I made this point before but nobody understood it - wind doesn't move in a straight line, it tends to come in 'gusts', so metres per second is far more useful a measure in the short term for vessels because it can change a lot before one hour is even up.
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Oh, wow. Did you actually just state this and try to defend it as a superior understanding of physics? Do you actually believe that expressing a speed in miles per hour means it takes an hour to obtain the measurement?

Here's the empirical rebuttal. My car's computer can read out speeds in either kilometers per hour or miles per hour. It updates that display once per second, and I assure you the number changes. Under the hood (or more precisely, under the fenders) it's measuring the speed of the car in in terms of fractions of a tire rotation per one algorithm cycle, which is a fixed length of time equal to a small fraction of a second decided upon by the engineer, and assuming a given tire circumference.

You're conflating the precision of the measurement with the precision of the reporting, although even that's a charitable description of the unholy mess of malthinking you've just subscribed to. Converting a speed measured at a high frequency to feet per second (which for decades is how we navigated spacecraft), miles per hour, or furlongs per fortnight for reporting purposes is straightforward but apparently beyond the galaxy-brained numbers person.

The magnitude of the unit that follows "per" in the expressed rate has bugger all to do with the precision of the actual measurement or how long it would take to obtain it. The magnitude of the unit preceding "per" in an expression has bugger all to do with the smallest or largest thing I can practically measure. I can express my car's highway speed in parsecs per annum. It would be a very small number—on the order of 3.198 × 10-8—but nothing prevents that number from being displayed and updated every second (or faster) to match the car's newly measured speed from second to second. Nothing would prevent a graph of that number over time (again at, say, one-second intervals) to express my car's actual measured speed as it varies on my way to the grocery store. That graph would be no less faithful than if I converted the underlying native measurement to millibarleycorns per microsecond (3.694 mbc ⋅ μs-1) for reporting purposes. That number too can be measured at any arbitrary interval.

Conversely, I can determine the distance from my garage to a given hotel parking space in Las Vegas in meters. And I can measure the time it takes to drive between them to the second. Thus I can express the speed of my road trip to Las Vegas in a single value with units "meters per second." It would be a valid expression of speed. The precision of the reporting is defensible. However, the fact that meters are smaller than nautical miles and that seconds are smaller than hours doesn't have anything to do with the inherent coarseness of the measurement. Being able to express a coarse measurement in fine units doesn't obviate the six-hour car trip. As long as I have the use of decimal points and exponents on a ten, the world is my oyster.

Following the example of the immortal Oliver Smoot, some schools of engineering embark on an exercise specifically designed to disabuse beginning students of the nonsense you have tried to enthrone as evidence of your superior intellect. The customary units are set aside, and new units of mass, length, and time are obtained at the beginning of the semester by measuring those properties as they apply to the professor. The professor's mass is the new unit of mass; his height, of length; and his average hearbeat, of time. The customary derived units follow. Then a mechanical design is developed and tested solely according to these new units. Sadly modern curricula don't frequently allow for such diversions, but the point is that students who do that walk away with a greater confidence in the notion of abstract quantity as opposed to arbitrary units.

People who think it takes an hour to measure a speed in units of distance per hour generally are not accepted to engineering programs.

Having belabored the basic concept of how to measure something, I won't go much further into the absurdity of saying, "wind doesn't move in a straight line, it tends to come in 'gusts,'" and its apparent conflation of direction versus speed.
 
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JayUtah said:
Oh, wow. Did you actually just state this and try to defend it as a superior understanding of physics? Do you actually believe that expressing a speed in miles per hour means it takes an hour to obtain the measurement?

Here's the empirical rebuttal. My car's computer can read out speeds in either kilometers per hour or miles per hour. It updates that display once per second, and I assure you the number changes. Under the hood (or more precisely, under the fenders) it's measuring the speed of the car in in terms of fractions of a tire rotation per one algorithm cycle, which is a fixed length of time equal to a small fraction of a second decided upon by the engineer, and assuming a given tire circumference.

You're conflating the precision of the measurement with the precision of the reporting, although even that's a charitable description of the unholy mess of malthinking you've just subscribed to. Converting a speed measured at a high frequency to feet per second (which for decades is how we navigated spacecraft), miles per hour, or furlongs per fortnight for reporting purposes is straightforward but apparently beyond the galaxy-brained numbers person.

The magnitude of the unit that follows "per" in the expressed rate has bugger all to do with the precision of the actual measurement or how long it would take to obtain it. The magnitude of the unit preceding "per" in an expression has bugger all to do with the smallest or largest thing I can practically measure. I can express my car's highway speed in parsecs per annum. It would be a very small number—on the order of 3.198 × 10-8—but nothing prevents that number from being displayed and updated every second (or faster) to match the car's newly measured speed from second to second. Nothing would prevent a graph of that number over time (again at, say, one-second intervals) to express my car's actual measured speed as it varies on my way to the grocery store. That graph would be no less faithful than if I converted the underlying native measurement to millibarleycorns per microsecond (3.694 mbc ⋅ μs-1) for reporting purposes. That number too can be measured at any arbitrary interval.

Conversely, I can determine the distance from my garage to a given hotel parking space in Las Vegas in meters. And I can measure the time it takes to drive between them to the second. Thus I can express the speed of my road trip to Las Vegas in a single value with units "meters per second." It would be a valid expression of speed. The precision of the reporting is defensible. However, the fact that meters are smaller than nautical miles and that seconds are smaller than hours doesn't have anything to do with the inherent coarseness of the measurement. Being able to express a coarse measurement in fine units doesn't obviate the six-hour car trip. As long as I have the use of decimal points and exponents on a ten, the world is my oyster.

Following the example of the immortal Oliver Smoot, some schools of engineering embark on an exercise specifically designed to disabuse beginning students of the nonsense you have tried to enthrone as evidence of your superior intellect. The customary units are set aside, and new units of mass, length, and time are obtained at the beginning of the semester by measuring those properties as they apply to the professor. The professor's mass is the new unit of mass; his height, of length; and his average hearbeat, of time. The customary derived units follow. Then a mechanical design is developed and tested solely according to these new units. Sadly modern curricula don't frequently allow for such diversions, but the point is that students who do that walk away with a greater confidence in the notion of abstract quantity as opposed to arbitrary units.

People who think it takes an hour to measure a speed in units of distance per hour generally are not accepted to engineering programs.

Having belabored the basic concept of how to measure something, I won't go much further into the absurdity of saying, "wind doesn't move in a straight line, it tends to come in 'gusts,'" and its apparent conflation of direction versus speed.
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Personally, I don't think a post of such rank stupidity and ignorance was worthy of such a fulsome reply as this.......
 
JayUtah said:
Having belabored the basic concept of how to measure something, I won't go much further into the absurdity of saying, "wind doesn't move in a straight line, it tends to come in 'gusts,'" and its apparent conflation of direction versus speed.
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Velocity, surely?
 
Mojo said:
Psychology?
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@Vixen maintains that accounting is mathematics and that her claimed certificate in accounting is equivalent to a Master's degree.

Mojo said:
We've seen plenty of examples of mathematical confusion from you. For example here you manage to confuse knots with nautical miles, and convert 119 miles to 137 knots. There was the 'port is at 45 degrees and starboard is at 135 degrees' stuff. And there was all the prime notation stuff, which indicated that you don't use notation the way the rest of the world does, or even consistently.
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My favorite example is still her attempt to explain metacentric height in her own words. My second favorite is her attempt to get some generative AI to spoon-fed her the method for determining impact forces in a collision.

Part of being a "numbers person" is knowing what actual quantities those numbers represent and the particulars of how they interact irrespective of what discrete units we apply to them. What is the underlying nature of an angle? What are the various ways vector quantities combine? Vixen simply can't demonstrate any competence in quantitative reasoning. Her findings are always wrong—often comically, conceptually wrong. Her argument seems to be, "But I'm highly qualified as an accountant, so since that makes me a certified 'numbers person,' you all have to accept my computations as valid even if they seem wrong." That puts the cart before the horse. The right way to think is, "Your answer is wrong for these objective reasons." We don't need to go on to question what effect that outcome has on her claimed credentials, but if the validity of those credentials were the question at hand, the incompetence would obviously challenge them.
 
JayUtah said:
@Vixen maintains that accounting is mathematics and that her claimed certificate in accounting is equivalent to a Master's degree.
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She was listing the "mathematical science degree" in addition to her qualification as an accountant.
JayUtah said:
Part of being a "numbers person" is knowing what actual quantities those numbers represent and the particulars of how they interact irrespective of what discrete units we apply to them.
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I'm old enough (as is Vixen) to have been taught to use a slide rule. To figure out the magnitude of the result you needed to have some understanding of roughly how big the answer was supposed to be.
 
Mojo said:
Velocity, surely?
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Not necessarily. If we say the wind is blowing at 15 knots, that's a speed. If we say the wind doesn't blow in a straight line, that's a direction. If we want to combine them (as you do when reporting for navigation), then that's a velocity. In aviation, ATC will report surface winds in curt statements like, "wind zero niner zero at ten, gust to fifteen." That means winds from the east at ten knots, gusting to 15 knots. You can also get "wind variable at ten," meaning the wind direction is changing more than 60°. That's still properly a velocity—a vector, just one whose directional component cannot be determined within the given constraints. Its magnitude remains known, however. And if no gusting component is mentioned, then the winds are not gusting even if they may be frantically changing direction while blowing a steady 10 knots. @Vixen's single-sentence pontification conflates the two orthogonal concepts that underpin vector reasoning. I'm sure we'll be treated to four pages of vigorous tap-dancing to assure us she really did mean something else that was still somehow correct.

@Vixen properly notes that winds can gust. Gusting is a sudden change in speed regardless of which direction the wind blows. For example, where I live we have canyon winds that literally only ever blow in one direction: down the canyon. While you can express that properly as a velocity vector quantity, it doesn't make much sense to. When canyon winds gust (as they often prodigiously do), you can talk about it as a scalar with no loss of rigor. Vixen wrongly thinks that the only way to accommodate high-frequency changes in wind speed (as a scalar) is to express the scalar speed in smaller units of measure irrespective of the actual frequency of measurement. That's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how measurement works. It's not even a science or engineering thing. It's a "numbers person" thing.

But aside from that, Vixen seems to be equating gusting with wind not blowing "in a straight line." True, wind doesn't blow in a straight line, but the direction of its blowing or whether that direction changes has nothing to do with its rate of speed measured at a high or low frequency or in fine or coarse units. Since we're talking about Vixen's conflation of the two parts of a vector quantity, it's appropriate to talk about that conflation in terms of scalar magnitude. It's incredibly important in this field of reasoning to understand how and why vector quantities may need to change direction while holding the magnitude constant—that is, why they're importantly not conceptually equivalent.
 
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LondonJohn said:
Personally, I don't think a post of such rank stupidity and ignorance was worthy of such a fulsome reply as this.......
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Agreed, but it's fun to write. Isn't that why we're here?

At work we have to deal with myriads of values in different units in different measurement systems and quantities from ginormous to eensy-weensy. Even though our policy is that all new designs must be done in SI, we still have to deal with legacy designs in EES. And we serve many customers in many countries. We have affiliates and subsidiaries in many countries, hence we always have to be on guard to triple-check units. We manage the stress of that by means of a fair amount of jocularity in units and quantities. I'll rarely pass up an opportunity to express something in barleycorns or fathoms, not just because it's a conveniently quaint-sounding whipping boy, but because the barleycorn is still a measurement used in commerce (American shoe sizes). My EU colleagues and I all laugh together.

But also, sometimes it just helps to put the full explanation out there for the world to see. If someone stumbles on the conversation years from now and sees one person say, "It is thus!" and the response is little more than, "Nuh-uh!" there's a case to be made that the conversation hasn't served the purpose of the E in ISF. If the answer to "It is thus!" is a full explanation of exactly how and why it isn't thus, then the E is vindicated and the reader goes away a bit smarter. That's also why we're here.

But in a more direct sense, it provides the evidence that @Vixen's claims to be so very smart—and consequently that her arguments based on Vixensplaining must have some evidentiary value—are unfounded. While her near-constant flame baiting provides ample evidence that her ulterior goal here includes accumulating as much attention (of the negative variety, if need be) as she can, it also includes buttressing the illusion of her intellectual superiority. Whether you survey the forum at intervals of a minute, a fortnight, or a year, you can find plenty of examples of Vixen professing her unmatched brainpower, be it in the form of straight up claiming to be smarter than 99.9% of the world's population or in her various chimeric claims to this or that certificate, diploma, honorary knighthood, or blue ribbon from the Frobningham county fair. Hence her nearly pathological need to never admit fault, her "I alone knew this," or "I alone figured this out," and her veiled characterization of her critics as people of "low comprehension,"—and the subsequent victim complex when criticized, complete with absurdly fanciful straw men. Psychologists have words to describe this behavior.

Part of why we're here is to show how to separate the theatrical scenery of an argument from its underlying plot. Whether the sinking of a ship, a gruesome murder, or a fire in a car park, the same patterns of reasoning emerge, and they all seem to point to, "I'm the one who was smart enough to figure out what really happened." Yes, it's fun to play armchair detective, but when that extends to working publicly to shift blame for something away from the responsible party to an innocent party on the basis of ignorant, self-aggrandizing claims, it merits scorn.

Our forum rules require us to address the claim and not the claimant, as well they should. So there is one important avenue of argumentation that looks at claims to expertise as a premise to whatever argument is at hand. "The ship should have completely turned turtle and remained floating," with its tacit premise: "...and I know what I'm talking about." We have to ask, "How do you know that?" and the answer will necessarily involve the claimant's diligence in research and comprehension of the relevant physical principles. By tying the necessary insinuations of competence to non-personalized declaratory claims as a premise, we avoid the ad hominem fallacy and the consequent wrath of the moderators. It's licit to ask how a person knows that ships are supposed to do that if they mention it as their expectation.

However, when someone straight-up says, "I'm smarter than 99.9% of people," that's an actionable claim as far as this forum goes. It's an invitation to subject that claim to a critical and empirical analysis to test its veracity, just as we would any other claim. The fact that the claimant makes it about oneself doesn't obviate it from critical analysis, nor does challenging a testable claim a person makes about oneself automatically become an ad hominem argument. When those challenges come in the form of trying to decipher "blind register" or explaining how actuarial tables really work, they remain firmly outside the realm of ad homimen reasoning. And as long as the claimant responds to corrections of obvious errors and misunderstandings with repetitions of, "But I'm a numbers person!" then it remains a valid premise to challenge. If you can't demonstrate the skills a "numbers person" is expected to have, then you don't get to claim to be one as a means of deflecting correction.

Myriad said:
There should be a classic comedy bit about this.

Officer: "I clocked you going 82 miles an hour."
Driver: "Impossible! I've only been driving for five minutes."
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This is so much better than anything I could have posted. I showed this to my spouse (a criminal defense attorney, but who has a background in science and mathematics including calculus) and we're now laughing all the way to brunch.
 
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JayUtah said:
Not necessarily. If we say the wind is blowing at 15 knots, that's a speed. If we say the wind doesn't blow in a straight line, that's a direction. If we want to combine them (as you do when reporting for navigation), then that's a velocity. In aviation, ATC will report surface winds in curt statements like, "wind zero niner zero at ten, gusting to fifteen." That means winds from the east at ten knots, gusting to 15 knots. You can also get "wind variable at ten," meaning the wind direction is changing more than 60°
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Similar to a |Notice to Mariners from the Met Office as broadcast by the BBC.

A typical forecast for a sea area might be

"Humber, Southeast veering southwest 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Thundery showers. Moderate or good, occasionally poor."
 
Vixen said:
It's a moot point, as this is how the bridge looked after just a few minutes:
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If it's a moot point as to the hows and whys the crew wouldn't report to the authoritarian captain, then why have you brought it up so often? Was it always irrelevant or has is not only recently become irrelevant? (edit: apparently "moot point" can mean "debatable", not just an irrelevant or academic point, that would be the more generous interpretation I think here)
 
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Andy_Ross said:
So that's a no?

If you don't know just say so.
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A 'mile' is a wonderful word. 'M-i-l-e'. So evocative and everyone knows exactly how long it is. It knocks the horrid 'kilometre' into a cocked hat.

A 'nautical mile' is merely a very naughty mile and needs to be afforded some latitude!

A knot: now here's yet another wonderful Old English word. Short, sharp and straight to the point. 'Knot'.
 
Vixen said:
I have no idea. However, I am curious to understand why so many marine experts and insiders - that is, seemingly respectable persons directly involved in the disaster - are convinced there is more to it than meets the eye. And I have to say I cannot help feeling sceptical about the visor just falling off all by itself as a result of force majeure, given some of the eye witness accounts of the few survivors. So the answer to your questions 1a to 2b - except 1b - is 'I wouldn't know'. As I said, I follow this topic as a local current affairs news item; following its developments. However, to your question 1b, the JAIC found as a measurable and observable fact that the bridge crew did not have the visibility range to see what was happening with the bow visor, so no, the bridge crew would not have noticed that the visor was open, or not.
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Speaking as a reformed conspiracy theorist, you need to get your brain around these facts:

1 - Being educated does not always preclude bias.
2 - Being educated does not exempt one from being stupid.
3 - It is possible for multiple things to be true at the same time, yet have nothing to do with a key event.

#1: Pick a historic event or disaster and you will find educated people questioning the findings of the investigatory agencies. Their education is used as a shield to make baseless counter claims using cherry-picked evidence, anecdotal observations, and outright fabrication.

#2 - The best examples of educated stupid people are 9-11A&E Truth, and the current US Presidential administration. They all have college degrees, and yet...

#3 - The MS Estonia could have been full of smuggled Russian technology, a Swedish submarine might have been shadowing the voyage, but neither has anything to do with the bow visor getting knocked off in rough seas.

See, conspiracy theories are nothing more than a game that allows people to think they are smarter than they really are because they know a secret, and need to educate the unwashed on how the world really works. The best part is the conspiracy theorist never has to learn anything of substance since the CT-Industrial Complex churns out its own information, thus exempting them from real facts. In these Estonia threads we've all been subjected to CT-based sources used to counter the JAIC report, yet none of those sources did anywhere near the amount of work that the JAIC investigators did to reach their conclusions. For CTists this is acceptable, but for skeptics it is not.

And open mind is one thing. An open mind without a filter, or in Vixen's case - bias, is another thing.
 
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