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The sinking of MS Estonia: Case Reopened Part VII

Andy_Ross said:
what does that have to do with you not watching videos of the things you say can't happen?
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I am not seeing how a fluke window smashing in an obviously high upper deck restaurant proves in any way that the windows of MS Estonia passenger deck 4 must have similarly smashed. Nobody denies it is not unusual for freak window smashing. Of itself it doesn't prove this is what happened to MS Estonia. It's a cool hypothesis I am sure.
 
Vixen said:
I am not seeing how a fluke window smashing in an obviously high upper deck restaurant proves in any way that the windows of MS Estonia passenger deck 4 must have similarly smashed. Nobody denies it is not unusual for freak window smashing. Of itself it doesn't prove this is what happened to MS Estonia. It's a cool hypothesis I am sure.
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It wasn't a freak happening.

Windows high in a ship aren't designed to withstand the full impact of a solid wave.
Ordinarily even in a storm they wouldn't be subject to a full impact but when the ship is listing, low in the water and rolling the windows are vulnerable, especially when the ship has lost power and turned side on to the waves.
This exaggerates the roll and force of the waves.
The video demonstrates this.
 
Vixen said:
But given eyewitness accounts and the visible deformations as per a jagged hole sketched by Brian Braidwood as what was seen in the SS Eagle dive with Gregg Bemis, one has to wonder why a more obvious explanation wasn't investigated. For example, a person or persons forcing the bow visor open or even deliberate sabotage, given the picture in the dive video of what looked like an unignited semtex package, and Braidwood being a British Navy explosives expert, who actually taught the topic at a naval academy, claims he immediately recognised it as such.
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As to why that "more obvious explanation wasn't investigated", I'd guess it's because the investigators didn't ask Dan Brown to write the plot.

Vixen said:
All brilliant deduction but rather post hoc ergo proptor hoc or what scientists might call the halo effect fallacy, when you make your results fit your hypothesis.
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I have never heard a scientist refer to making your results fit your hypothesis as the halo effect fallacy. As explained by Wikipedia:

The halo effect refers to the tendency to evaluate an individual positively on many traits because of a shared belief.​

Marketing folks also speak of a halo effect, as when an automobile manufacturer designs some technologically advanced model, without any expectation of making a profit from limited sales of that pricey model, just to attach some prestige to its more plebeian and more profitable models.

Vixen said:
I bet I can cite pi to more places than you can.
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That's a strong contender for the most useless skill that could be imagined outside of a Dan Brown novel.

On the rare occasions when I need more than the nine digits of precision I can recall off the top of my head, I'm using a computer to do some calculation. If the 16 digits provided by IEEE double precision aren't enough, I can use unlimited precision arithmetic to calculate pi to as many places as needed by the calculation. Knowing how and when to do that is far more important than rote memorization of the base 10 digits of pi.

Vixen:

The humble brag. :spike:
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Vixen said:
It's a cool hypothesis I am sure.
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One for which there is empirical evidence to dispute your expectation that such a thing cannot happen. You have been trying very hard for years to argue that JAIC reached for explanations you consider to be farfetched, and therefore that they investigated the accident only pretextually, and therefore that all your conspiracy-mongering is warranted as some kind of virtuous correction. The "one or two strong wave" straw man is one of those explanations. The unbreakable upper deck window straw man is another. You can't appreciate the prospect that all these are "problems" only because the expectations you are measuring against are things you just made up. You are not competent in the fields pertaining to the investigation of shipping accidents. Your judgment—while I'm sure you believe it to be very clever—is just ignorance.
 
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Vixen said:
I was quite aware of that. However, it would have been helpful for the JAIC to explain the exact specifications of the windows which smashed and the logistics of the extra volume of ingress.
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You mean like chapter 13.6? Here is an extract from it:

When some of the large windows on decks 4 and 5 broke, these decks became subject to progressive flooding and no buoyancy or stability contribution was available from this part of the superstructure. List and trim to stern increased and the flow rate through the openings accelerated. As soon as the accommodation spaces started flooding, the flooding could not stop before the vessel sank, or the condition could no longer remain stable as there were connections between different decks via staircases and other openings. The watertight compartments be- low the car deck were thus flooded from above.

The speed of flooding, however, depended on the size of the openings to the sea and on the escape of air from inside the. hull regarding Which there are several witness observations. Calculations indicate - as an example - that 18,000 tons of water on board, distributed between the car deck and decks 4 and 5, would have given a heel angle of about 75 degrees. This amount of water had entered the vessel in about 15 minutes, indicating an average flow rate of 20 tons per second. This is feasible through openings which have a total area of 5-10 m2. Progressive flooding was under way to several decks and compartments at the same time as the upper decks gradually sank under the mean water level.

If the windows and doors had remained unbroken the vessel may have remained in a stable heel condition for some time. It is, however, less likely that any reasonable strength of the large windows would have been adequate to with- stand the wave impact forces.

It can be concluded that, although the vessel fulfilled the SOLAS damage stability requirements valid for its building period, she had no possibilities to withstand progressive flooding through the superstructure openings once the heel angle approached 40o. When windows on the accommodation decks were broken by wave forces, subsequent sinking was inevitable.
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W.D.Clinger said:
I have never heard a scientist refer to making your results fit your hypothesis as the halo effect fallacy.
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Indeed, it's not a term used in science. The halo effect is a cognitive bias, to be sure, but the phenomenon Vixen is trying to allude to is more commonly known in science as HARKking—Hypothesization After Results are Known. It's unclear how she believes them to be equivalent. HARKing is the process of making a new hypothesis that fits the results, with knowledge of what the result looks like, and then pretending that was the hypothesis you were trying to test and that your results confirm the new ad hoc hypothesis.

However, Vixen is stumbling over the essential nature of hypothesization in science. The sine qua non of a hypothesis is that it make an attempt to explain an observation or phenomenon of interest. The observation you're trying to explain is not the "result" of a scientific exercise. The "results" in that sense are the outcome of a controlled application of the hypothesized cause to attempt to reproduce or recreate the effects in a way that is statistically differentiable from the null. In any case, it's ridiculous to suggest that a hypothesis is suspicious because it claims the phenomenon as a consequent or that it's any kind of circular reasoning. It's not suspiciously convenient that a hypothesis formulated to explain something necessarily names that thing. That's not what's meant by post hoc reasoning.

Here the observation we need to explain is the flood rate profile implied by the time the ship took to founder after the precipitating event. In the case where the ship lists or settles, the accepted procedure is to identify possible sources of downflooding. Despite Vixen's insistence that it's nigh unto impossible for waves to break the glass in ship windows, there are in fact many such examples including ships like Queen Elizabeth and Lusitania. It is not at all a farfetched theory to hypothesize that the windows on Deck 4 broke under wave action. In addition to the videos provided by others, here's a particularly graphic one:

We have much more sophisticated flooding models now than the one JAIC used, but theirs is sufficiently accurate to show that openings the size of the doors and windows on Deck 4 are sufficient to support the implied flood rate. In the absence of direct observation during the failure sequence, this is the best evidence anyone will ever get for what happened. Lay persons typically drastically underestimate the flood rates achieved by windows open to the sea. The suggestion that JAIC should have done more to test or verify this hypothesis and that their failure to do so is somehow suspicious is uninformed nonsense.

W.D.Clinger said:
[Memorizing the digits of pi is] a strong contender for the most useless skill that could be imagined outside of a Dan Brown novel.
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Nor is it even necessarily a flex. Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s I met the guy who, at the time, held the world's record for memorizing the digits of pi. He was really weird. Also he was not any sort of mathematician or physicist or scientist.
 
I have posted that video of the ferry window breaking a number of times.

Water hitting is not the same as spray or wind.

A full wave hits like a hammer.
 
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W.D.Clinger said:
As to why that "more obvious explanation wasn't investigated", I'd guess it's because the investigators didn't ask Dan Brown to write the plot.


I have never heard a scientist refer to making your results fit your hypothesis as the halo effect fallacy. As explained by Wikipedia:

The halo effect refers to the tendency to evaluate an individual positively on many traits because of a shared belief.​

Marketing folks also speak of a halo effect, as when an automobile manufacturer designs some technologically advanced model, without any expectation of making a profit from limited sales of that pricey model, just to attach some prestige to its more plebeian and more profitable models.


That's a strong contender for the most useless skill that could be imagined outside of a Dan Brown novel.

On the rare occasions when I need more than the nine digits of precision I can recall off the top of my head, I'm using a computer to do some calculation. If the 16 digits provided by IEEE double precision aren't enough, I can use unlimited precision arithmetic to calculate pi to as many places as needed by the calculation. Knowing how and when to do that is far more important than rote memorization of the base 10 digits of pi.
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Wikipedia, LOL. My statistics lecturer who wrote books on it is my preferred source to someone on wiki referring to an entirely different context.
 
JayUtah said:
One for which there is empirical evidence to dispute your expectation that such a thing cannot happen. You have been trying very hard for years to argue that JAIC reached for explanations you consider to be farfetched, and therefore that they investigated the accident only pretextually, and therefore that all your conspiracy-mongering is warranted as some kind of virtuous correction. The "one or two strong wave" straw man is one of those explanations. The unbreakable upper deck window straw man is another. You can't appreciate the prospect that all these are "problems" only because the expectations you are measuring against are things you just made up. You are not competent in the fields pertaining to the investigation of shipping accidents. Your judgment—while I'm sure you believe it to be very clever—is just ignorance.
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I did not say 'it could not happen'. You just made that up.
 
Andy_Ross said:
I have posted that video of the ferry window breaking a number of times.

Water hitting is not the same as spray or wind.

A full wave hits like a hammer.
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Nobody says it could never happen. What is required is a demonstration based on the actual MS Estonia specs that this did happen. A practical proof, not a theory.
 
What is hilarious that some seem to think that waves won't break glass- when waves can literally buckle steel plating on the hulls...

It wasn't uncommon to see trawlers around the town I grew up in with hull damage from large waves, where you could see the outline of the hulls frames beneath the steel from wave impact...
And that was usually steel 5mm or more in thickness
 
JayUtah said:
Your argument is clearly predicated on the notion that waves breaking windows on ships is sufficiently improbable that JAIC is irresponsible to have suggested it.
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That is not correct. It is one of the criticisms levelled at the JAIC by experts sceptical that the cause of the accident was proven to have happened as it claimed.
 
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