tfk - any discussions with Femr2 about his lateral ejection theories?
Not yet...
BY DEFINITION, that one's gonna be a pretty improbable event, based purely on "outlier statistics". Which most truthers don't accept anyway.
While most of the locations for the external columns can be laid at the feet of "immensely tall sheets peeling away & tilting outward" (perhaps aided, just a touch, by 400 - 600 mph winds. Ya think?), there is also no doubt that some pieces can not be explained by this. Truthers focus on the small percent that get hurled outward, and in a few cases, with a bit of upward initial velocity component.
But what they are automatically doing is focusing on the outliers. The ones that have separated themselves from the pack by virtue of their initial speed. Because those are the only ones that you can pick out to analyze.
The "average velocity" examples are all lost in the debris cloud.
The massive error is treating those outliers as tho they are typical.
This process is the result of pure random chance & statistical variation of a bunch of collisions. Truthers want a deterministic explanation, since they don't really believe in random events. Everything is planned & controlled.
So, they look at you and say "how likely is it that a beam WOULD HAVE BEEN thrown that far?" And I answer "very unlikely".
And they say, "AHA!"
And I say "So?"
And they say "AHA!"
And I say "So?"
And you sit there and stare at each other...
This really is identical to creationist who don't believe in random variation being able to explain evolution. "It HAD to be guided along, because it's so improbable."
Yep, it IS improbable. Yep, any deterministic explanation is going to rely on a highly unlikely sequence of events.
And, yup, take ANY bunch of statistically random events, and examine only the outliers, and you'll convince yourself that we live in a magical world with really weird properties.
Tom
