How come all these guys are mechanical engineers?
Embarrassing to me.
I don't see that there are "all these guys". I see a couple dozen.
And only one (Tony Sz) who has published anything. And that in JONES.
And in the most bizarre aspect of that paper is that the mechanical engineer is second author to a professor of religious studies. Go figure that one...?!
I'm going to try really hard to give Mr. Johnson the benefit of the doubt. The reason that I brought up this subject has only a little to do with him personally.
I am very concerned, however, about an 8 year stretch of young, impressionable engineers who were in college between 2001 & 2009. Engineering students go thru the very same adolescent angst that all kids do. They hate anyone that they perceive has authority over them. A natural part of life.
They were also such technical neophytes that they were mostly unequipped to parse out the nonsense of Jones, Griffin, et al.
I think that it is shameful on the part of their engineering professors that they did not confront this issue straight on, and left the kids to flounder around on their own. Any engineering professor that cannot IMMEDIATELY see the glaring flaws in the 911T engineering claims should be fired.
The result of this is that we've now got a bunch of newly minted engineers, who - like all of us at that age - think that they know everything. And are going to get co-opted into groups like AE911t. And go out into the public with their shiny new diplomas & bloviate as if they knew ***** from shinola.
They are going to do severe damage to their own careers They are quite capable of doing damage to the public perception of the gov't & the issues of 9/11. Because the public thinks that "an engineer is an engineer is an engineer". Interchangeable cogs. (Just like some misguided personnel do when it comes to hiring them.)
And they are completely capable of doing grave damage to the public perception of the engineering profession in general.
THIS is what this whole thread is about in my mind. This potential lost generation of baby engineers.
I've mentioned it before. New graduates don't appreciate that they are the youngest members of a fraternity, a society, that goes back a couple hundred years. That there is a lineage. That each generation learns from the previous several, and then, in their turn, become mentors of the next generations.
They also have not the slightest clue about all the stuff that is never covered in class. And the level of expertise that resides in the bodies & brains of all those old farts running around, looking just plain frumpy.
When I started writing Mr. Johnson, I was just puzzled with the fact that here was a Mechanical Engineer in the 911 group. I guessed (correctly) that he was very young. There are lots of very young engineers there. And a fair number of retired engineers too. What you don't see are too many that are working now.
What you absolutely don't see are ANY working structural engineers who have a long, successful history of working in the tall structures business that have published anything. Nothing. Nada. And like all science & engineering, publishing is the official, formal way of communicating within the fraternity. And competent, peer-reviewed publication is the standard way of getting a stamp of approval from the fraternity.
As I started to say, when I first ran across Mr. Johnson's presentation, I was just bemused. You can find it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=142Ati4GEJQ
Very quickly, I got annoyed that he was talking little mechanical engineering, and buckets of Richard Gage woo. Verbatim. Even took a bunch of the big Dick's slides. Politics, Polls, Wars, Constitution. The usual crappola. I thought he'd be talking engineering.
The very few things he did mention were the usual, utter nonsense. "Molten steel". "Free fall SPEED". I ***** you not. He must have said each about 30 times!
Then he got to this point, in the 6th part:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyXTiqUN7Gs#t=7m18s
This is the classic John Gross confrontation with the punk kids about "molten steel". The interpretation of Mr. Johnson that "well, we showed him. A lotta people showed him" was all that I could take.
This kid actually thinks that he "showed up" Dr. Gross. Priceless. Classic shoot yourself in the foot. Dr. Gross is old school. You can see it in his presentation. He doesn't brook nonsense. And that style just grates on kids.
(Which, to a HUGE measure, explains exactly why we use it.)
That's about as far as I got in his presentation. I'll try to finish it some time soon. As soon as my annoyance level has abated.
Tom