Oh my...

This is Conspiracy Factory business of the highest order. You can tell by the call for bookburning towards the end:

Conspiracy of Truth!

Okay, so this is right up my alley... A 9/11 troofer site has been caught by WhoreChurch grossly overrepresenting their blog traffic. This is *very* funny. Check out the truth:

The [troofer] article was only mildly interesting, but I was astounded at how much traffic this site was getting. Here is a screenshot of their visitor stats:Wow. Almost 800,000 visitors.

But then, my conspiracy radar came up. Does this site really attract that many visitors? It seemed unlikely. I clicked on the stat, hoping Sitemeter would not have it set as private.

Here is a screenshot of the “real” stats:
Did you catch the last line below the stats? I think I smell a conspiracy.

LOVE IT! The troofer makes up 798,235 visitors for his site, but claims that since he started tracking them using sitemeter, he's averaged 6 visitors a day (for the past 6 months). BEAUTIFUL!

Erm, where do you suppose he's hiding those 798,235 visitors?

Can you keep a secret?

"Three can keep a secret if two are dead."
-Benjamin Franklin

How many people can really keep a secret? I mean really keep a secret. Not utter it out loud, not write about it, not bitch about it over beers, but really and truly keep it a total and utter secret, safe from the world? I think I can keep a secret. My wife claims that I keep more secrets than almost anyone she knows.

Several years ago I was shopping for a Christmas gift for my then-girlfriend. I had flown in from out of town to visit with her and her family, so I was totally without a vehicle or any form of transportation.

She had recently gotten into photography in a semi-serious way, and I wanted to buy her an SLR camera for Christmas, but I didn't have the means to get to a camera store. So I arranged with her that we would go shopping with her parents' car, and I would blindfold her a few blocks from the store, and she agreed she would keep her eyes closed (she liked surprises far more than I did) while I went shopping. It was truly a convoluted plan, and in retrospect it was doomed to failure from the start. So that morning, we were ready to head out, and I was making a verbal list of all the things she and I were going to do that day. "Go to the movies, go get a present for my brother, go for lunch with your friends, go buy your camera...." Doh. I had blurted it out, just like that. I realized immediately what I had done, and I looked at my girlfriend in horror. She just smiled and said, "I thought that's what you were getting me."

Secrets have a way of coming out, even if you've never shared them. But what about when more than one person knows that secret? How hard is it to keep? I spent some time last night looking through PsychInfo for research on the difficulty (or ease) of keeping a secret. I confess I was unsuccessful (that said, I have a hard time imagining an ethical experiment that could test how well the average person keeps a secret). Most of the literature focuses on how damaging to one's psyche keeping a family secret can be.

So let's merely think about this, and I'll pose a few more questions. Could you keep a secret about yourself? What about if that secret is one that actually affects other people? For example, what if you harbor a secret about someone who is poisoning their wife? Could you keep that a secret? Do you know ten people you could share this with that would keep a poisoning secret? What about 10,000?

At the heart of most denialism is the need for there to be a conspiracy. For example, if mercury does in fact cause autism, tens of thousands of scientists would have to know this and be keeping it secret. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims that the CDC and the pharmaceutical industry have conspired to keep the dangers of mercury a secret. They would have to be complicit in a scheme to poison millions of children.

So how is it exactly that one gathers together a football stadium worth of people, reveal to them a secret that is so grotesque as that of poisoning millions of children, and then demand that they all keep it a secret?

9/11 simulation

The Hoofnagles gave us an entertaining view of a troofer a few weeks ago. This gentleman tried to simulate the fall of the twin towers on 9/11 using office supplies. It's clearly a mess.

Researchers at Purdue University recently released a slightly higher quality simulation of the crash:

The simulation could be used to better understand which elements in the building's structural core were affected, how they responded to the initial shock of the aircraft collision, and how the tower later collapsed from the ensuing fire fed by an estimated 10,000 gallons of jet fuel, said Mete Sozen, the Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering in Purdue's School of Civil Engineering.

It took about 80 hours using a high-performance computer containing 16 processors to produce the first simulation, which depicts how the plane tore through several stories of the structure within a half-second, said Christoph M. Hoffmann, a professor of computer science and co-director of the Computing Research Institute at Purdue.

Their findings? The towers lost 25% of their core support beams:

The researchers are analyzing how many columns were destroyed initially in the building's core, a spine of 47 heavy steel I-beams extending through the center of the structure, Sozen said.

"Current findings from the simulation have identified the destruction of 11 columns on the 94th floor, 10 columns on the 95th floor and nine columns on the 96th floor," he said. "This is a major insight. When you lose close to 25 percent of your columns at a given level, the building is significantly weakened and vulnerable to collapse."

It remains to be seen if this has much effect on the troofer movement. (Don't hold your breath).

Apparently the researchers at Purdue are currently working on modeling the fall of the towers:

In the coming months, we will explore how the structure reacted to the extreme heat from the blaze that led to the building's collapse, and we will refine the visual presentations of the simulation.

The video of the simulation is below. It's fascinating to watch, even if it is disturbing.

Sleuthing out conspiracies

From Salon.com.