Error Theory

John Reynolds, Chairman of the Memorial Project, has responded in the press to my claim that the Tower of Voices portion of the planned Flight 93 Memorial is a year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial. His grounds for dismissing concern show total ignorance of how an Islamic sundial works, proving that he never even looked at my sundial analysis.

He thinks Islamic prayer times are determined by shadow angle (and hence can be marked on any wall around any tower), when the first thing I explain is that they are determined by shadow length, so that an Islamic prayer time indicator must be placed a precise distance from a shadow-caster, and follow a precise arc.

Even though Reynolds does not know the first thing about my sundial analysis, he is assuring the public that my warnings of terrorist attack are a false alarm. So it has gone, across the entire crescent of betrayal.

Here is what John Reynolds told Brian Whipkey, editor of the Somerset Daily American, about my sundial claim:

I've also thought about the Washington Monument. I mean, since 9/11 - you know, the Washington Monument , as you well know, sticks straight up out of the ground, and security around the Washington Monument was an issue, actually an issue before 9/11, but it became a huge issue after 9/11, and the resulting design is a circular wall. It stands about this high, … it's big and it's thick and - you start thinking, well, gee, you know when the sun hits the angle as it hits the Washington Monument at the right time of day, it's going to point to a place on that circle. Is that a response to protecting the Washington monument, an Islamic response? No, absolutely not. [Reynolds' full fantasia is at the end of this post, forwarded via email from Whipkey. The interview was published on 8/3/07, but is subscriber only at the Daily American. UPDATE: Brian Whipkey has graciously sent me the page PDF so I can make the interview available to my readers.]

It is obvious here that Reynolds thinks Islamic prayer times are determined by the angle at which a gnomon's shadow projects away from its base. He thinks that when the shadow of the Washington Monument crosses the security wall at a particular angle, that point on the security wall can be seen to mark the time for Islamic afternoon prayers. But as my report to the Memorial Project explains, Islamic prayer times are determined by shadow length, not shadow angle. Afternoon or "asr" prayers commence when an object’s shadow is equal to the length of its noon shadow plus the object’s height.

To serve as an Islamic prayer-time indicator, the security wall would have to be just the right distance from the Washington Monument, and it would have to follow just the right arc. The exact position and shape of an asr prayer line varies with latitude. I took a couple of hours to plot for Mr. Reynolds where the end of the Washington Monument’s shadow actually lands at asr prayer time on different days of the year. The asr line never goes anywhere near the granite protection wall, nor does it coincide with any other structure:


Radial lines plot middle of the month asr prayer shadows, starting with June at the bottom, going up to December at the top, and back down again to the next June. The connecting line going up the right is the asr prayer line. The granite protective wall is the circle about a hundred yards from the monument.

[My shadow calculations are pasted at bottom of this post. I confirmed their accuracy by going to Islam.com and looking up the asr prayer times for Washington DC. They match the times that come from my shadow calculations to within a couple of minutes each day. Geeks might notice that the Monument’s shadow shows this photo to have been taken on about August 15th, a couple minutes before asr prayer time (4:00PM EST), and no, there is nothing within 20 yards in any direction to mark the spot. From mid-November to mid-January the end of the Monument’s shadow does not even reach the ground at prayer time. It lands on the building at the top of the image.]

Now that you know how an Islamic sundial works, look at the side by side comparison of a traditional Islamic sundial and the Tower of Voices:

Everyone who has read this far now knows a hundred times as much as that idiot Reynolds. He never even looked at this. He does not know the first thing about how an Islamic sundial works. He never even began to do is his due diligence as Chairman of the Memorial Project, yet he is out assuring everyone who asks that there is nothing to see here, nothing but the most ordinary coincidence, even inevitable coincidence.

Just as the editors of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette decided that "you can face any direction to face Mecca" (Crescent of Betrayal, p. 108), Reynolds now says that anything can be an Islamic sundial. On the contrary. The only way to get a blueprint for a year round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial is by very precise calculation.

I told Reynolds a year and a half ago that he needed to talk to me; that I was warning him that his project is under terrorist attack; that he needs to hear my information. Instead he comes up with ignorant excuses for dismissing my warnings, excuses that I would disabuse him of in a second if he would just TALK TO ME, but he refuses. This man is actively abetting a terrorist plot. Not intentionally perhaps, but his willful blindness IS culpable.

I have reported numerous private exchanges where those responsible for advancing the Crescent/Bowl of Embrace design have admitted features like the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent and the 44 glass blocks on the flight path and made excuses for them, while at the same time telling the press that my claims have been investigated and been found to be false. Reynolds’ sundial remarks break new ground by showing the excuse-making to the public, but otherwise the pattern is the same.

Even though Reynolds has not actually looked at my sundial analysis, he does not deny its factual accuracy. I guess they just all assume at this point that everything I am saying is factually accurate, as indeed it is. All his attention is on the excuse making, and since he is blissfully ignorant of the reality of Islamic sundials, he can grasp at any foolish excuse and have it sound reasonable in his own mind. The question is how he can think it is reasonable to assure the public that he has investigated a warning of terrorist attack and found it to be a false alarm when he has actually been grasping at excuses to avert his gaze.

Washington Monument, shadow calculations

By Alec Rawls, 8-7-07
For John Reynolds
(My calculations for the Tower of Voices are at CrescentOfBetrayal.com.)

Monument is at coordinates 38.88N, 77.03W and is 169.3 meters tall. The terraserver aerial photo I took a screenshot of was at 1 pixel per meter resolution. Gnomon point located at the center of the circle at the base of the Monument.

I used J Giesen’s Sun Shadow Applet to do the calculations. (Un-check DST. Entering the latitude and longitude will automatically set UT to -5.) Giesen’s applet gives the shadow position in polar coordinates. I used Kusashi’s online calculator to convert to Cartesian coordinates.)

Asr prayers commence when an object’s shadow is the length of its shortest shadow (which occurs at solar noon), plus its height. (This is the Shafie definition. Hanfie prayer shadows land even further out from the security wall. Shafie and Hanfi prayer times for DC can be found at Islam.com.). Calculations for mid-month asr prayer shadows are:

June 15th
Time of shortest shadow: 12:08 PM
Length of shortest shadow: 47.17 m
Asr shadow length (shortest shadow plus monument height): 216.47 m.
Time when monument shadow reaches asr length: 4.16 PM
Angle of asr shadow (degrees CW from north): 90.7
Cartesian coordinates, rounded to the nearest pixel: (Δx, Δy) = (216, -3)
[Microsoft Paint has no zero, so in Paint, go (Δx, Δy) = (217, -4)]

July 15th/ May 15th
Time of shortest shadow: 12:14
Length of shortest shadow: 52.97 m
Asr shadow length (shortest shadow plus monument height): 222.27 m.
Time when monument shadow reaches asr length: 4.09
Angle of asr shadow (degrees CW from north): 88.7
Cartesian coordinates, rounded to the nearest pixel: (Δx, Δy) = (222, 5)

August 15th/ April 15th
Time of shortest shadow: 12:13
Length of shortest shadow: 78.46 m
Asr shadow length (shortest shadow plus monument height): 247.76 m.
Time when monument shadow reaches asr length: 4.00
Angle of asr shadow (degrees CW from north): 79.9
Cartesian coordinates, rounded to the nearest pixel: (Δx, Δy) = (244, 43)

September 15th/ March 15th
Time of shortest shadow: 12:03
Length of shortest shadow: 122.53 m
Asr shadow length (shortest shadow plus monument height): 291.83 m.
Time when monument shadow reaches asr length: 3.34
Angle of asr shadow (degrees CW from north): 66.8
Cartesian coordinates, rounded to the nearest pixel: (Δx, Δy) = (268, 115)

October 15th/ February 15thTime of shortest shadow: 11:55 AM
Length of shortest shadow: 184.34 m
Asr shadow length (shortest shadow plus monument height): 353.64 m.
Time when monument shadow reaches asr length: 3.01
Angle of asr shadow (degrees CW from north): 53.1
Cartesian coordinates, rounded to the nearest pixel: (Δx, Δy) = (283, 212)

November 15th/ January 15th
Time of shortest shadow: 11:51 AM
Length of shortest shadow: 264.62 m
Asr shadow length (shortest shadow plus monument height): 433.92 m.
Time when monument shadow reaches asr length: 2.34
Angle of asr shadow (degrees CW from north): 41.2
Cartesian coordinates, rounded to the nearest pixel: (Δx, Δy) = (286, 326)

December 15th
Time of shortest shadow: 12:01 PM
Length of shortest shadow: 320.46 m
Asr shadow length (shortest shadow plus monument height): 498.76 m.
Time when monument shadow reaches asr length: 2.32
Angle of asr shadow (degrees CW from north): 35.19
Cartesian coordinates, rounded to the nearest pixel: (Δx, Δy) = (287, 408)

John Reynolds' full answer to my sundial claim

From: Brian Whipkey
To: XXXXXXXXXX
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2007 10:51 AM
Subject: RE: flight 93 memorial

Hello Mr. XXXXXX,
Thank you for your inquiry. We recently spoke to the chairman of the flight 93 commission for a question and answer feature. The following is his response to comments made by people such as Alec Rawls.

(John J. Reynolds of Alexandria, Va. and the chairman of the Flight 93 National Memorial Federal Advisory Commission, visited the Daily American to discuss a variety of issue with Vicki Rock, staff writer, and Brian Whipkey, editor, for this feature.)

Q: There are a few people who continue to think the memorial design has an Islamic symbol in it. What are your comments on that and the future of the appearance of the memorial?
A: Thanks for asking the question, because it's one I think about a lot. You know, I think that it's easy for people to take a lot of different things and say, well, gee, I can imagine it's this. I was thinking over the last few days, I thought about a cathedral, and sort of commonly we think of a cathedral as a Gothic-like structure and it's big and it's probably usually stone, and you know, that's not what defines a cathedral. A cathedral could be any building that has a cathedra, a bishop's chair, in it. It has to have a bishop and a bishop's chair. It has to be designated, and there's lots of places that people go see in Europe that probably we all walk away from thinking that was a cathedral and it's not, it's just a big, beautiful stone church. And so, you know, it's the intent of the people who are involved with that place I think that that drives, and I think that's the case here, and I think the thing that makes the most upset and the most concerned about this is the imposition of other people who haven't been involved whatsoever, of what they see, to overtake the intent of the people who have thoughtfully gone through the creation of this whole thing, and so I have a lot of angst about not valuing uppermost the intents of the people that created it, in this case I would say mostly the families and the architect and the other partners as well. If this was not a design that pleased the families and made them feel like they and their loved ones were embraced and taken care of appropriately and presented to the future appropriately, then they wouldn't have approved of the design. I've also thought about the Washington Monument . I mean, since 9/11 - you know, the Washington Monument , as you well know, sticks straight up out of the ground, and security around the Washington Monument was an issue, actually an issue before 9/11, but it became a huge issue after 9/11, and the resulting design is a circular wall. It stands about this high, but it's, you're not going to drive a tank or a truck up over it very quickly or easily. It's granite and if you know anything at all about what's behind and below the wall, it's big and it's thick and - you start thinking, well, gee, you know when the sun hits the angle as it hits the Washington Monument at the right time of day, it's going to point to a place on that circle. Is that a response to protecting the Washington monument, an Islamic response? No, absolutely not. It's a response to how the original designers of the Washington Monument expected that place to be seen given the realities of today and nothing more. And it's, gosh, if you haven't been there recently, the completed project is just beautiful. It's so understated that you just have no idea of what it is. So I think that the people who are inventing these theories have the right to do so, but I don't think they should overtake what the families and the designer and the architect have envisioned as the place to embrace what Flight 93 really is.

Brian Whipkey
Editor
Daily American
PO Box 638, Somerset, PA
814-444-5928
Fax 814-444-5966