It's Still a Crescent

Please check the blog that she links to, which is at http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2005/11/redesigned-flight-93-memorial-still_30.html (unfortunately, I cannot post a link to a weblog anywhere other than the blogger forum). This memorial to terrorists is beyond disgusting.

Heh. I've beat the system (but without the important graphics):

Redesigned Flight 93 memorial still an Islamo-fascist shrine
The redesigned flight 93 memorial, announced today, still contains all of the features that made it a terrorist memorial. Architect Paul Murdoch's infamous red crescent is still there, still planted with red maple trees, still inscribed in the exact same circle as before, and with the same two crescent tips still intact. Thus the crescent bisector defined by these crescent tips is also the same as before. It still points almost exactly to Mecca, making the crescent a Mihrab (an Islamic prayer station, where the believer faces into a crescent, towards Mecca, to perform his ritual prostrations). The design still incorporates a separate upper terrorist-memorial wall, centered precisely on the red-maple crescent. There are still 44 translucent blocks on the flight path to the crash site, matching the total number of dead, instead of just the forty translucent blocks that are dedicated to the forty murdered Americans. Lastly, the Tower of Voices part of the memorial is still an Islamic prayer-time sundial.

Start with the red crescent. In the original design, the lower crescent tip was defined by the furthest extent of red maple trees on the bottom, while the upper crescent tip was defined by the end of the inner of two concrete walls, between which trees were planted.

Figure 1. Original design. The inner of the two concrete walls at top follows the circle that the crescent partly inscribes. The crescent tip has to be located on this circle, hence the end of the inner wall defines the upper crescent tip. The green bisector points almost exactly to Mecca (in the northeast direction, into the red crescent). Pixel accurate calculations of the bisector and its orientation towards Mecca here.

In the redesign, the lower tip remains exactly as before. So does the upper crescent tip (the end of the inner concrete wall). The change is that there are now additional trees planted beyond the end of the concrete wall that defines the upper crescent tip. These additional trees, planted along and out from the circle line, make it look like there is now a bowl instead of a crescent, but both original crescent tips are still in place.

Figure 2. The redesign. The topo lines (also visible in Figure 1) show that the both crescent tips are located exactly as before. Similarly for the copse of trees (in the position of the star on an Islamic flag) and the upper and lower sections of the memorial wall.

The filling in of some trees, in places that blend the original crescent into its surroundings, but do not affect its defining characteristics, is apparently the only change in the entire "redesign." All of the original features of the terrorist-memorial remain. The new graphics show that there is still the same separate upper section of memorial wall as before. Like the lower wall, it lies along the flight path to the crash site. Just as the lower wall contains 40 translucent blocks, dedicated to the forty murdered Americans, so too does the upper section of memorial wall contain translucent blocks.

Figure 3. From redesign announcement. Identical to original design. The upper section of memorial wall, seen to the right, is centered precisely on the large red maple crescent and contains additional translucent blocks, in addition to the forty on the lower wall that memorialize the murdered Americans.

In all, there are forty four translucent blocks emplaced along the flight path to the crash site, where forty Americans and four murderers died on September 11th. [Three are on the upper section of the memorial wall, one is the large glass block, at the upper crescent tip, that dedicates the entire site. See UPDATE below for details, or click the link immediately below.] Further, the fact that the crescent tips are unchanged means that the upper section of memorial wall is still bisected exactly by the Mecca line that bisects the large red crescent. (My earlier analysis of the upper-memorial wall and the 44 translucent blocks here.)

For anyone who wonders if it could be a coincidence that the original/new red maple crescent orients almost precisely on Mecca, note that the Tower of Voices section of the memorial also is apparently unchanged. The Tower of Voices is surrounded by several crescents of trees. Lines drawn across the tips of these crescents also point almost precisely towards Mecca.

Figure 4. Crescent array surrounds Tower of Voices. Line across crescent tips points almost precisely to Mecca. Calculations here.

This second orientation towards Mecca is necessary to the overall terrorist-memorial plan because the Tower of Voices is itself an Islamic sundial.

Figure 5. Islamic prayer times are determined by shadow length. When the center of the crescent at the top of the tower's shadow reaches the outer pink line, the time for Islamic afternoon prayers (Asr prayers) has arrived. Notice that the prayer line remains contained within the inner arc of trees. Afternoon prayer shadows for June 16th (the shortest day of the year) in red; July 16th (green); August 16th (blue); September 16th (yellow); October 16th (orange), mid-November (aqua); and mid-December (fuchsia). The mid-January Asr-prayer shadow will be the same as for mid-November. Mid-February will be the same as mid-October, etcetera. Prayer times and associated shadow calculations here.

When prayer time is reached, Pious Muslims will need to know the direction to Mecca: the direction they are supposed to face when they pray. The Tower's crescent array gives them this information. All they have to do is walk out to the open end of the crescent array and sight across the ends of the rows of trees (towards the northeast in figure 4).

Why does the shadow line in Figure 5 have a zig at the end of November? Look closely at the tower shadow depicted in Murdoch's graphic. You can see that there is a vertical shaft of sunlight making it through about the top fifth of the tower. This is because there is a slot cut in the top of the tower that early enough in the day allows light to pass through and reach the ground. Later in the day sunlight comes through at too steep an angle to reach the ground, being intercepted by the crescent arms of the crescent cross-section tower. As the months progress towards December and sunset gets earlier, afternoon prayer times start coming early enough that light through the slot is still reaching the ground when prayer time arrives. Thus the bottom of top of the tower's shadow becomes the bottom of the slot, and this new lower tower height then becomes the tower height that is used to calculate prayer-time shadow length. From the tower graphics, it can be determined that this transition occurs near the end of November. Full analysis here.

Many of the terrorist-memorial elements of the Murdoch's design have this same half-hidden, half-obvious quality. (Litany here.) The redesign, blending the original red crescent into a larger circle of trees, but still retaining its defining points, fits this half-hidden terrorist-memorial theme exactly. I am surprised Murdoch did not blend the red crescent in from the outset. He might have gotten away with it. But we cannot let him get away with it now. Paul Murdoch's Flight 93 memorial, both originally and in its barely modified incarnation, is not just a bit of P.C. openness to Islamic symbolism. It is an explicit and thorough-going shrine to the terrorists. Murdoch is an Islamo-fascist. He is one of the enemy, trying to plant an Islamo-fascist memorial on the graves of our murdered heroes. No other explanation is possible. Please help stop this evil.

UPDATE: Thanks to so many people for stopping by. I’ll just add a bit of detail, for those who might like to look through the linked back-posts where I did my calculations, but would prefer a summary of the most critical details.

First, where are the four extra translucent blocks? You can see three of them in Figure 3, at the bottom end of the upper section of the memorial wall (the terrorist-memorial section of the memorial wall). Here is another view:

Figure 6. Close up of gap between lower and upper memorial walls. Forty translucent blocks on left. Three on right.

These blocks at the bottom of the terrorist memorial wall are inscribed with the date September 11th, 2001. That’s right: September 11th belongs to them.

The forty-fourth translucent block is further up the flight path. It is the large glass block, sitting at the point of the upper red-crescent tip, that dedicates the entire site:

Figure 7. Overlook extending through inner circle of crescent, with large glass block at end, dedicating the site. This graphic is from the original site-plan PDF’s, but the overlook seems to be unchanged in the new design. The announcement of the redesign includes an overlook graphic, but without a close up detail of the glass block.

LGF commenter aunursa corrects my assertion that the forty name-inscribed blocks are dedicated to forty murdered American heroes. Apparently two of the heroes were foreign. God bless ‘em.

I didn’t mean to mislead anyone by originally leaving the full explanation of the extra four translucent blocks out of this post. I was just trying to summarize my findings, while providing links to my full analyses. Far from thinking that the different shaped block at the upper crescent tip weakens the “44 death, 44 blocks” interpretation, my full analysis reveals the tying together of the upper section of the memorial wall with the large glass block to be perhaps the most diabolical feature of the entire structure. Feel free to redo my calculations . The large red maple crescent defined in the obvious way that I describe above is oriented 1.7 degrees off Mecca, enough to create plausible deniability perhaps. But when the large glass block is used to define the upper crescent tip, the crescent bisector points EXACTLY to Mecca, as close as the pixel resolution of the PDF’s can determine. (One pixel either way and the line points further away from Mecca.) It’s a good thing the Islamo-fascist who designed this thing is not making bombs, because he would probably be good at it.

There are also a couple of details about my interpretation of the Tower of Voices as an Islamic prayer-time sundial that people should know about if they are going to take it to heart. Shadow placement will vary with any change in either the geometry of the tower or the topography of the ground on which the Tower's shadow falls. From the information that is available, there are two points of possible deviation from my interpretation.

One is the slope of ground in the direction that the prayer-time shadows fall. On level ground, the prayer-time shadows are about 50 meters long. According to topo maps, the ground rises in the prayer-shadow direction about ten feet in fifty meters (graphics available about a third of the way down this post). The site-plan’s Tower Section detail shows the tower sitting on a built up mound ten feet tall. This would put it right where it needs to be to act as the shadow-caster (or gnomon) for an Islamic sundial: on level ground. Islamic afternoon prayers are supposed to commence when an object’s shadow is the length of its noon shadow, plus its height. This can only be determined on level ground.

The potential discrepancy here is that the Tower Section detail shows the trees in the prayer-shadow direction starting at the level of the ground at the bottom of the ten foot mound that the Tower sits on, instead of at the height of base of the Tower, as the topo maps indicate. It isn’t much of a discrepancy because the Tower Section detail is clearly in error on this point. Here is the offending graphic:

Figure 8. Shows trees in prayer-shadow direction (northeast) to grow from well below the base of Tower. Topo maps show they start at the same height as the base of the Tower, as a prayer-time sundial would require.

The second possible discrepancy is the depth of the slot cut in the spine of the Tower. The CAD generated shadow in Figure 5 shows the slot being 18% of the full tower height. This is contradicted by the Tower Section detail, which depicts the slot being 8% of the full tower height. The 18% figure leads to the jog in the shadow line depicted in my Figure 5. It is the exact depth of slot needed to keep the shadow line within the innermost crescent of trees, to that the inner crescent can serve as a consistent prayer-time indicator. Here is Figure 5 again:

Figure 5.

Since the Tower Section detail was already misleading about the topography, that gives reason to favor the CAD generated slot information. Also, the CAD information is what one would expect to be the real information. It is the actual 3D design. The PDFs, in contrast, are prettied-up picture boards.

My guess is that Murdoch and his co-conspirators (if he has any) realized that any competent sundialist would find them out if they put the accurate information in the Tower Section detail, so they phonied up the detail. I'm also guessing it was a slip that they let the CAD generated slot value into their presentation. Either that or hubris.

Still, there is a caveat here. It could turn out that the actual planned slot dimension is 8% of the Tower height and that the Tower array is thus not designed to be an accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial. The only way to tell for sure is to get hold of Murdoch’s computers and look. The many terrorist memorializing features of Murdoch’s Flight 93 memorial give plenty of probable cause to believe that he has perpetrated a fraud against the Department of the Interior, which is legal grounds for subpoena of his hard drives. Tancredo, Norton, the ball is in your court.

They won't give up honoring Islam and the Terrorists that murdered all those people in the name of Islam.

I guess they want throngs of Muslims to come and pray to Mecca at the site.

Thank You ! My thoughts exactly !

They should be saying:

"We told the guy is graphics to change the name on the little picture, but it's still the same"

It's disgusting. I will never visit it as is.

Case Closed.

Some people need to get a life. I cannot BELIEVE the amount of angst over this memorial.

People will see what they want to see, which happens to be the very definition of a conspiracy theorist.

Enough already!!!

The original Flight 93 memorial design, with a crescent of maple trees that some critics had said was a symbol honoring terrorists.

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"Entry Portal," is the new design for the Flight 93 memorial. The centerpiece of a bowl-shaped piece of land replaces a crescent-shape design

Concerning the so-called "prayer tower" sundial ~ we have one in Frankfurt Kentucky at the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial. It was designed with no reference whatsoever to Islam.

That Moslems do stuff by the numbers and need a bunch of clocks around is incidental to the case ~ I have a couple of watches myself and that does not make me a follower of the Prophet.

You may be reading more into this than is there.

You know, according to lefty conspiracy buffs who support this type of crap there were no Muslims on any of those planes. But they're also so quick to honor them.

This is messed up, worse even than trying to turn the WTC site into a permanent hate-America festival.

It just figures you wouldn't understand, sinky.

Looks very red cresent to me. One would think with all the controversy, they'd change it, but I supposed that would offend the minority.

Let me reprase:

Some people need to get a life. I cannot BELIEVE the amount of apologist influence in this memorial.
People will see what honoring terrorism is, which happens to be the very definition of a anti-americanism.
Enough already!!!

(nothing wrong with the following picture either)

This is totally beyond belief.

Another disgusting example of the fact that we are being transformed from a representative democracy, in which elected officials execute the wishes of the majority of their constituents under guidelines established in the Constitution into an Orwellian world of doublespeak where special interest groups direct the actions of government through an anonymous tecnhocratic bureaucracy answerable to no one but a collection of black-robed slickster lawyers with political connections. A government governed by a class of cynical, sycophantic parasites whose sole interest and concern is feeding their own egos and sucking from the public trough as much money and benefits as their sinecures can provide.

If we lived in the kind of world that created America in its infancy, the individuals responsible for this and this obscenity would be removed from their positions of public offense.

Is it possible that the designer of this "memorial" is a ward churchill crony?

You know that after all, the 9/11 victims were little eichmanns and deserved it. It's the 19 hijackers that were the victims.

That picture is of our fallen soldiers buried in france isn't it?

Ever since the french told us to come get our trash off our land(the soldier's bodies) I've said they deserve all that they get.

That was Germany's most respected Jewish cemetery

Looks like a semicircle of trees. And if the architect used that phrase in his description, the whole controversy would have been avoided. On the other hand, he could have written "croissant" and give the French-bashers apoplectic fits.

It just figures you wouldn't understand, sinky.

I understand completely. Some people are just sitting around, waiting to be offended.

Just make a dang square with a fountain in the middle.