Quoting Wikipedia: An ad hominem ... is an attempt to link the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the opponent advocating the premise.

If I had said the work they were doing is worthless because they are too young, or they look Irish, or Jewish, or Arab, etc., now that would be ad hominem argumentation.

What I actually did was express a negative opinion about a group based on their actions. You might not like the fact that I was making waves, but I did not engage in the logical fallacy of substituting a personal attack for a logical argument. I spelled out in detail what they did that invalidated their results and expressed the opinion that what they were doing was unscientific, damaging, and possibly even fraudulent.

You can accuse me of being outspoken, but ad hominem arguments are a dishonest form of argumentation. I try to avoid that.

See http://911blogger.com/news/2010-12-30/911-analysis-david-chandler-now-av...

If the red/gray chips are what we think they are, then.... If the fire ever reached 430 °C, it would be the gas temperature of the fire, then it has to heat its surroundings, including this material, in order for it to ignite. That raises the question if this material could be a time bomb with the clock started by impact. There are many possibilities.

Remember though; gas temperature ≠ steel temperature.

I think perhaps the most readily used piece of information in the paper is the story behind the calorimeter experiment. Here you start with a red chip which contains iron oxide but no iron, some aluminium and some other things. After heating to 430 deg C something happens, giving off heat. Afterwards the sample is found to contain some iron, and the iron is semi spherical, showing that it had been molten. The calorimeter was never heated hotter than 700 deg C so cannot have melted the iron. The thing which happened just has to be the thermite reaction, known to produce molten iron at about 2500 Deg C, from iron oxide and aluminium.