Re the Beirut explosion:

I'm an engineer at a chemical plant. I don't know much about explosion dynamics or anything like that, but I do know this:

Amateur analysis of (probable) industrial accidents is rarely correct or helpful. :P

"Industry" is another word for "Really dangerous shit carefully contained and controlled to be useful."

We're pretty good at the contain-and-control part - I'm safer inside my plant than out of it.

But the very complexity of those controls, plus the complexity of the underlying systems created by interacting industrial processes, means that when something does go wrong, it's usually gone wrong in a complicated way that requires a lot more than cellphone footage to analyze.

The public should always be skeptical of "experts" whose expertise seems to run counter to common-sense, or who make assertions based on measurements or statistics that are clearly too precise to be correct...
But speculation based on *even less data* is still a bad idea. :)

Necessary follow-up: https://twitter.com/BranMalin/status/1290702264051494913?s=19