Slashdot Mirror
More WTC News
Current WTC happenings: The FBI is searching ISPs with FISA warrants. Architects and civil engineers are starting to speculate on why the towers collapsed. Pictures: NASA, a powerful photoessay, newspaper headlines. Current investigation news: LA Times, NY Times, CNN. They're finally starting to mention casualty figures. Finally, bjb writes: "It isn't the hollywood blockbuster of a story, but I'm a daily reader of Slashdot, and I was on the 38th floor of the WTC 1 building when the first plane hit. Oh, and I was reading Slashdot at the time. You can read about my experience here. It was originally an email that I sent out to friends and family, but I was asked by NPR's Talk of the Nation to make it a web page."
we feel with you.
They were designed to survive a "once in a century storm", something like Hurricane Andrew. They naturally sway several feet in strong winds.
h tml
Buildings are simply not constructed to survive being slammed into by a 400,000 pound jet going 300+ miles per hour. Especially ones that are 20+ years old.
Jet specs are at: http://www.boeing.com/commercial/767-300/product.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
This was written by Gordon Sinclair in 1973 at the end of the Vietnam Conflict.
You can read about it at this site, including the aftereffects of what it meant to his career - both good and bad. There's also a RealAudio copy of the recording he did of this, which is backed up by 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic'.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
As everyone knows by know, Morgan Stanley Dean Whitter occupied roughly 10% of the WTC, with some 3500 employees. There's a good article on Yahoo this morning about their offsite back strategy, and how it enabled them to start working again almost immediately.
this is what you get if you google for Ameer-Bukhari
(link)
apparently a student-pilot from Vero Beach(!), Florida with the same name has had a plane crash exactly(!) a year before the WTC attack.
coincidence???
Plane collision victim was experienced pilot
A Maineville man who was killed in the midair collision
of two small planes in Florida on Monday afternoon had
been a pilot for Airborne Express for almost two years.
Roger Boromei, 31, of Jewelweed Court, was flying a
twin-engine Piper Aztec owned by a family friend,
according to Mark Weinberg, a spokesman for the St. Lucie
County, Fla., sheriff's department. Mr. Boromei started his
trip at an airport in Okeechobee, Fla., where his father lives,
Mr. Weinberg said.
The other man killed in the crash was Ameer Bukhari, a
Saudi Arabian national living in nearby Vero Beach, Fla., Mr.
Weinberg said. He was flying a single-engine Piper
Cherokee owned by FlightSafety International, where he
was a student pilot.
It might have been Mr. Bukhari's first solo flight, the Port
St. Lucie News reported.
Mr. Boromei, on the other hand, was a first officer - or
co-pilot - for DC-9s at Airborne Express, Beth Huber, a
spokeswoman there, confirmed Tuesday. The Wilmington,
Ohio-based company ships cargo nationwide.
The collision between the planes took place about
two miles west of St. Lucie International Airport, Mr.
Weinberg said.
Before anyone starts harping about admissibility of certain information it must be noted that this event can be considered an act of war. The rules for war are vastly different from those that apply in court.
I.e. You mearly want to know who did it. If that information is obtained illegally doesn't matter. It only needs to be accurate.
In fact you don't even need to be precise. I.e. you can narrow it down to a government and go flatten that country. Like I said war has different rules.
By extension if it's an individual that's responsible rather than a government, you can simply send an assassin after him rather than go for a trial.
I can for instance tell you what the Feds hope to discover. They want it to be Ben Laden acting on contract for Sadam. That way they can send in a full military strike and give the American people (through CNN) an adequate supply of revenge.
For the record however this isn't an American tragedy. Trinidad had an Embassy in the towers and There are several Jamaicans working in that complex. Perhaps over a hundred. Chances are some of us died too. Believe me we are every bit as pissed as you are.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
My boyfriend is a professional structural engineer who has done a lot of work on major LA buildings. He's currently attending Berkeley for a masters in Structural Engineering and, in chatting with his professors, came to this (paraphrased):
1) Yes, the buildings did withstand the impact of the airplanes. They didn't fall immediately, did they?
2) Buildings are built to a certain fire code, in that the building won't completely catch on fire and collapse for a certain length of time (usu 1hr?). The escape routes are located generally in the four corners. Since the plane took out one of them, this means that the required escape time is now 2+ hours.
3) Jet fuel burns with a much higher temperature than normal fuel.
4) Steel expands and crystalizes under extreme heat. Since the plane(s) hit at a "centre"-ish spot, the steel tried to expand up and down, but since the steel in the "up" and "down" weren't hot and wouldn't move, the steel in the "centre" buckled.
5) Since jetfuel burns hotter, step 4 happened faster and also reduced the "buckle" time by a certain amount - when used along with the increased escape time required, means that considerably fewer people would be able to escape.
6) Since the steel buckled, the upper floors now come crashing down on to the floor immediately below. Being as that floor is not suited to hold X number of upper floors MOVING rapidly at it, it collapsed and repeat until bottom.
Therefore, it was the fire that made the buildings collapse, not the impact of the planes.
-mrsmalkav
For those of you that are getting the nostradamus quotes in your email, point them here. Yep, its a fake.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
There's a reasonably good diagram of the affected areas here. (Requires shockwave) For NYC specifically, click on the NYC link on this map. The buildings down or in danger are in red. Manhattan island has been almost completely shut down from 14th Street south. That's about 1/6th of the island.
There is an interesting Ny Times article which describes a reporter's interviews with Afghanistan People.
[A] 25-year-old constable sat on the floor beneath a single dangling light bulb. His name was Muhammad Anwar. He had heard something about the attack in America but he had no idea how many were killed or what cities were involved. Indeed, it seemed unlikely that he had ever heard of New York.
"Attacks like these are not a good thing because Muslims live all over the world and Muslims may have been killed," Mr. Anwar said hesitantly. By his reckoning, Americans were enemies of Afghanistan, as were Jews and Christians. He thought about this a bit more and retracted it partially. "There must have been all kinds of people in the building, not just bad Jews but good Jews, not just bad Christians but good ones." He remembered something he had learned in his madrassa, or religious school. "It is un-Islamic to kill innocent people," he said.
Gordon Sinclair died in 1984. Those comments you attached were spoken in 1973, in comment on Vietnam.
u ni que/am_text.html for the full text and story.
It has been altered as well.
http://www.rcc.ryerson.ca/schools/rta/ccf/news/
The NY Times has a few maps of which buildings have collapsed/are unstable (Seems registration is uneeded at the moment too).
But I agree with typical geek - if you're not needed there, stay out of the way.
I simply put it there to prevent people from reprinting my story without my permission. I just don't want it to be used in the wrong way, and this is how I thought I could protect it.
You're entitled to your own thoughts, but if you think I'm doing this for money, you are quite wrong.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Interesting reading:
- Terror in the Mind of God: the Global Rise of Religious Violence
- Political Islam
Meanwhile, in Australia they are already stoning school buses with Islamic kids on them... (I have a rant about this on my home page.)Danny
[I have written 600 book reviews]
I have written over 900 book reviews
Amazon.com has an online donations page set up so you can give up to $100 from the comfort of your desk (using the patented one-click method if you like). Unlike the Red Cross site, which is severely overloaded, Amazon's page is quite quick. Donations through Amazon alone are already at nearly $2.4 million, and you can refresh the page to watch them climb.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
The "cloud" seen in the radar image is not a result of the smoke/dust cloud.
What radar image are you referring to? The spaceimaging shots are all visible light images from the ikonos satellite. That smoke/dust is very real.
Sinclair Editorial
From that page: "On June 5 1973, Canadian radio commentator Gordon Sinclair decided he'd had enough of the stream of criticism and negative press recently directed at the United States of America by foreign journalists (primarily over America's long military involvement in Vietnam, which had ended with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords six months earlier). When he arrived at radio station CFRB in Toronto that morning, he spent twenty minutes dashing off a two-page editorial defending the USA against its carping critics which he then delivered in a defiant, indignant tone during his "Let's Be Personal" spot at 11:45 AM that day."
Helevius
You might want to check your facts first. There were almost 60,000 killed in Vitenam and 153,000 casualties. We're all saddened by the events but please don't add to the misinformation.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Just a heads up to all who remember this movie, starring Peter Gallagher. Shows the FBI chasing the WTC bombers, and alot from the bombers side. It gave me chills when I saw it, and I'm setting TiVo to record this tomorrow - the listing came from a link off of the IMDb:
Path to Paradise(1997)
THMAX 09:40AM-11:15AM Friday Sep 14
"No curb side checkin? LIke thats gonna make a DIFFERENCE? Its SO simple to make a weapon - just as a prisoner. Consider this:"
[snip]
Consider THIS: A few weeks ago I was at the airport and went to one of those fancy restaurants you can eat in near the terminals (I don't recall the name right now). I ordered steak, and guess what? They gave me a nice large KNIFE to cut it with. This restaurant was AFTER THE SECURITY CHECKPOINT. Chew on that for a while.
A common type is lead powder/granules compressed into a bullet shape. WHen it hits a hard object, they generally dont penetrate, soft object get the full force and can be quite leathal as i understand. Were commonly used in old carnival games with shooting at wood sucks, wouldnt penetrate, wouldnt ricochet, and the powder wwas easily gatherd up and used again.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
The Red Cross is looking for Citrix engineers and Microsoft pros as well as a large list of equipment and connectivity for its field workers and Emergency Operations Centres in New York.
To see if you can help, please click here!
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
And like the articles also said, once the weight of the upper floors started to come down, it took out the floor support beams that also kept the outer skeleton in place.
The steel only buckled right around the fire, but once those supports were removed, the skeleton was then able to buckle and move in ways that buildings shouldn't.
Also, on the escape time, the fire from the fuel probably made passage from the above floors through the escape routes nigh impossible. So pretty much if you were above the point of impact, you were in trouble. After the first impact, they had people from around the 90th floor calling on cel phones talking about the heat and smoke, saying "We're fucking dieing up here".
But yes, the fire is the cause, hence the choosing of planes heading across the country from a "local" airport - LOTS of fuel.
I've probably fired about 100 rounds of Glaser ammo over the years at the range, and I've never had a single round fragment in the barrel. It is more succeptable to damage than traditional ammo (particuarly oil contamination) and it does degrade with age, so it needs to be handled carefully and replaced frequently. (That explains why I've shot so much of it even though it's insanely expensive). For more info, read the FAQ [safetyslug.com].
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
> Notably in the fact that Islam was spread initially by military conquest. Christianity was spread by word of mouth and people willing to die for it- but not fight for it with violence.
They probably didn't teach you in Sunday School that most of continental Europe (outside the borders of the Roman Empire) was "Christianized" at swordpoint.
To say nothing of the spread of Christianity beyond Europe during the Colonial Era. (Indeed, there was a doctrine [called repartimenta, IIRC], that essentially justified enslavement of the natives as a way for them to "repay" the Europeans for having troubled themselves to sail across the seas to save their souls.
Don't confuse ideology with history.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
A second debris site, 6 to 8 miles from the original crash site of the Somerset county plane has been found. This does not jive with what we know now.
The thinking now is that an A) explosive device went off on the plane or B) we shot it down. Dont be so horrified by this second possibility. Its better than it crashing into another populated building. Read the article. Its amazing.
The founders of the US identified "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as _inalienable rights_. Since liberty is one of them, losing it is a _major_ loss. Patrick Henry, great Virginian: "Give me liberty or give me death." Liberty was and still is worth dying for, to many.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
If they are really lying, they did a nice job changing the pictures... This is supposedly a picture of Palestinians celebrating on Tuesday. Notice the little boy. He's wearing a Brazilian national soccer team shirt. And this shirt is quite different from the ones used in 1991. Actually, this one is pretty recent, I think it was used the first time around the 1998 world cup.
I can't say if the picture is really from Tuesday, but it really can raise some questions about this "indie" article. That, and the fact that I live in Brazil and haven't heard a word from anyone at the University of Campinas about this.
Marcelo Vanzin
CNN has been known on many occasions to get the news wrong, or fabricate stories (Wolf Blitzer).
However, this time, they are reporting the truth. www.haaretzdaily.com , one of Israel's better independent newspapers also reported this story, and took photos on site, from the past few days, not 1991.
The story at Indymedia was posted by a Brazilian. I think I'll trust sources in Israel instead of someone in South America, Thank You very much.
Microsoft have donated $10 Million dollars to the red cross. Here's the article
Idiots.
Liberty in your lifetime
A terrific book that talks about the collision of the B-29 against the Empire State Building is Mario Salvadoris "Why Buildings Fall Down", it's a terrific book.
Chris DiBona
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
I seriously doubt your assertions that the fuel tanks would have gone out the other side of the building if they were filled with foam. That was a very big airplane traveling at high speed into a big immmovable object. If you want to convince me otherwise, build lots of finite element models of the airplane and building, run some tests, and get back to me.
Fuel cells in cars are easy since they are usually a simple geometric shape and are small. The fuel tanks in airplanes are large, integral parts of the structure and not so simple of a shape.
I don't think you can ever build a fuel tank for a n aircraft that will not rupture in a crash if the airplane is still intended to be light enough to fly.
I *am* a mechanical engineer working in the aerospace industry. (Formerly Boeing, now Lockheed Martin)
From: http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/ 0,23008,3347294,00.html
The New York American Red Cross is in dire need of technology equipment and services. The field workers and sites have little, if any, means of communication and the central office is processing way too much on completely paper systems. Your help in acquiring these resources would be greatly appreciated.
If you can help, please contact:
Joe Leo, Assistant Director, Business Applications, IT
American Red Cross in Greater New York
phone: 212.875.2409
email: jleo@arcgny.org
150 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10023
PLEASE NOTE: His email is slammed, so don't resend your messages over and over again.
Following is the list of equipment that the Red Cross needs for its field workers and expanded Emergency Operations Centers. It also needs certified Citrix engineers and Microsoft-certified consultants.
40 IBM computers and laptops (with NICs)
Monitors (with desktops)
Any storage solutions
25 10/100 hubs (8+ Ports)
100 Cat5 cables (All lengths)
50 power strips
Any IBM-compatible memory
Any 3Com wireless NIC cards and LAN products
30 desktop-size UPSs
15 LaserJet printers (HP 1100 or faster) and printer supplies
20 external Zip drives and disks
Any diskettes and R/W CDs
5 external CD burners
5 duplex document scanners
25 extension cords
any colored tie wraps
any Velcro cable wraps
50 Citrix client licenses
12 PCMCIA LAN cards for IBM P20 ThinkPads, preferably 3Com (in addition to those in the new PCs)
50 Microsoft Exchange CALs
35 Microsoft SQL CALs
50 Microsoft Office Professional licenses
15 PC Anywhere licenses
DSL lines
PDAs with wireless capacity and service
Nextel cellphones and service
Thanks in advance for your generous assistance. Any donation will help greatly.
I took this as if you'd written "Christianity was [initially] spread...", because that seemed clear to me in context.
If so, you're quite correct. The first 300 years or so, Christians were, by and large, tortured, beaten, probably raped, certainly killed, by the various nations to whose people they preached, whether their gods were pagan, Jewish, or none whatsoever. That indeed was the way Christianity was initially spread. Further, followers of Christianity typically gave up positions of power and/or tyranny over others, one notable example being Saul->Paul. Christianity wasn't then, and I believe never was intended to be, an authorization for tyrannizing anyone else, for any reason, under any circumstances, using any means involving force or the threat of its use.
Others correctly point out that, beginning with the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Rome around 300AD, it was subsequently (which is what I'm stressing here!) spread, too often, via violence, as you say Islam was initially (and I'll have to take your word on that).
In case anyone thinks the others' postings were just minor "oversights", in terms of missing the important element of the context of your post, I'll suggest that, no, they probably didn't care that you said "initially" at all.
I'm an avid reader of The Christian Science Sentinel. Needless to say from the title alone, that's a highly pro-Christian publication.
But, a few months ago, they ran a cover-page article on the so-called "cultural creatives" movement, an interview with the two sociologists who "discovered" this phenomenon.
In that article, when they asked these supposedly highly educated people about Christianity, they responded by talking about 2,000 years (not, I stress, 1,700 -- that is, they included the first 300 years) of a history of fighting, nations (they focused primarily on Western ones) building war machines, and so on.
(I guess maybe those sociologists considered early Christians' preference for being eaten by lions to denouncing Christ and converting to pagan deities to be examples of being "contentious"?)
So, I believe some of the respondents to your post did not miss your point at all -- that they did what those sociologists did, willingly and willfully repeat anti-Christian rhetoric as a "rebut" to a supposedly incorrect statement regarding Christian history.
And, again, your statement was not incorrect.
(To those who truly believe they responded without realizing he was referring to "initial" history, I apologize in advance for inferring that you didn't care. In recognition of the fact that a predominantly Christian nation is recovering from the aftermath of an attack killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, I urge you to immediately apologize for having written a knee-jerk response criticizing Christianity, especially if you used an insulting or condescending tone or if you didn't take care to point out that you were not referring to its first 300 years of existence.)
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
Steel (and Iron for that matter) have a number of differenty possible crystal structures, which vary widely in the strentgh, maleability and brittleness. The rusting rate also changes, but that is not interesting in this context, but it is for the design of blades and tooling. The oldest way to change the crystal structure of iron or steel is to heat it up to a certain temperature, then cool it in a controlled way. Fast cooling leads to a hard brittle structure, slower cooling leads to a more malleable structure. Heat the surface and cool it quickly and you've got case-hardened metal in hand. The key thing to remember is (as any blacksmith has experienced at some time or other) iron gets brittle before it gets to the cherry red stage.
I assume that there was both heat-related sag and a brittle region beyond that as you moved farther from the hottest flames. So, it is possible that the metal did, in fact, get brittle and snap in the heat, along with the sagging, leading to a sudden pancake type collapse.
Who would have thought that you needed to plan for hundreds or thousands of gallons of aircraft fuel when sizing fire supression gear in a tower?
As reported in today's WashPost Style Section, The Coup has changed the artwork.
Obviously, you don't know enough about guns. ;-)
The Glaser Safety Slug was invented specifically for use on aircraft by Air Marshals.
"I ain't 'nobody,' dork....right?"
No-one except Tom Clancy, that is.
As the originally quoted boyfriend in this thread, maybe I can offer some clarification of the comments made regarding my (personal)conclusions about the collapse. The original synopsis was fairly right on.
Regarding what happens to steel under extreme temperature - the previous post regarding crystalization of steel is right on. Steel is a crystaline structure made up mostly of iron molecules (mixed with carbon and some other things to create modern structural steel). Under normal conditions this crystaline structure is fairly densely packed (body-centered cubic for any chemists out there). As steel is heated (above approx. 2000 deg F, but I am not sure about the exact temperature), this crystal structure changes to a "looser" arrangement (face-centered cubic). The net result is that the "strength" of the steel degrades to about half of it's original value. In other words, once the steel crystalizes, its load capacity gets cut in half (approximately).
Regarding the difference between a fire caused by jet fuel and a "normal fire" - Buildings are normally designed to to remain standing during a fire. Or, they are at least designed to remain standing long enough to fully evacuate. Simply stated, take the occupancy of the structure and the rate at which people can exit via emergency routes and you get a time required to empty the building. As a designer, you have to make sure that the building will stay up that long (or longer). The point is that the "design fire" is made up of things that noramlly burn in a building. These are things like paper, drywall, furniture, carpet, etc. They are not things like jet fuel. Jet fuel is composed primarily of hydro-carbons (don't quote me on that one, I'm not a chemist or a fuel expert). The point is that jet fuel burns 2-3 times hotter than one would normally expect a building to burn. The result is that the steel changes phase faster, its strength degrades faster, and the additional forces created by the thermal expansion of the steel columns cause them to experience additional load faster.
Add to this the fact that the fire-resistant coating applied to the steel may have been mechanically damaged (i.e. ripped off) when the impact occured, and the fact that the fire-suppression system in the building was almost certainly damaged at the floors wherethe fire was actualy happening, and you get a building that loses its vertical load carrying capacity a lot faster than anticipated. Add to that the fact that some portion of the vertical load carrying system was already destroyed by having a jet liner crash into it and it's not surprising that the building collapsed prior to full evacuation (at least one of the 4 evacuation stairwells was totally destroyed, and the other 3 may have been on fire or full of smoke slowing evacuation further).
This is a tragedy. The loss of life involved is horrendous. The anger and hate that caused this attack in the first place makes me sick. The anger and hate that I suspect will ensue as a result (leading to more death - sickly illogical) scare me and sadden me. But, if we can momentarily accept that it did happen, and that we must mourn and respond in our own ways, and we can step back to look at how the building actually behaved, it is my initial and personal opinion that the structure behaved very well. It stayed up under the force of the impact of a large passenger jet even after losing some substantial portion of its structural system. It then stayed up for approx. another hour while a fire 2-3 times hotter than would normally be expected in such a building degraded the strength of the remaining structure. All things considered, the building behaved remarkably well!
Please do not interpret this as insensitivity to the terrible loss of life that occured. But, despite the sorrow and rage, consider what would have been required to make a building that would still be standing under those conditions. Can such a building be designed? Yes. Would it be economical to build? No. Would it be a functional to work in? No. Would it serve the purposes required of such a structure? No. And could someone, somewhere still figure out some way to bring it down that the designer had not considered? Yes.
Design and construction of a building like the WTC is an incredible accomplishment. That it performed how it did under that conditions it was subjected to is even more amazing. Much the same response is heard by designers after a major earthquake. Why not build them stronger?! Why did this happen?! Give me any design, and I can give you an event, natural or unatural that will fail that design.
So, where and how does the designer choose that line? Is it acceptable for you to go to work everyday in a 1 story concrete bunker with no windows so that your chances of being killed by a terrorist controlled plane full of jet fuel will be minimized? How would you responded Monday morning if someone had suggested that?
They just need to bring back Sky-Marshalls. Sky-Marshalls are specially trained agents that fly in plain clothes. The airlines don't even know who they are. El Al never gets hijacked because there are a guaranteed 2 armed agents on every flight. If we had just one Sky-Marshall on each of those flights they would have taken out the terrorists before most people on the plane even realized what was going on. Sky-Marshalls have not been flying much (or at all) lately because of budgetary cutbacks. The FAA has anounced that there will be many more Sky-Marshalls flying in the future.
Check out this and this-- it looks like an American Eagle starting salary is $30,000, with a raise of $3-8000 in the second year.
This still means the pilot is making about as much as a NYC bus driver with the same amount of seniority, which does strike me as a bit odd...
I hope this is one of the things that changes for the better after this awful ordeal.
HOWTO get better dates on slashdot
not a big surprise, but more trains & cars have been added.
sulli
RTFJ.