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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."
There is another good article on the collapse at NewScientist.com
I was very much impressed with the way the buildings withstood that kind of impact long enough for some people to escape. The loss of life if they had gone immediately, or had toppled sideways just doesn't bear thinking about.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
They are in need of computers, supplies and human techs. If you can please help. Some of us can't donate blood. But we can donate our extra computers and supplies.
r y/ 0,23008,3347294,00.html
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/sto
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eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
Apparently, for the vast majority of buildings in the USA, an impact by an aircraft, similar to what happened, would take them down almost instantly. The construction of these buildings saved lives.
There are many articles in New Scientist Magazine on many related subjects to this event, including one that discusses the buildings in some detail.
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Radio Free Nation
an alternate news site using Slash Code
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
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"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
http://www.rotten.com/news/articles/coup-cover-300 .jpg
This is not a joke. It appeared in the current issue of Wired magazine, which was on newsstands before this all happened. I guess it's just one of those odd coincidences.
dinner: it's what's for beer
Hi there. I'm sure many peple won't read this because it was posted so late in this discussion, but I thought you might like a quick word from some of the ER's I've been in today down here. (Columbia, NYU, and Vincent's). Tragically, everyone is really just standing around waiting for live people to come in, and there seems to be a general lack of this. Every now and then a fire fighter comes in, but is generally stable at this stage - likely incidental damage.
Yesterday, one of the firemen was brought in - in his mid fourties, I would suppose. He had a brother and 3 sons who were all firefighters; one of the latter was not accounted for all day yesterday. He himself had gotten caught in the first collapse, had gotten out and went in the second building and was then caught in that collapse and received some blows of debris into his back, for which he was being treated. It's that kind of bravery from the very salt of the earth which makes me so proud to be an American. God bless to all. K
Yeah... I've been wondering if some sort of "emergency slide" would be more effective at getting people out in a hurry... I picture something like the spiral slides in a waterpark, located in the central space of the building. Probably with some sort of mechanism to keep everyone on the slide moving at the same speed (wouldn't have to be powered; a simple harness attached to a cable to provide resistance would probably do the trick)... 'Course, this wouldn't have helped people above the impact site, but I can't help but think that with some design work that an idea like this could make a dent in the length of time it takes to evacuate such large buildings. And I don't think there'd be much of a barrier to handicapped people using such a system either, although I could be wrong on that one.
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Aside from letting the military take care of military matters, I'll tell you what we should do.
We should mow our lawns. We should go out to eat. We should sit on the porch with a beer. We should travel across the country. When the planes are back in the air, we should fly somewhere.
The terrorists don't have any real hope of getting the U.S. to say "Sorry. We'll stop doing the things that make you angry." They have no defined goal toward which they are working. They have a vague goal of defeating us. Because of this, they know they won't gain anything substantial by performing these acts.
The one thing they can accomplish, is to get us to drastically change our way of life. They can frighten us into not travelling about our own country the way we used to. They can get us to hide in our homes, to quit going to our sporting events, movies, etc.
That's their one spoil of war: our lifestyle. And that's not a spoil the military can get back for us. We have to do that. We have to refuse to give it to them.
The perception, even among ourselves, is that American culture is sometimes shallow. Hopefully, we will prove through this time that it only appears so because we refuse to surrender it to such people as would try to take it from us.
We need to go to our baseball games. We need to go buy a bunch of things we don't need from Walmart. We need to take our SUV's out to the lake for a picnic, or to go camping. We need to be ourselves. If we become somebody else, anybody else, we surrender.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
I, for one, think enough is enough. If these tanks were filled with foam, there is a good chance the momentum of the things would have carried the fuel tanks out the other side of the building and the buildings would not have fallen. They fell because of fire; and fuel cells greatly minimize fire.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
> Now that planes have been used themselves as weapons, and the passengers with them, I doubt there will be a high-jacking where they're aren't people like Glick and Barret, who are among the few passangers who apparently made sure that flight 93 crashed in PA woods, and not a national landmark.
The telly news this morning gave out a bit more detail about one of those guy's calls to his wife on the cell phone. He actually called her 4 different times. By the third one the WTC had already been hit twice, and his wife said that when she told him about hit he got really thoughtful and asked a lot of probing questions.
The next time he called, it was a simple "Three of us are going to do something."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade