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NIST Releases Report On WTC 7 Collapse
photonic writes "After three years of study, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finally released its report on the collapse of World Trade Center building 7. The main conclusion is that the building came down due to fire, not due to debris damage or some conspiracy demolition team. The fire started pretty small after the collapse of WTC 1, but was left to burn several floors out completely. The important finding is that the collapse was triggered by thermal expansion of beams, which could detach asymmetrically loaded girders from the main columns. Some limited pancaking of floors then caused a lack of lateral support and buckling of a single column. This triggered the failure of the entire core of the building, which finally fell down as a single piece. Crackpot theories can be discussed elsewhere; please limit the discussion to the science here. All documents can be found at NIST's WTC page, which read like a porn magazine for finite element junkies. Simulation movies are also available. And yes, they used Beowulf clusters to do the simulations, some of which lasted for several months."
No. The demolition industry avoids the pancaking of floors, because they want an ordered collapse of each individual floor, or at defined levels, to avoid floors completely pancaking into each other and completely dissipating the energy of the demolition. Thus, you see one floor going, and then the floor below a few milliseconds after to avoid the floor above completely collapsing into the floor below to avoid the collapse from being halted and to avoid debris being spread.
You have to do a controlled collapse of each floor at various intervals to make sure the building completely collapses. If you don't, and all you have are a few weakened floors above collapsing (pancaking) on themselves and on to the floors below, then the floors below will simply absorb the energy, the collapsed floors will fall outwards and keep at least some of the building intact. That's why no building above six stories has completely collapsed of its own accord. There's simply too much of it, unless you've weakened the floors at every level. Seriously. Try this with any kind of model any time. It will run out of steam.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. If you destabilise one floor there is nowhere near enough energy to collapse the whole building when the rest of it is still largely intact. That's why any demolition will demolish a building bit by bit at specific times and at given floor levels to make sure the whole thing goes straight down.
That's why you bring in a demolition company.
I don't believe I've said that all the steel needed to melt at all. This is something you're assuming - for some reason.
However, to get a complete collapse of a whole building that large you have to have destabilised large parts of it at various intervals to ensure that it all goes straight down and not a trace of the structure is left. All the floors below the fire have to be destabilised in some fundamental way to ensure this happens. No demolition company has ever turned up on site and said "Oh, we'll burn five storeys in the top half of this fifty storey building and it will all go down". The entire building needs to be accounted for.
You've offered no explanation as to how all the floors, most of which were completely untouched, below the few floors that were affected by fire became so structurally unsound that they were able to collapse in. Unless this happens, you simply don't have enough energy to precipitate a full collapse from the action of a few floors at the top of the building collapsing into those below. You will still get at least some of the building intact.
I don't. I'm asking the question as to what caused all the floors to completely collapse.
They Bush administration got exactly what they wanted in Afghanistan and Iraq,
No, what they wanted was for the Iraqi people to greet us as liberators, and to begin withdrawing our troops from a peaceful democratic Iraq by around 2004. Oh, and did I mention the profits from Iraq's oil sales were supposed to bankroll the whole thing, so it wouldn't cost the American taxpayer anything? Of course most of us would call this plan criminally stupid, but that was the plan.
they got exactly what they wanted with the Patriot Act
Yes, I wonder how long they'd had that bit of legislation sitting around waiting for the right opportunity.
the FISA bill, wiretapping,
No, they just didn't want anyone to find out they were doing it. They're happy with the recent modification to FISA, of course, but their intention was to simply ignore the law, not change it.
no-fly lists,
I'm not sure how really this benefits anybody. Although Ted Kennedy getting on the list was pretty funny.
they got exactly what they wanted on things like the bankruptcy bill,
I can't speak to this; I'm sure you're right.
now they even got Poland and the Czech Republic to agree to the missile shield, even though it doesn't even work and in both countries the majority of the population are opposed to the project.
Yeah, that was a neat piece of diplomacy. Of course it doesn't work, but that was never the goal of the project - the goal was to line somebody's pockets. Any actual security benefits are icing on the cake.
If you consistently get what you want for 7 years, that's not exactly incompetence.
If they'd gotten exactly what they wanted, Bush's approval rating would be a bit higher than 30%. We came awfully close to electing John Kerry in 2004 even though nobody (including Democrats) actually liked him. Yes, it's a testament to the genius of Karl Rove that Bush managed to get reelected anyway, and that we haven't yet found evidence of deliberate vote tampering by Diebold, but it was a lot closer than they would have liked.
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
All Bush had to do was dismantle and stall anti-terrorism intelligence work, and he knew *something* would happen, and soon. He perhaps didn't expect the WTC to be hit, but the incompetence aimed at allowing it to happen was pretty systematic. Once it did occur, it took only a matter of days before it was cynically being spun to sell weapons and make bank for those who profit from disaster. It was a boon for all the institutions of the day, and big media who are wholly owned subsidiaries of the war industry. Perhaps nobody really allowed themselves to admit how they were using it to profit, but everyone did. Iraq was rolled out over the not-yet-cold bodies of 9-11 without anyone blinking an eye, while leveler heads were roundly ridiculed and marginalized.
None of these incompetent fuckers are innocent.
And who most likely told George Bush to lay low and do nothing? Probably, he was sold on the idea in a late night phone conference with Henry Kissinger: "Mister President, perhaps a little trip to Florida is just the thing you need to bolster your plunging numbers..."
In fact, this will be dramatized in my upcoming made-for-tv film "Homeland Insecurity" which will be released on the day Tom Skerritt apologizes for his role in NBC's racist, jingo-fest made-for-tv movie "Homeland Security" (now available on DVD!)
Welcome to the pretendocracy, people!
-- thinkyhead software and media