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Heiwa article accepted at AsCE

R.Mackey said:
Dr. Corotis is familiar with them. And Heiwa's empty headed letter speaks for itself. You'll see.

Personally I think some scientists occasionally enjoy the opportunity to demolish conspiracy-minded idiots in a public forum. I'd have simply rejected the letter as too stupid to be worth addressing, but it's their call.
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I've got to agree with this. I have been looking for ANY response from the engineering community as to this discussion and have seen nothing. If Heiwa's letter struck any cord at all something would have broke by now.

This is just another fail in the long list.
 
Howdy patch,

patchbunny said:
Oooh... that's a beautiful photo. It's like a massive X-ray.
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Yeah, pretty, ain't it.

And instructive.

The image represents about ~90% of the structural support system of the buildings. The last ~10% being the (not insignificant) membrane stiffness added by the aluminum components of the outer wall panels. Note: not the glass portions, as those were necessarily isolated from the bending or shear loads.

Everything else was load, not support.

Without the aluminum fascia & glass panels, you also enormously reduce one of the two largest loads (wind) on the structure.

This image lets you see how good engineers are at getting enormous structural bang for minimal material buck. In one sense, the essence of mechanical design of many components, machines & structures is "paring back material to the absolute minimum required to do its job".

Here, the driving aspect of the design was "maximize tenant space by minimizing structural support space. Oh yeah, and the building collapsing would be a very bad thing..."

To get a sense of how astonishingly good they were in this case, go out onto a football field some day. Stand on the sidelines at the 30 yard line. Look towards the end zone. No, not that end zone. The far one on the other side of the 50 yard line. That (70 yards) is the length of one side of a WTC tower. The far side of it overhangs the far sideline by about 20 yards. Now hold up one hand, with your thumb & forefinger about 4" apart. THAT was the thickness of the solid part of the concrete floor, stretching from your location to the far corner of the building. (About 5.5" thick if you include the grooved trapezoidal segments.) Those concrete floors were wafers.

Trust me that actually going out onto a football field and creating these dimensions with the scale reference provided by the field will be far more impressive than imagining it while reading this post.

I hope that this image helped make my obvious point (that I'm belaboring here): that the load required to produce a failure in a solid mass (or ingot) of metal is vastly greater than that required to produce a failure in a long, thin member of the same material.

For a number of basic mechanical reasons. Few of which (I believe) Heiwa is likely to be able to provide.

And that these basic mechanical reasons are at the very heart of why Heiwa's so-called analysis is so woefully flawed.


Tom
 
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I think nature.com put it nicely

"We also know the difference between a peer-reviewed primary paper or review, and an unreviewed letter to the editor or opinion piece. In other words, we understand the peer-review system, and use it as a filter to sort the wheat from the chaff."

http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature05009.html

of course this will likely spur excuses why peer review isn't necessary after repeated touting of jones's superduperthermite peer review paper
 
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