I recently came across a post by Newtons Bit that made a whole lot of sense.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3967250&postcount=4
With this in mind, I hereby state that I will abandon the CD hypothesis if no serious challenge to NIST's WTC7 report is put forth.
In other words, if the "new phenomenon" put forth by NIST, which was responsible for the collapse of WTC7, is accepted by the engineering community and changes are made to building practices and codes to keep any other sky scrapper from falling, I will abandon the CD hypothesis and accept that all 3 WTC buildings collapses for reasons stated by NIST.
NIST needed 3 years to come up with their WTC7 hypothesis, so this is exactly how much time I will give for any serious challenge to be set forth by any engineering firm, individual, or "truther engineer".
You've heard it here, so hold me to it.
Cheers
I'm seriously challenging the code change recommendations that NIST is putting forth. I will be submitting comments on the report. I have also asked the people I work with to do the same. I find the code recommendations ridiculous. We(engineers) do not, and should not, guarantee that an office building not collapse given that a 100 story building falls on it, water supplies to half the city are cut, and firefighters have already suffered such horrendous losses that they retreat. To do otherwise would be a level of analysis not seen outside of nuclear power plants. This is huge design creep. It will cost engineers big dollars to do such an analysis that building owners aren't going to want to pay for. If there was something truly wrong with the analysis then developers, engineers and even the banking industry (that underwrites multi-billion dollar building ventures) would be screaming stark raving mad.
But there's not. And just like the reports on WTC1&2 there won't be any. Not any serious allegations of fraud and deceptions in any event. I have no doubt that there will be the standard kooks who will say, "hmm, the building
can't collapse because of friction!" and do some really bad math (if they do any to begin with) and don't even bother trying to replicate the same level of analysis in the NIST reports. We'll debunk them, but the sheep in the "Truth" movement will still believe that gibberish because someone with a degree in mechanical engineering, or architecture, or naval architecture said so. But the vast majority of engineers, the people who wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares of shear failure and wonder if they took the appropriate standard of care keeping
you safe, will not challenge the report because they know it's accurate. Most won't even need to read the report to know it's accurate. The people who worked on this are the same people who sit on the steel code committees, the building code committees, they are the researchers who have already figured out how to appropriately design building to resist seismic forces.
But that doesn't matter. The appeal to authority the Richard Gage, Gordon Ross, Steven Jones, etc will make will overwrite in the minds of "Truthers" the real experts and more importantly, the trust the entire engineering community has for these researchers to not be frauds.
I mentioned standard of care above, which is simply the due diligence that engineers do to verify that what they're designing is safe. I took a look at the "Journal" of 911 Studies and I see no level of care at all. Typos and basic math mistakes are rampant, not something I would expect to see in a real effort. It appears to me that the "Truth" movement's leaders just try to shotgun blast as many imagined problems or deficiencies in the overwhelming consensus theory in an attempt to sway the gullible. You don't see that in the NIST report. Real engineers exercise standards of care when doing things that affect peoples lives. That's why we trust them. That's why you don't think to yourself when you walk into a building, "gee, I wonder if this building is safe".
Oh, and I know that a number of the debunkings I've done have typos and even a few math errors (arithmetic is hard for people with science degrees). But that's because I didn't exercise the same level of care with those things that I do with my job. It's because it doesn't matter. It's arguing on the internet. Doing an analysis to expose a few charlatans isn't quite the same as doing an analysis that exposes wide-spread corruption of the nations engineering leaders or doing an analysis that will have serious ramifications on an entire industry.
So the question I pose to you, is what level of challenge are you referring to? Are you going to ask for a standard of care in this challenge that is similar to the NIST report itself? Or will you settle for something less?
