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Judy Wood's "Math"

I do hope that jeff takes you up on the invite.... having someone from NIST posting on here will do wonders for our credibility with the 'troofers'...ermmmmm...ummmmmm ....wellllll maybe not....but who cares?
 
From Maccy's link - http://www.clemsontalk.com/vb/showpo...40&postcount=2

As the joists on one or two of the most heavily burned floors gave way and the outer box columns began to bow outward, the floors above them also fell. The floor below (with its 1,300 t design capacity) could not support the roughly 45,000 t of ten floors (or more) above crashing down on these angle clips. This started the domino effect that caused the buildings to collapse within ten seconds, hitting bottom with an estimated speed of 200 km per hour. If it had been free fall, with no restraint, the collapse would have only taken eight seconds and would have impacted at 300 km/h.1 It has been suggested that it was fortunate that the WTC did not tip over onto other buildings surrounding the area. There are several points that should be made. First, the building is not solid; it is 95 percent air and, hence, can implode onto itself. Second, there is no lateral load, even the impact of a speeding aircraft, which is sufficient to move the center of gravity one hundred feet to the side such that it is not within the base footprint of the structure. Third, given the near free-fall collapse, there was insufficient time for portions to attain significant lateral velocity. To summarize all of these points, a 500,000 t structure has too much inertia to fall in any direction other than nearly straight down.
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That was probably one of the best arguments I have heard in a while.
 
Anti-sophist said:
This is where you make your "mistake". In her model of collapse, each floor is falling independantly, thus each collision is between equal masses. It's ridiculous, I know. I'm tempted to make a MATLAB simulation of her model of the collapse because it would make a pretty picture.
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Ahh, now I get it. For her model to work, all that's necessary is for me not to notice that the top pool ball is actually a bowling ball. ;)

This is cool! It means my project to create an h-parameter model of a cauliflower isn't hopeless! :D

BTW, do they still make those doodads with the steel dingleberries? They were fun- if you lifted a ball at each end and released them with the right time offset, you could get some pretty def beats going.
 
Howdy! I was introduced to this site when some of your members came over to Clemson Talk and noticed our, rather scaled down, version of 9/11 conspiracy debunking. Between us, we were curious if anyone would notice us, given the renewed interest in conspiracy theories heralded by the Loose Change documentary.

Maccy mentioned that it would provide a much needed credibility boost if one of the students, a NIST employee, were to begin participating in the forums. However, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, in science, there are no experts. Indeed, it doesn’t take a genius to read the NIST NCSTAR 1 report. It is, after all, written in language for the laity, relegating the rigorous mathematical proof and referencing to the appendices. It also doesn’t take a NIST scientist to know that conspiracy theories are garbage. All people who use valid scientific and logical reasoning are entitled to equal regard as “experts.”

Were I to assign any type of motivation to the student, I would say it’s probably more personal than philosophical. If the people you worked with, respected, admired and emulated were being blanketed by accusations of deceit, their arguments dissembled into various straw man arguments, and their work called a conspiracy, you’d be angry, too. It would infuriate you that hundreds of thousands of man-hours of research could be so casually dismissed as a fabrication, as though NIST employees toss their degrees, education and professional reputations to the wind in favor of a thesis they’ve been told to prove without proof. Inherent to all claims of conspiracy is the claim that these researchers are liars and fabricators of evidence. Dylan Avery and his cronies should be ashamed. They make broad accusations against the government from coercion to money laundering to fabrication, and all are made without direct proof.

Anyway, I’m at least interested in seeing what you folks have to say. It seems like you run a pretty tight ship here with logical, mathematical and scientific analyses in your posts. I’m eager to contribute.
 
Welcome!

I do feel that I need to clarify one thing from your post:

The Almond said:
Maccy mentioned that it would provide a much needed credibility boost if one of the students, a NIST employee, were to begin participating in the forums.
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What I actually said was:

Jeff the Great's expertise and NIST experience would be greatly appreciated if he feels like dropping by.
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http://www.clemsontalk.com/vb/showpost.php?p=545011&postcount=213

I don't think this forum requires "a much needed credibility boost" - I'm sure as you look around you'll agree - and it wasn't my intention to give that impression. I thought that "Jeff the Great" would add to the forum partly because of his expertise as an engineer (which I took to contributing to the quality of his posts on your board) and also because his experience in working for NIST would give an interesting perspective on the evidence. The evidence is at heart all that matters - but perspective and good communication can help to get it across.

Once again, though, welcome to the forum!
 
ellindsey said:
Here is a very simple Python script I put together to model the fall with inelastic collisions. This script treats each floor as an independant object and assumes all floors are equal mass. It assumes all collisions are perfectly inelastic, and that the mass of each floor is added to the mass of the falling debris block. I did put in a term to simulate some mass being lost to the sides with each floor.
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Very impressive Mr. Ellindsey. I applaud your ingenuity in code.
This script does not factor in deceleration due to the energy it would take to overcome the structure of the building. I'm not sure how to best add that.
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You shouldn't have to. NIST does not support the "pancake theory" as a means for destroying the support for each floor. See question 2 on the NIST FAQ.
I don't claim that this script is particuarily accurate, but I do believe it to be a much more accurate calculation than Judy Wood's.
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By accounting, at least in some part, for the momentum reactions at each floor, you've done far more than she has. Billiard balls = reinforced concrete flooring? I don't think so.
With the assumptions made in the code, I get a total collapse time of 15.7 seconds, which does appear to be close to what we see on the videos.
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This part particularly impressed me. The NIST report notes that parts of the interior columns and the core of the building are known to have stood 15 to 25 seconds after collapse initiation.

I don't know if it's been mentioned here, but the commonly reported time of "about 9 seconds" is that reported for the first exterior columns to strike the ground and create a significant seismic incident. The NIST report makes no mention of where the panels came from, or whether or not they were part of the core of the building. It is far more likely that the first panels to strike the ground were part of the ejecta of the building, which fell through the air, unobstructed. Despite video evidence supposedly showing the contrary, the collapse of the WTC towers was not a simple, neat little mess. It was an incredibly complicated bit of work which was largely obstructed by dust and not widely reported by the people the building fell on.

Judy Wood's assumptions and objections stem entirely from the straw man argument that NIST asserts that the collapse happened entirely in 9 seconds. It doesn't and NIST notes that. See sections 5 and 6 of the NIST FAQ I posted above.
 
The Almond said:
By accounting, at least in some part, for the momentum reactions at each floor, you've done far more than she has. Billiard balls = reinforced concrete flooring? I don't think so.
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Actually the concrete floors were lightweight, and not reinforced.
 
maccy said:
I don't think this forum requires "a much needed credibility boost" - I'm sure as you look around you'll agree - and it wasn't my intention to give that impression.
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I agree, you clearly did not mean to imply this. I apologize for the misunderstanding and for my poor choice of words.
I thought that "Jeff the Great" would add to the forum partly because of his expertise as an engineer (which I took to contributing to the quality of his posts on your board) and also because his experience in working for NIST would give an interesting perspective on the evidence.
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This is rather unfortunate. Federal government employees are specifically barred from using their positions in any official capacity. Unless they're in a public relations job, they cannot comment publicly on the validity or naure of any research they are not directly involved with. This is pretty much the same in industry, though industry seems more tight lipped these days.

I agree that a NIST employee would provide an excellent viewpoint, but only if he or she were directly related to the research.
The evidence is at heart all that matters - but perspective and good communication can help to get it across.
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Well said.
 
WildCat said:
Actually the concrete floors were lightweight, and not reinforced.
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From NCSTAR 1, section 5.7, page 75:
Two types of concrete were used for the floors of the WTC towers: lightweight concrete in the tenant office areas and normal weight concrete in the core area.

I acknowledge your point that the floors were not reinforced. Technically they were composite floors as the steel was not imbedded in the concrete. Thanks for pointing this out.
 
uk_dave said:
I do hope that jeff takes you up on the invite.... having someone from NIST posting on here will do wonders for our credibility with the 'troofers'...ermmmmm...ummmmmm ....wellllll maybe not....but who cares?
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To hezmana with the truthers; I'd just love the chance to chat with somebody that was part of the investigative team and to get there input on the analyses we've done here. That would be teh r0xx0rz!
 
It is pretty cool to have a guy from the NIST posting here, welcome to the forum, Jeff the Great / Almond. I look forward to putting your structural jargon into layman's terms while you correct me on the various technical details of how the structure actually works. (Isn't that what architects and engineers usually do?)
 
Here's something from that ClemsonTalk thread:

vash said:
Bush was warned about Al Queida and didn't want to be bothered....
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king said:
... Learn to spell Al Queda correctly and then we can continue this conversation.
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All right dudes!!!

:clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:
 
I noticed that soon after "Brian" appeared, Harksaw asked him something I've been itching to ask Ace as well:

Have you ever taken a physics class?
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Minadin said:
It is pretty cool to have a guy from the NIST posting here, welcome to the forum, Jeff the Great / Almond. I look forward to putting your structural jargon into layman's terms while you correct me on the various technical details of how the structure actually works. (Isn't that what architects and engineers usually do?)
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Thanks for your kind welcome. Just to be clear though, I don't work at NIST, nor do I represent the researchers (government or independent) who produced the WTC reports. I'm just a graduate student in civil engineering at Clemson with a pretty solid background in structural engineering and materials science. I have read the entirety of the NIST and FEMA reports, though, and I'm more than happy to provide references to both when making claims and corrections.
 
The Almond:

Welcome to the JREF Forum on Consipracy Theories. I truely enjoyed watching you tear Brian (sock puppet for TS1234 here) and Jack Straw new a&*holes. your work over here is more than welcome.

Look forward to your input/contributions to this site, where you find no end to a number of things:

(1) Interesting, and often very aggressive debate
(2) Insane theories (courtesy of some of our less than sane CTers)
(3) References to ALOT of useful information. In particular, a frequent user named "Gravy" has collected a vast wealth of info related to all aspects of 9/11.

If you ever get annoyed with the inability of the CTers to see the logic in things, just remember, for every CTer you will never convince, there are 50 lurkers that you will (we have almost as many lurkers as we do members on a given day.

TAM (The Artistic Macrophage)

Edit: I am going with Al-Qaeda:)
 
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Ah, my mistake, Almond, I must have received a wrong impression of a false assumption, thanks for setting me straight, and welcome aboard in any event.
 
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