Free Fallin' Again

I don't know why this idea didn't occur to me before this, but this afternoon I thought I'd try timing one of the controlled demolitions that the "Truthers" are so fond of citing as comparables for the World Trade Center Buildings. Professor Jones recommends the Southwark Towers as particularly instructive in his paper, Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse.

Here's a page with the Southwark Towers demolition. You have to click on the third icon from the left on the bottom row to see this demo.

Watching carefully, I estimated that the roof on the left building started sagging right around 38.24 into the movie, and that the top of the building hit ground at about 45.69. Thus the duration of the collapse was about 7.45 seconds. From this page we know that the roof of the building was about 98 meters high, or approximately 323 feet. But a building of 323 feet should not take 7.45 seconds to collapse in free fall, it should only take 4.5 seconds by the formula 16*4.5^2=323.

We can also figure out the actual formula for the drop of the building observed; it's about 5.85*7.45^2, which is quite a bit slower than free fall.

Now let's try using that formula to determine how long it should have taken the World Trade Center towers to fall.

1360=5.85*t^2
1360/5.85=t^2
232.5=t^2
t=15.25 seconds

Therefore, it appears that the World Trade Center came down too fast to be a controlled demolition.

Nutty Site

I just want to read some more of this crazy conspiracy theory.

WTC 7

I'm starting to assemble evidence regarding the collapse of WTC 7. This is a work in progress. I'm not going to get into any extensive structural analysis focusing on the column structure of the building; I'm not an engineer and unlike a lot of the folks in the 9-11 "Truth" movement I'm not going to play one on the Internet.

First, let's take a look at WTC 7 as it looked prior to 9-11:



This shows the relative locations of the buildings:



When you hear that they were 300 feet apart, that sounds like quite a ways, until you remember how immense these buildings were. This photo (from the South Tower) should give you a better idea of the proximity:



How was the building damaged?

It was damaged largely by the collapse of World Trade Center 1 (the North Tower).

Was the building severely damaged?

Yes, as you can see from the photo below, WTC 7 was severely damaged:



Here's a graphic estimate of how much of the building was actually damaged by the impact of Tower One:



I have not found a good picture of the south side of World Trade Center 7 prior to its collapse but after the collapse of the Twin Towers. But I think you can see that it was quite extensively damaged.

This is not a surprise when you look at this picture:



As you can see, WTC 7 is clearly in the debris field for the collapse of WTC 1; indeed in this picture it looks as though some debris cleared the WTC 7 building. Of course, as the North Tower continued to collapse, it would eventually be below the roofline of WTC #7, which would mean what? That's right, that the debris would be hitting the side of the building. Which side? Looking at the site map, it appears obvious that the south side of WTC #7 would sustain the most damage, especially the southwest corner.

Here are some looks at the fires raging in WTC 7:





Of course, again, these are pictures from the north side. Here's one I was able to obtain looking roughly east, which shows how much smoke is billowing out of WTC 7.



Did its collapse come as a complete surprise? Not according to accounts of firefighters at the scene:

Richard Banaciski of Ladder 22:

They told us to get out of there because they were worried about 7 World Trade Center, which is right behind it, coming down. We were up on the upper floors of the Verizon building looking at it. You could just see the whole bottom corner of the building was gone. We could look right out over to where the Trade Centers were because we were that high up. Looking over the smaller buildings. I just remember it was tremendous, tremendous fires going on.

Finally they pulled us out. They said all right, get out of that building because that 7, they were really worried about. They pulled us out of there and then they regrouped everybody on Vesey Street, between the water and West Street. They put everybody back in there.

Finally it did come down. From there - this is much later on in the day, because every day we were so worried about that building we didn't really want to get people close. They were trying to limit the amount of people that were in there. Finally it did come down. That's when they let the guys go in. I just remember we started searching around all the rigs.

Deputy Chief Peter Hayden:

Firehouse: Other people tell me that there were a lot of firefighters in the street who were visible, and they put out traffic cones to mark them off?
Hayden: Yeah. There was enough there and we were marking off. There were a lot of damaged apparatus there that were covered. We tried to get searches in those areas. By now, this is going on into the afternoon, and we were concerned about additional collapse, not only of the Marriott, because there was a good portion of the Marriott still standing, but also we were pretty sure that 7 World Trade Center would collapse. Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.

A transit is a surveyor's instrument; the idea here is that you fix its sight on an identifiable spot and then check it periodically to see if the building has moved at all. Incidentally, note that the fact that the fire department fixed a transit on the building undermines the claim that nobody expected the building to fall, because after all it was a steel building and none of those had ever collapsed.

By the way, that whole bit about WTC 7 collapsing neatly into its own footprint? Typical nonsense from the Loosers. Here's a picture of the damage to 30 West Broadway from the collapse of WTC 7:



Here's a picture of the damage to the Verizon Building from the collapse of WTC 7:



Here's the damage to the building adjacent to WTC 7 to the North (White building with terraced roof).



Incidentally, there were seven World Trade Center buildings in all; can you guess how many of them are still standing? Answer: Zero. Four buildings were destroyed on 9-11 (nobody ever mentions WTC 3, which was a 22-story building), and the other three (WTC 4-6) all partially collapsed and had to be demolished.

We also hear how far WTC 7 was from the WTC 1, but how many know even farther away buildings to the west suffered enormous damage? Here are the Winter Garden and World Financial Center #3:



You can see their relative positions here:



So we combine massive damage from the collapse of the North Tower, plus fires burning for hours with no attempts at firefighting, plus the fact that the fire department knew the building was doomed hours before it fell, and what's left for the CT crowd? Larry Silverstein's comment about "pulling" it.

The good news is that the rebuilding of WTC 7 was completed this week (no, Silverstein didn't take the money and run, he rebuilt):

Testing

123

The Cheney Story

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Rush and I

Both got this wrong:

Brown is black in the eyes of Rush Limbaugh. When Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett was forced out of the Democratic primary in the U.S. Senate race in Ohio, the conservative commentator criticized The New York Times for not saying that the Democrats' preferred candidate is black.

Limbaugh later found out from e-mails to his nationally syndicated radio show that the candidate, Rep. Sherrod Brown, is, in fact, white.

Yep, as a look at the photo on his website reveals. I'll even admit that the name was the main reason I made the assumption; unique first name combined with standard-issue last name is a big hint to me that the person is black. Kanye West. La Shawn Barber. Shaquille O'Neal. That's not to say that it doesn't happen the other way, as with Sherrod Brown.

But I should have realized that the racial issue would be discussed if we're talking about a black guy being the preferred candidate for a Senate seat over a white guy; somebody would be talking about the political calculations.

Poor Punctuation

The headline on this article reads:

'Radicals' plot how to save Earth.

Of course, were I editing that paper, the quotes would be around 'save'.

"I don't hear a lot of people talking about what it's going to take to win," Ben Pachano, a visitor from Arizona wearing a yarmulke and a black "Hunt Saboteur" T-shirt, says. "What's it going to take for us to overthrow the system that is killing the planet?"

These aren't idle words — not when they come at a national meeting of Earth First!, the in-your-face eco-crusade whose followers are known for holding 2-year-long tree sit-ins, throwing their bodies in front of bulldozers and sabotaging logging equipment to save forests. The movement held its annual winter conference this week in the J.W. Corbett Wildlife Management Area, briefly making Palm Beach County an epicenter of radical environmentalism in the United States.

"Radical" is a proud word for the movement's followers, including Lake Worth residents who have blocked rush-hour traffic, dumped rotten oranges in front of business leaders, marched with giant puppets and bared breasts in The Breakers to protest globalization, condo projects and The Scripps Research Institute.

"People tend to throw around the word 'radical' like it's a bad thing," says Peter "Panagioti" Tsolkas, 25, a Lake Worth anarchist who helped organize — if that's the proper word — the Earth First! gathering. "It's not that I hope we can save the planet. We're going to save it or we're going to die trying."

How Hackett Got Pushed Out

This story continues to resonate with the far Left.

Sen. Schumer was also reported to be trying to turn off Hackett’s cash spigots. No one would confirm this to me on the record. But veteran political activist David Mixner, who described himself as “a fanatically strong supporter” of Hackett and who helped sponsor a New York fundraiser, confirmed that he “received calls from a couple people in Congress urging Paul Hackett to withdraw or not to contribute money to his campaign. The reasons ranged from he can’t win, to he’s too controversial, Brown has more money, is more centrist, and more appealing. It was that inner beltway circle crap,” said Mixner. “They are people who have no idea what’s going on in the country but believe they know everything.”

As word spread about the intra-party intrigue that helped bring down Hackett, supporters have reacted angrily. “If the Democratic Party continues with these suicidal decisions, we will continue to defeat ourselves,” declared Yolanda Parker, who recently attended a California fundraiser for Hackett. “The only strategy the Republicans need to stay in power is patience. They just need to wait while our party self-implodes through idiotic decisions such as the one to pressure an articulate Iraqi war veteran to pull out of the race.”

Close Encounters of the Impeachment Kind

Richard Dreyfuss takes up the cause:

Richard Dreyfuss, the actor who starred in movies ranging from "Jaws" to "Mr. Holland's Opus," told an audience in Washington, D.C., on Thursday that "there are causes worth fighting for," and one of those is the impeachment of President George W. Bush.

"There are causes worth fighting for even if you know that you will lose," Dreyfuss said during a speech at the National Press Club.

Nevertheless, Dreyfuss charged that "people can sometimes be pretty thoughtless, pretty terrified and do some pretty impressive damage" when they are wrong or "are the victims of political hypnosis."

In the past, "time and distance played an amazing part in keeping the human race from killing itself," the actor noted. The need for revenge after an attack "inevitably weakened because it took a lot of time to get men into ships and move them to the right battlefield. Only those truly staunch of heart and truly zealous could keep up that hatred.

"But now, people in Kansas see the [Twin] Towers fall at the exact instant as people in Nigeria or Cairo," he said. "Instantaneous knowledge leads to instantaneous reaction, which creates a demand for an instantaneous, reflexive response."

Dreyfuss blamed part of that reaction on television newscasters, who "fill the air with the same terrible clips, the same blaring intro music, the same screaming fonts, and then the same clips again and the same screaming fonts again and again to fill up these news cycles."

Dun dun. Dun dun. Dun dun dun dun!

Welcome to Brainster's Backup

I'm using this site to make a few posts while the main site is experiencing problems. Hopefully I'll be able to transfer these over there once the problem is fixed.