I already built and made a video of a collapse model.
Adding mass without increasing strength resulted in A LOT FEWER toothpicks being broken. My point being that MASS would help resist the collapse. It is not just a matter of strength. I have been pointing out that we don’t have accurate data on the WTC therefore an accurate model cannot be built.
So why isn’t everybody demanding accurate data on the building? How many people even point out the the NCSTAR1 report does not even tell us the total for the concrete?
My video asks about the steel and concrete on every level. So what have you demonstrated to support your BELIEF that the building could collapse. You people just get on the case os anyone that doubts it. But the fact of the matter is that we don’t have adequate data on the building. What are the quantities and weights of the exterior wall panels? Has anyone else told you that we don’t have that data?
Then it would behoove you to be more clear in your statements. I suspect people are trying to figure out what you think because you’ve been so muddled in your contributions so far.
I know how unlikely it sounds, but it is a true story. I had lunch with a guy from the State Department- so he says. I don’t know how high up he is, probably not very far if he’s having lunch with me I don’t know him, I just ran into him. Even more unlikely since it is kind of a deus ex machina of conspiracy threads, but absolutely true.
Re: Afghan pipeline. He denied it as a motive for the war. This guy’s opinion was that in the beginning, the ‘motives were pure’ as far as fighting terrorism goes. He still doesn’t think the pipeline is practical, but thinks it would be great if it could work.
He thinks a pipe from the Caspian through Iran to the Persian Gulf would be even better, but that talk was not in the context of the war. He points out that Russia seeks to dominate the distribution of oil and natural gas in the region, and is doing a pretty good job. The US would like more diversification but isn’t going to crack heads in Iran over the issue- more a hope of a cooperative Iranian regime.
He’s just some guy. I know I’m a suspicious fellow, but I don’t go so far as making things up. We can ignore this guy’s opinions if you really want.
But you have had great difficulty expressing your main theme; flitting from point to point without showing what your view of history really means. I think you would do better to restrict the scope of the discussion to specific points until you are up to speed on some history.
Probably because your simplified demonstration is misleading, and your conclusion is wrong. Conservation of momentum does not result in energy being “lost;” you still have to account for where the energy is going.
Clearly, the more you know about the construction of the building, the better analysis you can do (up to a point, at least). But there’s no reason to think that your simplifies model sheds light on anything, really.
My concern is that the war wasn’t necessary, but that Bush, being a bit of a warmonger, pushed it.
The wars are very upsetting to me. Have you seen updated casualty figures for them? It amounts to a catastrophe. Nobody is defending the Iraq war as necessary and just, but instead seem to accept that Bush pushed for that war for his own reasons. I’m probing the question of whether it is the same story in Afghanistan.
My opinions have changed as I’ve gone along, and I probably haven’t been perfectly clear. Sorry, I’ll try to be a better doper. Let’s see if I can be clear about where I am now.
I’m not suggesting that the BA made up the entire story. My suspicions aren’t too big a twist on the official story, and we’ll see below how my suspicions stack up to consideration of all this. My suspicion goes something like this: 911 happens, there is an Al Qaeda conspiracy behind it. Bin Laden is a ‘guest’ in Afghanistan re: his Cold War work against the Soviets. Taliban opinion on him is split, OBL probably has support of mujahedin remnants and is dangerous to extract at best. The Taliban want evidence, they want to get him to some other Muslim country. Both of these claims aren’t so unreasonable. With evidence against OBL, the Taliban have something to show other Muslims when they question the legitimacy of handing fellow Muslims over to Infidel custody. Without it, they could face a backlash. Or they could attempt to capture OBL and fail, like everyone else has failed at this, and they get a new front in their civil war plus a maniac enemy with experience in trying to destroy governments. Or they could catch him and open up a new round of militancy anyway, with a new reputation as a US puppet.
So the Taliban don’t have any good options. The US is practically demanding the Taliban to self-destruct. In a universe where Bush didn’t have a big motive for war, he might think getting OBL into Pakistani custody would be a good start, and he might respect foreign governments enough to cough up some evidence before he occupies them for 8 years. With more patience and growing world support, OBL could have been extracted from Pakistani custody and the terrorist camps closed cooperatively.
All hindsight and woulda-coulda, I know. But here’s where my suspicions come in. If the whole matter is a media affair, it reveals that the administration’s concern is more with the home studio audience reaction than with the real diplomacy. If there was extensive record of official communication between the Taliban and the BA, it could be made obvious if the Taliban were being belligerently unreasonable and deserved to be attacked. As it is, we’re scraping around for bits of media-reported information.
If there’s no real diplomacy going on, but instead more a preordination for an attack, we’d expect to see a lot of media glossing of the situation instead of 10 hours of C-span.
Perhaps it isn’t that solid of a suspicion… more below.
It only proves that there wasn’t much official communication going on. There is one ambassador talking to a neutral 3rd party ambassador- rather tenuous really- and the media pick it up and tell the story.
But still. I don’t deny what was reported in the links provided. There was some communication between OBL and the Taliban, and they seemed to know where he was. Whether they could actually catch him is in question, but whatever.
Again, maybe it isn’t a great suspicion. If Bush was highly motivated to attack someone after 911, well obviously that’s what we got. That is his choice as you pointed out. In hindsight it looks tragic, but that’s hindsight for ya. If he was cautious in his march to war, a lot of documentation could prove that. And then the war would seem inevitable, and I’d feel a lot better.
No, I don’t have any of that evidence. Those points aren’t really what I’m getting at though.
It is documented that the Taliban wanted the evidence against OBL. A president who wanted to avoid a war might have played ball at least this much. Instead he was demanding and rude. Meh- nobody liked the Taliban anyway.
Nah. I’ve already quashed a lot of suspicion through this thread. If it boils down to: “The war might have been avoided, and that is suspicious”, well heck, that’s more or less the story. We all have to live with the history of the Bush Administration.
Meh. One of the last times Bin Laden’s location is reported to be known, and his capture likely, is in the period before the war when the Taliban claimed they knew where he was. A different handling of the situation might have produced OBL in a couple of weeks. If the Taliban still needed to be toppled, the CIA has done that kind of thing before without invasions. All the options can remain on the table.
Instead we’re stuck in a grinding war. I don’t like it, it grieves me, maybe things could have turned out better. Woulda coulda shoulda. This war sucks no matter how you slice it.
Yah I know. I was honest on this issue though. I declared by doubt of the ‘Bush (et al) is stupid’ premise waaaaay back in this thread. This is an advanced country. It is easier for me to believe Bush was playing dumb as part of his con.
But after all this I have you guys plus my (very real) state department dude of undetermined authority telling me that incompetence really did play a key role in the fucked-uppedness of the war. I heard some extremely harsh things about Rumsfeld’s moves, for instance.
So. If I give incompetence a fair shake, things most certainly could have turned out better. My suspicions about why they didn’t are justified. But I’m too slow for you guys.
You then drill more holes, increasing the number of toothpicks and decreasing the spacing between them. Why?
It sounds to me like you are constructing your model to demonstrate what you have already concluded must have happened. That’s a bad experiment.
You describe your model as having an initial drop of 14 inches, onto washers supported by toothpicks spaced 1 inch apart. That’s not an accurate representation of what happened in the World Trade Center. Assuming a floor-to-floor spacing of 12 feet. As Valgard explained, a collapse at the 90th floor would drop the top 20 floors 12 feet. That impact would crush the 89th, and now 21 floors would drop another 12 feet, etc.
Build another model where the initial drop and the spacing between levels are the same. If you can get that to stop without collapsing all the levels, let us know.
I just watched your video. You have made a model of a dowel with washers and toothpicks. That’s fine, but you cannot just take a 2 foot model, multiply what you see happen by 500 and say that’s what should have happened to a 1000 foot building. Things do not scale linearly like that and that’s one of the reasons why what happens “life size” may be wildly different from what happens with a small model.
A simple example would be the behavior of a cylindrical column. Roughly speaking the compressive load of its own weight is distributed across its own area. So if you’ve got a weight W and a radius R, the compressive stress is W/(pi*R^2), call that X. Suppose I build my scale model column out of a material that has an ultimate compression strength of 2X. No problem, it holds itself just fine.
Now let’s scale that column up by a factor of 10. The weight varies with the cube of the dimensions, so the total weight is now 1000W. The area varies with the square of the radius, so that’s (100piR^2).
Total stress? 1000W/(100piR^2) = 10X. So my model column behaves quite differently than the full-scale column.
And that’s just one failure mode. There’s all kinds of other things going on that scale differently with the dimensions and materials, so what you do in your living room may not represent the actual behavior of a 110-story building in any way. What you have is a model that specifically shows how your model behaves.
The problem with a small model is that things become STRONGER in relation to their size and weight as they get smaller. So making a small model collapse is more difficult.
But I did a comparison of a collapse without the mass of the stationary washers to a collapse with the washers and many fewer toothpicks were with washers than without. Therefore to talk about the collapse of the towers without knowing the distribution of steel and concrete is nonsense at best.
I already did calculations of a 64 foot collapse on the basis of changing the distribution of mass.
More mass toward the bottom slows things down more. So why isn’t EVERYBODY screaming for correct data on the correct distribution of mass? If the planes could bring the buildings down then having that information could not possibly hurt the case.
Thank you for establishing that the real life structure would be more likely to collapse than your pretend “model.”
That you could get any part of your “model” to collapse after playing with it six ways from Sunday indicates that some sort of collapse of a real building was not only possible, but probable.
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Your logic on the basis of observing my demonstration, if you did, is totally faulty.
My model is by no means an attempt to duplicate the behavior of the WTC. It is only to show what happens when a falling mass has to break supports with and without stationary masses on the supports. In only one case did the mass fall all of the way to the bottom and I explained why that happened. In all other cases the collapse was ARRESTED. That is what should have happened to the north tower on 9/11.
Theoretically it should be possible to make a scaled physical model. It would probably be complex and expensive. But accurate information on the distribution of steel and concrete in the tower would be required. So why don’t we have it after SEVEN YEARS?
Ryan Mackey, a world renowned NASA scientist, talked about building a scaled physical model on the Hardfire program episode #3: Revenge of the Physics.
Mackey hangs out on JREF. He and his buddies complain about my harping on the distribution of steel and concrete but then Mackey had the nerve to talk about a scaled model. That was hilarious. But then how do you build a 1360 foot skyscraper that could stand for 28 years without figuring out the proper mass distributions in the first place?
I have NOT said anything about any con_____cy th___y. I don’t give a damn about any of them. This is a physics and engineering problem but how are we supposed to solve it without accurate data on the primary element?
By now it is clear that your say so’s go both ways, your models can not be conclusive as you yourself mention.
Why? Because you do not have the proper numbers. Of course then you say that because more educated researchers are not using proper numbers then we can not trust them. Even if we grant you this (and I can see that we do not) the logical conclusion that we can reach is that we can not trust your models to properly represent the towers, and we can not trust your assumption that the collapse was supposed to be arrested.
Better evidence is needed just to conclude that more experienced researchers had less reliable information.
What do you mean when you say that your model was not an attempt to duplicate the behavior of the WTC however the WTC should have behaved like your model?
All that your model shows is what happens to your model. It confirms that dropping a mass onto a fixed support generates more force than the same mass under 1G but that was not in question. Aside from that you can’t apply your results to a totally different structure. Change some of the numbers in your model and you may get completely different results.
It’s like running Hot Wheels cars into each other all day long. You will confirm that the cars bounce around when they hit but beyond that you can’t make any kind of predictions about what an actual traffic accident will do to real cars.
Why do you think that a scale model is even necessary? Structural analysis is not generally done by making tiny models of buildings and applying forces to them to see what happens. It’s done with free body diagrams and some pretty straightforward math, or finite element analysis if you want to get all fancy.
I assure you that those buildings were indeed designed knowing the precise layout of everything, how much steel is here and how much concrete is there.
But analyzing an existing structure does not require you to redesign the whole thing again and you don’t need all of the same information.
I hate to keep harping on this but you yourself said that you have no education or experience in any related field - no structural engineering, no architecture, etc - so a lot of what you are saying is just uniformed opinion. The fact that you don’t understand why something happens doesn’t mean it can’t happen or that something important hasn’t been included.
Frankly I’m confused what your point is, then. Are you saying that it’s impossible to understand the exact collapse mechanism without the info that you think is necessary (meaning that the basic sequence is right but we don’t know whether Beam A failed before Column B or vice-versa)? Or are you saying that the accepted collapse mechanism is entirely impossible (meaning that “weakened floor failed, dumping the higher floors down, causing total building failure” is utterly wrong)?
In either case you have to have something to base your judgement on and it’s not education or experience, so what is it? You certainly seem to feel that the accepted collapse mechanism is impossible, so what do you think happened? Obviously those buildings came down and SOMETHING caused it.
You don’t have the necessary skills (education in related topics) to solve this problem. For that reason you also do not know what data is necessary to solve this problem. It’s fine to say “I don’t understand how this works, explain it to me because it doesn’t look reasonable” but “I don’t understand how this works, that means it doesn’t work” is ridiculous.
The more educated researchers at the NIST who claim to be “world renowned experts” don’t even tell us the total for the concrete in the towers. That should make them TRUSTWORTHY, right?
One model demonstrated the change in oscillation with mass and its distribution. There was no collapse and it was not supposed to.
The other model was a deliberate drop free to fall over a distance TWELVE TIMES greater than that of intervals between the toothpicks. There was no horizontal impact and oscillation and there was no fire in either case.
My falling mass was not compressible. I could stand on that stack of washers if there was a way to balance on it. The structure of the falling portion of the north tower was the same as that below only smaller and lighter. Therefore at least one level of the falling portion would have to be crushed for every level of the lower portion that was crushed. THAT COULD NOT HAPPEN IN MY MODEL.
So even if we were to give the top falling portion a 3 to 1 advantage and arbitrarily say that 14 levels falling from the top could crush 42 stationary levels below after falling through 1 collapsed story that is only 57 stories of a 110 story building. It is laughable that people can believe the top portion of the north tower could crush the rest in less than 18 seconds and not even demand to know the distribution of steel in the skyscraper.
The thing is, the more you insist that guys from the NIST got the results just by assumptions then it is even more likely that your models are even more flawed. I still wonder how it is that you can not realize that.
Or by using logic I would have to say that they got access to already published information and that the experience of other engineers tells them that the NIST and others reached the proper conclusions.
I don’t know him, I just ran into him. Even more unlikely since it is kind of a deus ex machina of conspiracy threads, but absolutely true.
