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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Doug R who wrote (202523)	9/11/2006 9:28:20 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

My own opinion about attempts to use straw man arguments is that the person building the straw man is, from the very start of the argument, being disingenuous at a minimum. Their credibility starts off as suspect. What are your thoughts on the credibility of someone who starts off looking for evidence that the US government blew up the Twin Towers in order to increase the likelihood that the US would go to Iraq and Afghanistan? THAT seems to be the position that bring into question the credibility of the poster, if you ask me.

To: Doug R who wrote (202523)	9/14/2006 9:25:03 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Doug R; Re: "If you care to back up your claims that any of the estimates are off by enough to completely eliminate all of the over 12 times discrepency between energy required to produce the effects and energy available in a gravity-only collapse, by all means, supply the data." For example, the amount of concrete the the author assumed to be in a tower was 600,000 tons. There were 110 floors. 600,000 tons / 110 = 5454 tons per floor. Each floor was about 43,200 square feet gross area and not all of that was had concrete floor. Call it 40,000 square feet of concrete. This means about 5454/40,000 = .14 tons per square foot. 2000 pounds in a ton, so this is 273 pounds per square foot. The density of concrete is 150 pounds per cubic foot, therefore the author assumes a concrete thickness of 273/150 = 1.8 feet = 21.2 inches thickness. This is ridiculous. No one would put floors that thick 110 stories into the air. No one could. The actual thickness of concrete in the WTC floors was about 3 inches just like it is in any other modern steel building. The author missed his concrete figures by something like 7x. For example, see this report on why the WTC fell down so easily (not enough concrete): Since the end of WWII builders designed most of the concrete from the modern high-rise constriction. First concrete they eliminated was the stone exterior wall. They replace them with the “curtain walls of glass, sheet steel, or plastics. This curtain wall acted as a lightweight skin to enclose the structure from the outside elements. Next the 8-inch thick concrete floors went. They were replaced with a combination of 2 or 3 inches of concrete on top of thin corrugated steel sheets. Next the masonry enclosure for stairs and elevators were replaced with several layers of sheet rock. Then the masonry smoke proof tower was eliminated in the 1968 building code. It contained too much concrete weight and took up valuable floor space. Then the solid steel beam was replace by the steel truss. And finally the concrete and brick encasement of steel columns girders and floor supports was eliminated. A lightweight spray-on coating of asbestos or mineral fiber was sprayed over the steel. This coating provided fireproofing. After asbestos was discovered hazardous vermiculite or volcanic rock ash substance was used as a spray-on coating for steel. Outside of the foundation walls and a thin 2 or 3 inches of floors surface, concrete has almost been eliminated from high-rise office building construction. If you look at the WTC rubble at ground zero you see very little concrete and lots of twisted steel vincentdunn.com Now I've shown you that just one of the assumptions (the first one I pointed out, the weight of concrete) in the estimate was wrong by 7x. The other estimates are also wrong but I'm too busy right now. And even if I went through each one and debunked it I doubt that is enough for you. I doubt you have the training or inclination to make any sort of intelligent engineering decision based on this sort of thing. Trying to convince true believers even with simple figures is quite hopeless because most of you can't understand very simple numbers. You don't know when you're being told something that just doesn't make sense from an engineering point of view. Let me try pointing out to you things from your own experience that you should very well know. When you drop a bunch of things from a very high height it tends to create dust. The idiots who made the dust calculation assumed that the most difficult thing to make into dust, the concrete, was responsible for ALL of the dust. But the stuff that is easy to turn to dust will be the stuff that is turned to dust first. Imagine taking a brick, covering it with mud, and dropping it 100 feet. Which is going to turn into dust more, the dirt or the brick? In the WTC collapse, the easy stuff to turn to dust was the gypsum, insulation, glass, and other building contents, not the concrete. This is just pure common sense. And it jives completely with what the government says: Particle Atlas of World Trade Center Dust By Heather A. Lowers and Gregory P. Meeker U.S. Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey pubs.usgs.gov Look, I know that this isn't the last of it. The WTC explosives fan club will continue on into the next century, LOL. Nothing I can do about it. Carl