Supreme Court ruled today on the D.C. gun ban

[trish]

Here are some brief remarks on your link, El Nino:

It’s not news that our beliefs are shaped by our environment which includes the society in which we live. It can easily happen that society is wrong about certain of its beliefs and that we are led by our society to believe those falsehoods. They might even be false beliefs that function to guarantee the relative comfort of a certain segment of society; e.g. we might believe that “all poverty is born of laziness.” Those who benefit by such a belief might in fact propagate it. None of this requires a conspiracy. There needn’t be a secret cabal in the recesses of government that set it all in motion. (Indeed, why is the government always the bad guy in these conspiracy scenarios, why not the pseudo-intellectual political think-tanks?) Of course our thoughts are not entirely our own. In fact it’s damn hard to come up with an original idea that’s viable in the market place of ideas. That’s simply part of the natural memetic evolution of ideas. The narrator in your linked clip is rather like the 19th century thinker who cannot imagine that evolution could’ve proceeded without gods to initiate and guide it.

[muhmuh]

The pessimist sees the glass half empty.
The optimist sees the glass half full.
The engineer sees a glass that’s larger than it need be to serve it current function.

and the communications engineer says
http://bangengineering.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/dilbert_optimist-pessimist-engineer.gif

[loki]

The pessimist sees the glass half empty.
The optimist sees the glass half full.
The engineer sees a glass that’s larger than it need be to serve it current function.

and the communications engineer says
http://bangengineering.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/dilbert_optimist-pessimist-engineer.gif
Spoken like someone who has never had to defend himself/herself against a"gansta" or a fucking mugger like i have.

[trish]

loki, i think many transgender women have witnessed their share of violence ( http://www.hungangels.com/board/viewtopic.php?p=415695&highlight=#415695 ).
Some of us just bravely handle it without waving our own guns and knives.

But just how the pessimist/optimist amusement prompted your ejaculation, I can only imagine. Maybe you could explain how the Dilbert cartoon linked by muhmuh is linked by logic to your insult. You know, you might try posting while sober sometime. I think you'll find a notable improvement in the result. (Well maybe not, but it's worth a try).

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[muhmuh]

Spoken like someone who has never had to defend himself/herself against a"gansta" or a fucking mugger like i have.

not everyone lives in a country where half the population is stuck in the wild west
and what in the name of all that is unholy does being mugged have to do with redundant glasses?

[trish]

Trish you are a little miss knowitall, aren't you. Well, we have news for you...

Yeah, like you know there's a cabal because you're a member.

All joking aside. Did you think I'd be wowed by that silly piece of fluff? I offered the obvious critique and now I'm little miss knowitall? I was hoping for a more reasoned response.

[chefmike]

Yeah, like you know there's a cabal because you're a member.

You probably have to know the secret handshake, trish. But they can be easily recognized due to their jaunty tinfoil hats.

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[trish]

With questionable levity El Nino writes


This is pretty funny too!

…and then he posts a link to tyrannyalert’s speculative pdf on the collapse of the twin towers.

The link claims to refute the conclusions of a dozen independent engineering firms and societies. Yet it contains not a single reference to any independent engineering analysis, not a single table or chart displaying the stress analysis data or dynamics. Not a single mathematical equation. In short, it fails to rigorously and quantitatively criticize the existing models of the twin tower’s collapse and offers no rigorous model or analysis of its own.

It’s just another piece of fluff posing as engineering science.

Here are a few slightly more serious links. The first is the final NIST report. It’s close to 300 pages long, so it may take a little while to download. The second’s only 8 pages long and demonstrates what a mathematic model of collapse should look like. The latter two are slide show presentations given at two different engineering conferences.

http://wtc.nist.gov/NISTNCSTAR1CollapseofTowers.pdf

http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Nuclear-Engineering/22-00JSpring-2006/B66465A4-5D39-43ED-8BE1-7BA23BBD64C6/0/ps2p2.pdf

http://web.mit.edu/istgroup/ist/documents/EFCA2004_Istanbul04.pdf

http://eagar.mit.edu/EagarPresentations/WTC_TMS_2002.pdf

[hippifried]

With questionable levity El Nino writes


This is pretty funny too!

…and then he posts a link to tyrannyalert’s speculative pdf on the collapse of the twin towers.

The link claims to refute the conclusions of a dozen independent engineering firms and societies. Yet it contains not a single reference to any independent engineering analysis, not a single table or chart displaying the stress analysis data or dynamics. Not a single mathematical equation. In short, it fails to rigorously and quantitatively criticize the existing models of the twin tower’s collapse and offers no rigorous model or analysis of the collapse of its own.

It’s just another piece of fluff posing as engineering science.

Here are a few slightly more serious links. The first is the final NIST report. It’s close to 300 pages long, so it may take a little while to download. The second’s only 8 pages long and demonstrates what a mathematic model of collapse should look like. The latter two are slide show presentations given at two different engineering conferences.

http://wtc.nist.gov/NISTNCSTAR1CollapseofTowers.pdf

http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Nuclear-Engineering/22-00JSpring-2006/B66465A4-5D39-43ED-8BE1-7BA23BBD64C6/0/ps2p2.pdf

http://web.mit.edu/istgroup/ist/documents/EFCA2004_Istanbul04.pdf

http://eagar.mit.edu/EagarPresentations/WTC_TMS_2002.pdf
Well yes it's true that the conspiracy crowd has no interest in actually explaining things. That automatically debunks the conspiracy usually. But I've never been fully convinced by the explanations of why the towers fell the way they did. My personal feeling, & I have absolutely no corraborating evidence nor am I an engineer, is that the towers were weakened in the '93 bombing at the base & never quite right after. A sudden shift at the bottom would explain a lot.

But be that as it may: Shortly after the incident, I stumbled on this article & have held onto the link ever since. It calls a lot of things into question. It doesn't pose a conspiracy theory though, except that maybe there was a lot of CYA happening in the engineering punditry that was all over the idiot box following 9/11. It's an old link (Oct/Nov 2001) & most of the hyperlinked graphics no longer work. Perhaps there are credible explanations for some of the questions by now. But it's still an interesting read.
http://web.archive.org/web/20021002105906/http://serendipity.magnet.ch/wot/mslp_i.htm

[trish]

Hi hippiefried.

Unfortunately your linked site has a lot of broken images these days. But that’s all right, I’m not an engineer either and I don’t want to get into a discussion of the dynamics of the twin tower collapse. A physicist, or a chemist or anybody else with sufficient background to concoct a rigorous model can of course propose their own explanation for testing and review. But those best equipped to judge the model’s veracity are architectural engineers. I’m not buying any theory that doesn’t pass muster with at least one recognized society of engineers.

The discussion over the last several pages which led to El Nino’s introduction of this topic concerns the question of whether the U.S. is an oligarchy or not. Of course it isn’t. What El Nino really defends is the existence of a secret cabal within the U.S. government which conspires to manipulate the media, manipulate what we think and evidently also conspired to destroy lives and real estate in lower Manhattan (presumably to convince the American public, whose minds they already manipulate and control, that we should wage a war in Iraq).

My point is that the various factions of society manipulate the media quite openly. People watch, listen, read, talk persuade and are persuaded. The evolution and propagation of ideas within a media driven society doesn’t require gods or cabals to set it in motion nor to guide it. Now just apply Occam’s razor.

The collapse of the twin towers does require one to believe there were handful of malicious, fanatic, murderous, suicidal, Saudi born (not Iraqi) members of Al Qaeda who crashed hijacked, freshly fueled, commercial airliners into the upper stories of the towers. That part, incredible as it is, is easy to believe. It’s was witnessed first hand and recorded by hundreds of independent sources. Perhaps the buildings were previously damaged by earlier attempts to bring them down, perhaps not. The consensus of the architectural engineers who’ve made a serious study of the collapses is that the evolving consequences of the initial trauma were sufficient to eventually bring on the collapses. No further detonations of cleverly synchronized explosives were required. Indeed there is no evidence that there were such detonations. Again we are in a position to apply Occam’s razor. The explanation with the simplest ontology is the least sexy hypothesis, but the one more likely to be true.

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[trish]

Let’s do our own little back of the envelop calculation. The time it takes an object to free-fall from a height H to ground level

t = sqrt(2H/g).

Here g is the acceleration of the falling object due to gravity and sqrt is the abbreviation for square root (since the text here doesn’t seem to support mathematical notation).

Now imagine the pancaking collapse of a stack of floors from the top town. The collapse will not proceed at a constant rate all the way down as suggested by tyrannyalert. Rather the collapse will accelerate impulsively. The time between the failure of each successive floor increases. Hence effectively the building will acquire an effective acceleration. Notice that by varying t and g in the above equation we can approximate the dependence of the variation in fall time (usually denoted by a lower case Greek delta in front of t, but here we shall denote it by dt) on the variation in g. Namely

dt = - sqrt(H/2g^3) dg.

Here g^3 is the cube of g and dg is the variation of g. Substituting the rough height of the World Trade Center H= 1350 ft and the acceleration of gravity g = 32ft/s^2, we find that

dt = (-.14 /(ft/s^2)) dg

This means that the acceleration of the fall can be slowed by as much as 1 ft/s^2 and the time of fall will only be 0.14 seconds longer than the time of free-fall. If the acceleration of the fall were slowed by nearly 7 ft/s^2, this would only add one second to the time of fall. Hence on first glance, the pancake theory cannot be eliminated without rigorous, quantitative analysis.

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[trish]

[Edit: El Nino writes...]"Ummmm

Let's start with temperatures "


Let's not. I'm not an engineer and neither are you. Let's stick to the subject at hand. So I'll repeat:

A physicist, or a chemist or anybody else with sufficient background to concoct a rigorous model can of course propose their own explanation for testing and review. But those best equipped to judge the model’s veracity are architectural engineers. I’m not buying any theory that doesn’t pass muster with at least one recognized society of engineers.

The discussion over the last several pages which led to El Nino’s introduction of this topic concerns the question of whether the U.S. is an oligarchy or not. Of course it isn’t. What El Nino really defends is the existence of a secret cabal within the U.S. government which conspires to manipulate the media, manipulate what we think and evidently also conspired to destroy lives and real estate in lower Manhattan (presumably to convince the American public, whose minds they already manipulate and control, that we should wage a war in Iraq).

My point is that the various factions of society manipulate the media quite openly. People watch, listen, read, talk persuade and are persuaded. The evolution and propagation of ideas within a media driven society doesn’t require gods or cabals to set it in motion nor to guide it. Now just apply Occam’s razor.

The collapse of the twin towers does require one to believe there were handful of malicious, fanatic, murderous, suicidal, Saudi born (not Iraqi) members of Al Qaeda who crashed hijacked, freshly fueled, commercial airliners into the upper stories of the towers. That part, incredible as it is, is easy to believe. It’s was witnessed first hand and recorded by hundreds of independent sources. Perhaps the buildings were previously damaged by earlier attempts to bring them down, perhaps not. The consensus of the architectural engineers who’ve made a serious study of the collapses is that the evolving consequences of the initial trauma were sufficient to eventually bring on the collapses. No further detonations of cleverly synchronized explosives were required. Indeed there is no evidence that there were such detonations. Again we are in a position to apply Occam’s razor. The explanation with the simplest ontology is the least sexy hypothesis, but the one more likely to be true.

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[trish]

I've read that shit and it's not scientific. Why is it published on website called tyrannyalert and blueprint for truth and not in independent refereed journals of science and engineering? Because it can't get passed the referees. Oh that's right, they're part of the cabal.

[trish]

All you need is common sense, not a Ph.D. in physics to comprehend fundamentals of physical properties.

okay, use your common sense to calculate the time of fall.

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[trish]

The paper you cite is indeed published in the very new (vol 2. issue 1) The Open Civil Engineering Journal. You will have noticed, however, it does not offer a primary analysis. For example, why do the authors dismiss the pancake model? The paper doesn’t say. The authors merely remark that on this point they are in agreement with NIST. Another example: why do the authors think initial impacts alone were insufficient to topple the towers? Again the paper doesn’t really say. The authors cite their agreement with NIST and others on this point, but they never say what they find agreeable in the arguments of others. The whole paper is a survey of opinion and lacks argument. Now there’s nothing wrong with this. A lot of professional papers are of this variety. But my contention is this. If you were convinced by this paper without looking up and understanding the actual arguments that were presumably presented in the twenty seven referenced articles, then your belief is based on airy nothingness. You believe because you want to believe.

Personally I’ve got better things to do than to attempt to read the technical arguments presented in twenty seven references. I may pay closer attention if the authors ever get the attention of their professional community.

So far, [edit] no society of architectural engineers endorses the theory that the buildings were brought down by synchronized detonations. No explosives were found. True enough, no one looked for them. Nevertheless, lack of evidence for existence is indeed evidence for lack of existence, for that is the essence of Occam’s razor.

This is getting rather far a field of the 2nd amendment. Cabals were far enough a field…but I could see at least a remote connection. [But] sabotage, after all, would not constitute evidence of a [mind controlling, ruling] cabal. I’m no longer going to address questions on the fall of the WTC in this thread. Start a new one if you wish.

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[trish]

Dr. Steven Jones doesn't sound like a society of architectural engineers. If he is, he's a society of one.

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[hippifried]

So far, the no society of architectural engineers endorses the theory that the buildings were brought down by synchronized detonations. No explosives were found. True enough, no one looked for them. Nevertheless, lack of evidence for existence is indeed evidence for lack of existence, for that is the essence of Occam’s razor.
Yeah. I ain't buying the idea of syncronized explosions either. & don't kid yourself. They looked for evidence of explosives. There was more than just firemen & rescue dogs crawling all over ground zero. These conspiracy theories were already floating around before the dust cleared.

From what I've seen, there isn't a shred of evidence that the conspiracy of 9/11 extended outside the 19 guys who managed to capture 4 airliners with nothing but a couple of plastic knives & a bunch of chutzpah. I'm not even convinced that binLaden had anything to do with it. His name was leaked to the press between the second plane & the collapse of the first tower, & it's been assumed ever since that he was the "mastermind" behind the attack. Based on what? If there's a US government conspiracy involved with 9/11, it's the propaganda campaign that got us into Afghanistan & is still in full swing from all sides of the political spectrum.

Occam's razor is also a meme.

As for how the towers fell: You see this style of collapse in earthquakes. But that's caused by intense vibration at ground level that creates a sudden settling & collapses the floors from beneath. That starts the chain reaction that brings the top down to squash the whole structure. Syncronized explosions work the same way. The WTC collapse had the same characteristics. That's what leads me to believe that it was vibration more than heat that caused the collapse. Heat dissapates, but vibration would transfer all the way down from the point of impact & even increase in intensity on the way. If there were flaws in the foundation, a violent shaking from the top would exploit them. There was just too much steel to melt with burning kerosene to convince me that it was the fire that brought down the buildings. The elevator shaft was concrete, a natural insulator. The outside was an exoskeleton. The buildings were wrapped in vertical structural steel posts.

Anyway, phew. This can go on & on, can't it? There's always going to be those who see conspiracies everywhere. I can't buy into it because I can't give that much credit to people I know aren't any smarter than I am. Some of the speculations are so outlandish that you'd need alien technology to pull them off. Of course if you mention that to the theorist, they just stare blankly & say "Uh huh... Yeah?" That's when you want to go looking for a butterfly net. :roll: Here's one that has deep tunnels running under the Grand Canyon. Geezle!
http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Bases.html

So back to the original topic?

Nah! Guns have been talked to death. It's gonna be a while before we see if this latest pontification from the SCOTUS has any impact whatsoever. Wake me up if some bozo blows Scalia away with his/her newly legal gun.

So... How about those trilateralist illuminatis in the CFR? :shock:

[Oli]

So... How about those trilateralist illuminatis in the CFR? :shock:

Dude, the Illuminati read every message on these forums. Now you're on their list!!!













Oh shit, so am I!

[BrendaQG]

Wow all the way from gun ownership to the twin towers.

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[trish]

Any thoughts?

Yeah, if the towers were brought down by sequenced demolitions, then arming the pilots wouldn't have save[d] them from collapse.

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[El Nino]

House Keeping

[chefmike]

So... How about those trilateralist illuminatis in the CFR? :shock:

Dude, the Illuminati read every message on these forums. Now you're on their list!!!













Oh shit, so am I!

No doubt they are watching from Bohemian Grove at this very moment...

[Justawannabe]

What does the house keeping post mean?

Sean

[Oli]

What does the house keeping post mean?

Sean

It means El Nino can't win the the argument, so he removes all evidence that will make you laugh at his logic.

[El Nino]

oh really?

[chefmike]

What does the house keeping post mean?

Sean

It means El Nino can't win the the argument, so he removes all evidence that will make you laugh at his logic.

LMAO...no way...say it ain't so, Oli...

[trish]

House Keeping

In the same magnanimous spirit exhibited by Stephen Colbert, I accept your apology.

[Paladin]

what happenned here - did nino try to say the world trade center was brought down by the gov't in a controlled demolition or something similarly absurd.

We all know it was mork from ork, who did it because he wanted a clean landing space for his egg-saucer that was closer to wall st than central park :D

[trish]

Disney, NRA Fight Over Guns At Work

by Greg Allen

All Things Considered, July 26, 2008 · Disney is leading a group of businesses that are fighting a new Florida state law that allows employees to bring their guns to work if they leave them in their parked cars. Disney says the law doesn't apply to it because its nightly fireworks show falls under a provision that exempts companies that "use, store or transport explosives." The NRA says Disney is violating the Second Amendment; Disney says it's maintaining workplace safety.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92965316