The Top 40

Arrgh. I get so mad at truthers. One moment you can be having the most rational conversation with them and the next thing you know they go all batshit crazy on you and start quoting Alex Jones, whoever the hell that is. I tried for a number of years to present the Popular Mechanics debunkment, but no...as with all conspiracists, they simply transfer 'buses' and find a new explanation.

Truthers are the terrestrial version of UFO kooks. They play in the same circles, I submit they are the same type of people, believe in similar things, and for similar reasons. Conspiracy people are most similar to a certain type of religious believer. The strong desire to believe in something is first present, and almost coincidentally, a target for that belief is found and becomes important.

Alex Jones hosts a small radio show and a few kook web sites, that are now showing up on occasion at Drudge. In my opinion AJ is a willfull fraud and liar. I have experience of him knowingly using photos from a source in a fraudulent manner. Perfectly innocent photos with an explanation from the picture taker were used as clandestine snaps of a secret UN/NWO concentration camp in the US. Now, the default concentration camp operator in AJ's world is FEMA. The photo was actually of a US/NATO training facility in NJ that was being used to train Republic of Georgia military police (MPs).

Anyway, AJ, in my opinion, is just a link in the media hate cycle between extremist groups like the KKK and neo-nazi type organizations and legitimate media. The extremist groups, I'll call them all KKK, generate stories to fan fear and hatred for their reasons, such as trying to generate a helter-skelter uprising. Those stories are then washed and cleaned up a bit to sound more plausible and their origins disinfected just enough to be tolerable to the next level of media, usually somewhere around the shortwave kookosphere. Hal Turner was a recent player at this level. Then the fake stories are further edited and disinfected and picked up by the Alex Jones type that is one further step removed and clinging to the bottom rung of partial respectability. Then the story is diluted, bawlderized, and disinfected and too often winds up at randomly accurate aggregators such as World Net Daily.

It's been my experience and in my opinion Alex Jones has no interest in the truth of any story. Like the Y2K hucksters, he will dismiss the reality of stories, insert non-existent connections and meanings, and then tell his audience THIS is just the tip of the iceberg.

Anything coming from Alex Jones, and his web sites Pris0nPlanet and Inf0wars should be dismissed out of hand for the same reasons you would dismiss "reporting" from the Louis Farrakhan organization about astronomy and manned spaceflight. There is a tiny, almost zero, possibility SOMETHING in their story might be true but that possibility is so small as to approach zero and the non-false item will concern the least significant aspect of the story.

Sadly Drudge and Andrew Napolitano of Fox News are spreading AJ misinformation and getting his false stories into conservative media. Trust me, the AJ connections to stories will be used to discredit legitimate stories and sources. If there is any truth to a story it will be quite easy to find sources other than AJ and his kookosphere.

Dunn is wrong. The steel doesn't warp because it is constrained, it warps because its strength goes down as it is heated and it can't support the load on it.

This is a pretty big error for someone who is supposedly an expert on building collapse. It's right up there with "steel doesn't melt." There are idiots on both sides.

Actually, I think that Dunn's right. The imposed displacements or applied loading on a structure tends to be "off-center" from the original configuration in a damaged system. If you start knocking out columns in a building, the loading path becomes very torturous very quickly. Since thin members (so beams and columns) are unstable, even slight changes may lead to large and nonlinear deformations. Finally, remember that thermoplasticity alters material properties other than the yield stress, e.g. Young's modulus, material hardening after yield, and even the coefficient of thermal expansion. Differential thermal conductivity and cooling rates then comes into play and may further warp the structure.

One other comment on the heat of burning jet fuel, the tower construction acted as a tall smoke stack creating a blast furnace inside. Also, I believe that the Towers were the first highrise constructed without aspestos sprayed on the steel. Just my take.

That is like asking at what temperature the lighter fluid burns to start the forest fire. Whoever said there are no stupid questions didn't know what he was talking about.

Conspiracists are like electrons, they must be attached to something.

Conspiracists are like electrons

They are more like Bosons, the more there are the more attractive they become and the whole herd moves as one.

Had I not read these comments I would never have known that stupidity has a scientific formula.

Also, I believe that the Towers were the first highrise constructed without aspestos sprayed on the steel. Just my take.

Certainly one of the first. The steel was sprayed with an inferior fire retardant instead of asbestos.

This issue speaks to another gigantic and destructive stupidity we have been subjected to for decades: hysteria-driven government mandates intended to make us "ultra-safe" or something. Asbestos enclosed within walls and other structures pose no harm whatsoever to building occupants, yet billions have been spent to tear asbestos out for no good reasons at all except to alleviate ignorance and emotion-driven anxiety created by activists and law firms with their own agendas. This folly was compunded by the fact that, like with other "safety" crusades, no reasonable timeframe was allowed for development of equally effective or better substitutes.

One of the most revealing, if unintended, results of this public policy nonsense was the damning captured video of Osama bin Laden proclaiming that the attack on the Towers "had better than expected results." As an engineer, he had calculated the likely level of damage based on the assumption that the towers were old enough to have had asbestos covering on their steel frames. He apparently did not expect them to collapse so quickly.

How long do any of you think it will it take to undo this generation's damage to our laws, our education, our souls?

And how much damage was done to the frame of the building when an aircraft, moving at a few hundred miles an hour, impacted on it? And that weakened structure, weakened by the hit and the fire, had to continue supporting all of the wieght above it? And what happened when the remaining damaged frame, heated and made mallable by the fire (remember - a blacksmith heats a horseshoe to make it easy for him to bend on the anvil - the blacksmith does not need to melt the shoe to work it, just get it hot enough) feels the weight slowly twisting it, compressing it?

At what point will there be enough cumulative damage that the structure catastrophically fails?

There is one thing that the truthers accomplished, however unwittingly.

Today anyone who asks legitimate questions about the mysterious past of the President of the United States is immediately dismissed as a "birther".

The hazards with asbestos, which have been known since around the end of the 19th Century, are those in the mining and manufacturing process. Asbestos as a completed product (tile, insulating wrap, etc.), is safe and highly effective. Find a way to keep humans from inhaling loose asbestos fibers (i.e., automated processing), and the problem of asbestos-related illness drops to practically nil.

I'm not a civil engineer or fire specialist, so I don't know if asbestos would have saved the Towers. But considering how ineffective the fire retardant was, it seems a safe bet that had asbestos been used instead, it may have slowed the fires down enough for more people to escape.

"The steel doesn't warp because it is constrained, it warps because its strength goes down as it is heated and it can't support the load on it."

That's part of it, but also remember, as it's being heated it wants to expand, but if it's attached to other parts of the structure that aren't being heated and aren't expanding, it's going to want to warp and buckle from that.

This is an additional stress on the structural member just when it's already being weakened from the heat.

A simple test to prove the theory of heat and metal. I am a baker. I have a large mop which I load up with butter to mop the thinly rolled out pastry. I pour clarified butter into a tin disposable pie pan. The same one. Every night. Until the following happens: As the butter cools, it congeals and I hold it over a gas flame to melt it in the tin pan. Over a period of time, the pan's metal becomes brittle and breaks. When that happens, I get a new pan out.
Simple science, really, Ms. O'Donnell and Alex Jones. The constant application of direct heat doesn't have to melt my metal pan, it just makes the metal brittle after being exposed to constant flame and heat.

"Dunn is wrong. The steel doesn't warp because it is constrained, it warps because its strength goes down as it is heated and it can't support the load on it."

It probably does both at the same time.
The heat changes the crystal lattice of the metal, causing it to loose strength.
At the same time (and in part because of it) it warps, causing the concrete around it to crack (and causing more stresses on surrounding structures even without surrounding concrete).

This is in fact the conspiracy theory I've the least trouble with, as structural mechanics and materials science are not something most people have any experience with.
They do however see steel structures heating without loosing strength every day in their own homes (specifically in their kitchen while cooking), and have all their lives been told about how strong steel is ("stronger than steel" is supposed to wow people for a reason when used to describe things like Kevlar).
For them to see steel buckle and collapse like this is as big a shock as the cause of that collapse, and not something their minds are likely to comprehend, so they naturally look for alternative explanations.
And with the assault on the hard sciences that's been ongoing in education and entertainment for decades, they're all too ready to believe that any scientist telling them their theories are wrong and this is what's really happening must have ulterior motives. All physicists are "mad scientists" after all, paid by "evil corporations" or "the government" to help in their plans for world domination.

the steel warps because of unequal heating which causes unequal expansion, resulting in twisting of the steel. however twisting of the steel did not cause the towers to collapse. the floors(each weighing over four tons) were hung on the four corners of the building. this coupled with the fact that the planes almost severed the buildings, causing a six or seven floor chunk of the buildings to be destroyed. if you could immagine a lumberjack cutting down a tree, they cut a wedge into the tree until the weight of the tree above the cut cannot be supported by the part of the tree still intact, the tree falls. when one of the corners of the building in the area of the fire gave way, the weight of the building above where the planes struck could no longer be supported and the buildings collapsed. if you look at the videos you can see the part of the building above the fire tilt and then collapse upon itself.