A study out of Perdue University again shows how the loss of fire retardant from the pressure of the plane, the destruction of many of the inner pillers from the titanium Airplane engines and fusilage, and the weakening of steel due to the fires was the cause of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. The study will help engineers to better design tall buildings, and included computer simulation to assist in the technical analsysi.

The animation (122 MB) can be seen online at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/papers/
popescu/popescuWTCVIS07.mov

A faster-loading version (9 MB) of the video can be found at http://news.uns.purdue.edu/mov/2007/HoffmannWTC.mov

In the animation, elements that were not part of the scientific simulation, such as flames and smoke, are clearly rendered, although the visualization does not show the subsequent effects of the fire.

Of course, this won’t convince conspiracy theorists any more than a similar analysis done by Popular Mechanics. If you debunk one fact, they will either ignore it, call you simply come up with another fact or another expert (who often is a professor from a different specialty of science, or not a scientist at all). Indeed, they often recycle debunked “facts” again, figuring the attention span of the public won’t notice. The blog ScrewLooseChange has lots and lots of information on the debunking and recycling of “truth”.

A few days ago, I posted about teaching children to meditate and “find the answer within”, saying it posed not only questions about religion but implied logic and knowledge were not as important as what you thought inside yourself.

Those who take one fuzzy idea out of context, mix with hatred of President Bush/the government, and spout off are examples.

Like Michale Moore Here, who thinks a security cameras (normal number of frames 7.5 to 10 frames per second) that are mainly aimed at the ground of the parking lot will see an airplane coming in at 500 mph (700 feet per second, or seventy feet per frame), which is so fast that the one security camera aimed at the wall of the Pentagon shows nothing in one frame and  then a fire with airplane debris in the next frame. Never mind the hundreds if not thousands of people who saw the plane go over Arlington. Never mind that Barbara Olson was on plane and actually on the phone with her husband at the time, and her body was recovered from inside the Pentagon. Facts don’t matter to Moore, who is the Leni Riefenstahl of the left.
Analyzing data, understanding construction, recognizing that you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts (as Popular Mechanics reminded their readers) is hard work.
It’s more fun to turn off logic and just have your “inner self” decide the answer. Post modernism at it’s worst.
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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines.
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