Posts by Kracklite
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Just to elaborate, here's how you get a tall building to collapse vertically when hitting it with an airliner from the side. Apologies for the length.
The initial impact will ruin the structure of a couple of storeys well below the top of the building. The explosion of the burning aviation fuel-air mixture will strip the fire-protective coatings off the steel truss structure of the towers, exposing them to far more heat than would be the case. Steel looses a substantial portion of its strength when hot but still far from molten.
A falling object accelerates (in vacuo) at about ten metres per second per second. When it impacts something beneath, the force is not merely its weight but its mass times its acceleration.
One floor falls onto another with the force of its weight and everything above times its acceleration. The structure beneath may have been weakened by heat already. This force is in any case far more than the structure was initially designed to withstand and Murphy's Secomd Law takes hold - that which has gone wrong gets worse. The building collapses like a vertical stack of dominoes.
A minor note: Gage referred to puffs of 'smoke' coming from lower storeys well before the wave of collapse had reached them and took these as 'proof' of explosive charges being detonated. He should know that shockwaves propagate at the speed of sound in their medium (sound is a series of shockwaves after all), which is much faster than gravity-induced acceleration. Buildings are complex structures and I can easily imagine the shock of the impacts of collapsing floors at upper levels propagating through the structure to find points of concentration below, causing sudden catastrophic buckling, producing lateral bursts of dust and debris.
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You know how Gage's (and others') conspiracy theory more or less hangs on the fact that having a jumbo jet slam into your building and burn up seems more likely to cause your building to buckle and perhaps topple over than to collapse like a controlled
If the plane were a hammer and the building were a solid block, maybe.
Planes are in fact very fragile objects (and would not get off the ground if they were not). They disintegrate very easily when slammed into buildings. The vertical collapses of the buildings were not the motions of posts toppling over, but cascades of falling storeys overwhelming the strength of supporting structure weakened by heat, striking those beneath with greater kinetic energy than they could withstand. The majority of the energy released was, in effect, not the energy of the planes exerted laterally, but the gravitational energy of all the building materials that were lifted up when the buildings were first constructed.
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Missed the edit deadline:
"It's been made apparent several times on this thread that mere statistics can be used to justify the most absurd claims - demagogues claim crime is 'up'... but when you examine the facts, you realise it's because more people report it, for example."
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A wee notette on 'majorities', which may be rather appropriate when the likes of Messers Craig, Clive - and Gage - turn up and use opinion polls as props for truthiness: as Anatole France once observed, 'When forty million people say a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing.'
Actually, as an adjunct, I'd love to have Kim Hill invite a scientist on to her show simply to talk about the scientific method for the benefit of her audience. I was somewhat, ah, irritated to hear the 911 loon claiming to be 'scientific' when in fact he was not in the least - where was the falsifiability, for example?
While people in this thread have been criticising postmodernism for justifying the belief that truth is arbitrary, in fact the best (and there are many bad) postmodernists attacked not the search for a description of reality, but the presentation of spurious overarching narratives that are constructions as if they were empirically true. A fine but crucial difference: the alarm bells are supposed to ring when someone says that something they say is true because it's 'scientific' when they are not a scientist (and a real scientist would never make any statement with absolute certainty).
It's been made apparent several times on this thread that mere statistics can be used to justify the most absurd claims - crime is 'up'... but because more people report it, for example.
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There would have to be a lot of rewriting of both acts, as they currently stand, to allow protesters to have their assets confiscated.
And
And the government would only need to demonstrate that this criminality is "probable" in front of a judge, rather than prosecuting in front of judge and jury?
I'm concerned at how the police could 'creatively' interpret and apply laws that are supposedly limited to prevent abuse. There is a kind of Murphy's law in effect regarding the police and their powers: If a law is specifically designed not to be directly repressive, it will be used to be repressive through harassment.
For example, during the raid on Abel Smith St here, a lot of computer hardware and film stock and equipment and even avocados were seized as 'evidence'. Possibly the avocados might have looked like cunningly disguised grenades to the cops who had tinfoil under their helmets, but a lot of the other seizures were actually unrelated to anything remotely 'subversive' or Tuhoe. This included material and equipment for an environmental documentary a former student of mine had been working on outside of NZ for years. That work was effectively sabotaged and years later now, she hasn't been able to work on it or get her irreplaceable stock returned to her.
Secondly, as the Law Society has pointed this out, it is a common police tactic to wear down opposition by constantly laying and then dropping charges and then laying new charges. This can lead to enormous legal expenses for defendants as each case has to go through depositions and hearings if not trials. The toll it takes psychologically is enormous too.
Now, IIRC, they can take DNA samples from people they "intend" to charge. Put that in the former context and they can "intend" to charge someone, use that as a pretext to build a database on them and then play a shell game with charges for years afterwards.
Remember that what was nominally anti-terorism legislation in the UK was used to pursue Icelandic banks.
It's a legal truism that extreme cases make bad law and anything that comes in under the guise of "fighting terrorism" and "getting tough on crime" will be used and abused outside its supposed intent. It will be abused by the police who know that even applied incompletely, such legislation is still very useful for harassment, intimidation and suppression of people they don't like.
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Hi Craig,
well, I've been in hours-long discussions with my PhD supervisors over my use of the word 'essential' as an unsuitable synonym for 'necessary' and appreciated the point they had to make, so a few minutes spent over quote marks is nothing to me.
The fact is I have a hell of a lot of respect for you because you bring up uncomfortable points and while you are frequently very exasperating, maybe the fact that you are exasperating may be the the point after all. Nobody can ever claim to offer undiluted reason anyway.
Your use of inappropriate sexual references annoys me, but then again, if you didn't...
What-ever [twirls hair and blows bubble]. I'd miss it if you didn't.
Keep it up.
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Well by Atropos' shears, it is, as you well know, a common convention to use quote marks in that manner to indicate sarcasm too.
If that was not your intention, I apologise, but you do use sarcastic ad hominem phrasing rather a lot as a substitute for actual engagement with someone's argument. It's often hard to tell the difference as a consequence.
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You know what Henry Kissinger said about power...
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Did NZPA's Maggie Tait canvas any other media "experts" besides Claire Robinson
I happen to know Claire and the use of the quote marks implies an undeserved and cheap sneer. Her PhD is in precisely the subject she is addressing, political marketing. She has very long career experience in business and academia and is well respected in both. If you're not just doing a vox pop and want expertise, you ask her.
Granted, varying opinion is needed, but the sneering at someone you know nothing about is inappropriate and unnecessary.
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[Sigh] It does seem to be in our national character to choose the most shoddy, philistine possible approach. Double-glazing (lack of), home insulation (lack of), Wellington's motorways... Sometimes we choose absurdly circuitous processes that seem to guarantee disasters - the competition that resulted in Te Papa is a case in point.
There's a light bulb joke to suit:
How many English civil servants does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. On to assure the public that there will be a full commission of enquiry into the light bulb situation and that there will be a strict timetable with measurable targets... and the other to screw the bulb into the faucet.
Maybe we picked up that culture - and it's pretty prevalent in business too.
Then again <ramble> , Jack Mitchell, a couple of decades back wrote one of the best books on NZ architecture, The Elegant Shed in which he identified the 'number 8 wire' mentality as a boon - but he did emphasise the Elegant , which seems to get lost... can't say that it's unique, considering what happened to a lot of British cities after WWII... </ramble>