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Some Thoughts On 9/11
Twenty years ago I was chief technology officer for a major news website. It was after lunch and I was testing new productivity tools for the news room. Someone came into my office and said that a plane had hit the WTC in New York City. I walked into the news room where several TV screens were filled with pictures of a smoking tower.
The news folks were busy writing their first takes. Some of it was speculation. I mentioned that this was not the first plane to hit a skyscraper in NYC and called it an accident. That made it into one of the first take stories.
Still – even as an accident it was spectacular news and the page views per minute on the website went towards our capacity limits. Then the second plane hit and it was immediately clear to everyone that these were no accidents. The web traffic went through the roof.
We had had ample capacity to cover news peaks but this was way too much traffic for our normal site to handle. I told the server administrator to take down all side processes on the web-server machines we were using. We then started to minimize the content of the site. Everything that was generated dynamically was switched off. We minimized the numbers of pictures. We stopped all advertisement delivery. Other major news sites I tested were already dead – overwhelmed from the enormous amount of traffic. We were still up – but even loading the much cleaned up front page took more than 30 seconds.
I phoned up a number of IT guys I knew who administered public web sites for other purposes. I asked them to mirror our site through a side channel we had opened for that purpose. We then fiddled with the domain name servers to reroute a part of our traffic to those mirror sites. With those finally up and running we barely made it through the evening traffic peak without crashing everything.
The traffic stayed above our nominal capacity for over a week. I stopped my news room productivity project and set down to design a new content delivery system which allowed for a dynamic addition of capacity. The design was quite expensive but three month later we implemented it.
9/11 touched a bit on my job but I was lucky to avoid its other deadly consequences.
Before working for that news site I had long worked with Americans on a daily basis. I had been to the U.S. over a dozen times during the previous years. It was immediately clear to me that its people would want revenge. They would not care much against whom it would be waged. That private prediction turned out to be right.
Little has changed since. The catharsis that 9/11 should have brought never happened. Most people still don't care about the wars of terror and who gets killed in them. I blame the media for that.
Today the New York Times and the Washington Post both report on the recent 'righteous' drone strike in Kabul:
Times Investigation: In U.S. Drone Strike, Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb
U.S. officials said a Reaper drone followed a car for hours and then fired based on evidence it was carrying explosives. But in-depth video analysis and interviews at the site cast doubt on that account..Examining a ‘righteous’ strike
Expert analysis of deadly U.S. drone strike’s aftermath in Kabul suggests no evidence of explosives in targeted vehicle
Ten innocent persons, including 7 children, were killed in that strike.
I applaud those reports. But there have been some 15,000 other drone strike since 2007. Most of those have hit innocent people but there was little reporting about them.
Three days before the drone strike happened a much bigger massacre took place.
A suicide bomber hit at the gate of Kabul airport. The bomb killed several dozen people including U.S. soldiers. But what happened immediately after the bomb went off made the incident much deadlier. Those who guarded the airport opened fire on the large crowd that had hoped to be let in to catch a flight to somewhere. In total more than 170 people died, some of them were British citizens, others were Taliban guards, most were Afghan civilians.
Local Afghan news, a BBC report on Twitter, Russian public TV (at about 3 min, German translation), China's major news agency and other reporters all spoke to eye witnesses who all confirmed the story: "Most of those dead were killed by bullets."
But 'western' media have buried that story. The sole mention of it I could find is deep down in a long NYT report about the evacuations from Kabul:
For the first time, Pentagon officials publicly acknowledged the possibility that some people killed outside the airport on Thursday might have been shot by American service members after the suicide bombing.
Investigators are looking into whether the gunfire came from Americans at the gate, or from the Islamic State.
'Officials publicly acknowledged the possibility …' Do they call THAT 'reporting'?
There were quite obviously no ISIS shooters at the gate.
Why ain't U.S. media all over a story during which the U.S. side killed more than 100 innocent people? Is it hyping the drone attack, which killed 10, to cover for the more embarrassing act during which troops under U.S. control massacred many more than that? Because those troops were the CIA's Afghan death squads who may soon be your neighbors?
Before 9/11 U.S. intelligence knew of Al-Qaeda sleeper cells and of plans for new attacks. Then came 9/11. I am by now one of those who thinks that they let it happen on purpose. That is because all the wars that followed had long been prepared for.
Following 9/11 the U.S. wars of terror displaced 37 million people and killed at least a million foreigners. The U.S. wars of terror are still going on today in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere.
Shouldn't 20 years be long enough to end those wars? To find some closure? To suppress the urge for revenge? To change the rather aggressive general U.S. mentality?
Unfortunately the answer to all those questions seems to be "No".
Thanks to Norwegian for chipping in as a structural engineer. Also Retiredmecheng, a mechanical engineer with professional background in thermodynamics.
I have commented here on two areas in which I am professionally qualified: the flying of the airplanes and the thermodynamics of heat transfer.
The former has been covered by many other pilots and there is broad agreement among those who have tried flying these profiles in full-flight sims.
The latter issue of heat transfer into the steel structure has hardly been addressed at all, anywhere, but is extremely important. I have already mentioned that there has been ZERO mathematical analysis of heat transfer from the fires to the steel structure in the NIST reports.
This is astonishing. The fact is that heat transfer is a very specialized field in engineering. There are very few actual practitioners, and those kinds of experts usually work in designing heat exchange systems for things like nuclear and conventional-fuel power plants, as well as engines of various kinds, fuel cells and things like that.
It is a fascinating science that I got involved in due to my academic background in thermodynamics. I have had the great opportunity to be invited to work on a number of interesting projects over the years, mostly due to relationships with industry people that I have known professionally.
Several such projects involved a particular type of heat transfer application used in gas turbine engines—which is to transfer heat energy from the otherwise wasted exhaust stream, and into the incoming air stream exiting the compressor and entering the combustor. In that way, the air is heated up significantly, so less fuel need be burned to achieve the same combustion temp.
This is called the recuperation cycle and is used successfully on gas turbine engines today, including the engines on the newest class of Type 45 destroyers of the Royal Navy. It is also used in other stationary gas turbines used for power generation and such. But it has not yet been successfully adapted to aircraft engines, due to size and weight issues with the heat exchanger, aka recuperator.
The key to the efficient use of a single prime mover is the choice of a gas turbine that provides efficiency over a large load range; the WR-21 gas turbine incorporates compressor intercooling and exhaust heat recovery, making it significantly more efficient than previous marine gas turbines…
A more prosaic application of a heat exchanger is a car radiator, or turbocharger intercooler. Here a flow of cooling air flowing past the hot fins of the exchanger carries away excess heat. Every air conditioner and refrigerator also relies on heat exchangers to function. Here they are called condensers and evaporators, but they are conceptually the same as a radiator.
I wasn’t involved in the WR21 turbine engine, but the bottom line is that I know this science well, and it is extremely critical to the issue of just how much ANY of the structural steel in those WTC buildings could possibly have been heated up.
The NIST, as I have noted did not even spare a single sentence on the issue of heat transfer, much less a mathematical heat transfer analysis.
Naturally, that leaves open a HUGE scientific question: just how did the heat go from that fire and INTO those thick steel beams?
We are left to assume this just sort of ‘happens’ spontaneously and without any kind of physics?
No! Heat transfer does not work that way. There are very specific PHYSICAL mechanisms by which heat is transferred from one object or fluid to another. I attempted in comment 121 to explain the basic heat exchange between a fireplace fire and a metal poker. But this fell on deaf ears [other than those who actually know something about the subject].
A couple of basic principles. first, heat always flows from from hot to cold. Any exchange of heat can NEVER result in the heated object reaching a temperature EQUAL OR GREATER than the heat source itself.
For an office fire that is at most between 500 and 650 C, it means that steel beams in proximity to that heat source will never reach that same temp. Not even if you specifically designed a HEAT EXCHANGER of the most advanced type, whose heat transfer effectiveness will at most reach about 90 percent.
I’m not going to attempt to explain the physical mechanisms of heat transfer here because that is just too big for a simple comment. But I will try to give a very basic introduction to the subject.
If you put a pot of water on a red-hot stove element, the heat will travel into the pot by means of conduction, which requires direct physical contact. The same is true for the earlier example of the fireplace poker lying on hot coals.
This would not have occurred in the WTC because the steel beams would not have been in contact with any hot coals or hot SOLID object.
Instead, the beams would be exposed to radiation from the flames. Radiation is the weakest kind of heat transfer. If you raise that pot of water up an inch above the stove, it will get heat only from radiation, and it will take literally forever for that water to boil—if it ever does.
The third mechanism is convection, where you have a flowing fluid, either gas or liquid. This is how most heat exchangers work, including a radiator where hot liquid flows from top to bottom, while cool air flows in between small gaps to carry away heat.
A heating torch is also an example of convection, because the torch gas is flowing under pressure and CONTINUOUSLY flowing over the part that is to be heated. This video of an oxy-acetylene torch heating a small steel bar shows how this works.
Notice how quickly the cherry-red hot spot cools down. This is because of the heat conductivity of steel which I mentioned in 121. The heat quickly flows from the hot to the cold end, continuously.
Now two things to keep in mind here. That oxy-acetylene torch has a flame temp of over 3,000 C, the hottest gas flame temp of any fuel. And also the CONVECTION, which means that NEW hot gas is CONSTANTLY flowing over the same spot. Anyone who has thawed meat in the sink knows that running the tap water over the meat continuously thaws it much more quickly, compared to just putting it in a pot of water and letting it sit. This is because of the convection of the running water.
Now there is NO convection in an office fire, other than the very weak natural convection which results from heated air rising. This is why smoke rises. But again, this kind of rising air current convection is orders of magnitude less effective than FORCED convection like you have in a torch [or even a water tap].
This has to do with the MASS FLOW of the hot gas. A weak natural rising gas and smoke column is going to carry much less MASS of hot gas, than a stream of hot gas under PRESSURE and moving very quickly.
I have already talked about the jet fuel. Those airplanes had only about 10,000 gallons on board [NIST], which is only about 40 percent of their full capacity of 24,000 gal. I have explained why those fireballs would have consumed MOST of that fuel.
The tanks in the wings shattered in the first microseconds of impact and the fuel was vaporized and flung in all directions. here is a picture of the second airplane fireball.
Any fuel that may have been left inside the building would quickly burn off, because jet fuel has a high flash point and boils easily. It is simply not true that the jet fuel would have burned for a long time and at high temperatures. Even the journal article I linked to previously which argues in favor of the fire collapse, admits the technical reality of diffuse flame, which is a low temperature flame characterized by a lot of BLACK smoke.
We see in the picture the first building the huge amounts of BLACK SMOKE. That means a low temperature flame.
Now these are the physical realities. Most here will not understand this fully and some will simply dismiss it on the grounds that the ‘alternative’ scenarios supposedly don’t make ‘sense.’
Well, nothing makes LESS sense than an explanation that flies in the face of physics.
I have never undertaken, nor am I interested in, the job of putting forth ‘alternative’ explanations. All I am doing here is using my knowledge of physics to state that the official explanation is not possible.
Specifically the notion that a low-temperature office fire could somehow transfer MASSIVE quantities of heat into thousands of tons of steel. There is no conceivable mechanism of heat transfer available in this scenario that could do that. The steel beams would not and COULD NOT have been heated very much at all.
The strength of structural steel actually INCREASES with temperature up to about 350 C! It is not until past 400 C that strength begins to decrease.
In a 500 C office fire, reaching even 200 C in steel beams would, in my professional opinion, be highly unlikely. That is to say reaching that temperature uniformly throughout the thickness of the beam.
Even if we take the NIST at face value, who claim that SOME areas reached a temp of close to 1,000 C, the steel beams would not have reached an INTERNAL temp of 400 C at most. At that internal temp structural steel still has 80 percent of its strength.
Remember the oxy-acetylene video. Here we have a 3,200 C flame, plus convection heat transfer and it is difficult to even reach cherry red, which is a temp of 600 to 700 C. how on earth can you expect a flame one third of that temp, and without convection [this is crucial] to reach similar temps? It is patently IMPOSSIBLE!
This heat transfer issue is only ONE aspect of the story. I do not purport to have ALL the answers. But as Prof Hulsey and his team showed with their Building 7 study, the official narrative is a BIG LIE.
As I said right from the get-go, for me it is enough to know [and to show] that they are LYING. How they actually did it, or let it happen, will probably never be known with any certainty.
There is simply no physical evidence left. The aircraft flight recorders have been seized and are kept secret. The camera footage from the Pentagon surrounding area has likewise been seized and is being kept secret. We can do nothing more than simply chip away at the actual physics. That is all.
Posted by: Gordog | Sep 12 2021 19:45 utc | 229
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