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Gold9472
01-19-2007, 01:31 PM
The Jenga hypothesis, or how I learned to start worrying
This is the story of one man's baptism in the September 11 truth movement.

http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2007/01/18/70347

By Adri Mehra
1/19/2007

For those of you inching further and further (read: younger) from my increasingly age-addled, 24-year-old cerebellum, I ask y'all to indulge my chronological license here.

Jenga is a popular Hasbro game from the 1980s.

It's a game of skill in which small hardwood blocks are stacked in a tower formation - 54 blocks arranged in 18 stories - and players remove one lower block at a time from the body of the building and place it on the top of the tower. The player who causes the tower to collapse loses the game.

The idea of the structural integrity of tall buildings is well represented.

Anyone who's ever played Jenga knows that if you take out a block or two, the building will not necessarily collapse right away.

That's the point, and the continual self-renewing challenge, of the game.

Sure, the tower might distort or shift its weight to compensate for the chunk you just took out of it - visible in the form of shaking, or teetering - much like the redistribution of forces of stress in the steel columns of skyscrapers.

But even if a Jenga tower does indeed fall, it will topple over and to the side - it will NOT neatly collapse straight down without resistance into its own placement, and in a beautifully symmetrical fashion, like a certain cluster of humanity's finest feats of structural engineering in Lower Manhattan were somehow wont to do on a crisp, clear morning nearly five and a half years ago.

Yes, when applied to the behavior of the World Trade Center towers after being struck by airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, this, my friends, is my newly minted Fisher Price My First Theory of 9-11 Skepticism.

This product has been brought to you by the makers of Gravity and other popular titles in our Laws of Physics line, such as Conservation of Energy and that game Mom loves to hate - Momentum!

But I digress. The issues at stake here could not be more serious.

This unprecedented depiction of instantly initiated and perfectly executed total uniform collapse of unbelievably massive steel skyscrapers from proportionally isolated impacts and similarly localized fires is precisely what the U.S. government and mainstream media have attached to the rapid obliteration of three of the world's strongest buildings on the same day of Sept. 11, 2001 - World Trade Center towers 1, 2 and 7, the last structure never even touched by a plane - despite a mountain of suspicious forensic structural evidence indicating controlled demolitions and thousands of questions being repeatedly raised by hundreds of academics and scientists the world over.

Knocking out a few Lincoln Logs in the side of the middle of the stack doesn't turn the whole damn cabin into exploding sawdust, does it?

I apologize for the elementary metaphors, but in this no-brainer of an instance, even the crayon is mightier than the sword.

For many, doubts about the physical characteristics of the Twin Towers' collapse began as it occurred before their very eyes.

My own recollection of the events very nearly brings me back to the days of Jenga, boxed wine safe for dorm smuggling, and roses, but not quite.

September 11 was my second Tuesday in college, and I can remember standing with at least a hundred fellow students in front of a hastily arranged TV projection in a classroom in Murphy Hall, completely disoriented by the nauseating pictures I was seeing.

As we watched in horror, the entire South Tower of the World Trade Center abruptly crumbled into dust, followed by the North Tower less than half an hour later.

It was clear that mere moments before their respective virtual implosions - nine to 10 seconds before in each case, actually - the 110-story steel structures had shown no signs of imminent collapse, such as characteristic sagging or tilting.

There were relatively sequestered fires visible in the crash impact zones - between the 78th and 84th floors of the South Tower, and between the 93rd and 98th floors of the North Tower, according to USA Today - but the towers stood stalwart as ever, with no worrisome leaning or shaking.

Then, suddenly, the buildings came roaring down, each floor exploding into dust one after the other, in roughly the same time it would take to drop a billiard ball from the roof of one of the towers and wait for it to hit the ground in free fall with only air resistance (calculated as 9.22 seconds by Dr. Judy Wood of Clemson University in 2005).

A graduate student in the University's School of Architecture stood next to me, shaking his head.

"There's no way those planes could have made those buildings come down," he muttered in a Swedish accent, and he walked away, leaving his fall coat by my side.

I never saw him again, but since that eternally disruptive and epoch-darkening day, I've been trying to figure out what he meant. More next week.

Good Doctor HST
01-20-2007, 08:05 PM
This is a really good article posted by a newbie in the 9/11 truth movement. I just mean, in terms of read-ability and flow. Very pleasant to the eyes.

But comparing the collapse of a 100+ story tower to the collapse of a foot-high wooden board game seems very elementary. I mean, I think the planes brought down the twin towers, no doubt in my mind.

But the #7 building.... well.... I'm still waiting for all of the science periodicals that are substantially anti-9/11 movement to explain what happened there. Maybe I'll get a crazy tonight and light my couch on fire; we'll see if my apartment building collapses in perfect free-fall when the bottom floor goes up......

Gold9472
01-20-2007, 08:07 PM
heh

Gold9472
01-20-2007, 08:08 PM
Unfortunately, I'm not intelligent enough to argue whether or not Jenga, and the towers are analogous or not.

AuGmENTor
01-20-2007, 08:13 PM
we'll see if my apartment building collapses in perfect free-fall when the bottom floor goes up......


I wanna know how that works out. Can't the y do a scaled down re-creation of that, and see what happens?

Good Doctor HST
01-20-2007, 08:30 PM
Unfortunately, I can't light my apartment on fire. I guess there's some stupid unwritten rule about it, I don't know....

Plus, no other living establishments in the area are any cheaper than where I currently reside. And I'm po'. So you see my dilemma....

But seriously, has any scientific or engineering-specific periodical or any sort of establishment explained the building #7 collapse? They've had 5 years..... is it a state job? (Probably only Gold understands when I say state job, it refers to a job involving the state of Pennsylvania and its state workers, and of course it means the job takes for-fucking-ever....)

Gold9472
01-20-2007, 08:41 PM
No. NIST has yet to release a report on WTC7. If you want, I could get Kevin Ryan here to explain if this analogy is accurate.

AuGmENTor
01-20-2007, 08:42 PM
Wy, did he invent Jenga?

Gold9472
01-20-2007, 08:43 PM
No. He's smart.

Gold9472
01-20-2007, 08:45 PM
I invited him to come. I don't know if he is or not.

Gold9472
01-20-2007, 09:01 PM
Here's my email...

Kevin,

I don't know if you're a member on my site or not, but someone asked whether or not this analogy is accurate, and I thought you were the best qualified (and most likely to take the time) to answer that question.

http://www.yourbbsucks.com/forum/showthread.php?t=14235

If you don't have the time, that's ok to.

Thanks,

Jon

Here's what Kevin said...

Jon,

As a Chemist and laboratory manager, I'm fully qualified to assess any Jenga analogies that come my way. :)

But seriously, I do get Adri's point and it is not without merit in my opinion. His means that, like the Twin Towers, a Jenga tower is an interconnected structural network that redirects forces when segments are lost. That is why the Engineering News-Record bragged about the towers back in the sixties, saying "one could cut away all the columns on one side of the building, and partway from the adjoining sides, and the building could still withstand design live loads and winds of 100 mph from any direction."

BTW - Adri asked me to interview with him for an upcoming segment. Sounds like he asked Barrett too, among others.

Take care - Kevin

Good Doctor HST
01-20-2007, 09:03 PM
Wy, did he invent Jenga?

You smart-ass you..... Now that's funny right there!

Good Doctor HST
01-20-2007, 09:10 PM
But seriously, can you compare a structure like the World Trade Center Twin Towers with a wooden structure a foot high consisting of three wooden planks stacked in opposing directions? Sorry, but sounds like a bunch of garbage designed to throw off the 9/11 Truth movement. Similar to the whole "Did a missile hit the Pentagon?" argument.


Just like what's been professed on this website: Stick to the facts that can be proven, and don't fall into traps.

AuGmENTor
01-20-2007, 09:11 PM
Just like what's been professed on this website: Stick to the facts that can be proven, and don't fall into traps.

Amen

Gold9472
01-20-2007, 09:15 PM
But seriously, can you compare a structure like the World Trade Center Twin Towers with a wooden structure a foot high consisting of three wooden planks stacked in opposing directions? Sorry, but sounds like a bunch of garbage designed to throw off the 9/11 Truth movement. Similar to the whole "Did a missile hit the Pentagon?" argument.


Just like what's been professed on this website: Stick to the facts that can be proven, and don't fall into traps.

:)

royster
01-20-2007, 09:18 PM
With such eloquent speeech, let's get that Cleidsdale brushed, and NOT to haul beer.

Gold9472
01-20-2007, 09:20 PM
I don't know if it was "Controlled Demolition" or not. If asked, I refer people to the people who have been involved in that aspect. Personally, I think "Controlled Demolition" has been burned into people's minds as that which makes the 9/11 Truth Movement look "crazy." This, and the missile/Pentagon theory. They are both theories. Theories the media has pounced on relentlessly. Anyway, I am a firm believer in promoting information that contradicts the official account, and is easily verifiable.