reply to post by pteridine
Which brings up a good point: What "additional evidence" would spur NIST into accepting that a new investigation is needed? At what point would they
consider it necessary to adjust their model?
They released their report with their simple "40% greater than free fall" point and their modeling of the collapse which was confirmed based partly
on that data. In August they were then presented with "additional evidence" (at least it was new to them) of free fall at their public hearing on
August 26th. They then confirmed this "additional evidence" when they released their final report in October, just about 2 months.
Did they then go back and look at the parameters they inserted into their modeling to see if they had missed something that, if corrected, would
account for this "additional evidence"? Did they adjust anything and run the model again just to see if they could or could not account for this?
Did they even care?
It doesn't seem so, as on this page
wtc.nist.gov... it says "The structural model of the building components
used to predict the subsequent fire-induced progressive collapse included more than 3 million separate elements and took about 7 to 8 months to
complete a single run on some very powerful computers." Or on page 80/130 of NCSTAR 1A-1, it says "Due to the nonlinearities in the analysis, as
well as sequential local failures, a 25 s analysis took up to 8 weeks to complete."
So unless they got some very very very very powerful computers to speed the process, I don't think they even tried.
It probably will be said in response "Why would they run their model again?" and I would reply "Because 'additional evidence' was found."
Edited: went in and replaced all instances of "new evidence" with "additional evidence" to keep the same terminology as pteridine..... I didn't
want to start discussing the differences of meaning between "new" and "additional"
Edited to add a clarification: I originally put quotes around "new evidence" not in an attempt to quote pteridine, but rather because the free fall
was not technically new as people were claiming it for years...but now with my last edit it looks like I'm just quoting him.... which I'm really
not.... well sort of....
[edit on 27-3-2009 by NIcon]
[edit on 27-3-2009 by NIcon]