Overcaffeinated Em Dash

⚖ | Human (finding a meaning for) being | Views are my own. RTs are not endorsements. | Patriot 🇺🇸 | End Anti-Intellectualism | Make Education Great Again!

[Overcaffeinated Em Dash @schr0dzinger]

@dcsteve5 Fruit, pitcher, tablecloth… at first I thought it has to be picnic-themed so I went with “garden.” Never ever would I have looked this and thought, “Yup, skull, definitely.”

[Yesh Ginsburg @yesh222]

Rick Rescorla. Every American should know his name. He single-handedly saved almost 10,000 lives that day, while sacrificing his own trying to save even one more.

[emily may @emilykmay]

I was curious how many people were in the twin towers when the planes hit: about 17,400.

a death toll of ~2800 from the towers now seems absolutely miraculous.

this was due to the efforts of FDNY, NYPD, and some extraordinary everyday people.

[Patrick Heizer @PatrickHeizer]

I had never heard this name before and I don't even know what to say.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

Twenty five years ago today, six firefighters slowed down for the slowest person in the stairwell, and that is the only reason any of them are alive.

Josephine Harris was 59 years old. A widow and a grandmother from Brooklyn. A bookkeeper for the Port Authority who worked on the 73rd floor of the North Tower.

When the building was hit she started walking down. She was still recovering from an accident and her legs were bad, and she was descending a smoke filled stairwell with thousands of other people. She made it more than fifty floors on her own, which is an achievement most people reading this could not manage on a good day.

Somewhere around the 20th floor she stopped. She could not go any further. She was exhausted and crying and people were flowing past her.

Captain Jay Jonas and Ladder Company 6 were going the other way. They had climbed to the 27th floor when the South Tower came down at 9:59, and Jonas understood immediately what that meant for the building they were standing in. He turned his men around and started them down.

Then they found Josephine Harris.

They could have gone past her. They had every operational justification. The building they were in was going to fall and they knew it, they had their own men to get out, and she could barely stand.

Instead Bill Butler put her arm over his shoulders and they went down at her pace. Step. Rest. Step. Rest. Six firefighters in full gear, descending a skyscraper they expected to lose, at the speed of a 59 year old woman with bad legs.

They got to the fourth floor and she stopped completely. She could not take another step. They were still trying to move her when the North Tower came down at 10:28 in the morning.

One hundred and ten stories collapsed on top of them.

And a short section of Stairwell B, right there in the core, between roughly the second and fourth floors, did not collapse. It held. Fourteen people inside it lived. Jonas and his men, Chief Richard Picciotto, Port Authority officer David Lim, firefighters from other companies, and Josephine Harris.

They were buried, in the dark, listening to the building settle. Bill Butler got a call out to his wife to tell her where they were. After a while the dust began to drift and clear, and sunlight came down through the stairwell from above, which is how they finally understood that there was no longer any building over their heads.

They were pulled out hours later.

Here is the arithmetic those men have lived with ever since. Ladder 6 was moving fast. If they had not stopped for Josephine Harris, they would have been in the lobby or out on the street when the tower came down, and the lobby and the street were killing fields. Her exhaustion held them in the exact place, at the exact minute, where the building chose not to fall.

They had a jacket made for her. It said Josephine, Our Guardian Angel, with the Ladder 6 patch. It is in the 9/11 Museum now.

She stayed close with those men for the rest of her life. When she died in 2011, the firefighters of Ladder 6 carried her casket.

Three hundred and forty three firefighters died that day running toward people they had never met. Six of them lived because they refused to leave one woman behind, and she saved them right back.

[Alex Boge @alexboge]

I find these World Trade Center simulations by Kostack Studio fascinating because they remove the smoke and let you see the collapse much more clearly.

In the real footage, so much is hidden by fire, dust, debris, distance, and chaos that many people come away with the impression that the towers simply dropped straight down into their own footprints.

But that is not really what happened.

These simulations make it much easier to see that the collapse begins in the heavily damaged and fire-weakened region, the upper section starts moving and tilting, and the destruction then propagates downward through the structure.

The towers do not simply disappear vertically into their own footprints. Large portions of the upper structure and exterior are moving outward and to the side as the collapse develops. Much of that motion is simply obscured in the real videos once the enormous debris cloud forms.

And this is also why I find these simulations useful when people describe the collapses as looking like “controlled demolition.”

Strip away the smoke and dust and the resemblance becomes much less convincing.

What you see is a highly asymmetric structural failure beginning around the aircraft-damaged and fire-affected floors, followed by an enormous moving mass progressively overwhelming the structure beneath it. There is tilting, rotation, exterior columns peeling away, debris being thrown far outside the building footprint, and structural failure occurring chaotically as the collapse moves downward.

That is very different from the neat mental image usually implied by “controlled demolition,” where structural supports are deliberately severed in a carefully timed sequence to produce a predetermined collapse.

And importantly, we already know what preceded these collapses.

Both towers suffered massive aircraft-impact damage. Fireproofing was stripped from portions of the structure. Large, uncontrolled fires then burned across multiple floors - for about 56 minutes in the South Tower and about 102 minutes in the North Tower - heating and weakening structural components until collapse initiated.

Once that upper mass began moving, the loads imposed on the floors and structure beneath became vastly greater than anything they had been designed to carry.

The result was progressive collapse.

No, an animation is not proof simply because it looks convincing, and these are not official NIST simulations. They are visualizations built under particular assumptions.

But as visualizations, I think they are extremely useful.

They let you see something the original footage often cannot show clearly: beneath that enormous cloud of smoke and debris was a complicated, violent, asymmetric structural failure - not two buildings neatly dropping straight down into their own footprints.

A note on the simulation: this is not intended to reproduce the collapse down to the exact motion of every beam, floor panel, and fragment of debris. No practical simulation could do that. Its value is in modeling the large-scale structural behavior - how the major sections deform, move, tilt, separate, and progressively fail. Think of it as a visualization of the mechanics and overall collapse behavior, not a frame-by-frame reconstruction of where every piece of steel ultimately landed.

[Adam Kramer @KegsnEggs]

If you'e never read The Falling Man, you should do so. I post this on September 11th every year, and I find time to read it on this day every year. Still, in my eyes, the greatest piece of journalism I have ever read. https://t.co/gZgwzRoSgX

[𝓟𝓻𝓲𝓷𝓬𝓮𝓼𝓪 🐸 @princesalamwane]

Remember those stories about male writers who stopped writing after their wives died, and we called it "losing their muse"? They didn't lose inspiration, they lost their uncredited co-writer.

[Patrick Witty @patrickwitty]

9:59 a.m., September 11, 2001. Bodies were falling. The South Tower began to collapse. I turned around. This is what I saw.

[rico @ricowill13]

“Who were literally clowns” is sending me

[La Rata 🐀 @CleverSafo]

Welcome Gugu Gaga

[jezz @JezziiB]

Colbert interviews James Talarico. CBS won’t air it.

Kimmel interviews James Talarico. ABC won’t air it.

Both end up on YouTube amid FCC equal-time pressure.

When broadcasters fear government consequences for airing political interviews, PAY ATTENTION.

You don’t have to become China or Russia overnight.
The warning signs come first.

[Kama @Kama_Kamilia]

At this point I believe that KFC HQ is just afraid to even say anything to KFC Spain.

[✬ @TeeAirRa_]

Phones costing the same as rent lmao what a time to be alive

[Phil Williams @montaillacman]

Love it!

[Aidan Simardone @AidanSimardone]

"Africa is poor because it is corrupt"

What they don't mention is that if you are not corrupt, the West will assassinate you

[KATE @myctorae]

I like this tweet I Love Pleonasms. Cease means stop and Desist means Do Not do it again. This is called a legal doublet, comprised of words that are irreversible binomials, like "for all intents and purposes" and "aid and abet" or even "law and order". Fun!

[​𝒎𝒂𝒆.°☃️ @ihymae_]

i love when someone says “this is gonna sound weird” because finally we’re getting somewhere

[🌥️ Overcast @bluethxghts]

Glasses that record people.

Watches that record people.

Fridges that record people .

Surveillance device on doors that record people.

[Overcaffeinated Em Dash @schr0dzinger]

@PopBase Into the surveillance-verse