Jones at Berkeley

Here's a video of Steven Jones at Berkeley last week. Comments:

1. Jones spends a great deal of time giving his credentials; there is a long discussion of his work on cold fusion, with far too much detail for the audience.

2. Jones has a self-deprecating wit that is quite disarming if a trifle dry. It is difficult to dislike him, unlike, for example, Uncle Fetzer, who is a little prickly at times, and at times you can remove the "ly" from that description.

3. Jones once again emphasizes WTC-7; we get the familiar claim that "If you dropped a steel ball off the roof, it wouldn't fall much faster."

4. Jones also claims that controlled demolition causes buildings to fall at close to free-fall times. I would like to see his evidence for this. The few occasions I have timed actual controlled demolitions, they took longer than free-fall.

5. Jones claims that the NIST study underway on WTC-7 includes only floors 8-46. He also states that he hopes that the NIST study will consider explosives. Of course, if Jones had been reading Screw Loose Change, he would know that the NIST study will include:

Investigation of hypothetical blast scenarios
Evaluation of thermite as a possible blast substance

6. At 35:00, Jones cites Joseph M. Phelps, who helps us understand with regard to WTC-7's collapse, "That airplane couldn't cause this." This puts Mr Phelps, who's apparently quite an expert on the structural engineering of golf courses, squarely in the OCT camp, since nobody I know claims that an airplane caused WTC-7's collapse, at least not directly (of course, American Airlines Flight 11 indirectly caused it).

I decided to take a break at this point, since Jones moves on to discussion of the collapse times of the two towers.