September 11th That You Have Never Seen | Hacker News Reader

September 11th That You Have Never Seen

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138 pointswhoiskatrin75 comments

Moments in history like these, now have a material place in history with exacting detail thanks to technological feat. May the cosmos bless those lost that day, heal those whom aided recovery, and may their memory never fade. And, may moments like these become exceedingly rare as we humans continue to evolve.

To those who haven't visited, the 9/11 memorial in NYC is very powerful and well done. I don't think there's a dry eye around by the time you get to the end.

There’s a solemnity to it that I’ve rarely experienced elsewhere. There’s even something sorrowful about the acoustics of the space, than I wasn’t able to fully grasp rationally.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum comes to mind

I haven't been there, but the holocaust monument in Berlin (The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) had a similar effect on me.

A 20-year-old corner of my site: https://camazotz.com/wtc/

Incredible photos, especially the one of a kind person covering the remains of body parts.

From the days when having a camera on you was a rare event.

> From the days when having a camera on you was a rare event.

I was listening to Come From Away - the musical based on the planes that were diverted to Gander on 9/11, and it made me realise how much I take a mobile phone for granted. Very few had phones in those days, especially ones which roamed internationally. There was no real way to look at the news unless the plane could receive live TV somehow (some could), many on the planes didn't even speak English, and there was no google translate in your pocket.

Made me realise what a change has happened in 20 years (and well I guess smartphones were ubiquitous by the 15th anniversary). Looking back over history the change in the way we live between say 1995 (when IT in many offices was still very new and often limited to very specific tasks) and 2015 is shocking, moreso than the gap from say 1975 to 1995

We're nearly halfway through the 2015-2035 period, I wonder how much AI will change things over the next decade.

Gave me the chills when I saw them

we had treos.

I think the first Treos came out in 2002, though?

I thought I had my T68 camera phone on 9/11, but it turns out I didn't get it until 3 months later.

I watched 9/11 unfold on an 8" LCD hooked to PC my friend and I had installed in his car. I remember most news sites on the Internet were totally hugged to death that day.

You maybe correct.

I kinda of remember a co-worker getting one as a bonus. The place was in lower Manhattan and everything changed after that.

It could have been some Palm or Handspring spring board or somebody was making a treo accessory that turned into the Treo of 2002.

You were big money if you had a Palm. My uncle had one because he did IT for lawyers. It was undeniably bad ass but so so limited compared to Treos (which came later) because mobile internet had not been established yet.

I was on Reddit (er, Slashdot? er, Digg? Something?) on 9/11 and the days that followed. I downloaded a ton of images and videos. I have a CD someplace.

I'm sure there are other people who did, too.

It feels like a shame that these aren't collected...?

Slashdot was about the only site that remained up. Just.

https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/World-Trade-Towe...

Top comment:

> Apparently it was Palestinian terrorists that did it (so TV is reporting)..

People just love to jump on BS. But the rest of the comment from September, 2001 is shocking to read in December, 2023:

> ... I was in Isreal once on business, and I saw what the Israelies do to the Palestinians, and what I saw made me sick to be an American because of how our government supports what the Israelis do to those people..

> Basically, the isrealis take palestinian land bit by bit to make settlements for Israelis only, and shoot/run over/kill Palestinians with the guns, helicopters and bullets that we, America give the Israelis. ...

This was before Israel withdrew their settlements from Gaza.

I've been travelling to Israel, West Bank and Gaza for over a decade, the two words that come to mind are apartheid and prison. I'm lucky, I have a western passport and I can travel through the checkpoints and blockades with a wave of white privilege as I pass the masses queueing to go through metal detectors to get to their fields. In comparison as a westerner, going into a shopping centre is a brief metal detector, the airport is a nicer experience than US airports despite the elevated threat, the only extensive security checks I encounter is coming out of Gaza at Erez which takes far longer than a typical airport check.

Of course it's not without reason, Palestinian terrorists have blown up many places in Israel in the past, buses, restaurants, etc, that caution is not unwarranted.

Meanwhile the far right of the Israeli political spectrum continue to spread into areas they shouldn't be, whether it's illegal settlements in the west bank or burning Palestinian fields supported by the Israeli military. It's not just attacking Palestinians and Muslims though -- how often is the attempted eviction of Christians from Jerusalem mentioned in the US press?

Eerie, if you compare the situation to today.

Yeah, I remember none of the big news sites were staying up. BBC was mostly down, CNN was mostly down, etc. Slashdot stayed up. I think at one point CNN switched to a static minimal text-only format to try to stay up.

There's a video I downloaded back then which I never managed to find since then. Not on my drives or uploaded by anyone to YouTube.

It was from the inside an office building most likely across the Hudson, where you see around 3 people gathering at the window looking at the building in the background and talking, until the second plane hits and a bit afterwards.

I think I had it as a QuickTime video.

I also started to record what was going on in German TV during these hours on the news channels, I wonder if those VHS tapes are still ok.

I swear I've seen that one, but can't find it now. It may have taken down by a claim?

As do I.

The first thing/meme (before R. Dawkins coined it) was a screenshot of CS1.6's "Terrorists Win" overlayed on top the billowing of smoke where WTC was. The last was a short video where someone created a montage utilizing the parallax effect as well as added the instrumental portion of "Teardrop" by the band Massive Attack.

Dawkins coined meme far before 9/11, and it's not primarily referring to funny images on the internet.

I was also /. when I first read about it. Ran to the TV and there it on live TV. Still a very fresh memory.

You should start it. Accept more pics from the public as it goes.

This is intense. I was in high school in downtown manhattan at the time. Seeing these photos is surreal, it brings me right back to that day over 20 years ago. I think aside from that, the curation of the photos captured the feeling of that day and those after quite well.

Worked at BMG/RCA Records (now the Adobe building) in Times Square on this day. I witnessed from our 41st office building floor the North Tower collapse.

I’ll never forget the plywood sign bolted over the Burger King, with letters that were obviously spray painted in a rush “Temp Police HQ”.

Emotional looking at those pics and descriptions. Damn.

(2012)

It'll never cease to amaze me that people look at photographs like this and think "Uhhmm ackshually, the planes had nothing to do with this, it was <insert nth truther variation here>"

Here's an annotated high-res one that made the rounds on reddit a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fh...

The idea that my gov't is totally in control at all times and willing to do evil things is more comforting than the idea that geopolitics is actually chaos, and a few motivated individuals can decide to murder the president or coordinate an attack on citizens to inspire a 20 year war.

The Powers That Be may be evil but at least they’re highly competent. The real horror is in the idea that no-one is in control.

And it's one of those opinions that (IMHO) is hard to hold for someone with sufficient history training.

The murder of one archduke kicked off a world war. Of course the action of one person in the worst place at the worst time can precipitate unspeakable horror. It's happened before.

Now, I don't know shit about shit, but from what I've tried to read on the subject, a nascent German empire after the Franco-Prussian war was ready to demand its place at the grown up table of France, England, and Russia for years.

So no, not just a single moment of bad luck turning friends into enemies.

>Germany did it.

Keep reading.

Tell me what the /pol view of WW1 is, then.

I wouldn’t know. The Sleepwalkers is a good start.

>sufficient history training

>action of one person

The murder of the archduke was a literal conspiracy. Involving high-level spooks, too.

I have no idea why you are getting downvoted.. but people cannot deal with chaos or "shit happens for no reason". People seek purpose and when none exists, make up one.

Hence all the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. People just cannot stand the idea that a single nut could destroy Camelot.

I don’t think anyone doubts that planes hit the buildings except WTC7. University of Alaska Fairbanks published a paper which suggests fire was not the cause of WTC7 collapse[0].

Memories can be faulty, but I remember news reports from the time of a controlled demolition of WTC7 to avoid a more catastrophic collapse later. In the midst of all the chaos I thought it crazy that they could set that up so quickly, but before long the building was down.

0 - https://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7

I (as someone who didn't know any of the details about WTC7 previously) found this (debunk) video very informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP3TNHPCIVU

> I don’t think anyone doubts that planes hit the buildings

The doubt is whether the plane crashes could've made the buildings collapse. And they exist, because I've argued with them in real life.

But the planes didn't cause the buildings to collapse. The internal steel structure of the buildings reaching annealing temperature caused them to collapse.

The jet fuel didn't need to melt the steel beams, it just had to get close, and gravity would do the rest.

Jet fuel (plus misc office combustibles) burns hot enough to turn airplanes (aluminum) into thermite, which is certainly hot enough to melt steel.

Yah, just look at what remains of an airplane that caught fire on the ground.

Not much.

The reason the SST that caught fire crashed was the fire melted away large parts of the wing.

There's an enormous amount of energy in jet fuel, which is why it is used in jets.

This video disproves that conspiracy theory, and with just the right amount of "WTF-you-truthers-are-idiots" attitude:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA

Same. Even argued with Flat-Earthers. It's wild. you make some progress, then they come back and say "you almost had me there, but what about XYZ?", and we're off to the races again.

It's always circular, too. You knock down one argument, go through the discussion, and half way through they no longer realise they agreed that an earlier discussion point was invalid.

thingx disproved... they say "ok".

10 minutes later "but what about thingx!"

I've had to say "now you can never, ever mention thingx again, right?", but of course, they do, and look baffled when you say no.

> It's always circular, too

Well it sure as hell ain't spherical. :-)

(Off in the distance, you hear screams from the direction of Canada.)

Those are reasonable doubts to have.

No they are not.

What’s unreasonable in thinking that a plane that has hit a building at the top of it shouldn’t make the whole building collapse in just a matter of tens of minutes? If anything, this war in Ukraine has proved that buildings can sustain a lot and lot of damage until structurally collapsing.

I can't think of a single example in Ukraine of a building experiencing anything remotely similar to the sustained heat of 24.000 liters of aviation fuel burning and spreading throughout the building by way of the elevator shafts.

Buildings are great at surviving individual impacts and explosions. They're not so great at aviation fuel melting through the concrete and steel supports and weakening them over time.

If Russia started indiscriminately dumping thousands of liters jet fuel inside buildings and setting it on fire, we might see something remotely similar to what happened on 9/11. Until then, I don't know why Ukraine has any bearing on what happened back then.

There are definitely conspiracy theorists that believe there were no planes. There are prominent people who promote the no-planes theory. Conspiracy theory isn't about truth.

Conspiracy theorists believe untrue things so why not believe that the planes in images were CGI. They ignore all the people that saw planes hit the towers. And don't consider what happened to the planes and people on them. Or what is the point of having fake planes when Al-Qaeda or the government could blow up the towers like they tried before.

> It'll never cease to amaze me that people look at photographs like this and think "Uhhmm ackshually, the planes had nothing to do with this, it was <insert nth truther variation here>"

It's a way to get people to waste their time, spin their wheels, and slow down everyone around them. To grasp the societal impact, imagine a co-worker who did that about work issues.

Yup

There are hordes of people who want to be fooled by Active Measures and ordinary malcontents.

The research I've been able to find on belief in conspiracy theory followers seems to point to minds that are so disturbed by a world that contains random events that they'd rather believe in some evil cabal that makes bad things happen. (Maybe because it seems somehow possible to discover and overthrow a hidden evil cabal than to make a disorderly universe orderly?) There also seems to be a correlation with reilgiosity, which seems a bit unsurprising as most religions train you to believe things without good evidence, and to avoid good evidence in favor of faith.

It'd be fine if these were harmless chatter, but they are actively exploited to undermine trust in institutions and science, and that literally kills people.

>[...] they'd rather believe in some evil cabal that makes bad things happen.

The flip-side of this is also true. Many people reflexively reject alternative theories because it makes them uncomfortable to feel like they're being manipulated by powerful actors. I'm not saying that's the case with 9/11, although, I suspect we were never told the total truth about that day (as with most big news stories.)

The frustrating thing is that there are people who will simultaneously be skeptical that oil and coal companies have worked to downplay the risks of global warming and slow the adoption of green energy, while believing that a car engine that runs on pure water was invented in the 70s but suppressed.

Eh, I'm tired of arguing. Believe what you want.

I do agree that undermining all trust in science, education and things like this is generally bad. I just think if someone is a serious flat earther, I'm not going to convince them otherwise, and I'd rather just enjoy the rest of my day.

its important to make the distinction between questioning and undermining.

Kind of a side bar but I wonder as AI generated images get better, it seems to me only a matter of time (if it hasn’t happened already) before images are generated to create “proof” of conspiracy theories. I wonder if over time, particularly with our history now being primarily digital, if it will become more and more difficult to “know” which history is “true.” I say this as a quote from Napoleon comes to mind: History is a set of lies agreed upon..

This was a regular feature of Soviet photographic record going back to the 1930s at least. They became quite good at removing (and occasionally adding) people to photographs for propaganda purposes or just rewriting history.

This was the origin of Winston Smith's job in Orwell's Ministry of Truth -- are you going to believe your memory when the photographic (and text) record says otherwise?

I'm watching a current Netflix documentary on WW2 where they've colorized the old b+w footage. I've seen attempts at colorizing it before, which weren't that good. This attempt is much better (though they really ought to do better with peoples' teeth! ouch!). I recognize most of the footage, it's amazing how much more real it looks when in color.

I've seen some bits of ancient film sharpened with AI, which makes it look incredibly new and fresh. I'd like to see that used with the WW2 footage. It's much more watchable that way. In a way, yes, it's lying, but not in a way that alters history.

And to avoid that (as well as to not pollute future AI scrapers), Adobe and other companies have created the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) [0] and are doing attestation on camera made photos versus those made in software.

[0] https://contentcredentials.org/

> Kind of a side bar but I wonder as AI generated images get better, it seems to me only a matter of time (if it hasn’t happened already) before images are generated to create “proof” of conspiracy theories.

Photographs have been manufactured for that purpose (and, even more simply, real undoctored photographs presented with false context for that purpose) for about as long as photography has existed.

Yes I think we’re all aware of that. Images of Stalin where people are edited out as they are purged come to mind. In the case of faked photographs these images were relatively few.

I think AI generated images open up a whole new realm fakery not just in quality but quantity and variety and ability to widely distribute those images. A person wanting to create a fake narrative could potentially make it very difficult to tell what is real and what is fake.

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