A former employee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Peter Michael Ketcham, who worked at NIST from 1997 until 2011, wrote this letter (below) to the editor of Europhysics News ; NIST is the government agency tasked with investigating how the Twin Towers collapsed. Ketcham is calling NIST out for its failure to, well,  investigate the collapse. (They only estimated the airplane damage and did not theorize how such damage could cause the buildings to fall.) I use the NIST report in Locus Amoenus,  where one of its author’s admits, to himself, it is, “nothing but fermented blend of preconception and irrelevance.”  My hero Hamlet (whose father died on 9/11 and whose new stepfather it is who works for NIST) is furious when he discovers the fraud, furious with himself, his stepfather and his mother, with everybody for being so intellectual lazy.  Here is Ketcham’s reaction, which seems to echo his literary predecessor: Continue reading →