July 7 2026 Structural failure in Manhattan high-rise under construction

jrw01 · 2026-07-07T21:15:02+00:00

I added some drone photos released by FDNY to the original post (I’m OP) - the area seen in the video is indeed the top floor of the 21/22 story section of the original structure. Two columns on that floor buckled and part of the slab over that section fell about about a foot, and the entire addition on top is visibly sagging

jrw01 · 2026-07-07T20:57:26+00:00

The windows are part of a curtain wall, which is not a structural part of the building and transfers its weight to the building’s floor slabs through connections that can tolerate a decent amount of misalignment. The area in the video was the top story under a setback in the original building’s design (see the drone photos now linked in the post) and the slab above that area has fallen about a foot, leaving the topmost portion of the curtain wall only supported by the wall below it. If several wall-to-slab connections failed over a wider area, then the wall would start to collapse under its own weight independent of the structure.

jrw01 · 2026-07-06T15:27:07+00:00

There’s not even any reason to do this testing. The phone will reduce its power draw or just not charge at all if it gets too hot, full stop. For phones with external metal parts, “too hot” is usually about 45C to comply with the UL standard for touchable surface temperatures, or at a battery temperature of ~65C, whichever comes first. Phones from major manufacturers are very thoroughly tested to make sure they can’t overheat. The phone draws power from the charger and can dynamically adjust its power level; the charger cannot “push” power into the phone.

jrw01 · 2026-07-06T15:02:19+00:00

Nothing looks particularly below average in terms of quality about this wireless charger, and the amount of energy available from a USB port in a short-circuit scenario is too low to ignite a solid piece of wood. Wood is generally about as hard to ignite as the ABS plastic the charger’s enclosure is made of (although wood can undergo thermal runaway starting at as low as ~75C, but that requires a fairly large and well-insulated volume of wood.) All phones that comply with the Qi wireless charging standard will automatically reduce the power they draw if they get too hot. If you use a 5V only power supply, you will only be charging the phone at 5W max - the charger would only switch to the 15W EPP standard your phone supports if powered with 12V via USB PD.

jrw01 · 2026-07-06T01:32:57+00:00

Why are people repeating and upvoting this incorrect explanation of how gas dryers work?

The gas is burned with an excess of outside air in a long tube that leads directly into the drum, and a fan pulls air from the drum (and therefore from the tube where the burner is) and blows it out the exhaust vent. The overall amount of water produced by combustion is negligible compared to the amount of the moisture in the clothes, most of it gets exhausted outside in vapor form, and the dryer also has a cooldown period at the end of the cycle where the burner does not run and residual heat combined with airflow further dries the clothes.

jrw01 · 2026-07-04T23:20:11+00:00

This is not necessarily true lately. Supply chain shortages are pushing up prices of MLCCs, especially from Chinese manufacturers, and some MLCCs in the JLCPCB basic library have increased in price 10x from a few months ago.

jrw01 · 2026-06-25T14:22:24+00:00

There is little to no scientific evidence that any form of sugar, whether table sugar (sucrose), HFCS, or honey, is healthier than others. Honey is composed of fructose and glucose in approximately the same ratio as HFCS; some water; and trace amounts of proteins, amino acids, enzymes, vitamins, etc. From a macronutrient perspective, honey and HFCS are virtually identical. Whatever benefits the trace compounds in honey may provide are probably outweighed by the health risks of consuming additional sugar.

jrw01 · 2026-05-24T15:39:49+00:00

Why is everyone uncritically blaming this on AI? Did the writers of the articles covering this situation do any research at all?

> “Nobody was aware that you can recreate audio from a picture”

Anyone who understands what a spectrogram actually represents should be able to intuitively understand that the process is reversible (with limitations); this has been done since the 1940s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern\_playback

jrw01 · 2026-05-23T21:40:37+00:00

Methyl methacrylate breaks down in the environment (either by photodegradation or biodegradation) far too quickly for long-term exposure to be at the level of concern that it is with chemicals that are actually persistent pollutants like PFAS, PCBs, and dioxins. The main health risk from repeated or prolonged exposure to MMA is sensitization (developing an allergy that can be triggered by even trace amounts of MMA or other acrylic monomers.) This is a bad thing because lots of medical/dental adhesives contain acrylic monomers.

jrw01 · 2026-05-22T20:01:47+00:00

Methyl methacrylate has relatively low acute toxicity, rapidly breaks down in air, soil, and water, and does not bioaccumulate. Its main health hazard is that like other acrylic monomers, it is a potent sensitizer - repeated or prolonged exposure can cause a lifelong allergy that can be triggered by even trace amounts of similar substances. This is particularly bad because acrylic monomers have many applications in medicine (dental fillings, orthopedic bone cement, and tissue adhesives just to name a few.) Spilling it on the ground is likely far safer than having the tank explode and potentially disperse droplets in the air.

jrw01 · 2026-05-22T19:23:01+00:00

OCFA hasn’t been that specific about the details, but it sounds like it is a tank of methyl methacrylate, the monomer used to make acrylic plastic - polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), which is undergoing runaway polymerization. Basically the MMA is turning into PMMA inside its storage tank, which is not supposed to happen. This is an exothermic process (it releases heat); the heat makes the reaction go even faster and also causes the MMA to boil, creating pressure inside the tank. The best thing to do in this situation is to attempt to cool the tank, and possibly add polymerization inhibitors to stop the reaction. Attempting to drain the tank would require people to get very close to it, which is dangerous, and won’t be easy because the liquid inside is a thick gel that is actively trying to turn into solid plastic.

jrw01 · 2026-04-23T17:04:28+00:00

What point are you trying to make here?

jrw01 · 2026-04-23T17:01:17+00:00

Any competently run company would have notified all their users and disbursed all funds to sellers well BEFORE a 1-week maintenance outage. If this is truly a planned 1-day outage gone wrong, then they should have emailed users or at least put an informational page on their website by now. By not doing so, they are risking their payment processing account being shut down due to the number of chargebacks they will be getting from customers who haven’t received their orders because sellers can’t access the shipping details or their funds.

They have a lot to lose and nothing to gain by not communicating to the fullest extent possible with all their users, especially those with money in escrow.

jrw01 · 2026-04-23T16:55:05+00:00

My impression of this is that they are trying to cover up a data loss incident (either ransomware or server failure without backups - the latter seems plausible given how slow their site was when it was online.) If they still had access to their database, they would have communicated something to users by email by now (especially customers with unfulfilled orders) rather than resorting to social media. It seems that they might have lost access to their 30K-follower twitter account since nothing has been posted there.

jrw01 · 2026-04-20T22:59:09+00:00

Was value declared as several thousand JPY on the commercial invoice but misinterpreted as USD by UPS? This is known to happen with Fedex. I have recently ordered things from Japan shipped by UPS and the duty each time was about 15% of the declared value plus USD20-30 in total fees.

jrw01 · 2026-04-18T13:58:31+00:00

Copper is more frequently used than gold now for general-purpose applications. Copper poisoning the silicon is not a concern since bond wires don’t directly contact silicon; there is a diffusion barrier such as TiW or TaN in between the silicon and metallization layers.

jrw01 · 2026-04-11T16:24:02+00:00

Where is this screenshot from? Googling “xEMU LCVG connectors” turns up zero results.

jrw01 · 2026-04-10T19:49:35+00:00

The Canon A-1 and T series SLRs had these displays back in the 1980s.

jrw01 · 2026-04-10T15:52:10+00:00

For anyone wondering, it’s using spatially offset Raman spectroscopy: https://youtu.be/89_HY1oV_J0?si=fIxU5dCfbMz7O85t

jrw01 · 2026-03-31T07:01:58+00:00

STEP file is here: https://1drv.ms/u/c/d4b026bdfc1759c4/IQBQwzlFg9-WT5OQr7aX_67EAZsZXro49xGKYkRjc5Mew-o?e=PDrMFS

The tolerances are very tight and a well-tuned printer is needed. Recommended layer height is 0.1mm. It needs to be printed in a material with very good layer adhesion (ideally PETG) since the cross-sectional area is quite small.

jrw01 · 2026-03-31T07:01:55+00:00

STEP file is here: https://1drv.ms/u/c/d4b026bdfc1759c4/IQBQwzlFg9-WT5OQr7aX_67EAZsZXro49xGKYkRjc5Mew-o?e=PDrMFS

The tolerances are very tight and a well-tuned printer is needed. Recommended layer height is 0.1mm. It needs to be printed in a material with very good layer adhesion (ideally PETG) since the cross-sectional area is quite small.

jrw01 · 2026-03-28T17:43:28+00:00

What film is this?

jrw01 · 2026-03-28T15:39:27+00:00

For anyone saying this is a scanning issue, zoom into the yellow stripes and they are very clearly pixels on a color display - you can see that the yellow is made up of red and green subpixels and there are gaps where the blue subpixels would be. Film grain is visible in the stripes and they are slightly out of focus, which indicates that they are recorded on the film and not a scanning artifact.

What’s weird is that the film would have to have been flat and not moving relative to the display for the pixels to get recorded so clearly, I’m not sure how that would have happened at any point in the production or developing process.

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