Oh, there is a response already that applies to almost all the CTs:
Piffle.
If you are so brilliant let us see you publish a paper in a respected physics journal describing your amazing insights or I just have to dismiss you as just an irrelevant pretender.
No, you have not demonstrated anything.
Because we do not need to assume that everything is an spherical cow.
Incidentally psikeyhackr, on your “responses” everyone can see here that you decided to ignore or reply to the points of the professor.
Pretending that by sending him a copy of your video that then you are dealing with what the professor is reporting and calculating was pathetic.
You can look at his site yourself and the cross sections of the columns on Lon Waters’ site. It is absurd to talk about a skyscraper having a uniform distribution of steel. The building could not stand if designed that way. You can be as impressed by the word PROFESSOR as you like. The laws of physics do not care.
psik
You can piffle all you want.
Why can’t you figure out the grade school physics of a skyscraper needing to be bottom heavy? If you can figure that out then why haven’t you been demanding to know the distribution of steel for years now. This has dragged on too long. The problem can’t be solved now without a lot of people making themselves look STUPID.
We don’t even have the data on the tons of steel in the impact zones. How does that not get mentioned for SEVEN YEARS?
psik
Meh.
Repeating your link will not help at all.
Speaking of dragging, you should be able to show how wrong the professor is, but I do think you are smart enough to know that in this message board there are indeed people that will demonstrate with simple logic and better physics how you are missing the point.
Meh, the only thing you showed was just a demonstration of a waste of time. A simulation based on assumptions and very little real life numbers and physics does not triumph over very educated assumptions and more realistic physics.
From Lute Skywatcher’s link:
That’s the damdest thing about this situation. There actually is a conspiracy.
No, it’s not very damned. Conspiracies happen all the time. There is a difference between a conspiracy and a Conspiracy Theory. And there is a big difference between a conspiracy, a Conspiracy Theory, and a conspiracy by the US government to destroy 4 commercial airliners, 3 of the most important buildings in the country, and murder thousands of its own citizens.
Sure. But I’m not advancing these demolition theories.
Right. You just want there to be more to it . . . [Caruso puts on his sunglasses] . . . than meets the eye.
I just want to say that **Valgard’**s explanations are the clearest I’ve seen. While before I didn’t have the book-larnin’ to put into words and formulae what he/she described, I now understand better the physics behind what I used to think was only “patently obvious to the casual observer.” Thank you.
I am always suspicious of anyone who posits what I want, or think, or puts words in my mouth.
But sometimes, Grasshopper, you only know what you want, but not what you need. It is foolish to feed children a diet of ice cream and potato chips, but that is what you want.
I’m using “floor” in the sense of the entire structural network at any given horizontal section of the building. I don’t mean only the actual floor slab. We can call it a level if you prefer.
If you go back and read that entire post again you’ll notice that I specifically address what you’re saying. Any particular cross-section is obviously strong enough to hold the weight of everything above it. It’s strong enough to hold more than the weight above it (for a variety of reasons including safety factors and the other loads that we’re ignoring for purpose of this discussion). But it was not strong enough to hold the weight of everything above it when “everything” suddenly dropped down several feet. Which means that the first section that failed gets crushed and the whole mess drops down onto the next section, which fails under the impact just like the floor above it, and so on - that’s a progressive collapse.
If you just built an exact duplicate of the ground floor in a test lab and then built a copy of the top, say, ten floors and dropped them a couple of feet onto the ground floor it might have held up - since the ground floor was designed to carry 110 floors worth of building that might handle 10 floors at 10G.
But that is NOT what happened. All of those floors between #1 and wherever the collapse began did not just magically disappear. The vast majority of all that stuff went straight down, it didn’t fly out to the sides. So the ground floor was subjected to a big multiple of its design capacity. Notice that we did not have to make any assumptions about how much each particular floor weighs, either.
Do you disagree that if you drop a weight some distance onto a surface that it will generate a peak force greater than the same weight sitting still? You don’t have to take my word for it, go do the really simple basic highschool-level physics equations yourself, or better yet try it out. Here’s a simple experiment:
Rest a brick on your toes. Now take that same brick, hold it up at shoulder level and drop it into your toes. Which trial produced more damage to your toes?
[QUOTE=dropzone]
I just want to say that Valgard’s explanations are the clearest I’ve seen. While before I didn’t have the book-larnin’ to put into words and formulae what he/she described, I now understand better the physics behind what I used to think was only “patently obvious to the casual observer.” Thank you.
[/QUOTE]
“He”
And thanks!
Yeah, well THAT was obvious, you being an Engineering Geek. I just tried to play that it wasn’t. 
ETA: Worked with some women who had to contend with Not Being Guys. This was the Early Days, so some went with using initials while others got jobs outside the field. 
That’s all fine and good.
Today by pure chance I had lunch with some Department of State scholar of the Afghanistan situation.
His opinions were (in short):
-the world probably passed peak oil a few years ago
-everyone would love a trans-Afghanistan pipeline (excepting a lot of Afghans), only it isn’t practical. It could potentially benefit India the most
-the real ‘prize’ (as he put it several times) is a pipeline from the Caspian through Iran to the Persian Gulf
-there is no intention to force this Iranian route militarily
Then there is the actual deal for the trans-Iran pipeline.
The yak yak went on and on, it is hard to summarize. The main point in the Afghan conflict discussion was that a major offensive at the beginning would have netted Bin Laden at staved off much of the insurgency. Instead we’re looking at a decades-long occupancy. Not the result of conspiracy, but rather incompetence.
(rant) How the FUCK can a profession hope to survive without asking HALF of the population to join? Idiots.
Your friend is a moron. It’s a TERRIBLE place to put a pipeline, and was since BEFORE the local warlords started carving up Afghanistan. Which was, oh, 3- or 4000 years ago.
I suggest that your friend is not nearly as high up as you claim, if he exists (as you describe him) at all. I believe you have dabbled with the realm of “making shit up” to support your baseless claims.
. . . which we tried to tell you, counting the other thread, about 1,100 posts ago.