Dantius

Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend But I'm telling you, that was no commercial plane. You're right. It's a space station! ... Seriously though, a point-by-point rebuttal: Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend Click to reveal.. You can obviously see a missile right there. I see a blurry, grainy shot of the underside of a plane, with several line that look like they appear due to reflection off the paint job on the planes.caused by the angle of the camera. Secondly, why would they need a missile? A Boeing 757 has a weight of around 100,000 kilograms. That means that, if we conservatively estimate cruise speed at 500 kph, the plane itself had around a gigajoule of kinetic energy- factor in the chemical energy of all the jet fuel, and you're looking at dozens to hundreds of gigajoules of energy (for unit comparison, a gigajoule is approximately the energy of 500 pounds of TNT). Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend A plane crash wouldn't have made a giant crater like it did unless it had some "help" (as in a certain something being shot at the tower first). Help like several tons of kinetic and chemical energy in the form of a 787? I could show you my math if that would help you understand. Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend I'm the kind of person that likes to question things that are just accepted by the average person. Look, I don't usually like pulling my credentials on people in Internet debates where they can't actually be substantiated, since people who rely exclusively on ethos-based arguments on the Internet tend to do so because they can't come up with logical arguments and prefer making up credentials instead. However, since I've been made repeated statements about my job and degrees for years here, I'll make an exception for truthers, since they really irk me and it kind of is an insult to my field. FYI: I'm a structural engineer with a decade and a half of experience in the field and a Master's, so I would like to say that I may be a little more qualified to make judgements on the feasibility of massive structural failure in high-rise buildings than, say, the average user on the Internet forum. Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend The real question is if those planes didn't have the people for those four flights, what happened to them? How about this- the people were on the flights, which were hijacked by lucky terrorists whose success was compounded by federal missteps and poor intelligence, who then proceeded to fly the planes into WTC 1 and 2, which sustained massive structural damage due to the force and heat, which subsequently collapsed and took down the adjacent building(s?)? That seems to be altogether simpler, more logical, and above all more plausible than a massive conspiracy involving all levels of a hyper competent shadow government bent on killing its own citizens in order to invade a country halfway around the globe and spend trillions of dollars failing to occupy it.

Originally Posted By: Harehunter Ludicrous Speed, GO!! Sir... They've gone to plaid!

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S "As the length of a thread increases, the probability of someone using Comic Sans approaches 1." Just kidding. Thankfully, it doesn't. FYT.

Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend Originally Posted By: Trenton Its not every day a plane crashes into a building like that, and You have to take it into consideration that a passenger plane is like 3 houses long. The power it put into the tower According to a WTC architect manager guy, The WTC were built slightly differently than most other high-rises were. Instead of distributing the load-bearing columns in a normal rectangular array like this: Code: --------------------| || * * * * || || * * * * || || * * * * || || * * * * ||__________________| , they were sort of clustered around the central elevators like this: Code: --------------------| || || ****** || * * || * * || ****** || || ||__________________| . While that made for lovely open-plan office spaces and was perfectly fine under the usual stresses and strains experienced by such buildings, like wind loads and such, it's also more vulnerable to collapse when a plane takes out the entire central support structure for the building. While a "normal" high rise may or may not (depending on the case) be able to resist the planes taking out a quarter to a third of the support structures for long enough to safely evacuate, when most if not all of the load-bearing supports of the building are removed, it's pretty much a goner. There were pretty intense discussion on this at work following the event on the precise mechanics and whether or not the towers would have stood if they had a more traditional design, but it was widely agreed that thee was nothing unusual or suspicious about the collapse and it could have easily been caused by a massive objected filled with explosive crashing into it at incredible velocity, and most structural engineers (hint: these are the people you should be listening to, not architects) would find nothing controversial about that statement, at all.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S It doesn't really do that, though. English grammar hasn't changed significantly in a long time, and owes bits to relatives of Old French and nothing, really, to Latin or Greek, let alone Spanish or any other languages that English acquires words from. But the word-acquiring works in all directions, all languages do that, and indeed English probably provides other languages with vastly more loan-words than it receives. So other languages have a trade imbalance with English? Sweet! That makes us like the China of linguistics!

Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim No, I'm not that interested in inventing anything really. ...I was referring to the Autodesk software program Inventor, which is pretty widely used in MechEng and manufacturing.

Originally Posted By: Triumph One of my favorite fictional towns was Ebonheart, in Morrowind. Mabe Village in LoZ: Link's Awakening was a pleasant place, in its way. I enjoyed Lemuria in Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Oh, and Shadow Valley Fort is pretty cool too. I'm there are other lovely fictional cities I've encountered, those are just a few that come to mind this morning. The Imperial City in Oblivion would actually be a beautiful place to live, if a bit small for the capital of the entire known world. It sucks that the house you can buy there is literally a shack on an island in the corner of the slums and not a gigantic mansion inside the city proper.

Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim Well I'll be. Manufacturing it is. I'd have guessed Inventor, myself. Correct, or not?

Originally Posted By: Arancaytrus Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Originally Posted By: The Forgotten Ann/Arm I don't log in for one day, and I miss this? For someone who made a goodbye topic last month, you're awfully attached. Come on, he managed six days. The longest I've been gone after posting a goodbye topic was about... mh, six hours. You seem to be pretty good with the long hiatuses without goodbye topics, though. Maybe you should make a bunch of goodbye topics to insure you'd stick around?

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Originally Posted By: Triumph I don't think Santa can be a hide and seek champion because I seriously doubt anyone is looking for him. It's really rather clever: convince everyone that you're myth and then no one will ever come looking for you or try to kill you. ...except for this guy: [snip] Dikiyoba. That was actually a half-good adaptation of the book. I'd prefer to see a good one of Night Watch, though.

Originally Posted By: Fflewddur Fflam I had a riddle and no one to ask it to, so I posted it here. Razors my edges, and trebled my steel - Tempered was I in the blood of warriors three One foe did I follow - Sought I the blood of one alone And never found it. What weapon is this? It's obviously a USAF rocket drone sent to kill Osama bin Laden- sent to find one foe, but never found it.

Originally Posted By: Triumph Wow. Yeah, I'm really curious now who's idea this was, and what purpose it is intended to serve. I can see it would encourage spam, and yet surely that wasn't the original intent? I'm also not at all surprised at who is at the top of the list... This is a horrible idea. All my hard work accumulating posts, carefully planning and investing and strategizing and analyzing the empirical distribution of the spam market in order to corner the market on posts has come to nought! The nouveau-spammers are encroaching on my old spammy postcount! Soon, my account in East Egg will be worthless due to the encroachment of arrivistes in East Egg looking to make a quick one or two thousand posts! This cannot stand.

I, for one, never bought into the whole 9/11 mania. It's the best example in recent history of how irrational fear triumphed over logic and rationality, and it resulted in an incredibly disproportionate response that caused more damage and created a greater potential for harm to America than the event itself ever could. One of the best skeptical essays ever was written about that on the first anniversary of the attack, and it deserves to be read again on the 10th.

Originally Posted By: Harehunter PChem *curls up in a corner and cries*

Originally Posted By: Lilith you can also use any of a wide variety of gender-neutral pronouns. (except don't use "it". it's rude.) Isn't "he" technically gender neutral in some circumstances? Like, if I said "The student dropped his books" it would be correct, since in that case I haven't specified the gender?

Originally Posted By: Sarachim Attention, everyone but Nico: New York does not like you, either. This is why people do not like New York.

Originally Posted By: Flame Fiend That makes me happy and frightened at the same time. What's the hardest in your opinion? Probably anything involving either partial differential equations or complex analysis. The stuff that high schoolers are told is "hard" math, like calculus or linear algebra, is a joke compared to that stuff.

Originally Posted By: Trenton Uchiha, shaper servile. Ok...Tri-what?

FAVORITE: Chicago, IL. LIKE: Chapel Hill, NC. AMIBIVALENT: Most cities in the USA that I have not spent prolonged periods of time in, Albany, NY. REALLY DISLIKE: New York City, NY. Also, the entire state of California.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S [snip] You haven't even bought me dinner yet, Slarty, and you're jumping straight to statistical analysis? For shame.

Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim Originally Posted By: Space Between Dantius: The Seventh Seal, I think that's Metropolis, To Kill a Mockingbird, Dr. Strangelove, I have no idea, I have no idea, and Episode V. What were the two unidentifieds? They look like they were out of Midway. Apart from that: The scene leading up to the first battle in 300. Theres so many parts out of the Die Hards I think of any favourites. I haven't sat down and watched any movies for a long time so I can't think of any more off the top of my head. It was the scene from Tora! Tora! Tora! where Yamamoto is told that the American carriers weren't at Pearl Harbor and he gets so distraught because he knew that if he didn't destroy the carriers he couldn't possibly win the war. The first one is from right before the Intermission in Dr. Zhivago when we see the face of the General Strelnikov we've been hearing about and discover that he's actually Pasha, who isn't dead.

Originally Posted By: Triumph Dantius, you're the second person I've encountered who lists Nixon as one of his favorite presidents. Interesting. There are two reasons for this, actually: 1. I am firmly of the opinion that Nixon did more to end the Cold War than any other president at the time. Detente, China, drawing down Vietnam, etc. I also think that these achievements tend to be overshadowed by the whole Watergate scandal, which is also very unfortunate, since I would certainly place Nixon as among the most intelligent and savviest presidents we've had, and it's a real smae his legacy got tarnished because of his obsessive paranoia. 2. I'm also fairly certain that, if I were elected president, I'd basically be Nixon all over again without pasty makeup, so the fact that he reminds me of me earns him enough brownie points to push him from "like" into "favorite". I do find it odd that you'd remark on me being the second. If I may inquire, who was the first?

FAVORITES: Hamilton (Yes, I know he wasn't a President, but he was the best Founding Father and was easily as or more influential than almost any president. And Secretary of the Treasury is like the president. It's around six steps away at any rate.), Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Eisenhower, Nixon (!), Clinton. LIKE: Washington, Adams, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Carter, some bits of Reagan, JFK (SPAAAAACE!). NEUTRAL: Any presidents between Jackson and Lincoln and any presidents between Johnson and Teddy, because they didn't really do that much, H.W., Ford, Johnson, anyone I forgot to put elsewhere because I don't remember "blah blah blah signed the Missouri Compromise blah blah quasi war etc." stuff from American History two decades ago that was boring. DISLIKE: Harry S Truman (there's no period, his middle name was S, just the letter S.), Carter, McKinley. DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF PRESIDENT: Most bits of Reagan, GWB, Hoover, Coolidge, Grant. SPECIAL CATEGORY THAT WITHHOLDS HISTORICAL JUDGEMENT UNTIL 2012 (OR 2016 IF ROMNEY IS NOT NOMINATED): Barack Obama

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus Actually, it's the third Doctor, but thank you. Doctor who now?