I'm about to go out, so I thought I'd add one more thing to my list of rules of thumb that directly affects the WTC question. I went to a number of "conspiracy" web sites and found a consistent theme that the collapse was inconsistent with the explanation by the government.
I thought that such a major event would be studied by civil engineers. And I was right. I was able to google a number of sites. A sample is given below. http://www.public-action.com/911/jmcm/sciam/ http://www.architectureweek.com/2001/1024/news_2-2.html http://cee.mit.edu/index.pl?iid=3742&isa=Category http://www.public-action.com/911/jmcm/sciam/ http://www.mscsoftware.com/success/details.cfm?Q=132&Z=181&sid=269 In addition, there is a list of abstracts that includes a number on the WTC collapse at: http://www.pubs.asce.org/WWWsrchkwx.cgi?Collapse >From this sample, I have determined that the professional civil engineering community believes that the collapse is consistant with damage done by airplanes. There are differences of opinion, of course, but they are mostly about the relative importance of various factors. If the collapse was inconsistent with being caused by airplanes, I would think that all these professionals would not have stated that it was consistent. They would, instead, write papers on not all the factors being yet understood because the collapse was not consistent with the specs. of the WTC and the damage done by planes. There would be a number of non-conspiricy based factors that they could consider. Since this is a high profile question, the people who did figure this out would gain significant recognition....a main goal of many accademics. This leads to another principal: when a professional community (such as biologist, physicsts, or engineers) states that data are consistant with established theories and facts and amature websites state they are not, there is a tremendous burdon of proof on the amature, since historically the professionals are right many many more times than creationists, alternate thinkers, conspiricy advocates, etc. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
