Cap'n Refsmmat

The fire sprinkler systems were retrofitted into the buildings; they did not originally have sprinkler systems.

Ah, interesting, I didn't realize it wasn't sent to Facebook members. I'll have to fix that. Here's the place for introductions: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/51253-the-official-introduce-yourself-thread/

When a user first logs in from Facebook, add an entry to your members database containing their basic information. When you later want to view their profile, all their information is in the database, just like with members who signed up through your site directly.

Hm. He had an interview with them. Does he actually have any other relation to Democracy Now, like actually watching/reading what they put out, or did they just score a good interview?

They didn't escape detection. F-15s were sent to intercept American Airlines Flight 11 after controllers realized it was hijacked. http://en.wikipedia....ht_11#Hijacking See here: http://en.wikipedia..../WTC_7#Collapse Uncontrolled fire with a terrible sprinkler system. Flight 93's flight data recorder was recovered; the two that hit the towers were not, although given the volume of the debris I'm not surprised. They're really big and tall buildings. NIST report: Dumb design.

IIRC they turned off the transponders, so they vanished from radar. As for the rest, NIST explains it in some detail (i.e. several thousand pages worth): http://wtc.nist.gov/ Short version of how they collapsed so easily: WTC towers had a novel design. The outer walls were load-bearing and there was an inner "core" of columns with the elevators; in between was open floor space. The aircraft likely damaged the inner core severely -- the columns are clustered together, so it's easy to strike many of them at the same time. Once the inner core failed due to fire and impact damage, the floors above collapsed downward into the center. The floor structure pulled the outer columns inward as it fell, destroying the outer columns. The same process repeated for subsequent floors: inner columns destroyed, outer columns pulled inward by floor beams as they fell. This process, and momentum, allowed the collapse to happen very quickly. Do you have a source for this?

I think a lot of things are computerized without concern for how they will actually be used. Back when I was applying to universities, there was the Common Application, a computerized college application that let you apply to several universities at once. How'd they go about it? Well, it's just a computerized version of the form -- once you type in your essay responses and fill in the boxes, it inserts those responses into the blanks on the paper form and prints them out so they can be sent to the colleges. The problem, of course, was that people wrote responses that were slightly too large for the boxes on the physical sheets of paper, so their answers were cut off. Had the Common Application been designed for how it's used, displaying applications on a screen instead of just filling in the same old forms, it'd have worked well. Instead they made it more difficult to use by requiring people to Print Preview their applications to make sure they fit in the old paper forms.

When you register, you're emailed a link to the Introduce Yourself thread.

I have spent my afternoon reading conspiracy theory websites discussing the shooting. Regarding the girl born on 9/11 and killed in the attack: I think our public discourse has problems other than violent rhetoric. edit: just saw this: We're doomed.

Back when we used vBulletin, we had devious types who would register, make an innocuous post, wait several weeks, and then add a signature to their posts with a link in it. I had to write a script to look for links in new member signatures so I could ban them easily. Hence new members now can't have a signature until they have 10 posts. With spammers, sockpuppets, and ban-evaders, you can see why I'm always suspicious of new members...

Academic research in philosophy isn't about how old philosophical ideas changed society or impacted our thoughts; you have to come up with new ideas, and if you think all of them are silly, you'll have a hard time.

Are you asking why it's so old or how we know how old it is?

http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html 4.5 billion years old, give or take a bit.

I suppose it's like a professor teaching Hannah Montana studies going "I can't take it any more! This is pointless!" and quitting. It's not that he disagrees with some of the teaching -- it's that he can't take it seriously. Not to say that philosophy of religion is like studying Hannah Montana. I've taken an introductory course in it myself. Just making an illustrative analogy...

Many people treat them as such. The two common gun-control related reactions to violence are "Don't allow guns so nobody is killed!" and "Let everyone have guns so they can stop it!" Of course, more gun ownership does not guarantee that (a) the citizens will know how to use those guns, (b) armed citizens will be in the right places, and © the armed citizens won't be shot and killed before they can save the day. We can see from the previous posts that an armed citizen was nearby at the Safeway, but got to the scene just a few seconds too late to stop the shooting.

Photons lose a tiny portion of their energy upon being reflected. Also, no mirror can reflect 100% of the light hitting it; you'll at most get in the 90% range, with the rest absorbed by the mirror and lost as heat.

I couldn't figure out how to do this the last time I checked. I'll do some searching and see what I can find.

An interesting message: Dear Water Balls: True Science or Internet Hoax [Answer,

Why would that help over a regular supercomputer? It's not like we have gigabytes of weather data being generated every second. Although... http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20028265-54.html

http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/public/default.htm

Electricity is merely a flow of electrons. Once those electrons are used, they don't go away -- you can run them through a generator again if you'd like. So no, we will not use up all the total electricity, though we may use up all of our fossil fuels.

I'm actually offended that people think we ban arbitrarily. Every ban given requires a second opinion -- or third and fourth opinions, in the case of permanent bans. Fear of unjust moderator action should not stop you from providing evidence in debate. (In any case, making points and refusing to back them up annoys the staff more)

They got that network up and running a year or two ago.

The question was about points in the universe that don't expand at all. There are inhomogeneities in the CMBR indicative of small random fluctuations in the early universe, but as far as I know they are indicated as corroborating whole-universe inflation theory quite well. Now, this says nothing of the universe's current state, since the CMBR is quite old. The current rate of expansion is determined by redshifts, and I don't know how comprehensive that data is.

The New York Times is running another profile of Loughner, suggesting he'd been influenced by right-wing extremist groups: http://www.nytimes.c...pagewanted=1