I appreciate the skeptical instincts of Farhad Manjoo. His reporting is consistently of the highest quality.

On the other hand, I am truly appalled at the letters in repsonse to this article. It would take too long to calalog all of the buffoonery evident in these letters, but I will mention just a few points.

In physics, scale matters. An intuition about everyday objects does not generalize to very, very large objects. For example, for any significant portion of the towers to fall outside its footprint one would have to laterally accelerate a mass on the order of hundreds of thousands of tons. Our notions about the way everyday objects tip when they fall only generalize to objects of a certain mass. Much larger, or smaller, and the behavior changes.

In fires it's the energy that counts, not the temperature. It's clear from the letters (and from watching "Loose Change") that most of the conspiracy theorists don't know the difference. The examples offered of other high-rise fires are largely irrelevant because they don't involve a comparable source of energy.

The form of debris left by an impact depends largely on the speed of the impact. High velcity impacts don't leave big chunks of planes lying around. Rather, the planes largely disintegrate.

There are oddities about 9/11, like the building 7 collapse, or the coincidence of miltary exercises occuring on the same day, which haven't, to my mind, been explained. Unfortunately it's difficult to take a skeptical look at these issues because of all the meaningless noise, like "Loose Change".

I have to chime in to dispute the argument that science can tell us nothing about god.

With science we can ask a question like "what would the world look like if Darwin were right?" Well, we would expect to find a mechanical mechanism of genetic inheritance common to all life on earth (DNA), to find all manner of fossil forms, to observe mutation and selection, and so-forth.

In fact, that is what we have observed. The believers made no such predictions, and are reduced to making arguments like "God planted the evidence", or, as Collins does "what is random to us isn't random to God", which is exactly the same argument.

That is to say, we can ask the question "what would the word look like if genetic variability were truly random, that is, that there is no intelligence guiding it?" Well, it would look like the world we live in. A non-intelligent randomness is sufficient for Darwin's mechanism to work. Collins is arguing once again that God is fiddling with the evidence, to carefully hide His pulling-of-the-strings of genetic variabiliy to make it look random.

The great thing about beliefs that are literally just made up is that you can always simply make up more nonsense when the belief is unsupported by evidence. I claim "pink elephants pirouette through the room when you're not looking". You say "But I don't hear them".

"Well, they're magic silent elephants".

"I see no foot prints."

"Well, they ride on anti-gravity shoes."

"But the door is closed."

"Ah, but they can dematerialize."

When someone has decided, as Collins has, to make these sorts of arguments, there really is no point any more.

They are fundamentally dishonest arguments, that turn scientific method on its head, retrofitting the theory over the data. All evidence is irrelevant.

I see many others reacted the same way I did when reading this article: Lord, what nonsense. I think this quote (from a letter) wins the prize, though:

"Teaching your kid basic first is like teaching them how to stumble so that they can learn how to dance."

Indeed.

What's more, there is no lack of BASIC interpreters in the world. Learn to google. Check freshmeat.net, and other repositories of free software.

But, really! BASIC? No one codes BASIC today because its one and only virtue was that it would fit in a few thousand bytes of read only memory. It is a horrible language that succeeded mostly in teaching very, very bad coding habbits to a generation of programmers. It was never a "standard". There were no two implementations that were the same. Any competent teenage programmer of that era used BASIC only until they learned assembly, or saved enough to buy a pascal compiler.

I can't imagine what Brin wants that isn't available in a modern scripting language. There are any number of great options. What's more, the amount of documentation and support available online is incredible. It is vastly easier to learn to code today than it was in the era of BASIC.