quote:

Just by being stationary when hit, whack whack whack, the floors would have slowed the fall down more than observed.

end quote.

Not so. If the first floor couldn't bear the weight of the 14 or 20 floors above falling on it, then the second floor below could even less bear the weight of now 15 or 21 floors falling on it. The next floor below would have been struck with the weight of 16 to 22 floors.

Each floor would have been hit with an accelerating and ever increasing mass and thus would have offered less and less resistance to the falling mass. Very quickly, the resistance of the floors would have become meaningless to the speed of the fall. Like I said, it would be like a bullet going through a leaf or a bowling ball on top of a straw. Therefore there would have been little difference from free fall.

I'm driving to work soon and will probably smack into a few mosquitoes along the way. Will the speed of my car be affected? Not in any way that can be measured by science. And similarly to WTC collapse: a half million falling tons is not likely to be impeded in its path by mere bolts in the wall, particularly when each floor was only designed to hold its own weight.

As far as the fire chief, anyone can visit or observe the EMB and compare it to modern buildings. Modern high rises are in fact much lighter and while they are very economical to build, in the case of the WTC there was a price to pay for that economy.

If you think the discussion is too technical, consider this:

If you buy cheap bookshelves, the shelves will be secured on the ends by pins in holes. The shelves should hold a normal set of books, but if you put more weight than expected on the shelves, the pins are likely to give way. If the shelf above happens to fall on the shelf below, this will be even more weight than expected on that shelf, and your whole structure is likely to pancake and collapse.

However if you build your own shelves, you proably set the shelves on upright boards every 30 inches or so. This makes the shelves very srong and even if one shelf were to collapse, all the other sitting on columns are likely to hold. This is how the Empire State Building was constructed as compared to the WTC.

The shelves (floors) in the WTC were simply held by pins (bolts) in the wall, just like cheap book shelves. Is this clear enough for everyone?

Thus when the floors fell, there was nothing below the floors to impede their collapse and they fell near the speed of free fall.

I agree that Salon and Mr. O'Hehir seem not to want to recognize that a media pile on occurred in 2000 against Al Gore and against Dean and Kerry in 2004. And now the media is gearing up once again to pile on Hillary Clinton or any other hapless Democratic nominee in 2008.

One incident from 2000 that I still remember is Gwen Ifill of PBS's 'Washington Week in Review' openly laughing on the air because Al Gore in one of the debates was so 'wonky' as to mention the name of a bill that was currently being considered in the House of Representatives. As I recall, she rolled her eyes and called it 'inside baseball' or some such.

Unfortunately, bills in Congress often have something important to do with my life; whether Al Gore is 'wonky,' 'portly,' or 'strange' really doesn't. How can a supposedly respectable journalist get away with snickering on tv at a presidential candidate because, gosh, he just happened to know something about a bill in Congress? How is that she did not lose her job immediately?

The answer is that rest of the media didn't call her out on it. And they didn't call her out on it probably because many members of the media would like to be tv biggies like Gwen Ifill themselves someday and making a fuss about how Gwen Ifill doesn't do her job isn't likely to help in that endeavor.

The suspicion here is that Salon doesn't like to call out the media on their errors because Salon writers would also like to become media biggies themselves--just as former Salon reporter Jake Tapper, now on ABC News, did.

Unfortunately, going after our very corrupt and dense media is exactly what has to be done. Good reporters these days MUST be willing to risk their careers by going after powerful media personalities--that is, if they want to write the truth.

And it's not just Fox News, it's all of it, PBS included.

...for his association with a blogger was a lot of trouble. He has gained a few of the friends of one blogger and apparently all of his enemies, and as yet there is no sign that the general public has even heard of him.

It is still an open question whether the 'netroots' will have any positive influence on politics. 9,000 contributors to the Hackett campaign is an awfully puny number compared to the 100 million plus who voted in the last election. No matter how fervent the netroots are, if the general public begins to perceive them as simple partisan malcontents, then their very fervency can and will be turned against them.

When Armstrong says the netroots are not ideological, but pragmatic, that's not a feature, it's a calamity. Ideas are what shape the world--ideas are why people do the things they do. Ideas are in fact the only possible way that bloggers could ever hope to influence the general public. When bloggers like Armstrong offer no ideas but only 'strategies,' then they are worse than the dullest Washington paid hack, because at least the paid hack might end up having a positive influence on the voters.