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[William Seger]

24. I can explain it to you; I can't understand it for you

... but you seem to have a vested interest in not understanding what I'm saying.

> We are not discussing NIST's model of collapse initiation and propagation.

"We" aren't? Do you have a mouse in your pocket? But yes, the fact that your aren't discussing the initiation and propagation is exactly the problem.

> We are discussing the fact that NIST's model bears no resemblance to reality, because it shows the perimeter structure folding up like a wet paper bag and we can see in the videos that it doesn't do that.

Given that the curtain wall was not included in the model, that's not a mystery, even to those of us not possessed with superior intelligence. Your love of mysteries seems to include a strong aversion to having them solved. You were challenged to explain why that even matters if it happened after the interior had already collapsed, and the best you can do is:

> If you would bother to look at the 30-second video of the sims, you would see that the east wall starts folding up like a wet paper bag 3 seconds before the building starts "going down".

In the first place, that did in fact happen AFTER the interior structure went down on THAT SIDE of the building, as evidenced by the disappearing penthouse. Second, there aren't any videos that show a clear view of the east wall, so what you're really claiming is that the sim doesn't match imaginary videos.

If that's too hard to come up with a valid logical reason for why your "wet paper bag" matters, you could just drop that dodge and attempt to find some other excuse for rejecting the NIST hypothesis.

> Why couldn't thermite achieve sudden onset? You're claiming that fires can achieve sudden onset through a process of heating the steel. Why can't thermite achieve sudden onset through the same process?

Obfuscation. The claim is not that "fires can achieve sudden onset" but that fires can trigger a progressive collapse and progressive collapse can cause relatively sudden global failure. Yes, if the NIST hypothesis is correct, you might achieve the same result by using thermite to take out just the girders spanning to column 79, but to chose that as a demolition method you were sure that it would lead to global collapse. I recognize that that isn't a problem for a spinner of "just so stories" but ...

> There is a rational reason for sudden onset: to maintain control.

Ah. of course, they must have had some reason to do it exactly the way they did it. So now you just need an ad hoc explanation for why they needed to maintain control.

> If you want to bring a building down symmetrically, you have to weaken the columns symmetrically, and that means sudden onset.

... and an ad hoc explanation for why they wanted to bring down the building symmetrically, and another one to justify claiming that only a sudden onset could produce that result.

> If you had gradual weakening you would run the risk of one part starting to collapse before another, and that could cause chaotic happenings.

Oh, I see, after two of the largest office building had just collapsed, they of course wouldn't want any "chaotic happenings."

> Most structural drawings show H-beams for the columns, because that's what they were. Most of them eliminate the flange plates on Column 79, even though we know they were there (See NCSTAr 1-9 Fig. 2-23)

(Ahem) The page I linked to has the original structural drawings for the building construction, including "as-built" notes. There are no hollow columns. I don't expect you to admit that you were wrong, but I should think that a superior intelligence would at least drop the subject to avoid further embarrassment.