looks like dripping jet fuel to me, those large passenger planes carry many thousand gallons of the stuff.

Reminds me of home made napalm we called it... take styrofoam and dissolve it into a bucket of gasoline, soon as styrofoam touchs the gas it dissolves, keep doing it until it doesn't dissolve any more


light the bucket and sling it, we'd hit side of a tree or whatnot and the mixture would be thick and drip while on fire looking exactly like lava similar to that in video.

there is no proof 100% it's molten metal or just dripping fuel. or hell even plastic dripping, grab a straw light it on fire and it will melt and drip while on fire also.

there will never be 100% proof regardless of the videos.

It's nonsense like this post that causes these kind of discussions to devolve into mudslinging matches. There is no credible evidence that fires caused the collapse either. Sure some fancy physics modelling produces something that could be a scenario for the collapse but please don't expect me to believe that this is proof.
There are no mountains of proof because the evidence was removed from the scene. It's all just theories. You like the official version. I don't buy it. That doesn't make me religious or a conspiracy theorist any more than you.>> ^lucky760:

>> Exactly how does some office furniture burn for 7 hours...
explain how a burning stack of coffee filters generates the same heat as a truck filled with 9000 gallons of fuel
Some office furniture? A burning stack of coffee filters? Because... that's all anyone can ever find in any high rise building, right? Typical.
It's simply fascinating the lengths some people will go to keep their death grip on the ideas they want -- need so badly to believe are fact.
It's very similar to the manner in which a religious person will vehemently defend that their god is the one real god, but these conspiracy theorists are exponentially worse. Not only do they not have credible evidence to support their outrageous beliefs, but they scoff with blissful ignorance in the face of a mountain of proof explaining why they're wrong.
I believe most of these folks, possibly due to psychological and/or personality disorders, just lack the ability or desire or courage to even consider the notion that the likelihood of their theory being reality is profoundly improbable.
Show them a black stone and they'll scream at you why it's white (and that you and everyone else on Earth are in collusion to try convincing them that it's black). That's human nature for you. Not always quality, but always interesting.

>> Exactly how does some office furniture burn for 7 hours...
explain how a burning stack of coffee filters generates the same heat as a truck filled with 9000 gallons of fuel

Some office furniture? A burning stack of coffee filters? Because... that's all anyone can ever find in any high rise building, right? Typical.

It's simply fascinating the lengths some people will go to keep their death grip on the ideas they want -- need so badly to believe are fact.

It's very similar to the manner in which a religious person will vehemently defend that their god is the one real god, but these conspiracy theorists are exponentially worse. Not only do they not have credible evidence to support their outrageous beliefs (their primary evidence usually seems to be in the form of questions), but they scoff with blissful ignorance in the face of a mountain of proof explaining why they're wrong.

I believe most of these folks, possibly due to psychological and/or personality disorders, just lack the ability or desire or courage to even consider the notion that the likelihood of their theory being reality is profoundly improbable.

Show them a black stone and they'll scream at you why it's white (and that you and everyone else on Earth are in collusion to try convincing them that it's black). That's human nature for you. Not always *quality, but always interesting.

House fires can reach pretty insane temperatures, I don't see why its so unbelievable that a building full of paper might also produce these temperatures.

You don't need the same heat as a tanker with 9000 gallons of fuel. That bridge collapsed in minutes, WT7 collapsed after 7 hours of fire...

As for one column failing...well its the straw that breaks the camels back. You'd expect multiple redundancy, but I imagine the trouble with building huge skyscrapers is the more load bearing structure you put in the more weight the structure beneath that has to hold. It doesn't really surprise me that it wouldn't take many things going wrong for gravity to have its way.

As for the fact the building went down like a controlled demolition...why is that surprising. If you want to bring down a building cleanly and efficiently with minimum explosives you look for the card that holds the rest of the house up. The fire did that job as well as any demo expert, it poked and prodded every single Jenga block in that building, it weakened every support and warped the whole structure and if you end up with just one Atlas of a crossbeam holding more than its fair share of weight and a fire goes through the building testing every single one then ya, its the one holding all the weight thats gonna fail.

Wow theorycraftin is ez.

>> ^Ryjkyj:

I think the main point of this video, which wasn't explained very clearly, is that the water resources would've been stretched to the max. Fighting so many fires in such a large area at the end of Manhattan could potentially have made the building's sprinkler/standpipe system practically worthless. I'm surprised they didn't stress that point. But I think that's what they mean by saying that no building like that ever burned "uncontrollably". That's what makes it a unique situation.
I'm not sure how old building seven was but I used to be a project manager for a major construction firm in NYC. And I can tell you that the fireproofing regs have changed a lot over the years. Not to mention, NYC's department of buildings is huge, and there's not a lot of checks and balances. If you know what you're doing, you can get an examiner to ignore just about anything. And people either make mistakes, or intentionally bypass the building code all the time. Especially the big companies who build the big buildings. The bigger and older your company is, the more you can get away with.
That's the first time I've ever heard of/seen that penthouse footage as well. I'm not an engineer but I think that was pretty compelling.


http://www.dykon-blasting.com/faqs.htm#implode
In a controlled demolition, the interior structures are removed first, in order to make the building fall inward. This video frames this fact as being against the theory of controlled demolition. How misleading.

Also this video compares a tanker truck fire to an office fire. Still need for someone to explain how a burning stack of coffee filters generates the same heat as a truck filled with 9000 gallons of fuel.

Wow. Only 10 gallons or so? Sheesh, the dangerous stuff we make:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromine

~10 gallons of spilled bromine gas apparently.

they're not hippies.

they're burners.

>> ^volumptuous:

I forgot what the exact number is, but I thin it was 25,000 gallons of fuel used for this.
Funny when "hippies" do their best to trash the environment. This stuff makes me hate hippies all the more.

Sooo....the great lakes are going to reek of dead lamprey? Home many gallons of dead reeking lamprey sauce does it take ot make it an effective repellant in the great lakes?

>> ^Crosswords:
One of the problems I have with a lot of pancakes is they're too dry, I shouldn't need a tub of butter and a gallon of syrup to make them moist enough that they don't get stuck in my throat halfway down.
I'm dubious on the use of melted butter, I generally find vegetable oil produces better results for moistness in baked goods.


Agreed. I don't like a lot of restaurant pancakes for this reason. I always use olive oil and add fruit to mine (see above recipe).

One of the problems I have with a lot of pancakes is they're too dry, I shouldn't need a tub of butter and a gallon of syrup to make them moist enough that they don't get stuck in my throat halfway down.

I'm dubious on the use of melted butter, I generally find vegetable oil produces better results for moistness in baked goods.

Pffft... 2$/Gallon Gasoline? If I'M elected The streets will be paved with gold.
By the way, here in Portugal gasoline is 6euros/Gallon (around 1,59 euros per litre)

He's lucky he didn't get electrocuted. All that electricity in such a small cup of water--everyone knows you need at least a gallon to do this safely.

>> ^coolhund:

I agree completely with visionep. Milkmans points are just not true or avoidable.
Theres also the point of engines not being able to run Ethanol at all. Vintage cars for example.
In the end this bio ethanol is just another farce to make money, at a very high cost to... as always... the poor.
What this guy says in the video is just not true. Even with only E10, a higher priced gasoline will still give you better mileage (up to 10%). This is happening in Germany right now. Nobody is buying this ethanol crap because it simply isnt worth it. Not to mention because of the detrimental effects on people and cars.


Yes, some older cars do not run well with an ethanol blend, and some might take that to a point where they wouldn't run at all.

You say bio ethanol is a farce to make money (aren't all businesses?) and the cost targets the poor. That makes a good soundtext-bite but I don't see how ethanol production is particularly detrimental to the poor, at least not in any way that isn't heavily outweighed by other competitors. Care to elaborate?

About mileage: yes, any blend of ethanol will give lower gas mileage than pure gasoline. The point that I would suggest is that when you burn that gallon of gasoline, it isn't coming back. At least not for a few million years. We can/will keep on burning through oil for a while, but as we do so the prices will go up.

Right now, today, the market settles out so that in Brazil the cost per unit of distance traveled may actually favor gasoline; car owners "vote" at the pump. But I'm talking about the long term, in the future. Corn, or better yet switchgrass, grows back. Not in millions of years, *next* year. We're just a few years down the line from the initial introduction of ethanol and ethanol blends as a fuel. And yet already it is making a bit of competition with big oil.

If better alternative fuels come along (hydrogen fuel cells or whatever), I'll be open to them. But at this point ethanol seems like one that actually works, and has been working, in spite of the fact that it doesn't have a fully stable infrastructure yet.

@visionep I come from a farm family in Kansas, so I'm a bit biased, but I tend to disagree with you on a few things. So upvote for your comment starting the discussion but here's my rebuttal --

1. "Not much" has the potential to be pretty good, considering that sources of ethanol are much more renewable than oil. Plus, a lot of the energy balance reviews of ethanol that I've seen or heard of talk about the input cost to produce the first gallon of fuel, ie. they include construction, fermentation tanks, etc. etc. That is fair, but it is worth noting that over the long term those startup input costs become less and less of a factor because the infrastructure already exists. The cost to refine the first gallon of crude oil into gasoline was higher than the bazillionth, also.

2. Some of the food production competition will remain long-term, and some is temporary. Right now in the US, we mostly use corn (field corn) to produce ethanol. Field corn can be ground into corn flour, but at least where I come from the majority of it went to feed lots to be used as food for beef cows prior to introduction of ethanol plants. Now, the produced corn is split between going to beef production or into ethanol.

Competition between beef vs. ethanol industries raised the price of corn some (both industries want that corn) which makes farmers happy. That in turn raised the price of beef a bit, but it didn't do much to prices for human-consumption food other than that, because field corn isn't used for that very much.

The reason that we use corn for ethanol now is that corn is plentiful; it is the major crop in my neck of the woods with wheat being the second but lagging far behind. Ethanol producers need something that ferments, corn fits the bill and is available. Minor crops like milo work basically just as well as corn, so if some weather event damages a corn field and it can be replanted with milo later in the season that is great for farmers because they now have a buyer that is willing to take milo.

In the future, we could use non-food cellulose crops like switchgrass for ethanol production, and the processing will only be slightly different. Switchgrass could be grown and harvested on land that is unsuitable for corn (corn does best with a lot of water), but there isn't a large supply of it right now because there hasn't been any demand for it historically.

So yes, there will always be some competition between what crop people decide to produce on a given piece of farmland, and that can affect food prices. But I think that over the long term, ethanol production could provide useful fuel that has positive benefits that outweigh impacts from potentially slightly higher food prices. Maybe. But then again, I am a biased source!