Anyone knows what are the advantages of using ISS for this kind of test? I would be interested to see what it costs to send such an antenna up with the shuttle, test that it does not interfere with the rest of the station and train an astronaut to fix it to the exterior, versus just slapping it as secondary payload on some other satellite or even some dedicated micro-satellite that is piggybacking on the launch of a bigger one.
As already said by others, you can reduce the risk by connecting large regions. The chance that it there is no wind in Spain, France and Germany at the same time is much lower than in a single country. And even if it takes a day to start up a coil plant, some basic weather forecasting will buy you enough time. And don't forget hydro-electric for fast on-demand power supply. I am not an expert, but it seems to me that you can keep accumulating water during the night when there is no need, and open the pipes in just a few minutes instance when there is urgent demand.
Note that there is a large selection bias in the example you cite. The Romans were great engineers, but I am pretty sure they also built a lot of shitty bridges and aqueducts. It is a sort of natural selection, the ones that are still standing today happen to be the good ones.
I started using Matlab in university and might even have bought a student license as an undergrad. Since then, I have used it extensively as a grad student and now at work. For tinkering at home, I have looked at Octave a few times, but as you said, it is not a real replacement (mainly the hard-to-learn plotting with gnuplot). I also looked at Scilab, but it was even worse (shitty graphics AND an incompatible language). A few years have passed since I looked at those (reached sub-guru status in Matlab meanwhile), but I have finally found a proper replacement: python+numpy+scipy+matplotlib. The syntax for array math is different than in Matlab, but not too much. The graphics are better (my Matlab version still does not do anti-aliased plots). Bonus points: python is a real object-oriented language, with tons of libraries for everything you can think of. And did I mention it is completely free and open source? For specialized topics (some toolboxes) it is not there yet, but it will be in a few years. Me and some colleagues have already converted some of our calculations and plotting to python now. I expected this to be a real competitor for Matlab, especially in academics.
My deepest apologies to the 'Ndrangheta for insinuating that this movie was about them. Turns out that is actually about the Camorra, which is from around Napels, while 'Ndrangheta is from Calabria (the 'toes' of the boot that is Italy). Turns out that 'Ndrangheta is actually the biggest scumbags of them all, having surpassed the more famous Cosa Nostra (from Sicilia) and controlling 80% of Europe's cocaine import. Sorry again, now please don't shoot me.
To get a good impression of 'Ndrangheta's involvement with toxic waste, go see Gomorra. Excellent movie, even though it is somewhat depressing to realize that is based on reality.
Gravitational waves are found as a 'natural solution' from Einstein's General Relativity, more or less like electro-magnetic waves are a solution to Maxwell's equations. Since GR so far seems to be solid as a rock (supported by many experiments), there is little doubt among theoreticians that GWs exist. Moreover, a binary system containing a pulsar observed by Hulse and Taylor is spinning down at exactly the rate that you would expect if the system loses energy by gravitational waves. This is not a direct observation of a GW, but it is circumstantial evidence. This observation was awarded with a Nobel prize in 1993, which would suggest that the according to the judges, the existence of GWs is more than a little presumptuous.
It's also in the Middle of Nowhere. So getting to it is going to be very expensive.
I once saw a presentation at a conference on telescopes, in that case about a similarly quiet location Dome C, also in Antarctica. They had pretty advanced ideas, including cost estimates. The shipping costs of a container by boat and then by some sort of big snowmobile weren't that ridiculously expensive. I forgot the numbers, but it was probably several orders of magnitude cheaper than sending anything to space and probably even cheaper than loading a big telescope in the back of your Boeing 747. Expect some big telescopes in Antarctica in ten years or so.
Not finding anything does not falsify the theory of gravitational waves. It disproves the existence of certain gravitational wave sources with a certain strength, that is all that was published now. They ruled out certain exotic models for sources (based on string theory), but nothing has been proven about the existence of GWs in general or for weaker sources.
This result does not contradict 'the theory of gravitational waves'. As mentioned by the OP, there is indirect evidence for their existence, for which Hulse and Taylor got the physics Nobel prize in 1993. The result published now sets a new upper limit on the strength of certain types of signals. This excludes some of the more exotic (stringy) models for the astrophysical generation of GWs (under the assumption that LIGO does indeed have the sensitivity it claims). It did in no way disprove the existence of GWs in general, or rule out some of the less exotic models, which predict much lower levels.
Parent is the head of MS's open source lab and is actually mentioned in the summary. (Or it is his secretary/PR guy, but who cares, this user seems to have inside information, see users history.) Even if you do not agree with him, I guess his answer is somewhat relevant to the discussion.
You are right, the scariest thing about this story is the fact that he was forbidden to speak. As already mentioned by others, earthquake prediction is not an exact science (yet), so it wouldn't have warranted evacuating a whole city. But I think it wouldn't have hurt too much if because of his 'scaremongering', some people would have been reminded to review their emergency plans. If he would have given such warnings every month without anything happening, people would ignore him in the end. The irony of the gag order is that because of his predictions of a medium level earthquake last week that didn't happen as predicted, he was forbidden to tell anything in the last 3 days when his detector went "ofscale high".
It was also reported in the Italian media that the seismic was so high in the last month that people had trouble sleeping and some people were actually sleeping in their cars. This event was thus hardly a 'thunder from a clear sky'. Interestingly, there was a reasonably strong quake (magnitude 4.6 on Richter scale) a few hundred kilometers to the north near Bologna at 10 pm, followed half an hour later by a medium one (magnitude 4.0) pretty close to the big one that followed at 3 am (magnitude 6.2).
I am sorry, but I am afraid I cannot answer your question, this requires a pretty good understanding of general relativity. If I understand you correctly, this is exactly one of my own questions, namely why a passing GW would extend and contract space time including the mirrors, but would not change the 'optical path length' that is used to probe that distance with a laser at the same time. As far as I understand, this description is not true so we are measuring the full contraction of space time (or rather the difference between contraction between the two arms, read up on the transverse polarization of the waves), and not some second-order effect.
I am merely an experimental physicist that knows a thing or two about how to build such an interferometer, I have to trust the theory guys on this issue, as I have to trust the astrophysicists on the predicted rate of stellar fireworks (so that I am not wasting my time waiting for a once in a million year event). At the same time, they have to trust us experimentalists that we can actually measure such tiny distances without being overwhelmed by environmental disturbances.
GWs are so weak because they are only emitted in some special, asymmetric cases (like two neutron stars spinning around each other, or a spinning pulser with an asymmetric mass), because space time is really 'stiff' and because the catastrophic events that produce them are typically very far away (the distance at which we believe we can observe certain events is measured in mega-parsec).
I don't know the fine details of Weber's experiments, but I believe his 2 meter metal bar was operating at room temperature, so he was severely limited by thermal noise. His claimed strain sensitivity (delta L / L) was on the order of 1e-16. There are currently a small number of resonant bars operational which are kept at just a few Kelvin. They reach a sensitivity around 1e-21 in a narrow band and have not measured anything during the last ~5 years, so Weber's claim is highly unlikely. I am involved with one of the biginterferometricdetectors, which use vacuum tubes of several kilometers and reach sensitivities at the 1e-22 level over a broad bandwidth. If the astrophysical models are right we should be able to detect something within the next 5 years.
As already mentioned in a previous comment, the article is somewhat speculative and it is a little bit late to verify the experiment. The standard accepted practice for claiming the detection of a GW is to observe the event with at least 2 detectors which are separated far enough to not measure the same external disturbances (but preferably 3 or more spread around the world so that you can do proper triangulation of the source). One single glitch might be a cosmic ray, lightning, dust falling before your detector, an earthquake, an instrumental error, anything. We see more of those than we like. One glitch measured at different observatories within the time it takes to travel at lightspeed (a few ms) at different observatories around the world might give you a nobel prize.
One book that is high on my 'to read' list is Gravity's shadow, which supposedly describes not only Weber's experiments, but also its reception by the scientific community and the eventual downfall of Weber's reputation.
Half of me says these guys need a reality check, the other half wants to go there.
Why bother going to Dubai anyhow? It is too hot, they only have sand and some fake islands that no-one wants to buy and no culture (unless you are into modern, megalomaniac architecture). And in terms of population, there are just overwhelmingly rich locals, western expats designing toy projects for said locals and Indian immigrants actually building those toy projects. If you are choosing a holiday destination, I could not thing of anything less interesting.
This says more about slashdot than about python. If you want to copy complete programs, you always download the source files themselves, so you dont have this problem. There are plenty of websites that contain code snippets (the online python manuals, various blogs,...), which do preserve the indentation which can be pasted directly into a python interpreter. There might be some annoyances sometimes, but if you write your own code in a decent editor the forced indentation is more a blessing than a curse.
I'm not too sure of what I think of Python's use of indentation to delimit blocks.
Have you ever actually tried using python? I am very much in favor of capital punishment for everyone who doesn't properly indent his code in other languages anyhow, so being forced to indent in python wasn't really a problem for me. I do not understand why people keep bringing up this argument, there are valid reasons why python was designed this way and it is something you get used to after 5 minutes. And if you really insist on using braces, you can still use them:
if button_pressed: #{
launch_missiles() #this line must be indented but slashdot does not allow me to
#}
Let them call the FBI/CIA, I would be surprised if they didn't already have the technology to connect every available database 20 years ago. To think that you can stay anonymous from the government is an illusion. Which of course makes it all the more important to have proper privacy laws and check-guards. Let them search around all they want, but not without a court order or (in case of national intelligence) a high official signing off.
But don't tell me that you are not already in 10 different databases from the moment you are born. I assume you guys also have to register for a birth certificate, you need to pay taxes at some point so you have a social security number, etc. I really don't see the point.
Some American please explain me: why do you have voter registration at all? In my country (Netherlands), everyone above 18 is registered by default. I assume this is similar in most of Western Europe. The only caveat is that you have to be registered with your municipality, which you have to do anyhow for various different reasons (municipal tax, getting passports/ID/driving licence...). A few weeks before an election, you simply get your 'voting ticket' in the mail. You typically take this to a neighborhood school to cast your vote, usually electronically.
Making everyone eligible to vote by default would save a lot of those voter-fraud claims and a lot of effort by the campaigns to get the people registered.
No. Apart from objects that emit at different 'shapes' due to different physics (stellar dust in the infrared, some stars towards UV or X-ray), a star emits more or less in the same 'shape' at all wavelengths. You will see it more blurry at long wavelengths than at shorter onces, but that is due to the diffraction limit, but that has nothing to do with focusing.
And galaxies do not drift over a span of a few days. You'd be happy if you see a nearby star move by a few arc-seconds over half a year, and those are within our own galaxy. As mentioned before, Hubble has state of the art fine guidance sensors, so I do not expect any drift in Hubble either. Overlapping a few images is also easy, you just use a few point like stars that appear in all colors.
It's unfocused because it's not a true visible-light image, and because it's assembled from three images taken over two days. Drift happens.
Citation needed. Focusing has nothing to do with light being visible. You can focus shorter wavelengths like x-rays or longer wavelengths like they do in radio astronomy. And you claim about drift (of focus?) is also odd. I don't know anything about Hubble's focusing mechanism, but I assume they either do it for every image, or they only calibrate it every month or so. It is not like they let their camera slowly drift out of focus over a few days or so. Drift in pointing should also not happen, since Hubble has one of most accurate guidance sensors up there in space.
As a certified nuclear country, does this mean they will get a permanent seat in the UN security counsil? Being the number 2 country in terms of population should also give some weight to such a claim. Or mightbe a better idea, can we simply get rid of the permanent members in the council and let them be elected like everyone else?
(describing the building my name, number, AND location)
Further, emergency workers are on video telling bystanders to run because the building was about to "come down", and that (in so many words) that it was about to "blow up". This, well before it actually fell.
This would all still be consistent with my scenario that they did expect WTC7 to collapse and that their was a misunderstanding between blowing up and collapsing. I am not claiming this is exactly what happened (we will never know), but in Mythbuster's words, it is a plausible scenario.
Those are just a few among many such "coincidences" that make the fire theory just unbelievable.
In your logic, the existence of an alternative theory makes the fire scenario less likely. This is false logic, since none of these 'facts' contradict the fire hypothesis. I don't see how one quote of a reporter/silverman is evidence that contradicts a simulation by NIST. Do read the report, i did and I liked it. It does explain in great detail how an uncontrolled fire can lead to structural weakening and an eventual collapse of the building. It will never be possible to determine how things happened exactly, but they describe a plausible scenario based on hard-core science. Denying this plausibility means you question the scientific integrity of some 50 experts of a highly respected institute. And as things works in science, you will need a consensus among people of similar qualification to counter their arguments, not just a single guy or some random amateur from the internet.
I could agree with you that they didn't rule out the alternative theory (controlled demolition) enough, although they do a little in appendix D of the report. But you still didn't give me an alternative scenario that would include demolition. I will help you: first we need a suspect with a motive to blow the building up, i can only think of Al Qaida (but they already blew up WTC 1 and 2 with airplanes, why would they take the trouble to blow up a smaller building with a lot of effort), Silverstein (he needed the insurance money, but would he commit a crime for that?) or 'the goverment'/FBI/CIA (but why? to cover up what?). Then we need to know how they did it, especially how they managed to sneek explosives or thermite into the building without anyone seeing. We also need to know when, did they install them in the few hours on 9/11 while the building was evacuated and already on fire? You see, if you try to make a story you quickly run into some hard questions. I dare you to come up with a story that is as simple as the one I gave.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone knows what are the advantages of using ISS for this kind of test? I would be interested to see what it costs to send such an antenna up with the shuttle, test that it does not interfere with the rest of the station and train an astronaut to fix it to the exterior, versus just slapping it as secondary payload on some other satellite or even some dedicated micro-satellite that is piggybacking on the launch of a bigger one.
As already said by others, you can reduce the risk by connecting large regions. The chance that it there is no wind in Spain, France and Germany at the same time is much lower than in a single country. And even if it takes a day to start up a coil plant, some basic weather forecasting will buy you enough time. And don't forget hydro-electric for fast on-demand power supply. I am not an expert, but it seems to me that you can keep accumulating water during the night when there is no need, and open the pipes in just a few minutes instance when there is urgent demand.
Note that there is a large selection bias in the example you cite. The Romans were great engineers, but I am pretty sure they also built a lot of shitty bridges and aqueducts. It is a sort of natural selection, the ones that are still standing today happen to be the good ones.
I started using Matlab in university and might even have bought a student license as an undergrad. Since then, I have used it extensively as a grad student and now at work. For tinkering at home, I have looked at Octave a few times, but as you said, it is not a real replacement (mainly the hard-to-learn plotting with gnuplot). I also looked at Scilab, but it was even worse (shitty graphics AND an incompatible language). A few years have passed since I looked at those (reached sub-guru status in Matlab meanwhile), but I have finally found a proper replacement: python+numpy+scipy+matplotlib. The syntax for array math is different than in Matlab, but not too much. The graphics are better (my Matlab version still does not do anti-aliased plots). Bonus points: python is a real object-oriented language, with tons of libraries for everything you can think of. And did I mention it is completely free and open source? For specialized topics (some toolboxes) it is not there yet, but it will be in a few years. Me and some colleagues have already converted some of our calculations and plotting to python now. I expected this to be a real competitor for Matlab, especially in academics.
My deepest apologies to the 'Ndrangheta for insinuating that this movie was about them. Turns out that is actually about the Camorra, which is from around Napels, while 'Ndrangheta is from Calabria (the 'toes' of the boot that is Italy). Turns out that 'Ndrangheta is actually the biggest scumbags of them all, having surpassed the more famous Cosa Nostra (from Sicilia) and controlling 80% of Europe's cocaine import. Sorry again, now please don't shoot me.
To get a good impression of 'Ndrangheta's involvement with toxic waste, go see Gomorra. Excellent movie, even though it is somewhat depressing to realize that is based on reality.
Gravitational waves are found as a 'natural solution' from Einstein's General Relativity, more or less like electro-magnetic waves are a solution to Maxwell's equations. Since GR so far seems to be solid as a rock (supported by many experiments), there is little doubt among theoreticians that GWs exist. Moreover, a binary system containing a pulsar observed by Hulse and Taylor is spinning down at exactly the rate that you would expect if the system loses energy by gravitational waves. This is not a direct observation of a GW, but it is circumstantial evidence. This observation was awarded with a Nobel prize in 1993, which would suggest that the according to the judges, the existence of GWs is more than a little presumptuous.
It's also in the Middle of Nowhere. So getting to it is going to be very expensive.
I once saw a presentation at a conference on telescopes, in that case about a similarly quiet location Dome C, also in Antarctica. They had pretty advanced ideas, including cost estimates. The shipping costs of a container by boat and then by some sort of big snowmobile weren't that ridiculously expensive. I forgot the numbers, but it was probably several orders of magnitude cheaper than sending anything to space and probably even cheaper than loading a big telescope in the back of your Boeing 747. Expect some big telescopes in Antarctica in ten years or so.
Not finding anything does not falsify the theory of gravitational waves. It disproves the existence of certain gravitational wave sources with a certain strength, that is all that was published now. They ruled out certain exotic models for sources (based on string theory), but nothing has been proven about the existence of GWs in general or for weaker sources.
This result does not contradict 'the theory of gravitational waves'. As mentioned by the OP, there is indirect evidence for their existence, for which Hulse and Taylor got the physics Nobel prize in 1993. The result published now sets a new upper limit on the strength of certain types of signals. This excludes some of the more exotic (stringy) models for the astrophysical generation of GWs (under the assumption that LIGO does indeed have the sensitivity it claims). It did in no way disprove the existence of GWs in general, or rule out some of the less exotic models, which predict much lower levels.
Parent is the head of MS's open source lab and is actually mentioned in the summary. (Or it is his secretary/PR guy, but who cares, this user seems to have inside information, see users history.) Even if you do not agree with him, I guess his answer is somewhat relevant to the discussion.
You are right, the scariest thing about this story is the fact that he was forbidden to speak. As already mentioned by others, earthquake prediction is not an exact science (yet), so it wouldn't have warranted evacuating a whole city. But I think it wouldn't have hurt too much if because of his 'scaremongering', some people would have been reminded to review their emergency plans. If he would have given such warnings every month without anything happening, people would ignore him in the end. The irony of the gag order is that because of his predictions of a medium level earthquake last week that didn't happen as predicted, he was forbidden to tell anything in the last 3 days when his detector went "ofscale high".
It was also reported in the Italian media that the seismic was so high in the last month that people had trouble sleeping and some people were actually sleeping in their cars. This event was thus hardly a 'thunder from a clear sky'. Interestingly, there was a reasonably strong quake (magnitude 4.6 on Richter scale) a few hundred kilometers to the north near Bologna at 10 pm, followed half an hour later by a medium one (magnitude 4.0) pretty close to the big one that followed at 3 am (magnitude 6.2).
I am sorry, but I am afraid I cannot answer your question, this requires a pretty good understanding of general relativity. If I understand you correctly, this is exactly one of my own questions, namely why a passing GW would extend and contract space time including the mirrors, but would not change the 'optical path length' that is used to probe that distance with a laser at the same time. As far as I understand, this description is not true so we are measuring the full contraction of space time (or rather the difference between contraction between the two arms, read up on the transverse polarization of the waves), and not some second-order effect.
I am merely an experimental physicist that knows a thing or two about how to build such an interferometer, I have to trust the theory guys on this issue, as I have to trust the astrophysicists on the predicted rate of stellar fireworks (so that I am not wasting my time waiting for a once in a million year event). At the same time, they have to trust us experimentalists that we can actually measure such tiny distances without being overwhelmed by environmental disturbances.
GWs are so weak because they are only emitted in some special, asymmetric cases (like two neutron stars spinning around each other, or a spinning pulser with an asymmetric mass), because space time is really 'stiff' and because the catastrophic events that produce them are typically very far away (the distance at which we believe we can observe certain events is measured in mega-parsec).
As already mentioned in a previous comment, the article is somewhat speculative and it is a little bit late to verify the experiment. The standard accepted practice for claiming the detection of a GW is to observe the event with at least 2 detectors which are separated far enough to not measure the same external disturbances (but preferably 3 or more spread around the world so that you can do proper triangulation of the source). One single glitch might be a cosmic ray, lightning, dust falling before your detector, an earthquake, an instrumental error, anything. We see more of those than we like. One glitch measured at different observatories within the time it takes to travel at lightspeed (a few ms) at different observatories around the world might give you a nobel prize.
One book that is high on my 'to read' list is Gravity's shadow, which supposedly describes not only Weber's experiments, but also its reception by the scientific community and the eventual downfall of Weber's reputation.
What were the designers on when they decided "exists" is not a member function of hashes -- excuse me -- dictionaries and arrays?
The main designer of Python is a Dutch guy that worked in Amsterdam at the time, you do the math ...
Why bother going to Dubai anyhow? It is too hot, they only have sand and some fake islands that no-one wants to buy and no culture (unless you are into modern, megalomaniac architecture). And in terms of population, there are just overwhelmingly rich locals, western expats designing toy projects for said locals and Indian immigrants actually building those toy projects. If you are choosing a holiday destination, I could not thing of anything less interesting.
This says more about slashdot than about python. If you want to copy complete programs, you always download the source files themselves, so you dont have this problem. There are plenty of websites that contain code snippets (the online python manuals, various blogs, ...), which do preserve the indentation which can be pasted directly into a python interpreter. There might be some annoyances sometimes, but if you write your own code in a decent editor the forced indentation is more a blessing than a curse.
Have you ever actually tried using python? I am very much in favor of capital punishment for everyone who doesn't properly indent his code in other languages anyhow, so being forced to indent in python wasn't really a problem for me. I do not understand why people keep bringing up this argument, there are valid reasons why python was designed this way and it is something you get used to after 5 minutes. And if you really insist on using braces, you can still use them:
if button_pressed: #{
launch_missiles() #this line must be indented but slashdot does not allow me to
#}
Let them call the FBI/CIA, I would be surprised if they didn't already have the technology to connect every available database 20 years ago. To think that you can stay anonymous from the government is an illusion. Which of course makes it all the more important to have proper privacy laws and check-guards. Let them search around all they want, but not without a court order or (in case of national intelligence) a high official signing off.
But don't tell me that you are not already in 10 different databases from the moment you are born. I assume you guys also have to register for a birth certificate, you need to pay taxes at some point so you have a social security number, etc. I really don't see the point.
Some American please explain me: why do you have voter registration at all? In my country (Netherlands), everyone above 18 is registered by default. I assume this is similar in most of Western Europe. The only caveat is that you have to be registered with your municipality, which you have to do anyhow for various different reasons (municipal tax, getting passports/ID/driving licence ...). A few weeks before an election, you simply get your 'voting ticket' in the mail. You typically take this to a neighborhood school to cast your vote, usually electronically.
Making everyone eligible to vote by default would save a lot of those voter-fraud claims and a lot of effort by the campaigns to get the people registered.
No. Apart from objects that emit at different 'shapes' due to different physics (stellar dust in the infrared, some stars towards UV or X-ray), a star emits more or less in the same 'shape' at all wavelengths. You will see it more blurry at long wavelengths than at shorter onces, but that is due to the diffraction limit, but that has nothing to do with focusing. And galaxies do not drift over a span of a few days. You'd be happy if you see a nearby star move by a few arc-seconds over half a year, and those are within our own galaxy. As mentioned before, Hubble has state of the art fine guidance sensors, so I do not expect any drift in Hubble either. Overlapping a few images is also easy, you just use a few point like stars that appear in all colors.
It's unfocused because it's not a true visible-light image, and because it's assembled from three images taken over two days. Drift happens.
Citation needed. Focusing has nothing to do with light being visible. You can focus shorter wavelengths like x-rays or longer wavelengths like they do in radio astronomy. And you claim about drift (of focus?) is also odd. I don't know anything about Hubble's focusing mechanism, but I assume they either do it for every image, or they only calibrate it every month or so. It is not like they let their camera slowly drift out of focus over a few days or so. Drift in pointing should also not happen, since Hubble has one of most accurate guidance sensors up there in space.
As a certified nuclear country, does this mean they will get a permanent seat in the UN security counsil? Being the number 2 country in terms of population should also give some weight to such a claim. Or mightbe a better idea, can we simply get rid of the permanent members in the council and let them be elected like everyone else?
(describing the building my name, number, AND location)
Further, emergency workers are on video telling bystanders to run because the building was about to "come down", and that (in so many words) that it was about to "blow up". This, well before it actually fell.
This would all still be consistent with my scenario that they did expect WTC7 to collapse and that their was a misunderstanding between blowing up and collapsing. I am not claiming this is exactly what happened (we will never know), but in Mythbuster's words, it is a plausible scenario.
Those are just a few among many such "coincidences" that make the fire theory just unbelievable.
In your logic, the existence of an alternative theory makes the fire scenario less likely. This is false logic, since none of these 'facts' contradict the fire hypothesis. I don't see how one quote of a reporter/silverman is evidence that contradicts a simulation by NIST. Do read the report, i did and I liked it. It does explain in great detail how an uncontrolled fire can lead to structural weakening and an eventual collapse of the building. It will never be possible to determine how things happened exactly, but they describe a plausible scenario based on hard-core science. Denying this plausibility means you question the scientific integrity of some 50 experts of a highly respected institute. And as things works in science, you will need a consensus among people of similar qualification to counter their arguments, not just a single guy or some random amateur from the internet.
I could agree with you that they didn't rule out the alternative theory (controlled demolition) enough, although they do a little in appendix D of the report. But you still didn't give me an alternative scenario that would include demolition. I will help you: first we need a suspect with a motive to blow the building up, i can only think of Al Qaida (but they already blew up WTC 1 and 2 with airplanes, why would they take the trouble to blow up a smaller building with a lot of effort), Silverstein (he needed the insurance money, but would he commit a crime for that?) or 'the goverment'/FBI/CIA (but why? to cover up what?). Then we need to know how they did it, especially how they managed to sneek explosives or thermite into the building without anyone seeing. We also need to know when, did they install them in the few hours on 9/11 while the building was evacuated and already on fire? You see, if you try to make a story you quickly run into some hard questions. I dare you to come up with a story that is as simple as the one I gave.