Pooh, I was developing and refining my understanding of the Twin Tower collapses as I went along, mostly from watching the collapse videos, sometimes frame by frame, and occasionally by reading engineers’ comments, and some of the academic papers. So my ideas changed and evolved as the thread progressed.
One thing I did that seemed to help me a lot was that I read up on the structure and construction of the Twin Towers, including dimensions of steel columns, floor assemblies etc., and then visualised it as a 1/100 scale model. The Twin Towers were just too big for me to think about directly; imagining the scale model helped me to fit it into my mind, my experience, as it were.
Something that really disappointed me was that no one anyone else really joined in with trying to work it out, for instance no one shared my wonder at the delicacy of the 1/100th scale visualisation. Nikko was occasionally helpful with some basic calculations, but mostly it seemed that everyone had already decided upon pre-rigged demolition, and just wanted to shut me up or ridicule my efforts. The ridicule in particular really pissed me off, and I got in a very bad mood at times; there was just more every time I returned to the thread.