Image via Wikipedia
2.
This works out to $20,928 profit every minute! Continue reading
An era is over. Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-135) has launched. I have lived through the conception, inception, and now possibly the demolition of one of America’s finest “moments.” Expensive? Heck yeah. But we have taken for granted the basic fact of the space shuttle program along with the entirety of the space program, and thus have under-appreciated what it has contributed and meant to this country.
Image via Wikipedia
Image via Wikipedia
This may change the landscape of immigration enforcement forever. This is from the U.S. Supreme Court which binds all of the lower courts, state and federal.
The Supreme Court has sustained Arizona’s law that penalizes businesses for hiring workers who are in the United States illegally, rejecting arguments that states have no role in immigration matters.
via High Court Upholds Arizona Law Penalizing Employers Over Illegal Immigrant Workers – FoxNews.com.
The article further states: Continue reading
Historic events in the life of a nation deserve to be chronicled, accurately and completely. The dispatching of Usama Bin Laden is one of those events. We must see the photos and videos (however gory they may be) for two reasons: (1) that is the modern and preferred medium for historical records, and (2) the disclosure of facts has been so “foggy” that the warm sunlight must now be brought to bear upon the events to clear the fog. Continue reading
(CAUTION: large article, will take some time to load)
Excellence is good — it makes you feel better about everything. 
If you are having difficulty visualizing 13,000 cyclists, so was I. I am not certain that I have fully absorbed the full import of that flowing sea of colorful jerseys wrapping bodies of people willing to impale themselves upon skinny bicycle saddles and crank pedals for what sometimes feels like an eternity. It was the 2011 BP MS 150 and I was there for my first attempt at riding 100 miles in one day, followed by 78 miles the second day. Many photo thumbnails follow. Click to enlarge. Continue reading
And if you have run low on crises, then create one. Let’s see how that might happen. Summer of 2010 and into the fall, fail to pass a budget bill for the fiscal year beginning 10/1/2010. In spite of being in control of Congress and the Executive. Even after November 2010 elections, when still in control until the new Congress convenes, let the matter continue to languish. Still no budget.
Fast-forward slowly to spring 2011. Need a crisis (for a host of reasons). Continue reading
Mohammed Alim Khan (1880–1944), the last Emir of Bukhara. Image via Wikipedia
All of which brings me to a question: Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this—like prostitutes, if we’re being honest with ourselves—but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards?
via Why Do We Let Girls Dress Like That? – WSJ.com.
After you answer that question — and good luck with that one — tell me/us why the attire you see on both sexes of all ages no longer, in far too many instances, is appropriate to the place or occasion? Let’s take an example near and dear to my heart. (after you ponder the following, go back and read the entire article — interesting)
Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away (isn’t that how all good stories are supposed to begin?) there was a judge conducting jury selection in a case somewhere in Texas. Moments after one of the prospects asked to approach the bench, the unsuspecting judge was rocked back on his heels. Well, back in his over-stuffed chair anyway.
There “it” was. Marching down the aisle between the two sections of seating, coming to share dark secrets with hiz honor, was this nattily attired person. Nattily attired if attending a beach blanket bingo party, that is.
Resplendent in his tank-top, shorts and 88 cent shower shoes (not even the courtesy of Birckenstocks), he sauntered right down for some conversation. The conversation was short. Once the startled judge got his heart restarted, his tongue out of the back of his throat and his gizzard to pumping again, he simply said “your attire, sir, is inappropriate for court and you may be excused and will appear on another day.”
The real trouble began later when I published (yes, I was that judge) my now-infamous Court Dress Code. Clean and pressed jeans were allowed — after all, we’re (thankfully) in the “sticks.” A jacket was preferred for men, but not required. I think it was the requirement that men wear a tie that garnered the most attention. Yes, I know it was. Without any doubt.
I say “trouble” only if one considers it to be a problem to be accosted at the Horseshoe Bay “500 of your closest friends” parties by every single male who either had gotten a jury summons or feared the very prospect now that the draconian dress code was in the wind. “I’m not wearing a damn tie to your court or any other” was the frequent greeting, to which I silently pondered “how will this play in (federal) Judge Sam Sparks court?”
Not to worry. I had the solution. I just knew that a rent-a-tie business could nicely add to my eventual retirement. Not really, of course, but I did garner a nice collection contributed by guys who obviously had not cleaned out their closets since pre-1980′s. Everyone’s favorite was the “fish tie.” If you turned the tie horizontally the tip was a fish-head and for a tie-tack … you guessed it, a huge faux gold-plated fish hook.
That dress code came and went. Another took its place and has remained for many years with moderate success punctuated occasionally by some hapless soul who gets his ticket punched to return another day.
But here I have digressed. The question was, and is: why do so many people seem clueless about attire appropriate to the occasion and place? The court is but one place, but one would think that almost anyone knows that the courthouse, with the potential to get on a jury looming high on their horizon, requires a certain degree of decorum and solemnity. It has been suggested that dressing down is a ploy to avoid being picked. Maybe, but I don’t think so.
So answer me. Why?
In a recent post I discussed the addiction of exercise, pedaling in particular.
A Race Across America cyclist
Due to the wonders (which sometimes is the curse) of Facebook I discovered a trailer to a movie — one that I will have to own — which talks about a truly awesome “event.” The Race Across America is an epic, 3000-mile bicycle race from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The RAAM is portrayed in the film Bicycle Dreams. The trailer alone, which follows, will blow you back into your seat. Continue reading
Forget the hysteria in the media about a “core meltdown.” Too many people have seen The China Syndrome. Thanks to a shared link posted to Facebook by Jim Wreyford I discovered a web site with what appears to contain knowledgeable, well-reasoned information about the nuclear power process in general, and about Fukushima in particular. An article was originally written by Dr. Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT (but apparently not a nuclear scientist). His original piece began this way:
I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors.
By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.
I have been reading every news release on the incident since the earthquake. There has not been one single report that was accurate and free of errors (and part of that problem is also a weakness in the Japanese crisis communication). By “not free of errors” I do not refer to tendentious anti-nuclear journalism – that is quite normal these days. By “not free of errors” I mean blatant errors regarding physics and natural law, as well as gross misinterpretation of facts, due to an obvious lack of fundamental and basic understanding of the way nuclear reactors are build and operated. I have read a 3 page report on CNN where every single paragraph contained an error.
via You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster In Japan — Here’s Why.
His article achieved quite a bit of notoriety and has now been modified and migrated to a site at MIT where his article now begins this explanation:
We will have to cover some fundamentals, before we get into what is going on.
Construction of the Fukushima nuclear power plants
The plants at Fukushima are Boiling Water Reactors (BWR for short). A BWR produces electricity by boiling water, and spinning a a turbine with that steam. The nuclear fuel heats water, the water boils and creates steam, the steam then drives turbines that create the electricity, and the steam is then cooled and condensed back to water, and the water returns to be heated by the nuclear fuel. The reactor operates at about 285 °C.
His article has a tremendous amount of detail about the redundant safety systems built into nuclear reactor construction. But more importantly, for in-depth explanations of the reactors and the events — being posted frequently with engineering details and analysis, there is now a blog at MIT described thusly:
Information about the incident at the Fukushima Nuclear Plants in Japan hosted by http://web.mit.edu/nse/ :: Maintained by the students of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. Click here to go to that site. Caution: very technical.
I have to put a lot of faith in the MIT explanation. Read and learn.
Let’s compare it to something we can visualize. First, what is the debt figure?
Click on the thumbnail and get a good look at what $14 trillion looks like written out. A “14″ with TWELVE places after that! And 15 cents. Check the clock for updates.
OK, $14 trillion. Now let’s think of something really, really huge and complicated that we might want to spend some money on. The object is to try to think of a monstrously expensive project. Continue reading
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