Letters to the Editor
Jeffrey P. Harrison
Published Letters: 354 Editor's Choice: 39
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Yeeessss!
[Read the article: John McCain is running for sissy in chief]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The most common comment to hear after I've said something is: Well, just tell us what you think, Jeff. I've been calling Americans pussies and wusses for years now (sissy is such a dandified word). Scared of their own shadows because that means they're out in the sun and they might, might get skin cancer sometime in the future always presuming they survive that long.
However comma I disagree with both his assessment of the cause (although I would agree that it could be an accessory) and his hope for the cure. The cause is the use of government coercion to ensure somebody's vision of "safety". The examples I could use are manifold but I'll select just one. Jarts. The game banned for decades by the CPSC who would also like it to be illegal to sell your jarts at a garage sale. I still have my jarts and I play them occasionally. About the second time I used them, I realized that, if you weren't careful, somebody could get hurt. The observation showed me the way to organize the game so that possibility that someone would get hurt was fairly remote. That, however, was not good enough for the nanny state (which I tend to ignore). It is the nanny state that has progressively turned Americans into pussies and wusses. And that's why it makes no difference who is in the White House (although, frankly, just about anybody would be better than the current asshole-in-chief). There is a huge body of law and regulation that tries to force you to simply obey and not think. That's not going to change with a new occupant.
As long as I'm ranting, let's talk global warming. The problem we have with what's being talked about is that it's scientists who are looking at things and not engineers (full disclosure, amongst other things I possess a BA in physics). The earth's ecosystem is just that: a system. As any systems guy can tell you, if you have a system at steady state and you alter a system characteristic, other system values will change. They usually oscillate around the steady state value and, if the system is damped (as is the earth's), they will settle back to the old steady state values or, more likely, to new steady state values. If the system isn't damped, it still oscillates, it just doesn't settle out to a new steady state value. Do you hear any talk of oscillation? No. Do they know the frequency of the oscillation? Hell, they don't even seem to recognize that it will oscillate, never mind the frequency. And, finally, the CO2 villain. I dunno what these guys are smoking but it's got to be good. CO2 might be an accessory but CO2 represents 0.3% of the atmosphere by weight (compare to Venus @ 70% by weight). That means that the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere is equal to 0.003 times the total weight of the atmosphere (compare to Venus @ 0.7 times the total weight of the atmosphere). So, if the concentration of CO2 changes from .003 to .0035, in reality, it's a diddlysquat change. Unfortunately, this myopia with the CO2 prevents investigation of all the other sources of heat being added to our atmosphere such as all the asphalt and concrete being spread around the earth's surface - materials that absorb solar energy and then re-radiate it as heat at night (as opposed to trees which absorb it and convert it to food and don't radiate much of anything). Or the billions and billions of air conditioners being run around the world (please feel free at this point to review the three laws of thermodynamics to understand why the amount of heat being exhausted by your A/C is substantially larger than the amount of heat being removed from your house). Here I'm talking about the heat directly. CO2 very much represents a secondary effect from the propagation of electromagnetic radiation (light) in a medium (in this case, the atmosphere). Light propagates in a medium by being absorbed by atoms and molecules which become excited temporarily. When they fall back to their ground state, they emit the light to continue on its way. If the molecule in question happens to be CO2 and the frequency of the light is within the visible spectrum (a fairly small percentage of the total spectrum), then some of the emitted light will be in the infrared spectrum instead of the visible spectrum. We call infrared light heat. What we really should be talking about here is energy and not heat. I note that the total amount of energy incident on the earth from the sun (measured in watts/meter) is totally unaffected by the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
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Not so.
[Read the article: Love it or hate it, Valentine's Day is about women's rights]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No jewelery
No Chocolates
No Flowers (only because I forgot when I was in town 30 miles away)
Whipping out her favorite dinner with fine wine etc? Piece o' cake.
The impact on male attitudes can be remarkable when you lot simply accept and appreciate whatever we've found affordable/practical/doable for what it is instead of demanding something that somebody else thinks is affordable/practical/doable.