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Comments
I'm pretty sure someone at my college has done ass drugs sometime or other. The probability of at least one person in sight radius having done any monumentally stupid thing you can think of asymptotically approaches 1 as you approach Eugene or Portland.
What about Miami?
I've never been to Miami and cannot conclusively report on its concentration of stupid.
I can conclusively report that hippies are a singularity of stupid, and any stupidflux integral should be careful not to intersect directly with any hippies.
Actually, come to think of it, Miami isn't known for a high concentration of stupid; it's known for a high concentration of crazy.
So, Mississippi outlawed slavery.
Like, just now.
Yeah, apparently they never actually got around to it, and after the Lincoln movie came out, someone was looking into it, pointed it out, and they went "oh, oops, we should do that."
Wouldn't the thirteenth amendment make that law redundant though?
> ass drugs
Is that like the joke Scrubs did about the how "analgesic" is pronounced?
...actually, I regret asking already.
@ClockorkUniverse Aren't there already federal laws that take care of that?
But don't worry. That was just a clerical error. Mississippi fully intended to take an anti-slavery stance way back in...1995. Gah.
> 1995
"We look like we're 148 years late, but we actually only meant to be 130 years late!"
lol Stevie Nicks
Wait, states can be against parts of the constitution? How does that work?
...and that's how Tea-Partier U.S. Senate candidates have ended up opposing the amendment that guarantees the right to directly elect U.S. senators.
http://atr.rollcall.com/nebraska-senate-conservatives-fund-warns-against-fortenberry-bid/
Arson, murder, and jaywalking, people.
The US still uses incandescent lightbulbs?
We still use motherfucking coal. Incandescents are the least of our problems.
What's actually stopped nuclear power from getting a decent foothold in the US? Is it predominately the anti-nuclear lobby, or is there more to it?
For your average American, the mental association process on the subject goes something like this: nuclear power = nuclear bomb = radioactive death = bad.
Seriously, there are people here who are convinced that their cell phones will give them cancer if they don't wear them in special protective holsters. Just imagine how thoroughly shitless they'd be scared if they found out about a plan to build a nuclear power plant anywhere near where they live.
People here are terrified of it because...just because, really.
The United States has a political system that validates people's hopes and fears, regardless of whether they're advisable.
And for U.S. conservatives...well, they're basically on a nostalgia binge, pining for the good old days when everything went right, and seeing the world being different from what they're familiar with, and cursing the differences. Except those that make their own lives better, of course.
Also, they're really quick to point out Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even though the former was because of profoundly shitty engineering even for its time, and the latter could have been much worse, and was because of a goddamn 9.0 earthquake.
One thing that annoys me about liberals, actually, is their aversion to nuclear power.
The way that our society's power-consuming infrastructure is built, that's basically the only good source of baseload power besides fossil fuels, barring development of really good energy storage.
Yes, nuclear waste is really nasty shit. Thing is, it's pretty nastiness-dense (rather than nastiness-diffuse) and is easy to lock away.
Now if you're talking about civil security problems, that's a more valid concern. But I think it's still worth having the nuclear option (start snickering, fellow political geeks) on the table.
It was also because local anti-nuclear groups were impeding upgrades to the reactors that would have dramatically improved their stability to the point that they likely would have survived the tsunami.
^ It's not really liberals so much as hippies specifically. And fuck hippies.
Most of the support for nuclear power comes from other liberal blocs who realize that burying 1 m^3 of properly-processed uranium for 500 years is a way, way better solution than spewing out over 100,000 times the mass of toxic gases in coal.
Nothing to do with legislation, or really important stuff, I guess, but apparently there's been quite a few politicians admitting to having "secret offspring" lately.
I guess it's not really important, anyway, but I just wanted to mention this somewhere.
Incandescent means it has tungsten wire inside? (And not, like, native Peruvian.) Because I haven't yet noticed these new ecological light bulbs being that much better or efficient.
Yeah. Basically, incandenscent in contrast to the CFL (compact fluorescent light) bulbs, which are actually tubes. Too bad our lighting infrastructure is pretty much built around circular bulbs, even though CFLs are much better straight.
Native Peruvian bulbs would be fuckin' awesome though.
^^ And here's a little bit about former U.S. Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM): http://politicalwire.com/archives/2013/02/20/flashback_quote_of_the_day.html
Looks like he got a piece of the action too.
IJBM: People panicking about genetically modified foods.
Incandescents shoot a current through a metal filament heat up and glow. Fluorescents shoot a current through a tube of rarefied gas to make it glow without heating up.
Fluorescent bulbs' light are mostly confined to a few spectral emission bands depending on the gas inside -- it's very efficient to let you see around and wastes very little energy on heat, but can feel artificial or give insufficient light to make out subtle color details because you're not actually getting a full spectrum. Incandescents are typically more full lighting because blackbody radiation does throw off a full spectrum, but use considerably more power due to broader spectrum and heat loss, and are more prone to burning out because that heating physically strains the filament with heat expansion.
For most cases you're much better off in the long term using fluorescents, though you still want incandescents for artistic endeavors (stage lighting etc).
SCIENCE
Fun fact, this is also a problem you'd run into with an underground bomb shelter or something. Most bulbs don't put off the kind of light you need to make enough vitamin D to be completely healthy, but incandescents will at least yield some. There's also an argument to be made for people in extreme latitudes to want incandescent bulbs, because they already get so little sunlight due to oblique solar angle and overcast weather.
Vitamin D pills are a thing.
Vitamin D pills, or that whale extract thing children were once fed.
As for the workings of light bulbs, I know what you speak of (though you omitted light-emitting diodes). My problem was that "incandescent" is that sort of long foreign word, the meaning of which I wasn't sure of (English language sure likes Classical borrowings), and that in my personal experience, those "ecological" or "energy-saving" bulbs are more expensive when you buy them and hardly better when it comes to fizzling out, perhaps I was just that unlucky (edit: and the folks who push for "ecologic" tend to disregard whatever mercury or stuff is used in their production). Also, tungsten bulb's light has a more pleasant colour. Typical fluorescent reminds me of hospital lighting.