Free Republic

Finger prints are useful for identifying kidnapped children.

The denial of a Medal of Honor to Sgt. Peralta is unjustified. Alleged medical experts who weren't eyewitnesses shouldn't be allowed to contradict the statements of eyewitnesses who saw what Peralta did to say the lives of his fellow Marines.

In my war, Vietnam, granting a Medal of Honor in such situations was essential automatic.

for an account of Peralta's heroism see http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200501110730.asp

I’m trying to find a quote for an essay I’m working on. I believe one of Al Gore’s disciples,possibly a NASA employee, suggested that those who disagreed with their religion should be jailed. I didn’t go ahead and download a copy of the article because it had no scientific value.

I believe real journalists, but not the propagandists who masquerade as such, would have recognized such a statement by a government employee as an indication that the case for global warming must be very weak.

Roger That! In the central highlands we thought of “cold” as temperatures in the low 70’s F.

The area of freezing weather is farther north, but still the whole idea of any part of Vietnam having freezing weather sounds unbelievable.

The “Gray Lady” is senile and really should be moved to a place where someone can take care of her.

He’s still a Republican as far as they are concerned and thus is on their enemies’ list. I thought they might wait a little longer to launch a Dan Rather type attack on him. They will likely look for other rumors to blow out of proportion as supermarket tabloids typically to about other types of celebrities.

The first Africans were brought to North America 480 years ago by the Spanish. The British had African slaves in Virginia in the early 17th Century. Sex across the color line likely started very soon after. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, white men in New Orleans sometimes had wives of African ancestry because of the shortage of white women. Men in frontier areas of the U.S. also took whatever women were available. With people spending so much of their time outdoors dark skin wouldn’t have been as much of a giveaway as it might be today, particularly after a couple of generations.

People in frontier areas where Jackson’s and Lincoln’s ancestors came from didn’t always ask a lot of questions about the backgrounds of others.

The media have been pushing the two parties into choosing a candidate too early in the campaign. Which issues will be important won’t be known until later at which time the candidate best able to handle those specific issues could be chosen.
I could vote for any of the three GOP leaders, but won’t vote for any of the top 3 Democrats.

Westar is among the companies that a few years ago had problems with executives allegedly looting the company (the issue is still in the courts). Now there is a question of possible assistance from Governor Kathleen Sebelius with a rate increase for the company's proposed generating plants. She appointed all three members of the commission that must approve the rates, two of them within the past year. She also had her secretary of Health and Environment veto coal powered generating plants by another Kansas electric company. Are the two connected by reasons other than concern about the environment? Perhaps the federal government could investigate the situation.

Further evidence that the whole thing is a scam. The whole claim of dire consequences if people don’t follow the orders of the UN is a common political ploy.

Thanks for posting this. I’m always glad to hear about real scientists. I particularly like the following comment: “Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science.”

Real scientists get bored simply repeating what is known. They want to discover new information rather than parrot what is already known.

Their conclusions are inconsistent with the other information in the article. The article states that some of the microbes produced organisms when placed in a liquid medium. A study of microbes from frozen areas cannot confirm or refute theories about whether DNA could travel in comets through space because conditions aren’t comparable. In particular, such a study can tell nothing about whether cosmic radiation could penetrate the icy covering of comets or be reflected by it.

The bridge was designed for anticipated traffic of 40,000 vehicles a day and was carrying 140,000 - 170,000 vehicles a day. Like most of the Interstate system is carrying much higher traffic than it was designed for which is why they have had higher maintenance costs.

A bridge expert on one of the Fox shows confirmed what I thought I was seeing. the support on the end where the bus was not only shifted it actually rotated toward the right. It looks like the metal portion of the bridge support was on a concrete struture. Would rotation indicate that the support was disconnected from the concrete whatever caused the collapse or would it likely have already disconnected from the support and its rotation caused the collapse? Possibly it started to shift causing the roadway on the shore side to start falling and then push it the rest of the way.

A physical event such as this doesn't happen overnight. There may be an accumulation of defects developing, such as broken welds, loosened bolts, fractures in the metal, etc. which gradually destabilize the structure. At some point, the structure becomes so unstable that a load it would normally be able to carry easily becomes too much and it collapses. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that three heavy vehicles passed over the support that fell toward the side of the bridge those vehicles were on seconds later. If the weakened bridge support depended upon a balanced load to remain standing an event which created an unbalanced load could cause it to tip or swing so far that the roadway would start to slide to one side on the support and push the support out of the way.

According to an NTSB official one of those assigned to the investigation will be a man who helped develop the computer program that will be used when he was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.

Thanks for the link. I hadn’t heard that yet. That situation would indicate the concrete may actually have been holding the bridge together and keeping it stablized which I believe is what reinforced concrete is supposed to do.

Thanks for letting me know you posted this. There are two factors in the collapse. One set would involve the actual condition of the bridge including any cracks, missing bolts or whatever. Any defects would make it possible for the bridge to collapse. The second set of factors would involve events that affected an existing defect(s) and caused it to fall at that particular time. The second set essential would be the triggering mechanism for the collapse.

The global warming issue demonstrates political efforts to control science. “All of which starkly contrasts to the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Sen. Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists—a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.

Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest.”

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220

Archaeologists engage in historical research,not scientific research. They look for evidence about the past and base conclusions on that evidence. Scientific knowledge may aid in that research such as by helping determine diets and diseases of people in the past. But the study of the past is not a science.

Geology is a science when it examines such matters as determining what geological formations might indicate locations where petroleum could be found. Determining how those formations developed involves historical research.