OT: "The Amazing Randi", of all people, has swallowed the GW dogma:

Hmm, close (within an order of magnitude). The greenhouse could be vented for harvest, then, or Mexican workers could be brought in who don't really care what they breathe. They'll be illegals so it's not like the company running the joint cares (ooh, mean)... But really, just spending a few hours or a shift or a day in there isn't "long term", so a percent or more probably wouldn't be a big deal, even for gov't TLAs.

Personally, I've breathed in the exhaust from my furnace burning insanely hot on wood: oak wood, stoked up to damn near white heat, tight yellow-white flames shooting out the top. Air smells perfectly pure, no smoke, no burnt smell, the smell of pure hot air, only the stifling sensation of unusually warm, moist and very stale air (at that height, probably in the 10's % range CO2).

Tim

Interesting how threads diverge.

What you miss is what Hamilton pointed out early in the game and others clearly understood, but disagreed with Hamilton over how badly we'd mangle our understanding of their intent a few centuries later.

The idea is that ALL RIGHTS belong to the individual, even those not stated in the Constitution. And that government gets rights granted by us, the people, for such purposes and for such times as we feel government uses them well. Read the 9th Amendment for clarification.

The 9th Amendment is known as the Hamilton Amendment and was added when Hamilton and others insisted that listing a few protective Amendments to the Constitution would cause later generations to imagine that those were the only ones secured by us. Hamilton argued strongly that it was like putting up a fence around yourself to be your last protection against tyrants -- the most important rights listed clearly so that if any of them are even slightly infringed that it would be a dire warning to all and sundry -- but Hamilton said that this last wall of defense against such tyranny would become our jail bars and later generations would instead imagine that those were the maximum rights of the people. Others just argued that they still wanted the most important ones listed out, but no one seriously argued that these were the ONLY rights or in any way able to be even slightly transgressed against.

Which is why the 9th Amendment was added. Just to make it clear to us in later times what the intent of listing out the other Amendments really means -- not our prison bars or the granting of all the rest to government, none of which was desired or even seriously argued back then.

Your "nowhere in" is completely misguided. All rights not explicitly granted to government are retained by the people and the listing of some hard lines against encroachment in the Amendments in no way affects the rights (all not granted to government) which are inalienable and individual. Look up the 9th.

Jon

well next time do some thinking about your writing before treating us to your halfbaked stream of consciousness ruminations.

It is necessary to plant photosynthesis, and helps land based vertebrates remember to breathe.

Sorry, that's the way I think. It does produce a lot of electronics.

John

What you missed was that it wasn't guaranteed, and can have other laws passed to regulate it.

On Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:19:30 -0700, John Larkin wrote: ...

Hey, the warmingists are producing megatons of phlogiston! ;-)

The crystal spheres have become Klein Bottles, and the body humours have been renamed to "Chi" and are the purview of eastern healing methods, like Tai Chi and acupuncture. :-)

Cheers! Rich

The Finns are big users of the Sauna. One type is the savusauna (smoke sauna), found on the older poorer farmsteads, in which the fire for heating the rocks vented directly into the same room as the sauna goers.

Years back before we knew better, one quick way to make your own sauna was to cut a gas water heater in half and fill it with rocks. The steam and exhaust filled the same room. I grew up using one such device. No one ever died, got sick or dizzy. Who knows what long term damage I incurred.

Still have one at home, and of course, one at the lake (kesämökin rantasauna).

B. Farmer

All rights were guaranteed, since they were reserved to the individual if not specifically granted to government. More, the 2nd Amendmend itself was placed there in order to try and guard against the possibility of the US government invading a State. The situation has certainly changed since then, particularly in terms of military weaponry, but that was the original intent.

James Madison writes about the subject in Federalist #46, saying "...the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation...forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of."

Madison also discusses the idea that a Federal Army might be formed in order to subdue the people. He leads his point by first trying to get an estimate of just how big an army the Federal gov't might possibly be able to muster. He then dispels it by saying, "To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops."

Alexander Hamilton writes in Federalist #29, "...but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist."

The constitutional authority, Professor Laurence Tribe, confirms that the 2nd Amendment is an individual right. See "American Constitutional Law, 2nd ed., 1988." He does so in a somewhat offhand way, but freely admits the difficulty of any other interpretation, writing, "...the debates surrounding congressional approval of the second amendment do contain references to individual self-protection as well as to states' rights." That was about 20 years _before_ this recent US Supreme Court itself re-iterated this individual right in a narrow decision.

I needn't get mired into all the details, but if you read the Virginia Legislature debates or what exists of the many writings by the various important visionaries around this time, well documented in George Bancroft's "History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America" (which is often referred to by members of the US Supreme Court), or if you carefully read through the Federalist Papers, in particular #24 to #29, #46, and others, you will find a continuing and clear understanding that common citizens must be afforded the right to keep and bear arms --- specifically because that would be a barrier to tyranny by political powers WITHIN our government -- and not so much, against those beyond it.

Even the opposition writers to the Federalists, for example the "Federal Farmer," an anti-federalist critic of the Constitution and its absence then of a Bill of Rights, wrote "to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..."

...

That said, how might this original intent be met? Not with pistols, I assure you. It was with roughly similar capabilities and training that they intended to form a final barrier.

Obviously, purely on prudent grouns, I agree entirely with you about building nuclear weapons as an individual right. But on original intent grounds (a position from where the founders could not possibly forsee this kind of weaponry, admitted) and the good purpose for which they wrote the 2nd Amendment, one could reasonably argue that individuals need __similar__ firepower as those in the US military in order to provide a __credible__ deterrent. (The founders also foresaw the need to dismantle a federal military in order to ensure that the differences in training wouldn't be too disparate, either. The point in all this was to ensure that there wouldn't be too much of a difference in the capabilities of a federal army under control of some despot regime -- because in their final analysis (clearly espoused in several Federalist papers) they felt that the last backstop was ultimately violent force and they wanted to make sure that there was sufficient disincentive at that level.)

But the reason I wrote to you about this was the implication, not clearly stated... but the implication in your words that if a right isn't guaranteed explicitly, then it might not reside in the individual in the US. Setting aside nuclear weaponry for a moment, that is a poor understanding of the Constitution and the source from which all of our rights emanate -- which is inside of each of us as individuals, not from some leader, some government, or some tinpot dictator who gets to decide what they are. All rights start at the tip of our each of our noses. And government gets to have only those we decide to grant her and only for so long as she treats them well.

Just wanted to make sure others didn't get the wrong idea from the way you phrased your comment.

Jon

And you omitted the very sellable / profitable as well.

That's what I like about electronic design. At the beginning, you have no idea of exactly what you plan to make, or how to implement it, or whether the world wants it. All you have is a hunch that an opportunity exists. So all sorts of wild ideas can be explored, dead-ends researched, false starts encouraged. This works well, extraordinarily well, in a group, if you can assemble a few people who are both technically competent and a bit looney. At some point all that fuzziness converges into something firm, and that has to be implemented with brutal engineering precision.

Not many people are comfortable with, or good at, both ends of this process. In particular, many engineers are distressed by the fuzzy start part, so want to get it over as soon as possible. So they wind up implementing the wrong architecture of the wrong product. What you call my "halfbaked stream of consciousness ruminations" is the way we start all new projects: by assuming that anything is possible, short of absolute violations of conservation of energy, and playing with the implications.

And yes, it is profitable, but that's a side effect. The money is just another tool we use to design cool electronics. Actually, we give most of it away.

John

yeah, i know what you mean. it's basically sculpture; you start out with something large and oddly shaped and chew away at it until you release the shape it was hiding within. honestly, i work the same way myself.

There's far too little attention paid to the early, architectural stages of electronic and system design. "Systems engineers" are being graduated in quantity, but I can't see how they can be much help without the ability to see far down into the implementation process, in other words they can't architect electronics if they don't understand electronics.

First-stage design, like most things, can be taught and learned. But that's rarely done in any deliberate manner. Academics have a positive dislike for such non-rigorous stuff. It can be a heap of fun, done right.

John

My point is that in the UK and in many other countries of the world you can grow this plant legally. In America cactophiles would risk jail by growing it. It has rather nice flowers.

Atomic weapon construction requires sufficient resources that only a handful of weapons related contractors would have access to the required materials. Although if the pure U235 or better Plutonium metal became available I don't see how the US government could stop a suitably resourced multi-millionaire from assembling a basic A-bomb weapon.

Growing native plants would seem to be a reasonable thing to do. The state should not need to interfere in such an intrusive way.

Regards, Martin Brown

At least they let us have kitchen knives and work on our own wiring over here. You can have the peyote.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Then it's no wonder why they won't let you own guns.

--

If you have broadband, your ISP may have a NNTP news server included in your account:

Sporadic E is the Earth's aluminum foil beanie for the 'global warming' sheep.

us

yeah; i'm suspicious of any engineering school that doesn't include a big dose of hands-on real world making it work. used to be a requisite for any good school; in fact, you'd be lucky to get enrolled if you didn't have a track record of having built stuff. any kind of stuff; soap box derby or replacement artificial hip for your dog. but just so's you had some kind of track record of having navigated the tortuous trail from concept to reality and were presumably educated as a result, in the things that classrooms aren't the best place to learn.

i don't know if that's still the case, given that most kids these days don't construct anything more real world than an irritating myspace page.

On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:20:07 -0700 (PDT), z wrote:

It's no longer the case and I can't really speak to what it was like, times back because I'd done what you mention and I was placed into the scholar's program at the university. Might have been just luck for all I knew about the process, back then. However, I'd built three telescopes, two of which I designed, and two by the time I entered the university; designed and built rocket nozzles (interesting area in its own right); made and tested quite a few different kinds of rocket fuels without help from anyone, including one that required an H2SO4 double-boiler setup; and had constructed my own computer beforehand (made the local news.. I still have the old newsclip with me standing on my front porch from the newspaper in mid-1970's.. which is on the web, too.)

I've been trying to encourage local high schools and one of the local community colleges (with sadly too much difficulty of late) to do more hands-on. Still struggling with that. Safety issues seem to be a huge change in the ambient teaching environment. For example, I was permitted, under teacher supervision, to make mercury fulminate and to purify it with glacial acetic acid/filtering while in high school. I was also permitted to work with teams making a huge 'crystal' out of styrofoam balls, wrapped in tin/al (can't remember) foil, and stuck together with sticks and then to irradiate it with a klystron from across the room, with us students running around with watt meters and recording results that we later digested into support for diffraction theory. I am having a hard time suggesting such things, today. ;) Also, both safety issues and short supplies of money seems prevalent so field trips have been largely cut off, too. I've tried to substitute more innocuous things, like building one's own spectrophotometer -- thick paper stock box, DVD, black paper baffles with perhaps some flocking, merc-argon lamp for finding doublets, etc., for wavelength calibration, $10 megapixel cameras for recording images for later study... as an example... but again, with what appears to be "yes, sounds great" and yet no call backs when it comes to figuring out how one might include this within existing curriculum.

Try finding hobbyist quantities of various kinds of glasses for making lenses! Used to be I could do that from more than a few suppliers. Now? I have to search for places like Surplus Shed's grab bags and hope, to get small quantities of blanks that _might_ be out of a material I want.

Oh, well.

Jon

yeah, i still get the occasional edmund scientific catalog. ain't like it was.