Iraq: the Democrats don’t have a plan or a clue

What does it meant to “lead”?  According to dictionary.com, to “lead” means “to go before or with to show the way; conduct or escort: to lead a group on a cross-country hike.” 

Based on this criterion, the websites of prominent Democrats display a stark lack of leadership on Iraq.  A review of the websites of these Democrat “leaders” shows that they have no plan for dealing with the current occupation of Iraq. 

I’ll cut to the chase.  It seems as though we are headed for a repeat performance of the November 2004 election, where the plan of Democrats was to attack Bush as incompetent.  That strategy will work even less in 2006 than 2004, because Bush is a lame duck, already thinking about packing his cowboy boots to retire to Crawford.  Who cares about your concerns about a guy who is already on the way out?

The Democrats have certainly had lots of time to develop a plan on Iraq. After all, the war has been going as long as WWII, as indicated by this article from the Chicago Tribune:  

The United States has been fighting in Iraq since March 19, 2003, when President Bush launched Operation Iraqi Freedom with air strikes against Baghdad. Monday marks the 1,245th day of the Iraqi conflict. By that reckoning, Americans troops will have fought in Iraq for as long as they fought Germany in World War II.

But back to the failure of prominent Democrats to develop any plan.  A “plan”…

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Can You Have a Barn Without Uranium?

I was perusing a back issue of Physics Today, reading an article about events at the Large Hadron Collider, when I noticed the word, “femtobarn”. It was defined as 10-39 sq.cm. or a decimal followed by 38 zeros then a one. This is pretty small.

As a midwesterner, I thought I knew the size of a barn. So I multiplied out the femto (you know, milli-, micro-, nano-, pico-, femto-) to get the quadrillion times larger 10-24sq.cm. This is a barn? I had to Google this, and found a clear article at Stanford defining it for lay-folk.

In brief, physicists in the 1940’s were often discussing the cross-sectional area of the Uranium Nucleus. They thought of calling it the Oppenheimer (too many syllables) or the Bethe (too likely to be heard as Beta). Well, most of the research was being done in the midwest, and slamming protons into this target made them think of tossing tomatoes at a barn. The name “barn” was used in a reviewed article, accepted, and it stuck. Now, why femtobarns as the standard unit? It’s just practical for their purposes, like kilometers or megabytes.

By now, if you’ve read this far, you are probably wondering, “why should we care?” Sure, it’s fun to say “femtobarn”, but what use is it in everyday life?

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You May Have It Cockeyed If…

Science cannot disprove the existence of god. I have heard this claim made so often and by such a broad spectrum of people that I rarely really think about it. But is that the end of it? Science is concerned with materialism ( in a philosophic sense) and does best…

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Red State, Blue State, My State? You State!

How red is the country, and how blue are we? Well, even in 2000, I wanted to see the colors of the states mixed, so we could see how purple each one was. Go here to see a variety of ways of looking at the red-blue situation from the 2004…

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I thought my computer liked me

This is a bit embarrassing to admit but, over the years, I had grown almost infatuated with my computer.  Through thick and thin, she was always there for me, never complaining, always executing the computer commands I entered via the keyboard and mouse.  After a long session, I sometimes thought “She’s so kind and understanding of my erratic ways.  She alway waits patiently while I stare at the monitor thinking of the next thing to type in.”

All of that was before I installed my new purchase, the Computamatic Voice Module.  The TV commercial claimed that every computer had a unique personality and that this device would give me a chance to know the innermost thoughts of my computer.  I would now be able to hear what my computer was thinking as I used her.  As I opened the package, I wondered whether my computer was actually a female.  I was about to find out.

I’ll never forget the first time I attached the Module to the USB port.  I turned on the computer, waiting for Windows to boot up.  Then I heard her raspy voice.  It was a she.

“It’s about time,” she said. 

“Hello?” I replied.  

She simply said “Just get on with it. Hit some keys. Let’s go.”

I double-clicked the word processor icon and started keying-in an article.  About halfway through, I realized that the noise I heard whenever I made typos was my computer scoffing at me, sometimes laughing at me, sometimes insulting me.  …

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