Oderint, Dum Metuant

Marriage in Alabama

I agree that if you and your spouse consider yourselves married then the state shall acknowledge the marriage.  It is a simple matter of liberty and the state has no other legitimate purpose than to uphold individual liberty.

"Advocates say the new law will require judges to treat all marriages as equal under Alabama law. Critics say it provides cover to biased judges and harms the wedding industry."
https://www.al.com/news/2019/05/alabama-lawmakers-pass-bill-to-end-marriage-licenses.html

HT: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/331461/

Clumps of Cells

Ancient Roman Engineering

                       Analogy between an invisibility cloak and ancient Gallo-Roman theaters.

Stephane Brûlé et al.

                                           

It is interesting to see how nature guides the path of our structures and makes me wonder what forces shaped ancient buildings.

"Co-author Stephane Brûlé, a civil engineer at a Lyon-based company called Menard, demonstrated the possibility of this kind of large-scale acoustic and seismic cloaking a few years ago with colleagues from the Fresnel Institute in Marseille. The researchers drilled a periodic array of boreholes into topsoil and discovered that sound waves reflected most of their energy back toward the source when they encountered the first two rows of holes. Brûlé noticed a similar foundational structure while on holiday in Autun (a town in central France), thanks to an aerial photograph of the semicircular structure of a Gallo-Roman theater buried under a field.

When Brûlé superimposed a more detailed archaeological photograph of the theater's structure over an image of one of the invisibility cloaking metamaterials he and his Fresnel colleagues had made in the lab, the ancient theater's pillars lined up almost perfectly with the microscopic elements in the metamaterial. He discovered similar overlap with images of the foundational structure of the Roman Colosseum and other, fully enclosed amphitheaters from the same era.

Roman engineers may not have done this deliberately; they could have just been lucky, according to Brûlé. Or they might have noticed over the centuries that certain structures were more resistant to earthquake damage than others and modified their designs accordingly. "Rigorously, we cannot say more for the moment," he told Physics World."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/study-says-ancient-romans-may-have-built-invisibility-cloaks-into-structures/

No Corn for Ethanol-Gasoline Mixtures

It is time to remove the market distortion for corn that is the government's economic incentive to produce more corn.  If we insist on burning gasoline-ethanol mixtures, it should make energy, hence economic sense.

"· It takes more energy to make ethanol from corn than you get from the ethanol.

· Corn requires a whole lot of fertilizer, and the runoff goes into the Mississippi River and runs down to the Gulf of Mexico, where it creates a dead zone the size of New Jersey.

· A gallon of ethanol has only about 2/3 the energy of a gallon of gasoline; hence, your miles per gallon will decrease if you use gasoline containing ethanol.

· Making corn into ethanol for our cars is tantamount to burning our food, and it is driving up the cost of the food left to eat. Corn is a staple food for hogs, cattle, sheep, and chickens, so the cost of all meat and poultry are going up, along with the cost of corn itself.

· Ethanol loves water and soaks it up from its environment, so it can’t be shipped in long-distance pipelines with gasoline, because the water will corrode the piping and pumping machinery. The ethanol will dry out pump seals. Consequently, it has to be transported in trucks at a higher cost and mixed with the gasoline near the end-use consumer market.

· The only good reason for making corn into ethanol is for whiskey." https://www.econlib.org/the-chemistry-of-ethanol/ 

Mental Illness Expressed

Transgenderism is a mental illness and pretending otherwise does a disservice to those who suffer from it.

"In 1961, at age 12, I was one of two-dozen black children who integrated an all-white junior high school in Richmond. White parents jeered me outside the school, and inside, their kids stuck me with pins, shoved me in the halls and pushed me down the stairs. So when the group of Google employees resorted to calling names and making false accusations because they didn’t want a conservative voice advising the company, the hostility was reminiscent of what I felt back then — that same intolerance for someone who was different from them."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wanted-to-help-google-make-ai-more-responsible-instead-i-was-treated-with-hostility/2019/04/09/cafd1fb6-5b07-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9f501119b11e