Here are 3 stories that caught my interest this morning. One is serious, another is funny, and the last is hopeful & might change science if true...
DENYING AMERICA
Those great lovers of liberty & freedom, the House Republicans, have decided that good public policy might be building a WALL on the United State-Mexico border. However, the wall isn't the end of it. Accoding to the Washington Times, the Republicans now believe that they can overturn part of the 14th Ammendment by statute...
...Birthright citizenship, or what critics call "anchor babies," means that any child born on U.S. soil is granted citizenship, with exceptions for foreign diplomats. That attracts illegal aliens, who have children in the United States; those children later can sponsor their parents for legal immigration.
Most lawmakers had avoided the issue, fearing that change would require a constitutional amendment -- the 14th Amendment reads in part: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."
But several Republicans said recent studies suggest otherwise. "There's been recent scholarship that says we can do it by statute, and we ought to try," said Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican...
One of my favorite quotes is from
Robert Kennedy, where he says...
"All of us, from the wealthiest to the young children that I have seen in this country, in this year, bloated by starvation --- we all share one precious possession, and that is the name American. It is not easy to know what that means. But, in part, to be an American means to have been an outcast and a stranger, to have come from the exiles' country, and to know that he who denies the outcast and the stanger still amongst us, he also denies America."
STUCK IT TO HIM?
I heard this story this morning on
Howard Stern, and laughed my ass off. It has no educational or beneficial social value whatsoever...
A 58-year-old Pennsylvania man, Kenneth Slaby, is suing his 56-year-old ex-flame, Gail O'Toole, for $30,000 after she used super glue to seal his ass shut, and bonded his dick to his stomach...
Slaby is looking to score $30,000 in a civil suit that accuses O'Toole, 56, of "outrageous and inhumane" acts after a night of dancing. An attorney for O'Toole said Slaby consented to having his genitals glued and that he suffered no permanent damage.
...Slaby contends O'Toole was dishing out some painful payback for their earlier breakup. The couple dated for 10 months in 1999. He said O'Toole waited until he was asleep to put her Super glue scheme to work. He said she smeared gobs of the sticky substance onto his penis and backside, and applied nail polish to his hair. Slaby said he woke up to a horrifying discovery - and a screeching woman.
"I'm tired of your lies," Slaby said O'Toole screamed at him. "The veins were popping out of her neck." Stuck without a ride home, Slaby said he walked a mile to a convenience store to call 911. He then had to wait four hours at a local hospital before medical personnel could put his penis back in its proper position...
According to the story, Ms. O'Toole is claiming that she super glued him as part of a sex-game. I was suprised that she only received 6 months probation for what she did to this guy. That had to be a great conversation with the 911 operator, when they asked him "what's the emergency"...
COULD EINSTEIN & HEISENBERG HAVE BEEN WRONG?
According to The Guardian, a scientist has discovered a "near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste." However, there's one problem. The discovery violates Quantum Mechanics...
Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation.
...What has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.
This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to get any closer.
According to Dr Mills, there can be only one explanation: quantum mechanics must be wrong. "We've done a lot of testing. We've got 50 independent validation reports, we've got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles," he said. "We ran into this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here. People are very strong and fervent protectors of this [quantum] theory that they use."
Is there a quantum physicist in the house to give an opinion on this?