Last week, the House passed a defense bill that included both an absurd $895 billion for the military-industrial complex and a provision that will automatically register men ages 18-26 in the selective service. Selective service registration is currently voluntary, although men who fail to register may face $250,000 fines or 5 years in prison (yet …
Continue reading “Musings on The Possible Return of the Draft”
Pikes Peak is one of Colorado’s fifty-three “fourteeners,” or mountains that have an elevation of at least 14,000 feet (4267 m). The mountain is named after an American explorer with a legendary name, Zebulon Montgomery Pike, although he himself never managed to get to the top of the mountain. At 14,115 feet (4302 m) above …
If you live in the Midwest US, this blog will not be news to you. But for anyone not in the know, a remarkable event is happening spring and summer in the middle states. Billions, or perhaps even trillions, of cicadas have now crawled from the ground and are screaming in the trees. But this …
Continue reading “Cicadas in the Midwest (For Those Who Are Curious)”
The Lehigh Valley Railroad (LVR) went into service in 1846 in the northeastern US. Its main purpose was to transport anthracite coal from northeastern Pennsylvania to New York City and Philadelphia. By the end of the 19th century, the LVR wanted to get into the passenger train business. There was demand for a route between …
Continue reading “A Brief Overview of The Black Diamond Express”
On Monday of last week there was another update in the long ordeal of Julian Assange’s political prosecution. Assange has won the right to challenge a UK court’s decision to extradite him to the US. Previously in February of this year a High Court in the UK debated whether Assange will be extradited to the …
Continue reading “Julian Assange Wins Right to Appeal Extradition”
Single-use plastics infest many areas of our lives, and many plastics either aren’t recycled or are not made to be recyclable. The world produces 350 million tonnes of plastic each year, compared to just 2 million tonnes in 1950. From 1950-2015, only 6% of the 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic produced was recycled. Much of …
Continue reading “Researchers Create Self-Digesting Plastic”
On 1 May, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that banned the industry of lab-grown meat from the state. Lab-grown meat, also called cultivated or cultured meat, is meat that has been grown from stem cells taken from live animals. The cells grow in a medium and are then harvested and shaped into burgers, …
What is America’s biggest irrigated crop? Is it wheat, soybeans, or possibly corn? In fact, it is grass. Turfgass lawns are present in neighborhoods, suburbia, and golf clubs across the US. Although corn is more widespread than lawns in the US (80 million acres versus 40 million acres, respectively), corn is rarely irrigated, whereas grass …
By the mid-1850s, the city of New York was faced with severe traffic congestion. Engineers and city planners in the metropolis came up with a variety of different ideas to try to solve this problem. Last week’s blog covered an attempt to build a railway underground, an idea which would take several decades to come …
Continue reading “New York City’s 19th Century Elevated Railroad”
In the late 1800s, many of the growing American cities suffered from a woeful state of public transport. The streets were terribly congested, and fights often broke out in the areas most prone to traffic jams. One potential idea to alleviate the traffic congestion was to build a railway underground. One challenge of building underground …
Continue reading “New York’s 19th-Century Pneumatic Experiment: Its first Subway”
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