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The Perfect Plate for the Nuclear Family Car
In what must be a dream come true for some, Nevada has approved a License Plate commemorating the Test Site and the connections Nevada enjoys with Nuclear weapons in the United States. The Associated Press article on the subject notes that a lot of people are up in arms about the new design, as Nevada is embroiled in controversy over the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility. The license features an atom. a mushroom cloud as the background and the equation E=mc2 on the plate.
I was unable to find a picture of the plate on the web (I saw it in my morning paper). I'm sure a picture must be on the web somewhere. I'll leave it to slashdotters to suggest the best personalized lettering for the plate. My entry: DUKNCVR?
Wow, must be a slow news day on the ole /. But hey I'll bite anyway. I'm not surprised that members of the general public are all up in arms about it. My neighbor across the street works for NASA and he's a scientist working on the idea of nuclear propulsion in space. Their real task now is figuring out how to safely and efficiently get such an enormous reactor into space. Anyway his license plate is an MIT plate (my state has plates for almost any university that has an alumni association that can rustle up however many signatures you need) customized as "SPCNUKE" He's always getting honked at, cut off, sworn at and lectured by the obligatory mother with three kids in the grocery store parking lot. Seems everyone thinks that his project is really about one of two things. 1) How to get nuclear weapons into space. Or 2) Failing that, how to dump all our nuclear waste into outerspace.
I've asked if he's ever considered changing the plate and he said no, he kind of likes the reactions he gets from people. (Lack of attention in grade school, perhaps?)
Hey....I always knew there was something just a little bit 'odd' about those folks...
As I see it, the real problem is that when it comes to something people don't understand that sometimes has the ability to maim or kill them they don't want to take the time to learn more about it. They want it banned, damnit, banned! Out of my children's face!!!
When I see one of these plates crusing down the road I probably won't give it a second look, it's just too bad people can't see the larger issue (or more often, the lack of one) sometimes.
(See Nevada License Plates)
On the other hand, you'd have to get the Legislature's approval...
Ahem, the only math involved when your dearest politicians resolved to nuke Japan (even if it was on the edge of a surrender) was: your civilian casualties vs our projected military ones .
I wonder how Nevada could be proud of being the official "most worthless place on the continent" as judged by the government which decided that if some place must be irradiated, it might as well be Nevada, because it's not really much of a loss.
Nevada relies heavily on tourism. Of course there are the idiots who go to Vegas, and the people who are attracted by Nevada's marriage and prostitution laws. Aside from that, Nevada has a strong appeal as an extremely desolate place- and it's the right kind of desolation, with Indian reservations and weird rocks and nuclear testing grounds. Not flat desolation like you see in the Plains States.
If you're wanting to see the Milky Way, or you're wanting to take some pictures with your new Canon D-30, or you're looking to justify your SUV purchase (and you don't realize that your Ford Explorer is going to need a tow truck), you could do a lot worse than Nevada. Of course, the nearest large population center is the west coast, and California itself has a lot of cool places to visit. Nevada's problem is that it's surrounded by states with similar terrain and features, so it doesn't get the fair share of tourists that it deserves. So they are always looking for things that make them stick out from AZ, CA, UT, etc., like gambling, prostitution, marriage laws, etc. (Utah might have funny marriage laws as well but if it does, they're of a different sort because I never heard of anyone going to Utah just to get married.)
The Manhattan Project sites are great things to have in your state. The bomb test areas themselves might still be radioactive and nasty places, but they have the status of historical sites, which is great for attracting tourists and so you can build tourist traps around them at a safe distance.
Yucca Mountain, on the other hand, is nothing but bad news because it cannot be leveraged to generate tourism at all- it's for waste, which repels tourists. As far as Nevada is concerned, the federal government might as well be dropping a smelly hog farm in the middle of Vegas. So you won't see Yucca Mountain plates anytime soon unless it's part of a political ploy during the next election, when Nevada's 4 electoral votes are up for grabs.
"The Alamo has become a fantastic tourist trap in spite of being a horrific military failure"
Err, no. The stand at the Alamo delayed the Mexian troops while the Texas army finally got it's act together. Not to mention galvanizing them as well. Also, lets not forget that the number of casualites inflited by the Alamo defenders against the vasty larger Mexican army were nothing less than amazing.
So, we lost the battle but won the war.
Uh, it's quite logical when you think about it. Military gunnery ranges are usually off limits for civilians => less human activity there (they don't shoot _that_ much there...) => animals like it. Why not call it a wildlife range at the same time and make some tree-huggers happy.
Off course there will be incidents when animals are killed by shells, but I think they are quite rare after all. There are exceptions though. Reindeers during winter being a famous one. Now, contrary to what you might have understood from watching xmas movies, reindeers are not very smart animals. In fact, they are fucking stupid. No survival instinct whatsoever.
Now for a short introduction to artillery. Usually you fire calibration rounds to calibrate the tubes. Only when you know the rounds hit the target you shoot with all you got.
So, during winter artillery firing exercises, the calibration shells blow away the snow cover. This often leads to reindeers arriving at the scene to eat the newly exposed undervegatation. Usually just in time for the "big arty barrage" to hit them...;) IIRC, there was a case in Finland a few years back when an entire herd of like 50 reindeers were blasted in one go.
This equation is almost always misquoted. E=mc^2 is the non-relativistic form, the actual equation is: E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4 (afair).
[p is the momentum of the object in question]