Sunday, February 9, 2014
Saturday, February 8, 2014
The Consequences Of Keeping Firearms In Your House..
From Wikipedia:
Kennesaw is a city in Cobb County, Georgia, United States, located in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area. It had a population of 29,783 according to the 2010 census. Founded in 1887, Kennesaw has a past surrounded with railroad history. During the Civil War, Kennesaw was the staging ground for the Great Locomotive Chase on April 12, 1862.
In 2007, the city was selected by Family Circle magazine as one of the nation's "10 best towns for families".[3] In 2009 Newsmax magazine listed the city among the "Top 25 Most Uniquely American Cities and Towns."[4] The city is perhaps best known nationally for its mandatory gun-
The town is noted for its unusual gun legislation. In 1982 the city passed an ordinance [Sec 34-21][18]
(a) In order to provide for the emergency management of the city, and further in order to provide for and protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants, every head of household residing in the city limits is required to maintain a firearm, together with ammunition therefore.
(b) Exempt from the effect of this section are those heads of households who suffer a physical or mental disability which would prohibit them from using such a firearm. Further exempt from the effect of this section are those heads of households who are paupers or who conscientiously oppose maintaining firearms as a result of beliefs or religious doctrine, or persons convicted of a felony.
Gun rights activist David Kopel stated that there is evidence that this gun law has reduced the incident rate of home burglaries citing that in the first year, home burglaries dropped from 65 before the ordinance, down to 26 in 1983, and to 11 in 1984.[19] The overall crime rate had decreased by more than 50% between 1982 and 2005.[20] Another report observed a noticeable reduction in burglary from 1981, the year before the ordinance was passed, to 1999. A 2001 media report stated that Kennesaw's crime rates continued to decline and were well below the national average, making citizens feel safer and more secure.[21] Later research stated that there is no evidence that [the law] reduced the rate of home burglaries [in Kennesaw],[22][23] The city's website says that the city has the lowest crime rate in Cobb county.[24]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw,_Georgia
Pluto Wins
It may not be a planet, but Pluto explains the whole solar system.
By Robert Irion
It's time to stop throwing pity parties for Pluto. The beloved not-quite-planet is about to become the star of our solar system. I'll go out on a limb and predict that in July 2015, the up-close photos of Pluto we'll get from a NASA spacecraft will be the most popular astronomical images of a generation. Screensavers, posters, live TV, Twitpics, you name it—Pluto will be everywhere. After all, we've been wondering what it looks like for decades.
But even now—and this is what most people don't realize about Pluto—we owe that little iceball a ton of respect. It led the way to a brand-new view of what our solar system is really made of. Here's the answer in advance: Almost all of the worlds circling our sun are like Pluto. There are thousands of them. Pluto's orbit, which used to seem weird, also showed us the violent history of how the big planets—the ones that get all the glory—got to where they are now. Its idiosyncrasies gave us the first, and best, clues about the history of our little nook of the Milky Way.
In other words, Pluto rules, regardless of what we humans deign to call it.
Formerly our ninth planet, Pluto was downgraded to "dwarf planet" in 2006 by some stuffy folks at the International Astronomical Union. A lot of astronomers disagreed, and Plutophiles howled. But the deal was done, and Pluto became a trendy verb. "I've been Plutoed" is a terrible thing to hear at the office. Even diminutive Tom Cruise got into it. A character in his Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol movie whined to him about a codename: "Why am I Pluto? It's not even a planet anymore."
All this angst over something that, to be charitable, is a smudge of light. No missions have flown past Pluto, so we're limited by what we see in telescopes. The object, with a surface area the size of Russia, is so far away—currently about 3 billion miles, more than 30 times the distance between Earth and the sun—that even the best telescopes show Pluto as an indistinct disk with light and dark patches. It has a gossamer atmosphere, frosts made of nitrogen and methane and carbon monoxide, and a whopping moon called Charon (pronounced by some astronomers with a soft "Sh" and others with a hard "K" sound). The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted other flecks of light circling Pluto: four more moons. Most everyone thinks Pluto has a bunch of other companions.
Beyond that, Pluto has remained mysterious. That will all change in 17 months.
On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft will whip past Pluto at more than 30,000 miles per hour after a flight lasting almost a decade. It carries what mission director Alan Stern calls "the best first-reconnaissance set of instruments for a planet, ever." We've had some amazing first looks at the four giant planets over the decades: majestic Jupiter and its bizarre moons, Saturn's ethereal rings, and the ocean-hued Uranus and Neptune. If you're old enough to remember the transformations of those bodies from blobs to fully realized worlds by the Voyager missions, you know the potential impact of Pluto's debut.
Not long ago I visited Stern at his home base, the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. SwRI is Obsession Central for Pluto, and Stern is at the core of it. He's an intense man with a compact build, a flier of high-altitude jets, and a former official at NASA. He can tell you, down to the minute, what the spacecraft and its observing tools will do during the zippy encounter. His nimble team has practiced the entire event many times. And he bristles, rightfully so, when any story (including one of mine, I must confess) refers to Pluto as an "oddball" or a "misfit."
"Pluto was the harbinger of knowledge that the solar system has thousands of planets, and nearly all of them are tiny," Stern says. Pluto and those other icy worlds inhabit a vast realm of the solar system called the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons will pay the first visit to such a world.
The biggest question is about Pluto's surface: Is it alive or dead? Pluto's craters, ridges, valleys, and other landforms may have been frozen and locked in place for eons. The sculpted ices of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide would look eerie and beautiful, but it's less interesting scientifically if Pluto is stuck that way. There's a chance—despite surface temperatures of about minus-400 degrees Fahrenheit—that some internal source of heat could make Pluto's surface ooze, flow, and perhaps erupt with icy geysers.
The largest moon of Neptune, called Triton, ebbs and shifts in such ways, creating fabulously exotic terrains. Scientists think Triton is one of Pluto's cousins, captured by Neptune from the Kuiper Belt billions of years ago. Comparing the two worlds, so unlike anything else we've seen up close, will consume scientists for years.
Pluto's tenuous atmosphere is another focus for New Horizons. From Earth, it's a nearly imperceptible wisp around Pluto's margins. The light-and-dark patterns seen by Hubble are the barest hint that the atmosphere and the surface interact as the planet's climate changes. Pluto's oval orbit takes it so far away (up to about 50 times the distance from Earth to the sun) that the atmosphere may freeze out as bright crystals onto a surface tinged red by methane. The spacecraft also may see clouds and fog: Plutonian meteorology, driven by the planet's all-natural global warming and cooling.
The barely-there atmosphere has kept us from knowing exactly how big Pluto is. Marc Buie, Stern's colleague at SwRI, wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Pluto as a last-minute swap 30 years ago, and the planet's elusive size has fascinated him since. "We're finally going to know the diameter of Pluto!" he told me in an urgent voice that only an obsessed scientist could conjure. For the record, Buie's published estimate is 2,306 kilometers (1,433 miles) in diameter. (In contrast, Earth's moon is 3,475 kilometers wide.) But Buie confided: "I think it's closer to 2,320 kilometers." Stay tuned!
By Robert Irion
But even now—and this is what most people don't realize about Pluto—we owe that little iceball a ton of respect. It led the way to a brand-new view of what our solar system is really made of. Here's the answer in advance: Almost all of the worlds circling our sun are like Pluto. There are thousands of them. Pluto's orbit, which used to seem weird, also showed us the violent history of how the big planets—the ones that get all the glory—got to where they are now. Its idiosyncrasies gave us the first, and best, clues about the history of our little nook of the Milky Way.
In other words, Pluto rules, regardless of what we humans deign to call it.
Formerly our ninth planet, Pluto was downgraded to "dwarf planet" in 2006 by some stuffy folks at the International Astronomical Union. A lot of astronomers disagreed, and Plutophiles howled. But the deal was done, and Pluto became a trendy verb. "I've been Plutoed" is a terrible thing to hear at the office. Even diminutive Tom Cruise got into it. A character in his Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol movie whined to him about a codename: "Why am I Pluto? It's not even a planet anymore."
All this angst over something that, to be charitable, is a smudge of light. No missions have flown past Pluto, so we're limited by what we see in telescopes. The object, with a surface area the size of Russia, is so far away—currently about 3 billion miles, more than 30 times the distance between Earth and the sun—that even the best telescopes show Pluto as an indistinct disk with light and dark patches. It has a gossamer atmosphere, frosts made of nitrogen and methane and carbon monoxide, and a whopping moon called Charon (pronounced by some astronomers with a soft "Sh" and others with a hard "K" sound). The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted other flecks of light circling Pluto: four more moons. Most everyone thinks Pluto has a bunch of other companions.
Beyond that, Pluto has remained mysterious. That will all change in 17 months.
 |
140204_MOU_PlutoNewHorizons
Artist’s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft as it approaches
Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, in July 2015.
Illustration courtesy Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)
|
On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft will whip past Pluto at more than 30,000 miles per hour after a flight lasting almost a decade. It carries what mission director Alan Stern calls "the best first-reconnaissance set of instruments for a planet, ever." We've had some amazing first looks at the four giant planets over the decades: majestic Jupiter and its bizarre moons, Saturn's ethereal rings, and the ocean-hued Uranus and Neptune. If you're old enough to remember the transformations of those bodies from blobs to fully realized worlds by the Voyager missions, you know the potential impact of Pluto's debut.
Not long ago I visited Stern at his home base, the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. SwRI is Obsession Central for Pluto, and Stern is at the core of it. He's an intense man with a compact build, a flier of high-altitude jets, and a former official at NASA. He can tell you, down to the minute, what the spacecraft and its observing tools will do during the zippy encounter. His nimble team has practiced the entire event many times. And he bristles, rightfully so, when any story (including one of mine, I must confess) refers to Pluto as an "oddball" or a "misfit."
"Pluto was the harbinger of knowledge that the solar system has thousands of planets, and nearly all of them are tiny," Stern says. Pluto and those other icy worlds inhabit a vast realm of the solar system called the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons will pay the first visit to such a world.
The biggest question is about Pluto's surface: Is it alive or dead? Pluto's craters, ridges, valleys, and other landforms may have been frozen and locked in place for eons. The sculpted ices of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide would look eerie and beautiful, but it's less interesting scientifically if Pluto is stuck that way. There's a chance—despite surface temperatures of about minus-400 degrees Fahrenheit—that some internal source of heat could make Pluto's surface ooze, flow, and perhaps erupt with icy geysers.
The largest moon of Neptune, called Triton, ebbs and shifts in such ways, creating fabulously exotic terrains. Scientists think Triton is one of Pluto's cousins, captured by Neptune from the Kuiper Belt billions of years ago. Comparing the two worlds, so unlike anything else we've seen up close, will consume scientists for years.
Pluto's tenuous atmosphere is another focus for New Horizons. From Earth, it's a nearly imperceptible wisp around Pluto's margins. The light-and-dark patterns seen by Hubble are the barest hint that the atmosphere and the surface interact as the planet's climate changes. Pluto's oval orbit takes it so far away (up to about 50 times the distance from Earth to the sun) that the atmosphere may freeze out as bright crystals onto a surface tinged red by methane. The spacecraft also may see clouds and fog: Plutonian meteorology, driven by the planet's all-natural global warming and cooling.
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Surface of Pluto
This is the most detailed view to date of the entire surface of Pluto, as constructed from multiple NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken from 2002 to 2003. Image by NASA
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