Friday, May 7, 2010
One week ago Pres. Barack Obama proclaimed May 6, 2010 to be a National Day
of Prayer in accordance with his responsibilities under Public Law 82-324.
I heard no pealing of church bells yesterday, nor were throngs of the
faithful seen gathering to give thanks. The only indication that
yesterday was National Prayer Day was a full-page ad in the New York Times
announcing that Federal District Court Judge Barbara Crabb had ruled that
the law is an unconstitutional call to religious action. However, Judge
Crabb put enforcement of her ruling on hold pending appeal, allowing
already scheduled prayer events to go on. The ad in the NYT, and perhaps
in other newspapers as well, was placed by the Freedom From Religion
Foundation, which initiated the court action by suing. It is no accident
that the Bill of Rights begins with the establishment clause; many of the
framers of the Constitution, having seen the pernicious effects of state
religions in Europe, were determined to produce a religion-free document.
They would have been shocked that the Rev. Billy Graham, a Southern Baptist
evangelist from North Carolina, could show up at the United States Capitol
164 years later and instruct Congress to pass a law directing the President
to urge citizens to pray; Congress dutifully obliged. Moreover, although
the law was a clear violation of the establishment clause of the First
Amendment, it was allowed to stand unchallenged for 58 years. It required
the President of the United States to set aside a day each year as a
National Day of Prayer and every President since has meekly complied; it
would be political suicide to do otherwise. Likewise, the President can
not publicly thank U.S. Federal District Court Judge Barbara Crabb for
upholding the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I'm not the
President, but What's New thanks her.
A hundred years ago, more or less, I had a professor whose response to
every question was: "Do the calculation." His point was that I knew more
than I thought I did. Last week I did the calculation of the energy per
gram to get something to the nearest star. Right there in front of the
world, I knew less than I thought I knew. I still have trouble converting
units. I got 317MJ/g. The correct answer, I think, is 317GJ/g.
The 15 metals in the lanthanide series of the periodic table (57-71)plus
scandium(21) and yttrium(39) are hot. They play an important role in
many high-tech applications ranging from hybrid automobiles to missile
defense. An excellent article by David Kramer in the May issue of Physics
Today focuses on the area of concern: they are fairly abundant in the
Earth's crust, as long as the crust is called China. Before 1950 if you
were interested in rare-earths you bought a bucket of them from China, all
mixed together. But the Ames laboratory in Ames, Iowa became the world
center of the chemistry and properties of the rare earth metals. There are
plenty of rare-earths outside China and there is now motivation to find
them.
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