Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Sorted by date Results 1507 - 1531 of 1962
Limestone and a couple other related sedimentary rocks are common in some parts of the country, including in Florida. The chemistry of limestone and groundwater can combine to make for sinkholes, or vertical holes in bedrock that can open up quickly. Sinkholes are caused by the fact that groundwater, percolating downward from the land surface, is acidic. And acids eat away at limestone, dissolving it. That means over time limestone bedrock can start to resemble Swiss cheese,...
It’s time to change my theme song. This realization came to me as I was driving to Spokane last week. I don’t know why epiphanies only seem to happen when I’m doing something that makes it impossible to write it down so as to remember it later. It would be nice if I could remember it later. It would be nice if I could remember anything later. Fortunately, I recently discovered that my smarter-than-me phone will record my thoughts, if only I can remember which app to selec...
Regarding Gerald Ray’s recent letter to the editor, it’s obvious to me that he has been watching way too much Fox News – you know, the channel where rich people pay rich people to tell middle-class people to blame poor people. I suggest he check out www.inthese times.com and search for “The GOP’s One Trillion Dollar Lie – How a Right-Wing Whopper About The Cost of Welfare Was Born.” He will then find that the reality expressed mathematically is: Total Spending on Welfare/Those Who Receive Benefits = $24.77 per day. This is...
I can't pass up commenting on Gerald Ray’s letter (of last week). He never even looked the report up! I have attached it. So what is a poverty income? Whenever I copy information from the Internet which I want to pass on to a friend, I type the http:// address as a reference on the page. I learned this in college. Here is an example: http://budget.senate.gov/republican/public/index.cfm/budget-background? is where you will find this misleading statement by the Senate Budget Committee: “Based on data from the Congressional Res...
Byron Behne watches the grain markets for the Odessa Union Warehouse. 4/3/13: Big rally in Chicago wheat futures today, which has so far continued into the evening session, as it was rumored that China was in buying a bunch of U.S. SRW. Unfortunately, for the first time in several months, soft white prices have broken their link to Chicago futures and have refused to budge, up only five cents from yesterday, while Chicago has gained over 30 cents. Most exporters in Portland have gone back to flat-price soft white bids...
Odessa area parents will want to know more about the Odessa School District’s new “Common Core” curriculum before subjecting their children to it. Be informed. It touts the Muslim religion over Christianity. It teaches Communism is superior to Capitalism. It includes new depths and heights in data-mining student behavior and performance. Parents can read what other parents have said about “Common Core” here: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/02/want-to-see-what-cscope-and-common-core-even-homeschooli...
Born in 1632 in the Netherlands, Antony van Leeuwenhoek was a self-taught man who made microscopes – ultimately producing some 500 of them. Microscopes consist of lenses of carefully ground class. Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes could magnify objects up to two hundred times. That opened up a range of investigations to him and he took advantage of the new devices he was creating to look at almost anything and everything, including bacteria he obtained from between his teeth. Van...
Thank you for printing the list of new U.S. citizens from March 24, 1938 in a recent "75 Years Ago" column. The first name in the list was that of my mother, Emma Jean Napier. Although she was born at Reardan and had lived her entire life in the state of Washington, she lost her U.S. citizenship in 1922 whe she married my father, John (Jack) Napier. They knew he was still a citizen of Scotland, but did not know of the law still in force which nullified citizenship when a U.S. citizen married a non-citizen. The law was...
Byron Behne watches the grain markets for the Odessa Union Warehouse. 3/28/13: Well, that was a surprise! The USDA managed to find an additional 400 million bushels of corn in the bin than what was being expected, and that pulled the rug out from under the grain market. Chicago wheat futures closed down 49 cents, corn futures were locked limit down shortly after the report and will open with limits expanded to 60 cents on Sunday afternoon (happy Easter!). The acreage projections came in as expected, but it was the higher...
There are two features of this time of year that make my heart glad. One is the rapidly increasing length of the day. In September we lose daylight quickly, but in the spring we gain it all back just as rapidly. Although the same pattern is repeated each year (so you’d think I’d be used to it), I’m always somehow surprised and delighted when we get to this time of year and have early sunrises and spreading daylight in the evenings. The other part of this time of year that...
As we get closer to the celebration of “Mother’s Day,” I think of the women who have been a tremendous influence in shaping my life. My grandmother, my mother and my mother-in-law. My grandmother taught me the beauty of flowers, gardening, sewing and cooking. She had her picture in the paper many times with the flowers she grew and the garden she raised. This began my journey as a Proverbs 31 woman. My mother taught me love unconditionally. She always told her children “to be there for one another.” Even when we were far...
To Sheriff Wade Magers, Please pass along my deepest appreciation for your department’s initial effort on 11 March 13 at the crash site of the Navy EA-6B Prowler aircraft in Harrington and your support during the week-long accident investigation. Your department was instrumental in helping to control the initial crash scene and also clear the route from the crash site to Fairchild AFB in order to transfer the remains of our fallen [with] the respect they deserve. Over 100 members of our military community attended the d...
As I was reading (yet another) book that promised to have the solution to my weight problem, I realized that what I really want is to be a success story. Success stories are intended to be inspiring, I know, but when I read about other people who were a hundred pounds overweight and managed to lose it, I get depressed. Because, when it comes to my health, weight, or housekeeping, I just don’t seem to be able to stick to any kind of plan. Any individual who succeeds at changing...
Sequester. What Sequester? For two months we have heard nothing but how bad it is going to be, people will starve, people will die, schools will close, and any horrible thing you can think of. That’s all you heard from the President, the Vise President and their lap dogs in the media. Once again it was, “Do as I say, not as I do.” On a couple of recent trips overseas Vice President Biden and his entourage of 136 people stayed in a hotel in Paris for one night at a cost to the U.S. taxpayer of $585,000.50. In London for one n...
Byron Behne watches the grain markets for the Odessa Union Warehouse. 3/22/13: Back from vacation, but after seeing what the market has done since I left, perhaps I should have stayed away. Soft white wheat basis vs. Chicago futures dropped 45 cents from late last week into this week, a result of a large producer selling at the end of last week combined with limited known export demand for white wheat going forward. The last big export news was the CCC donation tender for Bangladesh which took place last week and reportedly...
For shame, President Obama! The Veteran’s Administration has been serving veterans for many decades. There have been problems, as there are with any large department. They had a budget of $140 billion for 2012, even though you and the Senate haven’t produced a budget (required by law) for almost four years. Oh well, by now many of us know how you feel about laws and rules. You and your staff can’t possibly be proud of the more than $100 million that was spent by VA staff learning how to be better union members. It must have b...
There’s a new debate in paleontology, one that took me by surprise but that shows nicely how some science works. There’s a particular type of ancient fossil called the “Ediacara fauna” found in rocks about 550 million years old. The term Ediacara is reference to a place in Australia where the fossils were located and well-described. In a complex tale that unfolded over decades both before and a bit after the Australian discovery, similar fossils were found around the world at...
I’ve been thinking about labels lately. Not the ones we should all be reading at the grocery store. Not the ones that tell us where our clothing is made. Not even the ones that warn us of danger, like a skull and crossbones. Those labels all are designed to help us make informed decisions. No, I’ve been thinking about the labels we apply to ourselves (and often to others.) Some of this labeling is obvious from our appearance. I think we would all agree that I’m fat. Oddly...
I’ve never really thought of myself as much of a gambler. In fact, I was stunned when I moved here and found out how many people just loved getting in the car and driving a couple of hours to throw their money away. Since that time, I’ve made that trip a few times myself, usually with that same result. There are some people in the world who can’t stay away, but I’m not one of them. Actually, it’s kind of a relief to know that there’s at least one thing I’m not addicted to....
American manufacturing is more dependent on the metals and minerals access than ever before. Yet, we are tied with Papau, New Guinea for the time it takes to permit a new mine. Seven to ten years is the average delay period. Waiting for technology metals will severely hamper our ability to innovate our advance weapons systems that are increasingly metals intensive. The U.S. has domestic resources for 18 of those 19 metals and minerals that we now exclusively import from abroad. However, a maze of government regulations has...
I think the most memorable single day of all my years as a student was the afternoon I got to examine Moon rocks in graduate school. Rocks here on Earth are exposed to water throughout their existence, and water acts to break down mineral grains on a tiny scale. If you look at thin slices of rock under a microscope – a normal activity for geologists like me – you see this tiny breakdown at work. To use a technical term, the mineral grains appear “cruddy” because they are bre...
