See the “A” on the map above? Make a solar array about that size — 35 miles by 35 miles — and you can power the entire United States. Period. Day or night, winter or summer, rain or shine. No emissions, no pollution, no risk of radiation, no dependence on oil, coal, gas, no damage to the environment.
Thanks to @philipj for the link.
Steve Inskeep’s series on Pakistan’s Grand Trunk Road was among the most insightful works I heard last year, and I think it went largely unnoticed.
I thought Governor Dewhurst’s speech was all wrong. It was too long, too partisan, too campaign oriented. He had one foot off the platform on the way to Washington.
Sometimes the things he said made no sense at all. Speaking of the early settlers, he said, “Those men and women who made their way to Texas, who settled these unforgiving plains, who sought neither a handout nor a stimulus check — they simply sought freedom.”
Oh, please. Was Stephen F. Austin oppressed in Missouri? Was Davy Crockett in debtors’ prison in Tennessee? Did Jim Bowie face constant harassment in Arkansas? Nobody came to Texas for freedom. They came for cheap land and the chance to make a better life for themselves. Texas is not about noble ideals. It’s about making money.
(Source: texasmonthly.com)
“For some reason he continued on to the West Indies, where he told a Spanish officer that in northern waters he had run into ‘a sea as hot as water in a boiler’ and had altered course for fear that the water ‘should melt the pitch of their vessel.’” — Excerpted from The Rock Observed, by Patrick O’flaherty. Source text from The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, by H.P Biggar