Anything to keep from having to go outdoors and feel the ground. Colorado State University is trumpeting its development of a “Smart Valve”–complete with pistons, metering chambers, valves, hydraulic fluid, and a porous ceramic wick–which can sense the amount of moisture in the soil and turn off automatic sprinkler systems when it’s raining.
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“No one is ‘endangered’ immediately …when the kids borrow the batteries from the smoke detectors–until it happens in conjunction with a fire,” writes David Kraft of the Evanston-based Nuclear Energy Information Service, putting a corrective spin on Com Ed’s cheery PR responses (“the public was not endangered”) to its blunderful management of its nuclear reactors. When four sensors that monitor the Zion plant’s emergency core cooling system were accidentally turned off for a few days in March, “the only reason the ‘public was not endangered’… was because this serious error did not occur in conjunction with an accident at Zion that the sensors were designed to detect. That this incident occurred at a time when both reactors were in shutdown mode rather than at full operating power was a matter of dumb luck, not managerial prescience or intentional planning.”
And if that’s not enough to shame a legislator, try this, from the same ACLU press release: “Empirical evidence strongly suggests that women do not choose to have children because of the small increase in welfare benefits. A 1992 report by Child Trends Inc. found that the five states with the highest birthrates among 18- and 19-year-old women–Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi, Nevada and New Mexico–all have AFDC benefits below the national median; the four states with the lowest birthrates among 18- and 19-year-old women–Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Vermont–all have AFDC benefits above the national median. If living far below the poverty line does not, in itself, reduce childbearing, there is no reason to expect that the denial of a very small incremental increase will have that effect.”
