Snowy Range Road

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 01 Sep 2001 09:32:30 GMT
We drove 300 miles yesterday. Saw lots of Wyoming's beautiful country. Through Laramie featuring a stop at the West Laramie Fly Store (good gun and fishing gear selection), on to Centennial, over the Snowy Range to a picnic lunch at the Silver Lake Campground, a driving tour of Saratoga and Encampment, a short dip into Colorado, then back over the Snowy Range into Woods Landing where we stopped to look at the South Fork of the Big Laramie river where my Dad often took us fishing as kids, back through Laramie including a look at our 1957-1958 house, then home to Cheyenne on Happy Jack Road. Lots of good memories in that country.

I dropped into a mailbox my letter to Asa Hutchinson.

I took some pictures of the L.C.Smith shotgun I talked about yesterday. Click on the image below to go to a page with other images.

I learned what a "gauge" is. The gauge of a shotgun is the number of lead balls of the barrel bore size that weigh a total of one pound. According to this page, the density of lead is 710 pounds/cubic foot (which is very close to this page's number of 11.344 grams/cubic centimeter). Using this and the formula for the volume of a sphere (4/3 pi r3), comes up with the following formula for the diameter (d) of the bore as a function of gauge (g):
d = (4.648224 / g)1/3
As an Excel formula, if the gauge is in cell A2, then the diameter in inches can be calculated by:
=POWER(4.648224/A2, 1/3)
Which gives the following table:
Gauge   Diameter in Inches 
10 0.775
12 0.729
16 0.662
20 0.615
28 0.550

Vin Suprynowicz - She could show you a high time - part of The Libertarian series. Shines some light on the $100,000 a year that University of Las Vegas president Carol Harter spends wining and dining potential donors.

Vin Suprynowicz - They can never meet the 'demand' for free sandwiches - part of The Libertarian series. Vin gives us a little economics lesson. Why do government schools have a "teacher shortage". Because they're giving away education for free.

No one seems to know what it really costs to run a child through 12 years of government day care, any more, what with the expenditures scattered around in so many budgets.

Let's conservatively call it $6,000. Want to eliminate the "teacher shortage" overnight? Just start billing the parents that $6,000. (Heck, make it $6,700, admitting 10 percent of each class on full scholarships for poor kids who can do best on competitive entrance exams.)

Competing private schools charging less for more would spring up like mushrooms, rescuing an entire generation from the clutches of the current "reproductive organs of the welfare state."

With a new emphasis on "getting what you pay for," they'd probably pay higher salaries for the best teachers, driving up average teacher pay while attracting many new recruits from among folks who actually majored in something other than "Education" -- while two thirds of the unemployables currently holding down such jobs could be fitted for new uniforms at Wendy's. (Remember, de Tocqueville found this "the most literate nation on earth" in the 1830s -- 20 years before Horace Mann & Co. opened the first tax-funded "public school" on the Prussian model, in Massachusetts.)

Vin Suprynowicz - 'Pay up and don't ask' - part of The Libertarian series. Why it's a really good idea to publically investigate police misbehavior. Dave Acosta, a former Las Vegas cop, shot Celso Paz-Lopez in the buttocks and hip with his MP-5. From the story, it sounds to me that the shooting may have been justified, though that's apparently not what the review board said, in private. Of course no cop is ever justified in carrying an MP-5 around. That's a military weapon, and the military is not allowed to operate within U.S. borders except to repel a foreign invasion. Now the city council is considering a $500,000 settlement with Mr. Paz-Lopez.

This is dangerous. Out there on the streets, the police are outmanned. They depend on the continued support of a public that has to know there will be an accounting, should the wrong person get shot. This kind of ongoing secrecy can only continue to erode that vital base of public support.

The Small Government Act is Carla Howell's latest idea. It's a citizen referendum to end the Massachusetts income tax. Good idea, Ms. Howell!

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