Could the North Carolina legislature microwave a burrito so hot that they themselves could not eat it? →
Category Archives: ShortLinks
Answering legal questions with Google.
Nine weeks after launching Virginia Decoded, I’ve got some great traffic data to see how people are getting to the site. My hypothesis has been borne out: it’s mostly people trying to figure out legal problems via Google. →
Romney’s classmates recall his assault of a gay student.
A Washington Post reporter interviewed five prep-school classmates of Mitt Romney’s, all of whom independently recalled that, in Mitt Romney’s senior year, he attacked a gay classmate. They say Romney led a small posse to the kid’s dorm room, where he was held down while Romney forcibly cut the crying boy’s shaggy, bleached blond hair. …
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Greene County Republicans call for armed overthrow of the government.
In the March issue of their newsletter, a “Whitehouse [sic] Watchdog” column signed by newsletter editor Ponch McPhee concludes by declaring that “we shall not have any coarse [sic] but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November.” (It’s on page 7 of the PDF.) “Treason” is the word that …
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Why the USPS is running out of money.
I thought that the USPS was in financial trouble because they’d over-promised pensions. Nope. It turns out that a law passed by Congress in 2006 requires the USPS to save up enough money to pay 100% of their pension obligations for the next 75 years by 2016. That’s unheard of. So why require that? To …
Don’t miss the Tribune’s exposé of the flame retardant industry.
The Chicago Tribune is running a brilliant investigative series on how flame retardants came to be used in so many of the products that we buy. It turns out that a) they don’t actually stop fires even a little bit b) they cause serious health problems and c) tobacco companies created a fake public interest …
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Everything is turning into iron.
Iron-56, the most common isotope of iron, is what all material in the universe “wants” to be. That is, the nuclei of matter is all gradually exhausting its energy, and iron-56 is the form of matter with the lowest energy per nucleon. Eventually, stars will turn into iron—huge balls of iron. Everything will be iron. …
How to decode law histories.
After every law in the Code of Virginia is a little section called “history.” If you’ve seen it, you’ve almost certainly ignored it, because it looks like nonsense. In fact, it’s just a poorly encoded collection of really valuable data about that law. Here’s a translation guide. (From my State Decoded blog.) →
U.S. Route 58
At 508 miles, Route 58 is the longest numbered road in Virginia. It stretches from Cumberland Gap to Virginia Beach, passing through Martinsville, Danville, Emporia, and Franklin along the way. When living in the New River Valley, I looked at taking it as a shortcut to the Outer Banks. That would have been a very …
A big clue has been found in the mystery of the Lost Colony.
You’ll remember the story of the Lost Colony—Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement in the late 1500s that just disappeared, leaving only the word “Croatoan” carved into the fort’s wall. (They’d arranged the signal of a Maltese cross to be carved into a tree to mean they’d been forcibly removed, and no such carving was found.) But …
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