Speaking against business park

Monday’s special council meeting, the one about the noxious business park that the county wants to push on us, was a disappointment; for several reasons:
1. The surprise announcement by Mayor Wait that he was limiting speakers from the audience to 60 seconds and then only if they had a question.
2. Despite the prodigious work that Councilman Mike Combest has put into this, both he and councilwoman Michelle Barson, the other councilor assigned as liaison to the county, continue to pitch that all the negatives will disappear by virtue of special zoning….
3….even after both the legal counsel and the county’s representatives made clear that such zoning requires a quasi-legal procedure which is unlikely to happen soon and cannot be depended on to happen at all.
4. The closed eye to the elephant in the room: that even if such zoning were in place, the traffic count on Lewisville-Clemmons Road is projected to jump by thousands of vehicle-trips each day.
The county evidently has presented us with a Hobson’s choice: participate or not. We certainly should choose not to be left out. Applause filled the room when Councilman Wrights declared that this development flies in the face of everything that Clemmons is about. Perhaps all the councilors and Mayor Wait will listen to their constituents and participate as a voice for us that speaks to power.

— Al Harbury,
Clemmons

Let there be light

I read with interest a magazine article that tried to answer the question, “Since God didn’t create the sun until day four, that means the first three days had no sun.” The Bible says God separated the light from the darkness on the first day. I have spent my entire life studying electronics and geology. The answer to that question is a simple one for me. He and the Bible are correct in that there was no sun for the first three days.

You do not need a sun to have light. All you need are some electrons flying around hitting fluorescent elements and they will produce light. This is observable today when you see a fluorescent lamp glow. A cathode is heated. It gives off electrons which collide with the coating (it’s poisonous) on the inside of the fluorescent tube. The bombardment by the electrons provides light which uses the phosphor to emit light.

Other examples are an oscilloscope where electrons emitted from a cathode strike the coating on the inside of an oscilloscope and give off light. An example of a coating is zinc beryllium silicate. Different compounds give different colors. Another example is your TV set. There electrons from a heated cathode strike the coated screen and give off light. See — no sun is needed to have light. That is fact — not a theory.

— Gordon Mellish
Clemmons