Read it.

After the unprecedented damage to New York City’s transit system brought on by Hurricane Sandy, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has been looking into near-term solutions that could shield subway tunnels from flood waters come next storm season. It tested one of those safeguards yesterday for the first time by inflating a 30-foot plug (designed by the US Department of Homeland Security) that could effectively seal off New York’s subways in the event of a natural disaster. The test run took place at the South Ferry station in Manhattan — one of eight stations consumed by flooding in Sandy’s aftermath.

Soon to be a major motion picture.

Rockin’ Robin

Read it.

And the Terms of Service are a bitch.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

The Department of Defense announced Thursday that it had successfully conducted a flight test of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD), intercepting a separating ballistic missile target over the Pacific Ocean.

Read it.

 The Woolworth Building’s neo-Gothic tower, one of New York City’s most recognizable landmarks, is about to be turned into luxury condominiums, a transformation that would be second only to placing penthouses atop the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building.

Read it.

New Hampshire may soon shake off the shackles of Taxachussettsism.

In 2001 a Yale doctoral student named Jason Sorens published an essay in the small webzine The Libertarian Enterprise, lamenting the failure of libertarian efforts at the ballot box. “Nothing’s working,” he wrote, because libertarians are scattered. The only way to have a real impact, he argued, would be to concentrate thousands of libertarian activists in a state with a small population and an easily accessible government. Sorens settled on an ideal target of 20,000 people, an imaginary cluster of libertarians he christened the Free State Project.

Twelve years later, against all odds, Sorens’ peculiar dream is coming true. At press time, nearly 14,000 liberty lovers had pledged to move to New Hampshire once the Free State Project reaches its goal of 20,000 signatories. More than 1,100 of them, known as “pre-staters,” have already moved to Manchester, Concord, Nashua, and even the state’s rural northern region to prepare the ground for the coming influx of libertarians. These activists are penetrating New Hampshire’s political and judicial establishment, joining community organizations, befriending (and antagonizing) the locals, and generally making themselves at home in New England.

Read it.

I hate going to the dentist. For all the typical reasons–who likes people wielding sharp tools on their gums?–but for another one too: I’m bothered by getting X-rays. Maybe I’m unduly paranoid about such things, but when a technician covers me with a lead sheet, points a giant machine at my head, and runs for cover, I get nervous. But what if X-ray machines didn’t need to be so bulky? What if, indeed, you made such a small machine that it could fit inside the mouth and angle outward, thereby reducing your body’s exposure?

My dentist uses what is, I think, essentially an ultrasound probe to look inside suspicious areas of my teeth.

Steve Sailer suffers form an embarrassment of riches.

Okay, which of these two white women, the brunet or the blonde, is the American Indian?

…

That raises the metaphysical question: Can a blonde lesbian who claims to be an American Indian be racist against blacks? I look forward to the Washington Post’s black magazine The Root debating this burning topic for several months.

Read it.

Slip Sliding Away

You know, the nearer you get to Namron the more you’re slip sliding away….

Read it. And watch the video.

Seventy-year-old Michael Salame has eight heart stents, nerve damage and apparently quite a right hook, as an alleged home invader found out.

Read it.

As Detroit’s call-it-anything-but-bankruptcy budget crisis drags on and the city government is unable to provide the most basic of services, residents have discovered an alternative to lawless anarchy: cooperative anarchy! A number of experiments in spontaneous order are popping up in Motor City, and both the rich and the not-so-rich are pitching in.

You don’t need an expensive and corrupt government bureaucracy to get things done.

Of course, this is all a drop in the bucket for the city’s problems, but even that much self-management and tiny amount of voluntaryism has Katherine McFate of the Center for Effective Government (read their anti-austerity argument here) worried:

“The idea that we are now outfitting first responders through charitable contributions should be very concerning,” she said. “There are certain functions that you want government to perform that should not be at the whim of individuals or charities.”

Clue: All services are provided at the whim of individuals; the question is whether those individuals get a government paycheck.

Well, let’s see what functions the government of Detroit is engaging in that is so much better than the “whims” of individuals and charities, shall we?

Hint: Not even close.

Read it.

We don’t quite have the technology yet, but they’re working on it.

Read it. And watch the video.

We have the technology.

Two tweets:

Read it.

Homeschoolers typically score higher on the ACT than their public school counterparts and have higher grade point averages (GPA) than other students once they are in college. Nevertheless, homeschoolers are schooled by their parents at a cost around $500-$600 per year. In public schools, the cost per student averages $10,000 per year.

Recruiters from colleges are noticing the trend, since the majority of homeschoolers graduate and obtain a four-year bachelor’s degree at a much higher rate than public school and some private school competitors. Colleges such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Duke have begun recruiting homeschooled students.

Another knock on homeschoolers is that they miss the socializing aspect of student life. According to a
National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) survey, homeschoolers have “healthy social, psychological, and emotional development, and success into adulthood.” Homeschoolers typically have core groups of students and do not operate completely alone, contrary to popular perception.

Read it.

You know you’re in hipster Brooklyn when someone who looks like a 19th-century farmer tells you that his line of work is “affinity marketing.”

…

So I decided to embed myself among the rooftop gardeners and the sustainability consultants and the chickeneers. I wanted to see what the demographic behind nanobatched chervil and the continually cited show “Girls” could teach me about life and craft cocktails. I wanted to see what sullen 25-year-old men had to tell me beyond “Leave me alone during this awkward period of beard growth.”

Only in New York. (And they laugh at ‘flyover country’….)

Joel Kotkin lays out some inconvenient truth.

A funny thing happened on the way to the long-trumpeted triumph of the city: the suburbs not only survived but have begun to regain their allure as Americans have continued aspiring to single-family homes.

People want their own space, the more the better. That’s why, when people get rich, they buy bigger homes rather than smaller ones. You have to be an intellectual to ignore evidence like that.

Read the actual Brookings report that led to the “Suburbs Lose” headline: it shows that in 91 of America’s 100 biggest metro areas, the share of jobs located within three miles of downtown declined over the 2000s. Only Washington, D.C., saw significant growth.

Your tax dollars at work, that.

Suburbs have never been popular with the chattering classes, whose members tend to cluster in a handful of denser, urban communities—and who tend to assume that place shapes behavior, so that if others are pushed to live in these communities they will also behave in a more enlightened fashion, like the chatterers. This is a fallacy with a long pedigree in planning circles, going back to the housing projects of the 1940s, which were built in no small part on the evidently absurd, and eventually discredited, assumption that if the poor had the same sort of housing stock as the rich, they would behave in the same ways.

The reason we lived close together was because in the Old Days it took time to get information from Point A to Point B, and those who got their information before others tended to have an advantage. Well, information travels a lot more quickly now, as do other things, and so the rationale for living cheek-by-jowl went away — and people responded appropriately.

The new low-cost suburbia, wrote Robert Bruegmann in his compact history of sprawl, “provided the surest way to obtain some of the privacy, mobility and choice that once were available only to the wealthiest and most powerful members of society.”

One of the reasons that the Crust like living in urban cores is that they still have plenty of space because they can afford it, and having plenty of proles around makes the Servant Problem less acute.

Read it.

Remember when Defense Distributed’s Cody Wilson promised to unveil an entirely 3D-printed handgun made of ABS plastic with the firing pin its only metal part? Well, he’s apparently done it. Forbes’s Andy Greenberg was given a sneak peek of the result, and it looks and appears to be quite an achievement. If all goes well, the plans will be unveiled at Defcad.org next week.

Read it.

My favorite is National Lost Sock Memorial Day.

Read it.

Essential knowledge for all true reactionaries.

Read it.

When you shoot a gun in BioShock or Far Cry, you don’t have to think much about how that gun works — you press a button to fire, a button to reload, and that’s about it. Receiver, on the other hand, is a first person shooter that’s almost entirely about mastering your weapon. And it all started with The X-Files. When David Rosen from developer Wolfire Games picked up a replica SIG Sauer P226 as part of a Fox Mulder halloween costume, he says he “had a lot of fun just playing around with the slide and ejecting and inserting the magazine. It seemed crazy that there were so many games about guns, but none that let you actually play around with them and see how they work.”

Receiver was originally developed over the course of nine days as part of the “7 Day FPS Challenge,” and just this week was released on Steam. In it, you play as a sort of disembodied handgun, infiltrating a virtually empty building in search of 11 different cassette tapes. The only things stopping you are are the drones and automated turrets littered through the hallways, as well as your ability to handle a gun. What makes this so challenging is just how many actions are required. If you’re using a revolver, for instance, you’ll need to dump out all of your shells in order to reload, and then put in each new bullet individually. Each of these actions requires a different combination of button presses, and you’ll need to memorize these sequences to be successful. (This concept could also be ideal for the next generation of Microsoft’s Kinect sensor.)

Read it.

The which I encourage you to buy, as I have. And also I urge you to SUPPORT JOHN DERBYSHIRE (look on the sidebar, to the right, at the top, for the link).

Read it.

Hannah Warren has been unable to breathe, eat, drink or swallow on her own since she was born in South Korea in 2010. Until the operation at a central Illinois hospital, she had spent her entire life in a hospital in Seoul. Doctors there told her parents there was no hope and they expected her to die.

Read it.

Donald Kagan, Yale’s great classicist gives his final lecture, fighting as ever for Western civilization.

I had the privilege of taking Professor Kagan’s intro Classical Civ course as an undergraduate. He was an amazing guy. (Of course, his finest hour was as Big Julie in the Timothy Dwight College production of Guys & Dolls.)

Closer to the Heart

Watch it.

Lady Thatcher’s granddaughter understands the dialectic.

Watch it.

Read it.

Read it.

Researchers at the University of Wyoming have discovered a new lithium reserve that could radically alter where the US sources a key component of the li-ion batteries used in consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and other technology. Currently the United States imports a vast majority of its lithium, but the newly-unearthed reserve — located at Rock Springs, Wyoming — could transform the US from “a significant lithium importer to an independent lithium producer” according to experts at the university’s Carbon Management Institute.

Tell the apparatchiks in China they can suck on it.

Read it.

Some researchers from Vanderbilt have developed a new app and hardware module that will help you find the direction of gunfire. The research team used the sonic signatures associated with firing to pinpoint its location, and put this on an Android smartphone map.

Read it.

If you think 3D printers have given would-be gun controllers the vapors already, just wait until you hear the latest from Cody Wilson, the head honcho of Defense Distributed. He told reporters at the Inside 3D Printing Conference in New York City that the group’s latest project — a gun made entirely with 3D-printed parts (except for a metal firing pin) — is just weeks away from success. If Wilson and company can deliver on the promise, it would be an important step beyond their already impressive accomplishments in producing functioning AR-15 lower receivers and “high-capacity” magazines for AR-15s and AK-style rifles. It would also be an unmistakable message to government officials that gun control laws are becoming ever-more unenforceable.

Read it.

Stanford researchers are developing rooftop panels that cool buildings by sending heat back into space, a technique that could be more efficient than running an air conditioner from solar panels.

Electrical engineering professor Shanhui Fan has designed a device which uses materials that allow him to manipulate how heat and light affect building temperature. He envisions flat rooftop panels which could greatly cut down on daytime cooling energy or be used to cool homes that don’t have access to grid power and air conditioning.

I’m a Believer

Read it.

Sometimes the system works.

Read it.

Scientists have implanted a laboratory-grown kidney into a rat for the first time, a medical milestone that they hope will soon lead to similar solutions for human beings needing full organ transplants. “It’s the first one ever that’s been implanted into an animal,” said Harald Ott, MD and PhD at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Regenerative Medicine and the lead researcher behind the project, to The Verge.

Ever notice how rats get all the good stuff?

Read it.

A Kickstarter project to turn back the clock.

The Vermont Sail Freight Project is a contemporary re-invention of a historic regional foodway, and is sponsored by the Willowell Foundation of Monkton, Vermont.  In 2013, the Sail Freight team, led by farmer Erik Andrus and Willowell staff, will build a simple low-cost sailing barge 39 feet in length, 10′ in beam (width) and with 12 tons of cargo capacity with which to trade Vermont-produced foods in New York City and the Lower Hudson.

All this with nary a Teamster in sight. What’s not to like?

Anytime

Read it.

Two men suspected of attempting to invade a home in North Carolina Friday died after a gunfight with the homeowner.

Fayetteville Police tell WTVD both robbery suspects fled the home after the exchange of gunfire. One of the suspects, 25-year-old Dominik Council, was found dead on the side of the road nearly two hours after the incident.

I got yer gun-free zone … right here.

Read it.

Yeah, it’s called ‘freedom’, and it’s a feature, not a bug, you communist.

 While each of these substances are legal to use in the US, whether or not they are safe for long-term consumption — by themselves or in combination — is a different story altogether. Many have been deemed too harmful to use in other countries.

Yeah, we really trust foreigners to know more about what’s healthy and what isn’t than we do. That’s why they all come over here for treatment when they get sick.

Read it.

Before Walker’s reforms, it didn’t matter if, say, a city hall clerk or a public school teacher wanted to support a union or not. They had to pay if they wanted to keep their jobs. The money was taken directly out of their paychecks just as if it were a tax.

Big Labor feared — and conservative groups hoped — that without this legal requirement a lot of union members would simply drop out. That assumption has turned out to be correct.

Read it.

The US Navy has been pursuing solid-state laser weapons capable of setting other vessels on fire for years, but now one is almost ready to actually be put out to sea. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) today announced that it is aiming to “field and test a solid-state laser prototype” in early 2014 aboard the USS Ponce. The Ponce is a transport vessel from the 1970s that was recently upgraded into a hi-tech floating base and is stationed in the Persian Gulf, in range of Iranian attack boats.

Bob pays tribute to a black man who refused to define himself as a victim.

Booker T. Washington was born on this day in 1856, the illegitimate son of a black slave and a white plantation owner. Following emancipation, he worked his way through school, eventually becoming a teacher. In 1881, at the age of 25, he helped to found the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, originally a college for training black teachers.

Washington devoted his life to improving the lives of black Americans through education and vocational training, with a strong emphasis on teaching the life skills they would need to gain social acceptance, overcome white racism, and lead productive lives. He was often criticized by other black civil rights leaders of his time who found his style too understated and insufficiently confrontational. Washington’s formula for success for black Americans — education, thrift, and hard work — is what all too many black kids nowadays dismiss as “acting white.”

May his memory be eternal.

Read it.

So what are the oldest known “records” in this sense—that is, the oldest known gramophone recordings, as opposed to the oldest sound recordings in general?  The first commercially available gramophone discs were manufactured and released in Europe in the summer of 1890, and numerous examples are available for listening (here, for example).  In addition to these, a few experimental gramophone discs from 1887 and 1888 survive at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, but attempts to play these haven’t been very successful, and no intelligible or identifiable content has been recovered from them to date.  Finally, some other very old gramophone recordings have come down to us only in the form of prints made on paper,like the one on the fourth floor of Wells Library.  This isn’t a unique situation.  Many important early motion pictures that didn’t survive in the form of actual films were nevertheless preserved as paper prints deposited for copyright registration purposes with the Library of Congress and later retransferred to film for projection and preservation.  Similarly, I’ve found that paper prints of “lost” gramophone recordings can be digitally converted back into playable, audible form.

You Can Call Me Al

Read it.

It’s like happy hour with added fire power: “Open Carry Wednesday” at the Cajun Experience in Leesburg, Va., means patrons who pack heat get a 10 percent discount on their bills.

Watch ‘progressive’ heads explode.

“Right now I feel like I’m in safest place in Leesburg, Virginia,” said Sterling resident Dana Quirk.

My, I wonder why.

“You’re not going to hunt for your dinner,” said Leesburg resident Anne Meyers. “So I don’t know why you’d need a gun in a restaurant.”

Ask the people who died at Luby’s in Killeen, Texas, on October 16th, 1991, if you can raise their ghosts.

Read it.

Creating housing from old shipping containers is generally the stuff of high-end design magazines and the territory of the urban and hip.

But one San Antonio developer is taking shipping containers to the Eagle Ford Shale region, with a project that brings modern design to the oil patch.

David Monnich has started construction in Encinal, between Laredo and Cotulla off of Interstate 35, on what will eventually be a 70-unit apartment complex made from recycled shipping containers.

The apartments are mostly two-bedroom units with 840 square feet of space and patios, created by putting together two shipping containers plus an additional space that holds the plumbing, bathrooms and kitchens. The first seven units are in place now and getting interior finishes, but the first 35 should be in place by the end of the summer.

Read it.

A bullet loses six feet of height while flying across 1,000 yards, and a hunter firing such a shot must compensate by altering the weapon’s aim. At that distance, fine adjustments would be difficult to estimate — but TrackingPoint has developed a Linux-powered hunting rifle that’s capable of doing all of the calculations for the hunter. Ars Technica has an in-depth report on what it’s like to look through the $17,500 rifle’s scope when the target locks and the viewfinder tracks upward to locate the precise point where the weapon should be aimed. Building distance compensation into the hunter’s view is only part of what the embedded ARM computer is capable of: it can also follow targets, determine the precise moment when to fire, and stream video from the viewfinder to a paired iPad app.

We have the technology.

Read it.

“Well to have a printable gun – it’s my intention to have that done by the end of this month and we’re at the end of March now so it’s my intention to have it done by April,” he said.