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I am not making this up.

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Hey, don’t mess with the goat.

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Using DNA to trace the evolutionary split between head and body lice, researchers conclude that body lice first came on the scene approximately 190,000 years ago. And that shift, the scientists propose, followed soon after people first began wearing clothing.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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The Sunni militia was not at home when the killings happened. The armed men cut the throats of his three young sons and shot his wife and a daughter in the head, police said.

At least the Mafia leaves your family alone.

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We report, you decide.

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Well, in Britain you can do that.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A more correct headline would be ’10 Sets of Bureaucrats Demand Online Privacy’.

Just another case of ‘journalists’ carrying the water for those who see no distinction between a nation and that nation’s government.

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Ronald Wayne’s 10% share in Apple would be worth £13.6bn

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

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If you had a trust fund, you could be an innovator too.

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I am not making this up.

Paul Graham explains.

I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can’t afford a front yard full of old cars.

My name is Tim, and I have too much Stuff.

And unless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.

I’ve got some of those.

The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don’t use much because it’s too good. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For example, the “good china” so many households have, and whose defining quality is not so much that it’s fun to use, but that one must be especially careful not to break it.

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And a bad one.

Watch it.

This is Jeff’s ‘lecture’ at Tedx NYED. Jeff is the first person I’ve ever encountered who sees, as I do, modern schools as ‘factory schools’, and has a lot of exciting ideas about how to fix that. His most exciting idea is a modern school designed like Oxford University: Get the best lectures in a subject from online repositories like MIT (and have a quasi-market system to determine which is best), and then provide students with tutors to guide their intellectual journey. We have a tremendous number of tools available for people to find stuff out and practice useful skills, with more being developed every day. Let’s get to work.

An Informative Chart.

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“Cancer starts when the DNA code within the cell’s nucleus becomes corrupted,” he says. “It seems frankincense has a re-set function. It can tell the cell what the right DNA code should be.

“Frankincense separates the ‘brain’ of the cancerous cell – the nucleus – from the ‘body’ – the cytoplasm, and closes down the nucleus to stop it reproducing corrupted DNA codes.”

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How else are we going to keep Medicare solvent?

Lileks.

But some of the criteria describe “waste” as something you might call “living.” Look at the categories. No. 1: Minimal Impact Behavior. Like not hitting people or running my car into a tree? I did my part. No, it’s “reusing wrapping paper.” So a city gets dinged because parents let kids rip open presents instead of insisting they open them with an Exacto knife so Mommy can iron out the creases and use the paper next year, and you get Care Bear paper for your high school graduation.

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As if they weren’t ‘pouring into the U.S.’ anyway.

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Not the sort of thing you usualy find in Slate.

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Iran has demanded America’s expulsion from the international nuclear system.

And how do they propose to do that, exactly?

Let’s nuke Qom, and see how they cope.

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A perhaps not unbiased perspective.

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The reality is that President Obama, like President Bush before him, has rather dramatically raised government spending and therefore has raised your taxes. To say otherwise is like saying you got your new swimming pool for free because you put it on your credit card.

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The “convenience of the employer” rule – the state tax doctrine that subjects interstate telecommuters to the risk of double taxation. Specifically, a state with a “convenience of the employer” rule can tax nonresidents who telecommute part-time to an employer within that state on the wages they earn at home, even though their home states can tax the same income.

For many people, the threat of owing taxes to two states can put a long-distance job out of reach. By making telework unaffordable for workers, the tax penalty also thwarts businesses and government agencies trying to tap the cost-saving and other economic benefits telework offers.

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An Informative Map.

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The Oregon Supreme Court ruled that a state worker who used pot to relieve pain and nausea could be fired for drug use even though he had had a state-issued medical marijuana card.

This strikes me as a very odd decision. The employee wouldn’t be fired for using a prescription drug, properly prescribed, for a medical condition, even though using it without a prescription would be illegal.  He effectively had permission from his employer, the state, to use marijuana for a medical condition. I can see where he would be liable to arrest under Federal drug laws, but not how he can be liable to termination.

An informative cartoon.

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LaHood says the government is going to give bicycling _ and walking, too _ the same importance as automobiles in transportation planning and the selection of projects for federal money. The former Republican congressman quietly announced the “sea change” in transportation policy last month.

Well, what else could one expect of a RINO that would accept a position in the Obamateur’s administration? Yet another fellow-traveller on the lefty magical mystery tour attempt to turn the clock back before the Industrial Revolution. How did these crapweasels get the name ‘progressive’, anyway? Edmund Burke wasn’t even this reactionary.

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An especially surreal episode comes from Binghamton, New York. The Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton is one of those congregations that tired of its denomination slouching toward heterodoxy and decided to leave for purer pastures. A legal dispute over the property resulted in a New York court ordering the congregation to hand the church property over to the denomination. Trouble is, the denomination no longer had need of the space, what with the congregation leaving and all.

This basic scenario has been repeated all across the fruited plains over the last several years. But in this case, the Episcopal Church did it one or two better. After the court decision, the congregation offered the denomination $150,000 for the building (its assessed value was $386,400). But a Muslim imam also offered to buy it. Now you might be anticipating that the denominational officials had a moral dilemma, since the imam made a more competitive offer.

But, alas, no such dilemma ensued. Rather than sell the church building to the departing Anglican congregation, the denominational authorities managed to act with both spite and economic irrationality. They sold the church building to the imam—for $50,000. It’s now called the Islamic Awareness Center.

With ‘Christians’ like these, who needs Muslims?

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“I was five thousand miles away, drunk and happily unaware at a friend’s birthday party in Berlin, when I learned that the first white farmer had been murdered.” So begins the book The Last Resort, by Douglas Rogers. Rogers grew up in Zimbabwe on a chicken farm and vineyard; his parents presently own a small resort called Drifters, hence the title. “Own” is used here very loosely, since the concept of ownership in President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is only tangentially related to the concept of ownership as we know it. The book chronicles the life of Rogers’s parents since that first farmer died in the Zimbabwe land invasions that began in 2000.

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No one really knows why, but for an open wound, simply applying suction dramatically speeds healing times. (The theory is that the negative pressure draws bacteria out, and encourages circulation.) But for almost everyone, that treatment is out of reach–simply because the systems are expensive–rentals cost at least $100 a day and need to be recharged every six hours.

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People don’t flinch at using anything else made in a factory; yet the term ‘factory food’ is seen as, and is meant to be, derogatory. Why is that?

Perhaps it’s because things made in factories are far less expensive that hand-made stuff, and the New York Times doesn’t like poor people who use factory-produced stuff because they have to make their limited supply of money go a long way. Perhaps it’s because the New York Times would rather see them beg in the streets while the sort of people who read the New York Times throw them a quarter or two. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times loves Whole Foods and hates Walmart.

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I’m not one to get uptight about extramarital sex. But I am not president of a country where one in five adults is infected with a still-fatal sexually transmitted virus. Mr. Zuma has rubbed South Africa’s nose in the fact that he racks up as many sex partners as he can, and he doesn’t use condoms.

How is that a good thing? Well, it allows us to say the unsayable: countries get the HIV epidemics they deserve.

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I’m pretty sure Rehnquist and O’Connor went to Stanford.

President Obama, Harvard Law, class of ‘91, “wants somebody who has a sense of what real life is like in America,” said Senator Patrick Leahy last week. Real life, hmm? Name somebody outside of the Axis of Ivy, someone who didn’t learn to chant, “That’s all right, that’s O.K., you’re gonna work for us someday,” while losing to a state school in hockey.

Yeah, we really do have to get rid of all that Harvard trash.

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The takeaway: For every doctor, there are five people performing health care administrative support.

There are two basic reasons for the absurdly large administrative employment in health care. First, our health care system — with its actuarially focused multiple health insurers, paper-based record keeping and multiple billing systems — is bound to create a lot of administrative work. Second, the way the payment system is structured, there is little incentive to make the system more efficient.

And how much of that administrative burden is because of government paperwork requirements? Can you spell M E D I C A R E? Can you spell M E D I C A I D? Can you spell T A X D E D U C T I B I L I T Y? Of course you can.

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In Diana Paxson’s back yard … oh, wait….

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That monkey must be heavily armed.

Perhaps it’s Muslim. That would do it, too.

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In the suit, job applicants claimed the Census Bureau was unlawfully screening out minorities by requiring all applicants to provide court documents related to an arrest, whether or not it resulted in a conviction.

Jeez, don’t they know how racist that is?

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The Davey family’s £815-a-week state handouts pay for a four-bedroom home, top-of-the-range mod cons and two vehicles including a Mercedes people carrier.

Father-of-seven Peter gave up work because he could make more living on benefits.

Yet he and his wife Claire are still not happy with their lot.

With an eighth child on the way, they are demanding a bigger house, courtesy of the taxpayer.

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Ross Langmead, 18, was described by friends as “very bright” – and planned to go to medical school later this year to study to become a doctor.

Ever notice how kids who do away with themselves are always talented and well-liked, if not actual over-achievers, with a bright future ahead of them, etc., etc.?

Ever wonder why we never read stories about suicide by antisocial losers from the left side of the bell curve without whom society is really much better off?

Don’t mean to come across as cold-hearted or anything, but I suspect that, from an evolutionary point of view, oversensitivity to teen angst tends to be a self-correcting problem.

A useful decision tree.

Don’t say that we never have useful stuff here.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Steve Sailer does a lot of interesting stuff.

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Scientists in Australia have embarked on a unique attempt to save the quoll, an endangered bushy tailed marsupial, by dropping toads from the sky.

Gotta love Australians.

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The iPad by itself would be just another physical product living in a nearly linear world. Doubling revenue would require Apple to double the number manufactured; and that would mean roughly doubling labor costs etc. It could be profitable, and there are advantages to building at scale, but not in the greater-than-linear leveraged manner that software or content can deliver. As Apple well knows, a business built on that model builds enterprise value linearly with unit sales. But… the iPad as a distribution channel for fungible goods reasserts the non-linear leverage that Microsoft enjoyed back in the day.

One interesting twist is how the iPad combines network effects and constrained distribution. The bright shiny object design of the iPad leads to network effects at the app store which in turn drives more consumers back to the device itself. Then to the degree that those two forces hold consumers in thrall of the device, Apple can use the device as the point of sale for content worth more than the device itself. The leverage is linked – the first leads to market presence, and then the market presence makes for stronger monetization opportunities in the device-hosted channel.