Read it.

They could do worse. Hell, we could do worse — there’s nothing wrong with dysfunctional American cities that a million extra ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix. Turn Detroit or Los Angeles into Singapore? I’m so there….

Megan McArdle looks at looks at our system where the cream is supposed to rise to the top, and discovers that there isn’t a lot of cream there to rise.

I don’t care about income inequality.  I care about the absolute condition of the poor–whether they are hungry, cold, and sick.  But I do not care about the gap between their incomes, and those of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.  Nor the ratio of Gates and Buffett’s incomes to mine.  And I’m not sure why anyone should.  Other than pure envy, it’s hard to see how I could somehow be made worse off if Bill Gates’ income suddenly doubled, but everything else remained the same.

Well, it is envy — envy deliberately stoked by ‘progressives’ because that is how they do their ‘community organizing’ and get the mob behind them to effect change — and the kind of change doesn’t matter, so long as it’s change, because ‘progressives’ believe that progress is inevitable, and therefore any change is good change because it will inevitably lead to progress. Unless things are changing, ‘progressives’ are unhappy.

Arguably, this is just what they’ve done.  Rocked by the shattering forces of the Depression and World War II (and flush with the prosperity of the postwar years), the old moneyed elites of the Northeast and Midwest did something really remarkable: they voluntarily abdicated their position.  Ivy League colleges threw open their doors to the bourgeois masses, and cut back on the Saint Grottlesex crowd.  The old WASP bastions democratized or were swept away by nimbler competitors who didn’t scruple to sacrifice profits because it might look bad to the boys in the club.  First Jews, Irish, and Italians, and then later blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, burst through doors that had once been reserved for the sort of people who got married and buried at St. Thomas Church.  They were joined by the children of undistinguished WASP families from America’s small towns, suburbs, and tenements.

The architects of the transition envisioned a shift to a new meritocratic society in which the circumstances of one’s birth didn’t matter–only hard work and talent.  But that hasn’t happened.  Instead, we have a system that has less mobility than the old, forthrightly aristocratic version.

And the characteristics used to promote ‘diversity’ are often insane. Having a dark skin or being sexually abnormal or coming from a foreign background might make you more interesting but it doesn’t make you a better person — what the Crust calls ‘diversity’ is only diversity from the point of view of the Crust.

Who gets the benefit of ‘diversity’ having black kids at Harvard? Not the black kids — they see all the black kids they want to, every day, and if they want to see white kids they can just watch TV. It’s there to benefit the white kids. These ‘diversity’ quotas are play-toys for the offspring of the white liberal establishment, the way Irish and Scottish gentry used to send their children to be fostered by crofters until they were old enough to be useful.

The only ‘diversity’ that can’t get its foot in the door is diversity of ideas — because that’s threatening. After all, nobody is going to persuade your white kid to become a black kid (although they may be persuaded to act that way), nor persuade your American kid to become a Mexican kid, nor is your straight white kid going to be persuaded to become homosexual (probably). But they might be persuaded to become a Mormon, or an entrepreneur, or (God forbid) even a Republican — and that the Crust cannot allow. Hence all of the colors and all of the sexual preferences and all of the accents at college speak the same Party Line.

Read it.

You hear this argument all the time from people in New York.  “Rich?  Hah!  We’ve got four people in 1600 square feet, and our school bills are going to put us into bankruptcy.”  Many New Yorkers believe that they should be given some sort of income tax abatement because of the expense of living there (with the lost revenue being made up from “really rich” people, natch).  Slightly less affluent New Yorkers frequently believe that landlords should be forced to offer them “reasonably sized” apartments at a modest fraction of their income, because after all, otherwise they couldn’t afford to live in New York.

There’s a sort of irritating supposition in all of this that living in New York (or San Francisco, or Boston) is something that just happens to you, like getting cholera.  And that therefore high incomes, expensive real estate, and so forth, somehow don’t count for the purposes of assessing how well off you are relative to the rest of society.  In fact, perhaps society should get busy making it up to you for all the hardships.

Read it.

Basically: Do it like Apple. His is an experience that we’ve all had.

Thomas speaks for me.

I am a pro-defense, conservative libertarian.

By conservative libertarian, I mean that I am a libertarian who understands that liberty depends on the preservation of the traditional institutions of civil society (e.g., marriage, religion, voluntary charity) because it is those institutions that make possible mutual trust, respect, and forbearance. And it is those things that enable a people to coexist peacefully and cooperatively, to their mutual benefit. It is those things — not the statutes, ordinances, codes, and regulations that may be overlaid on them — which constitute the rule of law. Without the rule of law, liberty and the enjoyment of its fruits is impossible.

Read The Whole Thing.

Read it.

The cephalopods’ abilities are a defence mechanism, apparently arising from the fact that they operate on the depth boundary between two main kinds of deep-sea predators who might fancy them for lunch.

Many of the hungry enemies of J heathi and O banksii spot prey by seeing its silhouette against the light waters above, illuminated by the sky. To avoid these, staying transparent is best. Those parts of the cephalopods which can’t be fully see-through – for instance their guts, filled with food – are reflective, as that’s the next best thing.

Deeper down, however, many ocean hunters use bioluminescent lighting of their own to illuminate prey. The transparent condition, used against these, would be a bad idea as the predators would easily detect the cephalopods’ reflective innards. Thus, when J heathi and O banksii notice that they are being illuminated strongly by certain wavelengths of light – blue is favoured by ocean creatures as it penetrates water better, as any diver will know – they swiftly turn themselves dark.

Read it.

A prototype fingerprint scanner has been developed that can detect the presence of opiates, cannabis, or cocaine in the sweat on a user’s fingertip.

We have the technology.

The device uses special cartridges to take a fingerprint, which are then processed using both chemical testing and a unique photo scanning system. This takes a high resolution image of the fingerprint and its residue, so that the output from individual sweat pores can be measured.

And … how convenient … they now have your fingerprint. One-stop-copping, you might say.

Read it.

Since John is a Crustian leftist, this is a dependable answer to the question “Who’s the biggest RINO of them all?”

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Don’t care.

Ain’t my school, ain’t my state, got more important things to think about.

Read it.

School was a bubble of instant academic and athletic validation, full of prizes, accolades, awards.  We weren’t just successful adolescents for getting there, we were successful there too.  Look at our resumes.  We’re all successes.  But school has to end at some point–though many of us give the impression that it is possible to continue to “be educated” ad infinitum–and so we were foisted on the real world.  What happened then?  It was 2008 or 2009, the economy was a disaster and nothing we anticipated seemed to be coming our way.  Experts in art history ended up folding jeans.  Animal rights activists ended up at a hunting non-profits. There were jobs, just not ones that matched any of our skills or interests.

We were deceived.  There had been a tacit promise throughout our twenty years of schooling that good grades and meaningful activities would conspire to produce a satisfying existence.  Was it the system–the teachers, coaches, parents–that fooled us or did we fool ourselves?  Either way, we were gypped.

So the ‘Occupy’ movement represents an outburst of Lost Boy angst, a great cry from the heart ‘I Won’t Grow Up!’ Unfortunately, the world has a very quick and brutal way of dealing with those sorts of sentiments. Never Never Land doesn’t exist, but Captain Hook does, and he’s waiting.

Read it.

There are two challenges. One is the sheer speed of adjustment. In a hyper-Schumpeterian economy, the main work consists of destroying someone else’s job. Garett Jones has pointed out that the typical worker today does not produce widgets but instead builds organizational capital. The problem is that building organizational capital in one company serves to depreciate the organizational capital somewhere else. Blockbuster video adversely affected the capital of movie theaters, Netflix adversely affected the capital of Blockbuster, and the combination of faster Internet speeds and tablet devices may depreciate the organizational capital of Netflix.

The second challenge is the nature of the emerging skills mismatch. People who are self-directed and cognitively capable can keep adding to their advantages. People who lack those traits cannot simply be exhorted into obtaining them. The new jobs that emerge may not produce a middle class. Instead, if the trend documented by Autor for the period 1999-2007 were to continue, most of the new jobs would be low-end service jobs, for which competition will tend to keep wages low.

The recent trend in job polarization raises the possibility that gains in well-being that come from productivity improvements will accrue to an economic elite. Perhaps the middle-class affluence that emerged during the latter part of the industrial age is not going to be a feature of the information age. Instead, we could be headed into an era of highly unequal economic classes. People at the bottom will have access to food, healthcare, and electronic entertainment, but the rich will live in an exclusive world of exotic homes and extravagant personal services. The most popular bands in the world will play house concerts for the rich, while everyone else can afford music downloads but no live music.

And there stands the plot of about half a dozen science fiction dystopias I could mention, starting with the books of Mack Reynolds.

The chief problem would appear to be for the people on the left side of the bell curve. Such people traditionally get jobs where physical strength but not much brain is required. What do they do when all such jobs are performed by machines? The best they can hope for is temporary employment during the time it takes to design and build the machine that will ultimately replace them.

And even ‘smart’ people will have to run as fast as they can just to stay in place. As a lazy smart person, I don’t much like that idea, and I’m tremendously glad that I’m not in my twenties these days.

On the other hand, this may just represent the speed at which evolution works in a technologically sophisticated world. We’ve almost completely eliminated the frictional barriers to the flow of information; perhaps we’ve effectively done the same with whatever frictional barriers there are to the activity of evolution.

Read it.

If you have ever wondered what would happen in a society consisting entirely of liberals, the Occupier movement is providing the answer: devolution. It is almost impossible to keep up with the downward spiral, but here are some of the highlights of the last 24 hours….

Read it.

Contrary to what the Food and Drug Administration might insist on having you believe, high-sodium diets may not be so bad for you afterall, a new meta-analysis finds.

Specifically, the new analysis found that reducing sodium intake increases cholesterol levels by 2.5 percent and triglycerides by seven percent.

Read it.

Read it.

Let’s get some to Michael Moore and watch him vanish like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Read it.

How long before we get the traditional SWPL hand-wringing about Soulless Walmart Squeezing Out Local Mom & Pop Doctor’s Offices?

Walter Williams, a Real Economist, explains some inconvenient truth.

Let’s look at corporate taxes and ask, “Who pays them?”

Virginia has a car tax. Does the car pay the tax? In most political jurisdictions, there’s a property tax. Does property pay the tax? You say: “Williams, that’s lunacy. Neither a car nor property pays taxes. Only flesh-and-blood people pay taxes!”

What about a corporation? As it turns out, a corporation is an artificial creation of the legal system and, as such, a legal fiction. A corporation is not a person and therefore cannot pay taxes. When tax is levied on a corporation, who pays it?

Hint: Where do corporations get their money?

Read it.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one. These reasons are applicable to a generic competent President (such as Hillary, or any of the front-rank Republican candidates), but the Obamateur not only thinks outside the box, he’s set up housekeeping so far outside the box it’s barely within hailing distance.

Biggest real reason: If he throws the dice bombing Iran and it actually works, it’s his best chance for re-election. That’s logic that he can appreciate.

Read it.

Hey, they made that bed, they can just sleep in it.

Read it.

But folllowing his recovery he quit his bank job to become a hairdresser, grew to hate sport, called off his engagement and started dating a man.

Soon to be a major motion picture, I have no doubt.

Read it.

Last March the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an $14 million award to John Thompson, a Louisiana man who spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, because prosecutors in the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office deliberately withheld crucial exculpatory blood evidence. Since the prosecutors themselves enjoyed “absolute immunity” for their egregious misconduct, Thompson argued that their office should be held liable for failing to properly train them in their constitutional obligations. A federal jury agreed, and so did the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. But the Supreme Court reversed that ruling, saying Thompson had not demonstrated a pattern of disregard for constitutional rights under District Attorney Harry Connick that was tantamount to official policy. Today the Court saw more evidence of that pattern as it considered a case in which Connick’s office failed to disclose a key witness’s conflicting statements to Juan Smith, the defendant in a multiple murder trial. Justice Antonin Scalia, who voted with the majority in Connick v. Thompson, lost patience with Assistant District Attorney Donna Andrieu, who persisted in arguing that the prosecution was not obligated to share the statements under Brady v. Maryland, the 1963 decision that established a defendant’s due process right to see such evidence. “Surely it should have been turned over,” Scalia said. “Why don’t you give that up?”

Read it.

The machine on the drawing boards at the Science Museum in London is the Babbage Analytical Engine, a room-size mechanical behemoth that its inventor envisioned but never built.

The project follows the successful effort by a group at the museum to replicate a far less complicated Babbage invention: the Difference Engine No. 2, a calculating machine composed of roughly 8,000 mechanical components assembled with a watchmaker’s precision. That project was completed in 1991.

The new effort — led by John Graham-Cumming, a programmer, and Doron Swade, a former curator at the museum — has already digitized Babbage’s surviving blueprints for the Analytical Engine. But the challenges of building it are daunting.

Read it.

In a sane world, the news media would disseminate information about which states are most successful and what policies they pursue, so that other states can emulate them. That is a pipe dream, of course: we all know that in the world we actually inhabit, our media have an entirely different agenda.

Which leads me to the three-part hit-piece that NPR recently did on South Dakota.

Read it.

The men who killed the al-Qaeda chief have decided to speak out because they are tired of their “shabby treatment” by politicians who claim they were on a “kill mission”.

“I’ve been a Seal for 30 years and I never heard the words ‘kill mission’. It’s a fantasy word. If it was a kill mission you don’t need Seal Team 6; you need a box of hand grenades.”

He said the men were angry with President Barack Obama for announcing Bin Laden’s death on TV just hours after they completed the mission on May 1.

“There isn’t a politician in the world who could resist trying to take credit for getting Bin Laden but it devalued the ‘intel’ and gave time for every other Al-Qaeda leader to scurry to another bolthole,” he said.

Way to go, Barry … Chuck Schumer in not-so-black face.

Read it.

Not that it made any impression.

“Real class acts, the Chicago Board of Trade,” tweeted Occupy Chicago. “This week, it’s McDonald’s job applications they litter from the windows. Soulless place.”

Hey, at least they have jobs. (And bathe regularly.)

Read it.

When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will quite cheerfully murder each other.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra has just released “The Greatest Video Game Music” featuring full orchestrations of all of your favorite themes including Super Mario Brothers, the Legend of Zelda, and Halo. That’s right: Angry Birds finally has its own multi-part score and trilling woodwinds.

And the cover art, featuring a soldier playing a cello, is wildly goofy.

Read it.

At Watts Up With That, data from the National Climatic Data Center are reviewed. The results are quite startling. Every region of the continental United States has shown a cooling trend during the winter from 2001 to the present, and five of the nine regions have also had a cooling trend during the summer. With respect to annual mean temperature, only one of nine regions–the Northeast–has gotten warmer; the other eight have gotten cooler.

But the science is settled! Global warming! We’re all gonna drown! AlGore said so!

Read it.

The percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Democrats has dropped from 50 percent in early 2008 to 43 percent now, while the percentage of those who consider themselves Republicans has gone up, from 37 percent to 40 percent.

Read it.

Read it.

Even a left-wing rag can’t avoid realizing the Unintended Consequences of Yet Another Politically Motivated Boondoggle.

The California High Speed Rail Authority, the agency trying to build the bullet train, couldn’t have found a more politically sensitive target. The school is where House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), one of the project’s staunchest opponents in Congress, sends his children.

Critics say such blunders are routine for the rail authority. Across the length of the Central Valley, the bullet train as drawn would destroy churches, schools, private homes, shelters for low-income people, animal processing plants, warehouses, banks, medical offices, auto parts stores, factories, farm fields, mobile home parks, apartment buildings and much else as it cuts through the richest agricultural belt in the nation and through some of the most depressed cities in California.

Although the potential for such disruption was understood in general terms when the project began 15 years ago, the reality is only now beginning to sink in.

Once again, ‘progressive’ pie-in-the-sky can’t be bothered to think it through.

Read it.

Cornwall should adopt its own currency to protect itself from economic downturn and keep money in local communities, local groups have urged.

Scott Johnson at Power Line does the honors.

It’s tough to keep up with the crime wave associated with the Occupy encampments around the United States and Canada, but we’re doing our best.

Read it.

Hizballah continues to discuss battle plans for its next war with Israel, promising to take a much heavier toll on the Israeli people than the 2006 conflict in Lebanon. In recent weeks, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah has held a series of meetings with the group’s senior military commanders to prepare the group for a future war, which reportedly include plans to fire missiles at Tel Aviv, seize parts of the Galilee, and take Israelis hostage.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

Hundreds of protesters affiliated with Occupy DC shut down streets on Friday night near the Washington convention centre, where Americans for Prosperity was holding its annual conference. That day, the conference was addressed by the leading republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Herman Cain.

According to foreigners, anyway.

From a Canadian perspective – being able to walk into a store at 3am and purchase a can of beer the size of my head.

Drive-through everythings. Drive-through ATMs, drive-through bank tellers, drive-through pharmacies, drive-through liquor stores in some states. On the flipside, the paucity of sidewalks/pavements in many parts of the US, where your European would receive funny looks from his hosts if he suggested walking to a relatively nearby destination, and might even be stopped by the cops if they spotted him strolling along a residential area.

The first time I tried to cross a road by myself, it took me at least 15 minutes to get the rhythm of the traffic lights and how much time I had to make it to the other side. Streets are a lot wider, so the timing is completely different. And drivers in Southern California do not give a shit about pedestrians. And the multi-lane intersections… aaah. So confusing.

This guy obviously hasn’t tried crossing a street in Boston.

People using checks is antiquated in terms of other developed countries.

DID YOU HEAR THAT, YOU ASSWIPES WHO HOLD UP THE LINE WHILE WRITING A CHECK? IT’S A NEW CENTURY. GET A DEBIT CARD LIKE A NORMAL HUMAN BEING.

A mate of mine was asked honestly if we have electricity in Australia.

Of course they do — they make it out of beer.

People without passports.

Passports are only for people who want to leave the country. Only wierdos want to leave this country; that’s why foreigners are always trying to come here, sneaking in if they can’t do it any other way.

The realization that while you may be familiar with American celebrities, journalists, politicians, and geography from it’s broader worldwide audience, no one in America has a clue about eqiuvalent sundry things from my country of origin.

That’s because no rational human being gives a shit about your country of origin; otherwise they’d be buying your stuff, not American stuff.

That it’s not unusual to see soldiers travelling in full uniform in the USA (I’ve seen this often at Grand Central, and at various airports around the USA). In many parts of the UK, soldiers, airmen, etc. are unable to wear their uniforms off base due to the level of abuse they get from the public. (Yeah, WTF?)

That’s why Britain (and other European countries) are turning into such behavioral sinkholes.

Read the whole thing — it tells you quite as much about how quirky non-Americans are.

Read it.

The market for maple syrup offers an odd inversion. The thin, pale fluid labeled Fancy or Grade A Light Amber commands the highest prices. It is the white bread of condiments, an inoffensive accompaniment to more flavorful fare. The robust, thick syrup marked Grade B fairly bursts with maple flavor, but sells at a significant discount. So why does the nominally inferior grade offer decidedly superior flavor? The answer lies in the history of maple syrup, a product that has long served as a symbol of American authenticity. As our sense of American identity has evolved, our syrup labels have not always kept pace.

I recall someone telling me once upon a time that the stuff from New Hampshire is better than the stuff from Vermont, but all I’ve ever seen in the stores is Vermont syrup, so there it is.

Read it.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul said Sunday that the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan was making the U.S. less safe.

“It makes things worse,” said Mr. Paul, the Texas congressman running for the Republican presidential nomination. “Sometimes they miss. Sometimes there is collateral damage. And every time we do that, we make more enemies.”

I like Ron Paul’s domestic policies, but in foreign policy he’s still off in batshit-crazy land where live the radical libertarians and Pat Buchananites.

1. Every drone strike targets an enemy of the United States. I fail to see how killing enemies of the United States is a bad thing.

2. Hey, Ron, wake up and smell the hummus — they’re Muslims. Muslims are already our enemies, either in esse or in posse — read the Koran if you don’t believe me. To the extent that drone strikes convert passive enemies into active enemies, it helps us identify them … and kill them. The only good enemy is a dead enemy, and it’s better to kill them on somebody else’s turf than here at home.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to run for President, apparently.

Read it.

Sure, 7 billion is a big number. But most serious demographers, economists and population specialists rarely use the term “overpopulation” — because there is no clear demographic definition.

A Useful Chart.

Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

Read it.

And the people who thought of it taken out into the courtyard and shot, with their bodies left for the dogs to feast on.

Read it.

There wouldn’t be a bunch of smelly people running around in masks, for one thing.

Read it. And watch the video.

Yesterday a crazed Wall Street Occupier who apparently has been part of the protest for the last three months went on a violent rampage, attacking Occupiers’ tents in Zuccotti Park. He was finally stopped by another Occupier, who turned out to be crazy also.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

(Hey, the batshit-crazy are part of the 99%, right?)

Steve Hayward at Power Line takes on the Myth of Camelot.

 JFK’s supposed “cool handling” of the missile crisis is probably the greatest enduring myth of JFK’s presidency.  Yes, it was good that we avoided World War III, but aside from that just about every common judgment about the missile crisis is wrong.  It was both a political and military defeat for the United States, but the great Kennedy spin machine managed from the first moments to convey the exact opposite impression.  And the whole matter arose precisely because the Soviet Union perceived JFK’s weakness.

This fact was not generally recognized because key concessions from Kennedy were kept secret from the American people and even from most of Kennedy’s top advisers at the time.  Kennedy secretly agreed to withdraw American missiles from Greece and Turkey, something he had publicly stated he would not do when the Soviets demanded it.  (When this concession leaked out years later, it was said the missiles were “obsolete” and unimportant, though the Soviets did not share this view.)  The biggest public concession was Kennedy’s pledge that the U.S. would cease attempting to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba.

Kennedy was in many respects the proto-Obama … and the proto-Clinton.

Read it.

Doing well by doing good. (Hey, compassion like that don’t come cheap.)

Attending the event required a donation of between $1,000 and $5,000, continuing Warren’s trend of raising money outside the state where she is actually running.

The Boston Globe reported in late October that, according to Warren’s campaign filings, nearly 70 percent of the $3.14 million Warren raised last quarter to unseat Republican Sen. Scott Brown was from out-of-state donors.

The Crust is nothing if not cosmopolitan. Hillary Clinton blazed that trail.

Read it.

It’s that flapping sound again….

Maybe Men’s Wearhouse will learn from this lesson.  But I can’t guarantee it.

Indeed.

Read it.

Well, if you can boil a kettle with a bulb, why not crank up the dial and zap bugs with UV? Philips is doing exactly that with InstantTrust, a new instant water disinfection solution that is petite enough to be used in household appliances like taps, water filters and even water pitchers. The ultra-violet system is able to nix those nasty microbes at a rate of around four liters of water per minute and, unlike other bacteria-zapping systems, at any water temperature.

Read it.

The July issue of the science journal PLoS One detailed an explosive finding: a drug that creates a kind of viral self-destruct switch. In years to come it could be used to eradicate diseases from HIV to the common cold. “Forget the flu shot,” wrote Men’s Health. “How about a flu cure?”

Even more impressive, the study’s main researcher isn’t a doctor. Todd Rider entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986 at age 17 and left nine years later with four degrees, including a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science. He also minored in relativistic quantum field theory and solid state and optical physics. “Once you start on the path of the dark side, you are hooked,” jokes Rider of his obsession with science.

Read it.

Further detail on the bit I blogged about back in February.

The trick for locating the position of the hidden sun is to detect polarization, the orientation of light waves along their path. Even on a cloudy day, the sky still forms a pattern of concentric rings of polarized light with the sun at its center. If you have a crystal that depolarizes light, you can determine the location of the rings around the hidden sun.

Calcite is such a crystal. It has a property called birefringence: Light passing through calcite is split along two paths, forming a double image on the far side. The brightness of the two images relative to each other depends on the polarization of the light. By passing light from the sky through calcite and changing the crystal’s orientation until the projections of the split beams are equally bright, it is theoretically possible to detect the concentric rings of polarization and thus the location of the sun.