Popular Science shows us a glimpse of the future.

As military strategists look ahead, the days of asymmetric warfare and the uncontested airspace that comes with it seem to be drawing to a close. “There are no active area defenses run by insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq or, for that matter, Syria,” says defense analyst Phil Finnegan, of the Fairfax, Virginia–based Teal Group. “But the next generation of UAVs will have to confront potential threats like China. They’ll need to be much more capable—faster, with greater autonomy in case communication links are disrupted, and stealthier so they are more difficult for an adversary to detect.”

That’s what Andy Ihnatko calls Christmas … and who can say he’s wrong?

Read it.

It’s more interesting than you might think.

Read it.

But that was yesterday … and yesterday’s gone.

Read it.

In the French news report below, you’ll see a woman explaining to the TV audience that the man who ran down a number of pedestrians in Dijon a couple of days ago while shouting “Allahu akhbar” was in fact a lunatic. He had a psychiatric history, had been institutionalized, etc. etc. It was had nothing to do religion; the attacker wanted to “commit a political act”.

Somebody should have explained to this well-meaning lady that politics, religion, and insanity converge in Islam. Islam is in fact the Perfect Storm of lunacy, politics, and religion.

Read it.

Read it.

Those present in the Abbey Road studio to record Lennon’s song A Hard Day’s Night could not have imagined that 50 years later the events would still be analyzed and dissected. Particularly since the focus of the analysis is almost not a piece of music, it’s a short sound, less than 3 seconds long, a crashing, ringing, chiming sound that has caused arguments and discussions between Beatles’ fans and musicologists ever since it was recorded.

…

Here, for the honour of all mathematicians, I would like to put the record straight — or at least straighter. The mathematical tale of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Chord is a tale of 18th century mathematicians, the study of heat, Karaoke tricks and a measure of luck.

Read it.

This is the map you’ve been looking for.

Read it.

Nothing rings in the holidays better than gift giving, except gift taking. With that in mind, please enjoy the Top 25 “Christmas gifts” cops took from you or bought with your money through civil asset forfeiture:

Read it.

The key problem with this study and the more alarmist stories that followed, is that when it says “e-reader”, it means “Apple iPad”. An iPad at full brightness, no less. When I hear “e-reader”, I tend to think “dedicated e-reader” – an e-ink device without a backlit screen — rather than a multi-purpose tablet. And there’s a big difference.

Read it.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, there were about 200,000 Jews in Turkish lands – when the entire population was barely 10 million. Today, the Turkish population has reached 77 million – and there are fewer than 17,000 Jews.

Mois Gabay, a Turkish Jewish writer for Salom, the Istanbul Jewish newspaper, recently wrote in his column, “Are Turkish Jews Leaving?”: “We face threats, attacks and harassment every day. Hope is fading. Is it necessary for a ‘Hrant among us’ to be shot in order for the government, the opposition, civil society, our neighbors and jurists to see this?” The ‘Hrant’ to whom he referred is Hrant Dink, a Turkish Armenian journalist who was shot dead in 2007 by a gang of nationalist Turks.

John C. Wright reminds you what Islam is all about.

Maybe we can find Baptist on Mormon violence around the time of the Civil War, or something else not in living memory.  For Catholic versus Protestant atrocities, we can uncover many in Ireland, and, before that, we need to dive back far enough in history that everyone is wearing lace or ruffs. My amateur’s knowledge of history tells me of few or no battles between Catholic and Greek after the Great Schism, and some tumults and riots between Orthodox and the Nestorians or Arians. The next time religious atrocities appear in Western history is the persecutions of Diocletian or Nero. Before that, the Roman pagans engaged in the greatest witch-hunt in history, wiping out members of a cult whose practices were abominable.

Hence there is no moral equivalence here. What is the occasional and historically anomalous aberration for Christendom is the heart and soul of the Dar-el-Islam. What for us is a freakish departure from our code of conduct is their code of conduct. A more perfect and absolute evil than performing the most grotesque and nightmarish atrocities the vile imagination of man can conceive in the name of God does not exist. Even the Nazis were more civilized than this — they did not use nerve gas.

The battle is existential and absolute. Compromise or coexistence is not possible if the enemy is unwilling to compromise and coexist.

Read it.

Words fail me.

Read it.

It’s astonishing how many bad ideas the creators were able to cram into a two-and-half-minute video, which concerns a child protagonist who “doesn’t feel safe with a gun in my house.”

First, the child steals the gun out of his mother’s dresser—something no young person should ever do. Then he brings it with him to school. Kids have been shot by cops for brandishing fake weapons; bringing a real gun to school is even more reckless, and could result in serious injury or death. Last, he shows the gun to his teacher and asks her to make it go away. Any child who did this would be expelled on the spot at the very least, and could face criminal charges, regardless of any mitigating circumstances.

Read it.

Ever notice how all of these corruption scandals happen in cities run by Democrats? Wonder why that is?

Read it.

Procedural generation—having the game build stuff randomly instead of using hand-authored content—is amazing when it works well. You get a ton of replayability because the game is different every time. As the person implementing the game, you also get the critical feature of not knowing what you’re going to get even though you wrote the code. The game can surprise you too.

People get into procedural generation because it seems easier. Hand-authoring content is obviously a lot of work. If you want your game to have a hundred levels, you have to make a hundred things. But make one little random level generator and you can have a hundred levels, a thousand, or a million, for free!

Back when I was playing RPGs, I would have killed for this tool.

Read it.

SO A GUY FROM Boston walks into a bar and offers to sell the owner a chunk of ice. To modern ears, that sounds like the opening line of a joke. But 250 years ago, it would have sounded like science fiction—especially if it was summer, when no one in the bar had seen frozen water in months.

In fact, it’s history. The ice guy was sent by a 20-something by the name of Frederic Tudor, born in 1783 and known by the mid-19th century as the “Ice King of the World.” What he had done was figure out a way to harvest ice from local ponds, and keep it frozen long enough to ship halfway around the world.

Read it.

A small stone artifact recovered from a Paleo-Eskimo site on Baffin Island is important evidence of a Viking presence in Arctic Canada around 1000 CE, says a team of scientists led by Dr Patricia Sutherland of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

Read it.

In 30 B.C., the Roman architect Vitruvius wrote down an ancient recipe for mortar that, as it happens, could make modern buildings more durable and environmentally friendly.

The crucial ingredient, volcanic sand, has long been credited with the longevity of Rome’s ancient monuments, including the Pantheon, Hadrian’s Temple, Trajan’s Market, and the Baths of Diocletian.

Read it.

Read it.

So far, it has brought as much fear as hope. Since Chinese-speaking surveyors, backed by Nicaraguan soldiers and police, began assessing land and houses along the canal’s proposed 278km (172-mile) route a few months ago (see map), peasants fearful of their land being expropriated have taken to the streets 16 times. On December 10th several thousand, shouting “We don’t want the Chinese”, protested in Managua, the capital, despite police efforts to keep them in their villages, activists say. Boatmen in Punta Gorda on the Caribbean coast have refused to ferry heavy machinery to be used to begin construction, fearing their livelihoods will be harmed.

And the Occupy Whatever people say: [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp] ….

Read it.

If Judah Maccabee were alive today, he’d kill all of the Moslems in Israel and tear down that Mosque and rebuild the Temple. (Not an exaggeration, that’s what he did to the Greeks, and if he didn’t feel guilty about treating Greeks like that, I don’t see why he’d shed tears over Moslems.)

Read it.

Islam is a charnel house. It was born in fire and blood and slaughter in the 7th century and has maintained the same modus operandi for the past fourteen hundred years.

When it is strong it wages aggressive jihad. It slaughters victims who refuse to convert. It takes slaves and distributes concubines to its warriors. It rapes and loots and destroys the wealth of civilized societies to feed its insatiable lust for booty and plunder, battening on the flesh of the prosperous. It reaps what it does not sow and harvests where it does not plant.

When it is weak, it goes into dormant mode. It turns its aggressive energies in upon itself, ferreting out blasphemy and unbelief and punishing the malefactors. Deprived of plunder, its cities fall into decay and desuetude. Poverty and degradation become the norm. The soldiers of Allah bide their time and await the moment when they may resume their rapacity.

With the emergence of the Islamic State in the Middle East, we are now moving out of a three-century hiatus of Islamic weakness into an era of renewed Islamic strength. What seems an unprecedented horror of bestial behavior is actually just a return to the Islamic norm as practiced before 1683 throughout the lands conquered by Islam.

All of the above is easily discoverable by any non-Muslim who cares to look into the matter. None of it is hidden. Yet the average Westerner is wearing a blindfold and earplugs when it comes to Islam. The arrant nonsense that is peddled by our media and our political leaders is swallowed by millions of people who should know better. And who could know better, if only they would raise a corner of the blindfold and take a little peek.

Read it. And for sure watch the videos.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

After months of the White House, the Democratic Party, and the prestige press trying to angry up the black vote, things like this were bound to happen. So what if the Democrats’ 2014 campaign strategy has come home to roost. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, can you? Too bad Lu, Ramos, and Begic had to die for the crime of being non-black, but it was all in the good cause of trying to boost black turnout to benefit Democratic politicians.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, connects the dots.

As the dust from the Ferguson outrage-a-thon settles, we enter a lull in what I have dubbed the Cold Civil War: that is, the conflict between whites who see things like this and whites who see things like that, with colored auxiliaries recruited by one of the sides to groom the horses and dig field latrines.

Read it.

“Wow, I never expected that!” said the federal government, who apparently do not have a single economist on staff.

Nor, indeed, anyone who attended Econ 101.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Well, to start with, there are still a lot of Muslims out there….

For two decades now, Pakistan’s all-powerful intelligence service called the ISI – equivalent of CIA – has played a complicated game of “good terrorist, bad terrorist” based on whether a group serves its geopolitical ends against India or not. And it has cultivated the “good” ones, giving their noxious ideology a pass and offering them a safe haven in the country.

Read it.

The science has spoken: Chicago’s red light camera program hasn’t made driving in the city any safer and has replaced one type of car crash for another. The cameras are there obviously to make money for the city, not for the benefit and safety of the residents.

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

Read it.

I’m a sucker for maps, real or imaginary.

Another thumbsucker from the Los Angeles Times.

Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.

And of course such conditions exist nowhere else on earth, and especially not in Muslim countries.

Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.

And that is totally the fault of the United States.

Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.

Any resemblance to college students after graduation is purely coincidental.

Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.

Any resemblance to Communist dictatorships like, say, Cuba is purely coincidental.

Major U.S. companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

Which is, after all, their primary job, and forget about making a profit.

Read it.

An Illinois woman is seeking to trademark the dying last words of the New York City man who gasped “I can’t breathe” while being arrested by NYPD cops for selling loose cigarettes.

In a December 13 application, Catherine Crump petitioned the United States Patent and Trademark Office to register the phrase for use on hoodies and t-shirts for men, women, boys, girls, and infants.

…

Three similar entrepreneurs have filed to trademark the phrase “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” for use on clothing items. Each of those USPTO applications was filed within three weeks of the August 9 death of Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager who was shot to death by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri.

Read it.

HIV belongs to a class of viruses called retroviruses. They all share three genes in common. One, called gag, gives rise to the inner shell where the virus’s genes are stored. Another, called env, makes knobs on the outer surface of the virus, that allow it to latch onto cells and invade them. And a third, called pol, makes an enzyme that inserts the virus’s genes into its host cell’s DNA.

It turns out that the human genome contains segments of DNA that match pol, env, and gag. Lots of them. Scientists have identified 100,000 pieces of retrovirus DNA in our genes, making up eight percent of the human genome. That’s a huge portion of our DNA when you consider that protein coding genes make up just over one percent of the genome.

Read it.

“Woz” has lived in Australia on and off for a few years now and recently picked up a gig as an adjunct professor at Sydney’s University of Technology. According to The Australian Financial Review he’s now taken the plunge and moved down under to become, if you will, The Woz-ard of Oz.

Don’t blame him.

Read it.

Cell biologist Andrew Hessel of Autodesk is designing viruses in software to attack a specific individual’s cancer and then using DNA Printers to create the viruses as a drug.

Paul Mirengoff explains the latest Leftist trope.

As far as I can tell, a micro-aggression is an affront — real or imagined for the sake of being affronted — so trivial that few stable adults would notice it and none would give it a second thought. When the term is used, the only aggression in sight is that committed by the grievance industry against the English language for the purpose of political bullying.

Read it.

I guess “Black Lives Matter!” doesn’t apply to Nigeria.

Read it.

But will they stop the stupid gasohol mandate? Of course not! Think of all those campaign contributors depending on all those subsidies!

Read it.

The University of Virginia rape case profiled in Rolling Stone has fallen apart. In doing so, it joins a long and distinguished line of highly-publicized rape cases that have fallen apart. Studies often show that only 2 to 8 percent of rape allegations are false. Yet the rate for allegations that go ultra-viral in the media must be an order of magnitude higher than this. As the old saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

The enigma is complicated by the observation that it’s usually feminist activists who are most instrumental in taking these stories viral. It’s not some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists choosing the most dubious accusations in order to discredit public trust. It’s people specifically selecting these incidents as flagship cases for their campaign that rape victims need to be believed and trusted. So why are the most publicized cases so much more likely to be false than the almost-always-true average case?

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

A non-Muslim who studies Islamic law in any depth soon learns that certain words have different meanings in Islam than they do in ordinary usage. Terms used in Islamic law that have specialized definitions include justice, peace, freedom, innocent, human rights, terrorism, slander, and any number of other seemingly commonplace English words and phrases.

Spokesmen for Islamic organization — and particularly those for Muslim Brotherhood front groups — rely on our ignorance about these “terms of art”. One reason that they are winning their information war with the West is that we simply do not understand what they really mean when they use these deliberately misleading words.

Read it.

Eight-year-old Dakota Nafzinger attends Gracemor Elementary School. Rachel Nafzinger said school staff took away her son’s cane as punishment for bad behavior on the bus and then gave him a swimming pool noodle to use as a substitute.

The school wouldn’t go on camera, but North Kansas City School District Spokeswoman Michelle Cronk confirmed taking away Dakota’s cane, calling it school property that was given to him when he enrolled. They said they took it away after he reportedly hit someone with it and wanted to prevent him from hurting himself or others.

Perhaps he was being bullied. Doesn’t sound as if they investigated the incident at all.

Read it.

And there you have it.

Read it.

Pretty much everyone is all over this story, but what the heck: why not pile on? The Obamas are trying to catch the wave of racism that supposedly is sweeping across the land. They may live in the White House, but hey–they are still subjected to racial bias. No, they don’t mean getting preferential treatment when applying to colleges and law schools, or being taken seriously as a presidential candidate after two undistinguished years in the Senate, or getting a $300,000 job with a hospital for no discernible reason.

Read it.

Six years after candidate Barack Obama vowed to make working for government “cool again,” federal hiring of young people is instead tailing off and many millennials are heading for the door.

The share of the federal workforce under the age of 30 dropped to 7 percent this year, the lowest figure in nearly a decade, government figures show.

Heh.

“Jeb’s a nice guy, and would certainly be a better President than Obama — but, then, my cat would be a better President than Obama, and I don’t own a cat.”

— Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Steve Sailer pulls back the curtain.

The exchanges during marches have been even sharper at times. One night in Oakland, African Americans staged an alternative demonstration to avoid “march-jacking” by mostly white megaphone-wielders.

“We’re all trying to make sure the white guys with megaphones don’t take over the whole conversation,” said Eileen Santos, 37, a Filipino resident of Berkeley who has been to several marches. “We’re having more brown and black voices, and that’s good.” …

The conflict has been most visible with clashes between predominantly young white vandals and black people who try to stop them. Several times in Oakland and Berkeley, African American residents have run out of their houses to yell at white vandals who split away from protests to burn and smash things in the street.

“I cannot stand the spoiled, white privileged kids in masks — and yes, that’s what most of them look like — trying to take over the message by destroying things,” said Moni Law, 54, a housing counselor who lives in Berkeley. She and other black demonstrators have blocked groups from breaking windows at several marches, as have white activists.

Read it.

Everybody knows that the best part about CSPAN is the unpredictable nature of the show’s call-in segments, where regular hosts and guests do an admirable job of fielding unusual questions with no advance warning. But brothers Brad and Dallas Woodhouse are now the champions of awkward CSPAN calls, after the politically divided brothers ended up taking a call from their mom.

“Oh God, it’s mom,” Dallas Woodhouse said as soon as “Joy” from North Carolina started to speak.

Know how they feel.