Ring of Fire

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Reintroduce yourself to Texas A&M, CEO maker!?

Bet you forgot, didn’t you?

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Heh. Best laid plans of progs and commies….

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The good guys win one for once. Yet another stake in the heart of FDR’s corpse.

In a decision issued today in Horne v. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the USDA’s raisin confiscation scheme as an unconstitutional violation of the Fifth Amendment.

“The reserve requirement imposed by the Raisin Committee is a clear physical taking,” observed Chief Justice John Roberts. “Actual raisins are transferred from the growers to the Government. Title to the raisins passes to the Raisin Committee.” That is a textbook example of an uncompensated government taking of private property, Roberts held, and it therefore must fall under the plain text of the Fifth Amendment.

And it also lays bare the defects of ‘diversity’:

Justice Sotomayor filed a solo dissent, in which she sided entirely with the USDA. “The government may condition the ability to offer goods in the market on the giving-up of certain property interests without effecting a per se taking,” Sotomayor asserted.

Thereby proving that she is incompetent to be a Justice of the Supreme Court. The forced ‘giving up of certain property interests’ to the government is the essence of a ‘per se taking’. Apparently a ‘wise Latina’ can’t read plain English.

Dance to the Music

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Me want robot horse.

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Special for Roy, the barbecue boy.

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Hey, what do you know — the top three, and five of the top seven, are in Texas.

San Marcos, Texas, for example, grew at a whopping 7.9 percent rate, from 54,567 residents in 2013 to 58,892 in 2014. It’s been the fastest growing city for three consecutive years.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason for that.

Steve Sailer runs the numbers.

Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s Equality of Opportunity Project has ranked 2,478 United States counties by upward mobility in income of young people from what their parents earned in 1996-2000 to what they earned in 2011-2012.

Here are Chetty’s Top 25 best counties out of all 2,478 for young people whose families were in the bottom half of the income distribution (determined on a national basis) in the later 1990s. Chetty is looking at IRS reported income for a combination of people who moved and for people who were permanent residents.

I haven’t looked in detail at each one, but, yeah, they’re basically pretty much all white.

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A woman being held hostage in Florida ordered a pizza with a special request — to send help — potentially saving her life and the lives of her children.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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I first became interested in homeschooling several years ago after a friend with six kids began homeschooling in San Francisco out of necessity – the public school system wanted to send each of her kids to a different school. Instead of hiring six Ubers each morning she decided to start homeschooling her kids herself.

What she told me about the experience was very different, and much better, than what I expected:

• It only takes 2-3 hours of study per day to keep up with the regular school curriculum since the kids were able to study when they were best prepared and motivated. No time was spent on bureaucracy / classroom management.
• The kids could deep dive into their own interests, thus learning self-direction and creativity without the requirement to stick to a fixed schedule and curriculum largely driven by logistical concerns
• A lot of basic material could be covered through online courses, such as those offered by Khan Academy
• A lot of learning occurs outside the home and is social

The last point was the biggest surprise to me. Especially in the Bay Area, there is a wealth of group learning activities that are offered outside of regular school. The Exploratorium, Academy of Sciences and Museum of Craft and Design, to name but a few, offer tours and classes. New microschool startups, such as QuantumCamp which offers one-day per week science programs, are popping up. Parents group together to informally organize their own classes.

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It’s a transparent armor so good it might turn the phrase “glass cannon” on its head. The Naval Research Laboratory developed a manufacturing process to reliably make a strong, transparent ceramic that also allows infrared cameras to look through it, which most commercial glass can’t do. Now that the process is complete, the NRL is sharing the technology with industry so they can scale it up to make giant sheets of transparent, lightweight, bulletproof clay.

Called Spinel, the material is made in a lab from synthetic powder. Under the right conditions, it can be shaped into strong, transparent sheets. The NRL has worked with the material for decades. Earlier production strategies used crucibles and high heat, which left behind imperfections that made the crystalline glass murky. To reliably produce clear material, NRL used a hot press under a vacuum. An added bonus to this method is that it allows the spinel to be pressed into shapes–for example, a dome for a new camera turret or a sloping panel that’s flush with a wing.

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Win-win.

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You are in a large room. There is a basket in the northeast corner and a door to your right. It is paved in cobblestones and there is blood on the stones in the center of the room. Your party enters from the south. Suddenly, from off of the room’s ceiling of comes a Hook Horror! What do you do?

If you said “Stop for a few minutes to download and 3D print most of the D&D Monster Manual in order to up the realism of your dungeon crawl” then you made the right choice. You see, a designer named Miguel Zavala has been modeling all of the D&D Monster Manual monsters in 3D and putting them up for all to download. His alphabetical collection features creatures like the Owlbear, the Ettin, and even Tiamat, the many-headed dragon that haunted the dreams of many a Saturday morning cartoon watcher.

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‘Save the trees! Save the bees! Save the whales! Save the snails!’

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And if ‘reasearchers’ say that, are we not obliged to believe it?

Good news for Chris Christie.

‘Just stick it in the garage and we’ll see if the other pieces show up.’

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Eyelashes? More like why-lashes. A team of scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology wanted to understand the function eyelashes serve in mammalian species. So they tested fake eyelashes in a wind tunnel.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Jesse Walker reports back.

“I think the reason we think conspiracy theories exist is because they exist,” he declared.

It was neither the first nor the last contentious moment of the conference, which took place on the university’s Coral Gables campus from March 12 to 14. The event had been organized by Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, a pair of political scientists who did a commendable job of looking past their own field to invite people from different disciplines. And when I say “different disciplines,” I don’t merely mean “people who study different things.” I mean “people with entirely different tool kits for understanding the universe.”

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Apple Watch uses a mini version of Passbook to hold your credit and debit card info for payments. When you want to buy something at a cash register, you just need to double click the button beneath the “Digital Crown” and hold it up to the contactless payment system. Apple is using “Device Account Numbers” for each of your cards, which means that your actual card number isn’t transferred to the merchant. There’s also a “transaction-specific dynamic security code” to help keep your payment info secure and prevent hackers from skimming your account number and using it for another purchase. After a successful payment, the watch will vibrate and make a small beep.

This almost makes me want to get one. Almost.

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From a mile away, ATHENA burned through the engine of a truck in under a minute. The truck was mounted on a platform with the engine running, to simulate real conditions.

Gettin’ there, gettin’ there….

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The Eko Core is a digital device that attaches to a regular stethoscope, allowing medical practitioners to visualize, record, play back, share and analyze heart sounds. The device is linked via Bluetooth, through Eko’s smartphone app and HIPAA-compliant web portal, to an array of cloud-based digital tools. They enable clinicians to analyze heartbeats, access audio visualization, attach heart sound reports and recordings to most major Electronic Health Records, and securely store the digitized cardiac information.

From Scott Adams, of course.

The ‘automated bits’, of course, are markets. The ‘organic bits’ are increasingly dominated by government bureaucrats and consequently getting more and more, well, tired, incompetent, and dishonest. But you knew that….

In memory of M. Stanton Evans. RIP.

Adopted in conference at Sharon, Connecticut, September 11, 1960

In this time of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths.

We, as young conservatives, believe:

That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;

That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;

That the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;

That when government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates power, which tends to diminish order and liberty;

That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;

That the genius of the Constitution—the division of powers—is summed up in the clause that reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people, in those spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal government;

That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;

That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both;

That we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies;

That the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties;

That the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace; and

That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?

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If there is one thing that has driven humanity forward in the last several centuries of technological progress, one thing that we’ve striven for above all others, one thing to which we bring our ingenuity and prowess to bear upon with laser-like focus, it is ordering pizza.

Let’s take a break from the slow-motion train wreck that it Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Eric Holder.

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“Jesus tells us what you do unto the least of them, you do unto me,” said the 28-year-old from Detroit who served an extended tour in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. He asked for his surname not to be published, to protect his family at home. “I couldn’t sit back and watch what was happening, women being raped and sold wholesale.”

So in December he traveled to northern Iraq, where he joined a growing band of foreigners leaving behind their lives in the West to fight with new Christian militias against the Islamic State extremist group. The leaders of those militias say they have been swamped with hundreds of requests from veterans and volunteers from around the world who want to join them.

Sauce for the goose….

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The nice thing is that they are free.

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Looking at cities by density of design, Dallas has both New York and Chicago beat.

That’s right, the Big D. If you look past the nation’s tallest and most spectacular designs and focus on the sheer concentration of great design, you’ll find that there is no place that packs in better design than the city’s Arts District. While this standard doesn’t quite rise to the rigor of objectivity, it is juried. Dallas, it turns out, is host to the densest design district in the country.

…

Six different Pritzker Prize-winning architects have designed signature buildings in the Arts District, all within an area that’s smaller than a square mile. All of the designers have won other prestigious awards, including Japan’s Praemium Imperiale, the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, and the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Gold Medal. Dallas’ superior six includes one architect who’s been knighted by France, one who’s been knighted by England, and one who’s been named a senator for life in Italy.

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University of Maryland researchers have programmed a robot to learn basic cooking skills from YouTube videos, a feat that could eventually be expanded into other skills like equipment repair.

I can recall several instances of restaurant food that tasted as if they had been prepared by robots taught by YouTube videos. But that was probably just me.

The kitchen was full of new tile, up to the pantry door.
The wife stood with arms akimbo, grinning at her new floor.
The tile had replaced the wood veneer, cheap plastic pad, and all,
And the tilework man came grouting–
Grouting– grouting–
And the tilework man came grouting, down through the long back hall.

He had pried up old linoleum, levered the baseboards free;
He had scrubbed the slab to lessen the lingering odor of old dog pee;
He had wrestled the washer and dryer out of the laundry room;
So the tilework man went grouting–
Grouting– grouting–
So the tilework man went grouting, sweeping before with his broom.

The wife was full of rapture, seeing the final look;
‘No longer need we feel ashamed of our kitchen and breakfast nook!’
The husband was just as happy to get rid of that cheap crap wood;
And the two of them went off dancing–
Dancing– dancing–
And the tilework man ignored them, since his English was not that good.

Yeah, flowers are nice, but you know what women really want.

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More than 60 years ago, Idaho Fish and Game dropped beavers out of a plane and parachuted them into the state’s backcountry. This little-known piece of Idaho history stars a crafty Fish and Game officer and a plucky male beaver named Geronimo.

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If you don’t know anything about the SCA, that’s alright — they don’t know anything about you, either.

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A team of researchers led by Harvard geneticist George Church at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has made big strides toward a future in which the predominant chemical factories of the world are colonies of genetically engineered bacteria.

In a new study, scientists at the Wyss Institute modified the genes of bacteria in a way that lets them program exactly what chemical they want the cells to produce — and how much — through the bacteria’s metabolic processes. The research was reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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Turns out I’m a Ninja.

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This winter, a biotechnology company began offering a whole new service to police departments. Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs’ Snapshot service allows police to send Parabon NanoLabs DNA samples taken from crime scenes. From that DNA, the company reconstructs a guess of what the person’s face looks like.

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Programming language based on the one-liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I am not making this up.

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My favorite: The Battle of the River Talas – The Abbasid Caliphate vs the Chinese Tang dynasty — coming soon to an XBox near you….

Read it. And watch the awesome video.

Mark Steyn, in addition to being on of the most entertaining political commentators around, knows more about popular American music than I would have believed humanly possible. Today he takes a fascinating look at ‘Sinatra Song of the Century #5’ and the people who made it great.

Who wrote “It Had To Be You”? Cole Porter? The Gershwins? No, it was Isham Jones and Gus Kahn. Who? Don’t laugh: By some rankings, Gus Kahn is second only to Irving Berlin in the number of hit songs he wrote, including our very first two Songs of the Week, “San Francisco” (Number One) and “Dream A Little Dream Of Me” (Number Two). Frank sang a lot of Gus Kahn lyrics. Kahn has two tracks on the defining Sinatra LP of the Fifties, Songs For Swingin’ Lovers – “Makin’ Whoopee” and “Swingin’ Down The Lane”, which is the nearest thing to a title song.

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A trial to determine whether U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson’s wife committed bigamy when she wed the congressman has been delayed because she required emergency surgery to remove breast implants.

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You could do a lot worse than have your kid spend his spare time at Khan Academy.

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Just in case a mere Bingo card is not enough….

Cards Against Humanity is a party game for horrible people. Unlike most of the party games you’ve played before, Cards Against Humanity is as despicable and awkward as you and your friends.

The game is simple. Each round, one player asks a question from a black card, and everyone else answers with their funniest white card.

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Be prepared.

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The Phoenix-based company crowdsources the design of its cars (like the oddball Rally Fighter), and it’s showing a refreshed version of its 3D-printed Strati model here. But here’s where it gets weird: Local Motors is building the Strati right on the floor of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit with printing and routing equipment that it brought in just for the occasion. The machines, encapsulated in glass for safety’s sake, don’t take much more room than a very small apartment (or a very big closet, depending on how you look at it).

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In what’s becoming a yearly tradition for Ars, we met up with Austin-based TrackingPoint at CES to see what was new in the world of “Precision Guided Firearms”—the term the company uses to refer to its Linux-powered rifles. Last year, TrackingPoint had just taken the wraps off of its AR-15 PGF (which we got to shoot a few months later), and this year we got to take a peek at a new prototype weapon that can accurately put rounds on targets up to a mile away—targets that can be moving up to 30 miles per hour.

Dubbed the “Mile Maker,” the prototype was described by TrackingPoint representative Anson Gordon as “mostly” representative of the final product. The weapon at least for now is built around an enormous, enormously heavy, custom-milled steel barrel, which fires what TrackingPoint is calling “338TP”—a round somewhat similar to .338 Lapua Magnum but with some customized attributes. The company decided to continue on with their own cartridges for the longer-range rifle instead of moving up to a bigger round (like .50 BMG) because of the superior ballistics of the .338 bullet over the bigger .50 round.