Watch it.

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The problem is that those who need it the most are the least likely to use it.

Pinterest has what you need.

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Yeah, everybody’s having a good time:

Soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt. Pixar, are you listenin’?

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Jeff Bezos revealed something that truly would revolutionize e-commerce and online ordering, should it become widely used: automated air delivery drones that could deliver 86 percent of the goods Amazon ships to customers today (packages under 5 pounds), in less than 30 minutes in many cases. That would be a huge change to business as currently conducted by the Amazon giant, and it would mean the end of retail as we know it.

…

When I do still shop retail instead of Amazon, the only real reason that I do so is because I need (or think I need) the item immediately. Amazon’s pricing is better in almost every case, and there’s no worry about whether something is in stock or not, and there’s no compromising about models or the type of item you’re after. If Amazon can promise all of that, combined with a delivery system that essentially beats a round-trip journey by car to the nearest Walmart, then consider it bye-bye brick-and-mortar for me, and, I suspect, for a considerable portion of the population, too.

I bought stock in Amazon when it was 187, heh heh heh….

On the other hand….

Let’s ignore, for a moment, all of the obvious problems with a drone-based Amazon Prime delivery system. Let’s ignore the fact that you can get free stuff if you’re a good shot with a rifle. And let’s ignore the fact that a 10-mile range isn’t much when it comes to underserved rural areas and is a jungle of potential snags and snares in urban, populated areas. Let’s ignore the fact that, unless you’re having Amazon deliver something to your secluded place on Martha’s Vineyard, having a robot drop paperback books on your house sounds like a mess.

Let’s ignore the possibility that a drone falls on a person and gives him or her an Amazon Prime haircut…..

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“(University of) Idaho is a land grant university. Part of the land grant mission is to respond to the needs of the constituent industries and otherwise in your state,” Coats said. “I’m doing this bioplastics research. To make bioplastics, I need a lot of carbon. I need a lot of electrons. Well, they’re in manure. It works out perfectly.”

We have the technology.

Put this in place in D.C. and our need for petroleum would shrink amazingly.

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Here we present our map of American lake monsters (view it large here), showing the spread of cryptids that might be lurking in the depths of the waters of the United States.

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Civilians can still experiment with hydrogenated fats at home, but while Catalan chefs can play with liquid nitrogen and celebrate candy-bar food additives such as lecithin as though they were the Philosopher’s Stone, heaven help the one Mayor Bloomberg catches with a can of Crisco.

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How to continue living in your parents’ basement without the inconvenience of having Mom & Dad hanging around all the time and cramping your style.

As I once told a friend who spent his spare time climbing rocks and jumping out of perfectly good airplanes: ‘You know, if you joined the military they would actually pay you to do that….’

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With his palatial mansion behind him and clouds of steam rising from his body, the wealthy eccentric stood as two large attendants dried him in a plush towel and then wrapped an equally luxurious blanket around his bare shoulders. “In the span of two hours, my machine brought the sea from 47 degrees to a balmy 82,” Hodgegrass announced. “After a few adjustments and a bit of time, I expect all my affluent neighbors to have one of these machines,” he continued, adding, “Nature will no longer dictate how we spend our leisure time.”

I look forward to watching the eco-nazis and global warming control freaks blow a gasket. Pass the popcorn.

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The Internet works, even when there’s no point.

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And than God for that.

Officers refine counseling and interrogation skills on artificially intelligent virtual humans. Commanders execute complex battle drills as if they were a giant round of World of Warcraft. Soldiers dispose of improvised explosive devices in driving simulators. Immersive, portable, and tailor-made for the Xbox generation, these simulations are being used to do everything from treating post-traumatic stress disorder to familiarizing a soldier with an enemy base, as in the case of the Afghanistan scenario I experienced.

“We don’t give them a manual, we don’t send them home for three weeks to study,” says James Blake, head of the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation. “We just put them in the environment, put the device on them, and exercise.”

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A teen playing the “Knockout Game” in Lansing, Michigan unwittingly targeted a concealed carry permit holder and was shot twice. He survived and is now in jail.

Gotta geta gun.

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Google has launched an ambitious Chrome experiment today, in partnership with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. It’s an interactive updated version of those great hand-drawn maps Tolkien included in his print edition of the works upon which these movies are based, that provides a guided tour of Middle-earth and the people, elves, trolls, wizards and other beasts that populate it.

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

Read it. And watch the videos.

 Andersen: “I discovered historical texts that [described] Saracens who fought with the Crusaders had a series of tests which had been preserved. For example, one test required, at a 60-bow distance, to shoot three arrows so quickly that the last shall be in the air before the first has hit,” added Lars. “That is three arrows in one-and-a-half seconds. That motivated me to accomplish it.”

Fast forward several years later with heavy training under his belt, Andersen has now achieved an impressive shooting technique. Both fast and accurate, he accomplished what many thought was simply legend or folklore.

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 Anyone who ever wanted to have a small tree house in their backyard will be totally amazed by this massive construction, The World’s Biggest Tree House, located in Crossville, Tennessee. Designed by Minister Horace Burgess, the structure relies on six oak trees as the base to support all five stories, which collectively stand 97-feet-high.

According to Burgess, his inspiration to build the tree house originated from a vision he had in 1993. He says, “I was praying to God and he said, ‘If you build me a treehouse, I will get you all the supplies.” To develop the project, the minister spent $12,000 and used mostly recycled materials across the course of 14 years. All of the wood is held together by exactly 258,000 nails, put into place by Burgess and a handful of volunteers.

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Assuming, of course, that you might want to do that.

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I’m pretty sure that foreigners aren’t as interested in what Americans think about their country as Americans are interested in what foreigners think about their country. And that’s a pretty significant difference.

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No restaurant in D.C. has been better outfitted for the iPhone generation than the forthcoming Bolt Burgers. It is a restaurant full of screens — touchscreen systems for ordering your food and making your drinks, tablets at every table, and a 16-foot-wide projected TV screen to watch while you wait for your order.

You can order food without having a single interaction with another human being, which, for millennials who prefer texting and online ordering through Seamless to picking up the phone, is a major plus.

Sounds like heaven, if the burgers are any good. (Aye, there’s the rub….)

“Everybody in the burger business has a good burger,” said Spinelli, “so this is what distinguishes us from everybody else.”

Au contraire, few in the burger business have a good burger. If they think that, then I predict that their burgers will be crap.

One of the technological centerpieces of Bolt Burgers is a no-flip burger grill. The device can cook a six-ounce burger in exactly three minutes, to the exact same level of doneness every time. It can make 1,200 burgers an hour. “I think it’s fantastic,” said Clayton. “I have the confidence that the guy at the grill will hit a button and get a perfect burger every time.”

More to the point, they will have few enough employees that they’ll sail under the radar of ObamaCare, and so might actually get a chance to make a profit. Too bad for all those Victims of Color out there who want a job, although I don’t imagine there are a lot of those any more.

Read it. And watch the video.

The guys at Powerline have some fun.

* I Walk the Lie
* Coward of the Country
* I Used To Be a Coal Miner’s Daughter, But Daddy’s Unemployed
* Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Democrats
* Thank Allah I’m a Commie Boy
* Benghazi’s Never On My Mind
* Jarrett Take the Wheel (That’s IowaHawk)
* He Stopped Having Health Coverage Today
* I’m a Rhinestone Golfer
* I Love This Par
* Here’s Seventeen Trillion Dollars, Call Someone Who Cares
* MSM: Are You Going to Kiss Up To Me, Or Not?
* Don’t Take Your Guns To Town (Or Anywhere Else)
* Man, I Throw Like A Woman
* I Wanna Talk About Me (Actual song name, no change needed)
* Scammed By Your Plan (Heh.)
* Patches (to the Web Site) (You have to be of a certain age to appreciate this one)
* God Damn the USA
* I Never Promised That In the Rose Garden
* Take This Constitution and Shove It
* All My Taxes Are In Excess
* You Picked a Fine Time To Leave Me, Blue Cross/Blue Shield

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A new poll by Democratic firm Public Policy Polling shows Republican Greg Abbott leading Democrat Wendy Davis by 15 points in the 2014 Texas gubernatorial race.

As predicted: Prettiest. Roadkill. Ever.

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Hey, they got some serious women in Tennessee.

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Another stupid idea mandated by government that everybody agrees is bad but nobody seems able to fix.

Lot of that going around these days.

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I am not making this up.

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We have the technology.

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John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, waxes choleric.

Following up last week’s rant about cant, kindly permit me a harangue about slang and the affliction of bad diction. Got that? Last week, the empty, insincere things we say; this week, the sloppy, lazy way we say them.

Nobody does it better. That’s why it’s so important to SUPPORT JOHN DERBYSHIRE. (See the top of the column to the right.)

The Register, while normally dealing with tech, sometimes wishes it were the Onion.

Many lotharios will agree that there’s nothing attractive about a cold sore – but the virus behind this common affliction is proving very useful in tracing the migration patterns of early humans.

In fact, boffins have been able to analyse the DNA of the unsightly, lip-borne herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) to shore up the “out of Africa” theory of early human development.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were able to identify 31 different strains of HSV-1 in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. The “stunning” result was that separate strains of the virus could be found on each continent.

This fact allowed the boffins to trace the pattern of human migration by analysing the relatively simple genome of HSV-1, which is significantly less complex than the human gene.

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One of my Chinese students told me, “I think Americans live very much in harmony with nature. There are so many trees and squirrels! When I first get here, I thought I was in a fairy tale movie.”

Yeah, that’s us. In tune with nature. The squirrels are key. (Wait until he meets a coyote….)

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#1 is of course Pepe’s, from New Haven.

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Over 20 years ago, I learned how to be a ship watch stander a few miles from the Raytheon facility at the Navy’s Surface Warfare Officer School. But the operations center of the Zumwalt will have more in common with the fictional starship USS Enterprise’s bridge than it does with the combat information centers of the ships I went to sea on. Every console on the Zumwalt will be equipped with touch screens and software capable of taking on the needs of any operator on duty, and big screens on the forward bulkhead will display tactical plots of sea, air, and land.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the first commanding officer of the Zumwalt will be Captain James Kirk (yes, that’s actually his name). But considering how heavily the ship leans on its computer networks, maybe they should look for a chief engineer named Vint Cerf.

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For the December issue of mental_floss magazine, Jake Rossen managed to do something we thought was impossible—he snagged an interview with the legendary Bill Watterson! Since we’re guessing there are a few Calvin and Hobbes enthusiasts in the audience, we thought we’d provide a glimpse of the e-mail exchange. For our full story on the comic strip, be sure to pick up the print magazine.

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Hate gerrymandering? We have the technology.

Read it. And for sure watch the video.

Yeah, yeah, I know, but I just love these things.

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My favorite is the ‘Luna Sea Hotel’.

Read it. And watch the video.

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1. barrycade

1. A barrier (usually temporary) that exists for no reason.

2. A barrier erected for political reasons.

“Dude, Obama barrycaded the park.”

“Hey, let’s put up some barrycades to keep those World War II veterans away from the open-air World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., in order to try and score some cheap political points.”

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, has a new piece at Taki’s Mag.

The disappearing middle. A study out of Oxford University, written up on Slate.com, says that 47 percent of US jobs are “at risk” of being automated in the next 20 years. The Slate guy says we have to Fix The Schools so that everyone is still employable. In the leftist mind there’s no social problem that can’t be solved by Fixing The Schools, which seems to translate as “making dumb people smart.” Yeah, we should get right on that.

Which is why it’s important to SUPPORT JOHN DERBYSHIRE. See link at right.

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The drug candidate, SR9009, is one of a pair of compounds developed in the laboratory of TSRI Professor Thomas Burris and described in a March 2012 issue of the journal Nature as reducing obesity in animal models. The compounds affect the core biological clock, which synchronizes the rhythm of the body’s activity with the 24-hour cycle of day and night.

Cincinnati Public, circa 1870. Credit to Steve Silberman.

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Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation awarded University of Pennsylvania graphene startup Graphene Frontiers $744,600 to develop technology that makes it faster and cheaper to produce graphene on a large scale. I recently caught up with CEO Michael Patterson who described how roll-to-roll manufacturing will enable graphene to make its entrance into the big industries.

We have the technology.

Check it out.

This would make a great wall poster but you’d need a big wall.

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The Oracle CEO was slated to give a keynote speech Tuesday afternoon at Oracle OpenWorld, the business-software company’s annual gathering for people who love gabbing about databases and computer server racks. But just before Ellison was set to hit the stage, conference officials announced Ellison was out keeping tabs on the Oracle Team USA sailing team.

Sometimes it is good to be the king.

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Truly, you can find anything on the Internet….

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You’re never too young to learn how to be productive.