Whether you like it or not.

But for some, the abbreviated original mission was a tribble in the quadrotriticale, nibbling away at them. So some fans got together and created a new web series, “Star Trek Continues”. This is no fly-by-night operation; my friend Steve Dengler is putting his weight behind it, and he’s funded such web-series efforts as Geek & Sundry, “My Gimpy Life”, and many more. He told me he and the others are doing this for no other reason than love of the show. They don’t make any money from it; they simply want to do it.

“Star Trek Continues” takes up where the original series left off, even creating a vignette that takes place moments after the final scene of “Turnabout Intruder”—the final episode of the original series, a clever way of tying it all together. Two other shorts are available as well.

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To the handful of petrochemical scientists, engineers and industry executives who have spent a lifetime trying to unlock America’s domestic energy potential, the country’s current shale-oil and -gas boom is the result of a half-century of technological trial and error. But to the rest of the world, it has seemed like an overnight miracle. In less than a decade, the United States has gone from importing $30 billion worth of natural gas to the cusp of becoming an energy exporter.

Thanks to improvements in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, wells can be dug into rock formations that are nearly 100 m thick and tap reserves that are nearly two kilometres wide. That has the potential to unleash enough oil and gas to power America for nearly a century—a feat unthinkable just a few years ago.

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The Nautilus took high school inventor Justin Beckerman just six months and $2,000 to put together — all while keeping on top of his homework.

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Not in Texas, he doesn’t. He’s like George W Bush, without the nice.

Gov. Rick Perry’s high-profile efforts to lure jobs to Texas from other states may be good business and smart politics back home, but they’re infuriating to prominent Democrats around the country.

Hey, prominent Democrats! Suck on it! If you weren’t so busy destroying your own states’ economies, you wouldn’t have to worry about it.

And now at least one Republican business leader says Perry’s taking the Lone Star swagger a little too far.

Wonder how long they had to look in order to find him? And that fact that he claims to be a Republican is just hot air; Nanny Bloomberg claims to be a Republican, and he’s about as Republican as Lincoln Chafee.

Those attacks hit where it hurts and have touched off an angry political backlash against Perry outside the Texas borders, with Democrats mocking his attempts to steal jobs as clownish — and warning the Republican governor to keep his hands off. In a memorable put-down, Gov. Jerry Brown said Perry’s incursions into California were about as effective as breaking wind.

And even that is more effective than any policy Jerry Brown has ever pushed. Talk’s cheap, which is why that’s all that Democrats can afford.

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After more than 25 years of studying the calls of prairie dog in the field, one researcher managed to decode just what these animals are saying. And the results show that praire dogs aren’t only extremely effective communicators, they also pay close attention to detail.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

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The bottom 10% in the U.S. are better off than the top 10% in Italy, Israel, Russia, Portugal, Brazil, Turkey, and Mexico.

Think about that next time some Crustian hand-wringer starts to vent about ‘the poor’.

Take the quiz.

Nailed me.

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Sipping a soda before one of their Thursday-night “meet-ups” at the Rosewood bar, Andersen’s business partner, Nina Ericson, describes the origins of Cougar Night. Ericson—a 50-year-old lawyer turned life coach—goes by the Twitter handle @DrDate2soulmate and often meets Andersen’s clients at the Rosewood spa café. She tells me it all started when the local venture capitalists wanted to find somewhere to go for drinks after work. Men make up 89 percent of venture-capital-firm partners, according to a 2011 survey by the National Venture Capital Association and Dow Jones Venture Source, and a demographic of mostly male, wealthy, well-known businessmen began reliably showing up for happy hour. Thursdays were the most consistent night and colleagues from up and down the road congregated in the comfortable bar overlooking the Santa Cruz Mountains. “Soon, women interested in the V.C.’s started coming,” says Ericson, “and it just turned into a crazy night.”

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“It was our friend Chelsea’s birthday, and we didn’t have an oven to bake her a cake, so we decided to try to 3D print a cake for her, instead. It took some trial and error, but eventually (and unfortunately months past her actual birthday) we managed to print a simple cupcake topper that spelled out ‘Chelsea’ in cursive sugar,” said Liz von Hasseln. “Chelsea loved it so much that we started seriously considering how interested other people might be in 3D printed sugar. When we graduated, we decided to start a mini design firm for 3D printing custom sugar.”

You, too, can be fattening.

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Welcome to the future of 3D-printed body hacks. Dr. Susmita Bose and Dr. Amit Bandyopadhyay have been waiting for you.

In the same way that commercial 3D printing has changed product design and prototyping, these researchers are creating a way to build body parts. Their cheap, iterative designs take the best of the 3D-printing industry and add novel materials like resorbable ceramic powders and titanium. The resulting artificial body parts can then be placed on humans, creating some of the most complex chimeras in existence.

“Using 3D-printing technology, and optimum material chemistry, one can control the geometry and shape of the scaffold and bone-like material chemistry at the same time. We can control the resorption and dissolution kinetics in a controlled manner that can be used based on application need. If you can resorp the scaffold, then the ultimate result would be for the natural healing to replace the scaffold and need for a second surgery, as is needed with current technologies,” explains Dr. Bose on a recent visit to her office.

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If you write code, you need these.

Not only can you leave expressive remarks in your code, you can use these annotations to draw attention to your poetic endeavors. How many times have you written a palindromic or synecdochal line of code and wished you could annotate it for future readers to admire? Look no further than @Palindrome and @Synecdoche.

But wait, there’s more. The Google Annotations Gallery comes complete with dynamic bytecode instrumentation. By using the gag-agent.jar Java agent, you can have your annotations behavior-enforced at runtime. For example, if you want to ensure that a method parameter is non-zero, try @ThisHadBetterNotBe(Property.ZERO). Want to completely inhibit a method’s implementation? Try @Noop.

We have the technology.

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For the first time, scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a new type of lens that bends and focuses ultraviolet (UV) light in such an unusual way that it can create ghostly, 3D images of objects that float in free space. The easy-to-build lens could lead to improved photolithography, nanoscale manipulation and manufacturing, and even high-resolution three-dimensional imaging, as well as a number of as-yet-unimagined applications in a diverse range of fields.

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After the unprecedented damage to New York City’s transit system brought on by Hurricane Sandy, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has been looking into near-term solutions that could shield subway tunnels from flood waters come next storm season. It tested one of those safeguards yesterday for the first time by inflating a 30-foot plug (designed by the US Department of Homeland Security) that could effectively seal off New York’s subways in the event of a natural disaster. The test run took place at the South Ferry station in Manhattan — one of eight stations consumed by flooding in Sandy’s aftermath.

Soon to be a major motion picture.

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And the Terms of Service are a bitch.

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We have the technology.

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 The Woolworth Building’s neo-Gothic tower, one of New York City’s most recognizable landmarks, is about to be turned into luxury condominiums, a transformation that would be second only to placing penthouses atop the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building.

Steve Sailer suffers form an embarrassment of riches.

Okay, which of these two white women, the brunet or the blonde, is the American Indian?

…

That raises the metaphysical question: Can a blonde lesbian who claims to be an American Indian be racist against blacks? I look forward to the Washington Post’s black magazine The Root debating this burning topic for several months.

Read it. And watch the video.

Seventy-year-old Michael Salame has eight heart stents, nerve damage and apparently quite a right hook, as an alleged home invader found out.

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As Detroit’s call-it-anything-but-bankruptcy budget crisis drags on and the city government is unable to provide the most basic of services, residents have discovered an alternative to lawless anarchy: cooperative anarchy! A number of experiments in spontaneous order are popping up in Motor City, and both the rich and the not-so-rich are pitching in.

You don’t need an expensive and corrupt government bureaucracy to get things done.

Of course, this is all a drop in the bucket for the city’s problems, but even that much self-management and tiny amount of voluntaryism has Katherine McFate of the Center for Effective Government (read their anti-austerity argument here) worried:

“The idea that we are now outfitting first responders through charitable contributions should be very concerning,” she said. “There are certain functions that you want government to perform that should not be at the whim of individuals or charities.”

Clue: All services are provided at the whim of individuals; the question is whether those individuals get a government paycheck.

Well, let’s see what functions the government of Detroit is engaging in that is so much better than the “whims” of individuals and charities, shall we?

Hint: Not even close.

Read it. And watch the video.

We have the technology.

Two tweets:

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Homeschoolers typically score higher on the ACT than their public school counterparts and have higher grade point averages (GPA) than other students once they are in college. Nevertheless, homeschoolers are schooled by their parents at a cost around $500-$600 per year. In public schools, the cost per student averages $10,000 per year.

Recruiters from colleges are noticing the trend, since the majority of homeschoolers graduate and obtain a four-year bachelor’s degree at a much higher rate than public school and some private school competitors. Colleges such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Duke have begun recruiting homeschooled students.

Another knock on homeschoolers is that they miss the socializing aspect of student life. According to a
National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) survey, homeschoolers have “healthy social, psychological, and emotional development, and success into adulthood.” Homeschoolers typically have core groups of students and do not operate completely alone, contrary to popular perception.

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You know you’re in hipster Brooklyn when someone who looks like a 19th-century farmer tells you that his line of work is “affinity marketing.”

…

So I decided to embed myself among the rooftop gardeners and the sustainability consultants and the chickeneers. I wanted to see what the demographic behind nanobatched chervil and the continually cited show “Girls” could teach me about life and craft cocktails. I wanted to see what sullen 25-year-old men had to tell me beyond “Leave me alone during this awkward period of beard growth.”

Only in New York. (And they laugh at ‘flyover country’….)

Joel Kotkin lays out some inconvenient truth.

A funny thing happened on the way to the long-trumpeted triumph of the city: the suburbs not only survived but have begun to regain their allure as Americans have continued aspiring to single-family homes.

People want their own space, the more the better. That’s why, when people get rich, they buy bigger homes rather than smaller ones. You have to be an intellectual to ignore evidence like that.

Read the actual Brookings report that led to the “Suburbs Lose” headline: it shows that in 91 of America’s 100 biggest metro areas, the share of jobs located within three miles of downtown declined over the 2000s. Only Washington, D.C., saw significant growth.

Your tax dollars at work, that.

Suburbs have never been popular with the chattering classes, whose members tend to cluster in a handful of denser, urban communities—and who tend to assume that place shapes behavior, so that if others are pushed to live in these communities they will also behave in a more enlightened fashion, like the chatterers. This is a fallacy with a long pedigree in planning circles, going back to the housing projects of the 1940s, which were built in no small part on the evidently absurd, and eventually discredited, assumption that if the poor had the same sort of housing stock as the rich, they would behave in the same ways.

The reason we lived close together was because in the Old Days it took time to get information from Point A to Point B, and those who got their information before others tended to have an advantage. Well, information travels a lot more quickly now, as do other things, and so the rationale for living cheek-by-jowl went away — and people responded appropriately.

The new low-cost suburbia, wrote Robert Bruegmann in his compact history of sprawl, “provided the surest way to obtain some of the privacy, mobility and choice that once were available only to the wealthiest and most powerful members of society.”

One of the reasons that the Crust like living in urban cores is that they still have plenty of space because they can afford it, and having plenty of proles around makes the Servant Problem less acute.

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Remember when Defense Distributed’s Cody Wilson promised to unveil an entirely 3D-printed handgun made of ABS plastic with the firing pin its only metal part? Well, he’s apparently done it. Forbes’s Andy Greenberg was given a sneak peek of the result, and it looks and appears to be quite an achievement. If all goes well, the plans will be unveiled at Defcad.org next week.

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My favorite is National Lost Sock Memorial Day.

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Essential knowledge for all true reactionaries.

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When you shoot a gun in BioShock or Far Cry, you don’t have to think much about how that gun works — you press a button to fire, a button to reload, and that’s about it. Receiver, on the other hand, is a first person shooter that’s almost entirely about mastering your weapon. And it all started with The X-Files. When David Rosen from developer Wolfire Games picked up a replica SIG Sauer P226 as part of a Fox Mulder halloween costume, he says he “had a lot of fun just playing around with the slide and ejecting and inserting the magazine. It seemed crazy that there were so many games about guns, but none that let you actually play around with them and see how they work.”

Receiver was originally developed over the course of nine days as part of the “7 Day FPS Challenge,” and just this week was released on Steam. In it, you play as a sort of disembodied handgun, infiltrating a virtually empty building in search of 11 different cassette tapes. The only things stopping you are are the drones and automated turrets littered through the hallways, as well as your ability to handle a gun. What makes this so challenging is just how many actions are required. If you’re using a revolver, for instance, you’ll need to dump out all of your shells in order to reload, and then put in each new bullet individually. Each of these actions requires a different combination of button presses, and you’ll need to memorize these sequences to be successful. (This concept could also be ideal for the next generation of Microsoft’s Kinect sensor.)

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The which I encourage you to buy, as I have. And also I urge you to SUPPORT JOHN DERBYSHIRE (look on the sidebar, to the right, at the top, for the link).

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Donald Kagan, Yale’s great classicist gives his final lecture, fighting as ever for Western civilization.

I had the privilege of taking Professor Kagan’s intro Classical Civ course as an undergraduate. He was an amazing guy. (Of course, his finest hour was as Big Julie in the Timothy Dwight College production of Guys & Dolls.)

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Researchers at the University of Wyoming have discovered a new lithium reserve that could radically alter where the US sources a key component of the li-ion batteries used in consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and other technology. Currently the United States imports a vast majority of its lithium, but the newly-unearthed reserve — located at Rock Springs, Wyoming — could transform the US from “a significant lithium importer to an independent lithium producer” according to experts at the university’s Carbon Management Institute.

Tell the apparatchiks in China they can suck on it.

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Some researchers from Vanderbilt have developed a new app and hardware module that will help you find the direction of gunfire. The research team used the sonic signatures associated with firing to pinpoint its location, and put this on an Android smartphone map.

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If you think 3D printers have given would-be gun controllers the vapors already, just wait until you hear the latest from Cody Wilson, the head honcho of Defense Distributed. He told reporters at the Inside 3D Printing Conference in New York City that the group’s latest project — a gun made entirely with 3D-printed parts (except for a metal firing pin) — is just weeks away from success. If Wilson and company can deliver on the promise, it would be an important step beyond their already impressive accomplishments in producing functioning AR-15 lower receivers and “high-capacity” magazines for AR-15s and AK-style rifles. It would also be an unmistakable message to government officials that gun control laws are becoming ever-more unenforceable.

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Sometimes the system works.

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Scientists have implanted a laboratory-grown kidney into a rat for the first time, a medical milestone that they hope will soon lead to similar solutions for human beings needing full organ transplants. “It’s the first one ever that’s been implanted into an animal,” said Harald Ott, MD and PhD at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Regenerative Medicine and the lead researcher behind the project, to The Verge.

Ever notice how rats get all the good stuff?

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A Kickstarter project to turn back the clock.

The Vermont Sail Freight Project is a contemporary re-invention of a historic regional foodway, and is sponsored by the Willowell Foundation of Monkton, Vermont.  In 2013, the Sail Freight team, led by farmer Erik Andrus and Willowell staff, will build a simple low-cost sailing barge 39 feet in length, 10′ in beam (width) and with 12 tons of cargo capacity with which to trade Vermont-produced foods in New York City and the Lower Hudson.

All this with nary a Teamster in sight. What’s not to like?

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Yeah, it’s called ‘freedom’, and it’s a feature, not a bug, you communist.

 While each of these substances are legal to use in the US, whether or not they are safe for long-term consumption — by themselves or in combination — is a different story altogether. Many have been deemed too harmful to use in other countries.

Yeah, we really trust foreigners to know more about what’s healthy and what isn’t than we do. That’s why they all come over here for treatment when they get sick.

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The US Navy has been pursuing solid-state laser weapons capable of setting other vessels on fire for years, but now one is almost ready to actually be put out to sea. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) today announced that it is aiming to “field and test a solid-state laser prototype” in early 2014 aboard the USS Ponce. The Ponce is a transport vessel from the 1970s that was recently upgraded into a hi-tech floating base and is stationed in the Persian Gulf, in range of Iranian attack boats.

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It’s like happy hour with added fire power: “Open Carry Wednesday” at the Cajun Experience in Leesburg, Va., means patrons who pack heat get a 10 percent discount on their bills.

Watch ‘progressive’ heads explode.

“Right now I feel like I’m in safest place in Leesburg, Virginia,” said Sterling resident Dana Quirk.

My, I wonder why.

“You’re not going to hunt for your dinner,” said Leesburg resident Anne Meyers. “So I don’t know why you’d need a gun in a restaurant.”

Ask the people who died at Luby’s in Killeen, Texas, on October 16th, 1991, if you can raise their ghosts.

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A bullet loses six feet of height while flying across 1,000 yards, and a hunter firing such a shot must compensate by altering the weapon’s aim. At that distance, fine adjustments would be difficult to estimate — but TrackingPoint has developed a Linux-powered hunting rifle that’s capable of doing all of the calculations for the hunter. Ars Technica has an in-depth report on what it’s like to look through the $17,500 rifle’s scope when the target locks and the viewfinder tracks upward to locate the precise point where the weapon should be aimed. Building distance compensation into the hunter’s view is only part of what the embedded ARM computer is capable of: it can also follow targets, determine the precise moment when to fire, and stream video from the viewfinder to a paired iPad app.

We have the technology.

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“Well to have a printable gun – it’s my intention to have that done by the end of this month and we’re at the end of March now so it’s my intention to have it done by April,” he said.

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In a referendum election on March 4, [Brooksville] residents voted 112-64 to approve the “Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance,” which states that producers or processors of local foods are “exempt from licensure and inspection,” so long as the food is sold directly by the producer to a consumer.

The ordinance also makes it “unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights organized by this ordinance.”

Looks like a grass-fed roots revolution.

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Nothing like being on the receiving end of Communist ICBMs to concentrate the mind.

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Sell it Forward encourages users to sell their used clothes and donate half the proceeds to Goodwill. The pilot program is currently only available in San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin, though the company is going out of its way to make the process as painless as possible for those in eligible areas. Instead of creating listings for each item, wannabe auctioneers need only fill the pre-paid mailing bag (provided by eBay) with the clothes and accessories they wish to sell. Everything else will be taken care of for them. Employees will decide if your wares are in decent enough condition to sell, create a listing and, if the item is sold within 14 days, split the proceeds between the “seller” and Goodwill. If the item remains unsold for 14 days it becomes a straight donation to the charity.

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Google’s PageRank algorithm has forever changed the way we access information by putting the best stuff first, and now researchers are using the same mathematical models that Google uses to fight the spread of lung cancer within the human body. While there’s no “best” when it comes cancer cells, the aim is to identify tumors more likely to metastasize and then hit them with targeted treatment before the cells have a chance to spread.

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 That’s essentially the message Hulu’s sending in making the entirety of the Star Trek series free for everyone, starting today through the end of March. That’s not just Shatner-era Star Trek, but literally all of it: the Original Series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. Normally this bountiful selection of space operatics would only be available for Hulu Plus paid subscribers, but Hulu’s going crazy in celebration of Shatner’s 82nd birthday. With all those hours of medium-octane space drama ahead of you, you could just go crazy and marathon until the offer expires come April! We wouldn’t suggest that, though.

Check it out.

Girl’s Guide to Guns is a website dedicated to women who dig fashion and fire power. Think of us this way: if one day Vogue and Guns&Ammo Magazine fell madly in love, got married and had babies, we would be their favorite child. Whether you’re a champion shooter or have never picked up a gun in your life, we’ve got something for you.

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The river as whole also serves as a single divider, surprisingly enough in the realm of radio – a medium that, on the face of it, is not as bound by the strictures of territorial demarcation. West of the Mississippi, all radio stations have call signs beginning with K. East of the river, all call signs start with W.