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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.

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 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.

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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’.

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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.

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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.

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For edX, MOOC.org represents another step towards going beyond the boundaries of its current model, which includes partnership with institutions like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and other elite universities. In April, the organization merged with Stanford University-based startup Class2Go to build an open-source version of its platform that can be used by any institution around the globe. The goal has been to allow developers access to edX’s code to allow any institution to host and distribute digital courses for on-campus and distance learners — both online and offline — and create better ways to collect student data.

With today’s partnership, edX is expanding that mission, as its partnership with Google will enable any institution or business to post courses on MOOC.org and presumably open the doors to public access of edX’s content. It will also offer a more diverse range of content from non-profit institutions to higher education institutions and businesses, edX President Anant Agarwal said.

Unfortunately, this will suffer from the General Problem of the Internet: Sorting through all of the crap to fine the useful stuff. And, when it comes to education, what constitutes ‘useful stuff’ will differ from person to person. I have high hopes, but low expectations, for the success of this initiative.

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A cross-disciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and clinicians announced today that they have begun a Phase I clinical trial of an implantable vaccine to treat melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer.

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According to the sources contacted by Foreign Policy for a recent profile, NSA head Keith Alexander is a “cowboy,” a well-intentioned extremist, a blithely naive fan of big data. He is also, it appears, a huge fan of Star Trek. Foreign Policy describes Alexander’s data-processing “Information Dominance Center” in Fort Belvoir, Virginia as the site of a high tech homage to the Starship Enterprise. Alexander reportedly had his operations center redesigned to mimic the Enterprise bridge, “complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a ‘whoosh’ sound when they slid open and closed.”

Aye, keptin….

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Hey, it could happen.

 The Heineken World Bottle was designed by architect John Habraken. When then-CEO Freddy Heineken was visiting the island of Curaçao, he was bothered by the mass amounts of trash and the lack of housing. His solution? Make a beer bottle that could serve as a brick when it’s finished. It was a brilliant compromise, but Heineken’s marketing department rejected it as effeminate.

Spoil-sports.

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We have the technology.

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That would be … very interesting.

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 Why “Rent The Chicken”?  We provide all of the supplies you need with the rental:  portable chicken coop, two egg laying hens, enough food for the length of your rental, food & water dishes as well as instructions on how to keep your chickens happy! Within two days of the arrival, your chickens will lay eggs ready to use!  These eggs have 1/3 less cholesterol, 1/4 less saturated fats, and 2 times more omega 3 fatty acids than store bought eggs.  Your Rent The Chickens should lay 8-14 eggs per week.  You will know exactly what your chickens eat!

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O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Kaeding was performing ACL surgery on a woman who had hurt her knee while playing softball. Glass apparently didn’t hinder Kaeding’s performance or concentration in any way. “To be honest, once we got into the surgery, I often forgot the device was there,” he says.