Read it. And watch the video.

I’m talking to my daughter’s preschool class about Passover tomorrow, and in preparation I’ve been looking for appropriate Youtube videos to show them.

I was completely unaware of the genre ‘Passover videos’ until now, but there it is.

Check it out.

I love these guys.

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Although Clotworthy was off the mark in predicting that his vision of an electronically stored human would come to pass by 2000, many of his other predictions are surprisingly close to what technology is actually like today.

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Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have created the first ever graphene audio speaker: an earphone. In its raw state, without any kind of optimization, the researchers show that graphene’s superior physical and electrical properties allow for an earphone with frequency response comparable to or better than a pair of commercial Sennheiser earphones.

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By now, using your smartphone for check deposits has almost become old hat. U.S. Bank is looking to take the next step in conjoining gadgets and financial accounts with the launch of Mobile Photo BillPay. The feature, which the bank says is the first of its kind, lets customers snap a photo of a bill, after which all payment fields will automatically be populated with the proper information. The underlying technology has been developed by Mitek, with extracted data including the intended payee, address, account number and total amount due. Of course you’ll get a chance to review this data before authorizing a bill’s payment; that’s a good thing, since we can’t imagine Mobile Photo BillPay will be flawless each and every time out. Nonetheless, U.S. Bank cites one study that expects the feature to reach a 33 percent adoption rate within the US by 2018. Mobile Photo BillPay is available now for U.S. Bank’s iPhone, iPad and Android mobile banking apps.

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Medical researchers announced today that, for the first time, a child born with an HIV infection appears to have been cured. Doctors are hopeful that the results may be replicated and used to treat infants infected via pregnancy or delivery in the first few days of life.

Yet another milestone on the road toward saving children from the mistakes of their parents.

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Mayor Bloomberg was booed yesterday as he walked in the annual St. Patrick’s Parade in the hurricane-ravaged Rockaways.

The jeers grew so loud toward the end of the Queens parade that mayoral candidate and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn appeared to break away from the mayor to march separately.

Heh.

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Amazon is good at sorting and ranking things—we understand that. It knows exactly how many boxes of diapers my kids have ever used. It knows every book I’ve considered. It’s also clear that Amazon doesn’t care about what it sells; it just cares about the selling. To Amazon, a book isn’t really a book. It’s the result of a database query that Amazon will seamlessly transmit over its Whispernet or via USPS to your doorstep, if that’s still your thing. To the shopper, Amazon, with its records of browsing and buying, is not a store nor a website, but more like a ghost limb, for grabbing whatever is needed or wanted.

Which is one of the reasons I own stock in the company. They make my life (and the lives of a lot of other people) much easier.

Evidently this puzzles some people. Like Walmart, Amazon is one of the favorite whipping boys of the Voices of the Crust and their politically activist cousins, who would much rather reduce American shopping to the era of The Music Man, where the epitome of modern times was riding your Model T Ford to the county seat. Cheap prices that help the poor stretch their dollars? What’s up with that?

“Everything about them,” said one indie publisher of Amazon in a Salon article, “is still evil.” But that view is countered by people like Will Wiles, who took to the Huffington Post to describe the process of publishing his novel, Care of Wooden Floors, with New Harvest. “Ascendant companies always seem most threatening,” he wrote, “at the moment when they’re becoming indispensable parts of the scenery of an industry.” He had reason to show his loyalty, of course. But consider: When he was promoting his book after the birth of a child, Amazon did something that few publishers would. They sent him a box of diapers.

And that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Amazon — and its critics.

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Grand Rapids has discovered beer tourism.

Those tourists come there because it’s where many of their favorite beers come from. Fifteen of the 21 craft breweries in West Michigan are in metro Grand Rapids.

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On a sponsored media trip to McDonald’s US headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, Barbara J. Booth, the company’s director of sensory science, told Kim Bhasin of Business Insider that Chicken McNuggets come in four carefully designed shapes: the “bell,” the “bone,” the “ball,” and the “boot.”

Watch it.

In this video, we are reminded that spiders are weird little assholes and that we probably shouldn’t model our superheros after them.

Patrick Rothfuss, one of my Recommended Writers, undergoes a life-changing experience.

Because you only get wrapped in duct tape so often in your life, (this is #2 for me) I figured I might as well take some pictures.

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Prince Edward sheriff’s deputies are investigating a deadly home invasion that happened early Sunday morning in Prospect. Two of the three suspects are dead, shot by the homeowner in self defense, according to investigators on scene. Meanwhile, the search continues for the third suspect.

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A team from the University of Southern California (USC) has built a lithium battery that provides three times the power capacity of conventional designs, with a recharge time of just ten minutes and a predicted long life-span.

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 “As I was processing the collection, I glimpsed this weird red flying-disc icon in the corners,” Rhodes says. Inside the box was a trove of oddities: cutaway schematics of disc-shaped aircraft, graphs showing drag and thrust performance at more than Mach 3, black-and-white photos of Frisbee shapes in supersonic wind tunnels. The icon was a flying saucer on a red arrow—the insignia of a little-known and strange sideshow in aeronautical design. Rhodes was leafing through the lost records of a U.S. military flying saucer program.

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The geographic clusters are  based on county proximity, urban area, and commuting patterns.

I just love funky maps.

Now, let the political operatives with their computer programs start gerrymandering it….

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(Thanks to reader RealRick for this one.)

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The first products designed specifically to wipe one’s nethers were aloe-infused sheets of manila hemp dispensed from Kleenex-like boxes. They were invented in 1857 by a New York entrepreneur named Joseph Gayetty, who claimed his sheets prevented hemorrhoids. Gayetty was so proud of his therapeutic bathroom paper that he had his name printed on each sheet. But his success was limited. Americans soon grew accustomed to wiping with the Sears Roebuck catalog, and they saw no need to spend money on something that came in the mail for free.

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Still Alive. This is the original, from the credits at the end of the video game Portal I. It was written by Jonathan Colton (A Yale Man, Calhoun ’93, former Whiffenpoof).

Still Alive. This is a performance JoCo did at some geekfest with The Geek Goddess Felicia Day, who is as much of a genius as he is. (Note that the audience immediately starts singing along. This is a certified Geek Anthem.)

In re Felicia Day: If you haven’t watched The Guild, or her music videos Do You Want To Date My Avatar or Game On,  well, your life is a bare ruined choir, and the angels will weep for you.

If you’ve ever asked, ‘Why would anyone want to go to a place like Yale?’, well, spending four years with people like these (and the rest of your life, intermittently) is the reason. Just sayin’.

John Hinderaker joins the NRA.

The day may come when the childish ignorance of Obama and his ilk reigns, but in the meantime, if you subscribe to American Rifleman or visit the SIG Sauer web site, you can buy an M400. Assuming they aren’t sold out.

I personally refuse to buy a weapon that is so delicate as to require a forward-assist. But that’s me.

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“There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire and a Zamboni clearing the ice.”

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THE humid streets of Waco, Tex., may not have much in common with the misty glens of Scotland, home to some of the world’s best malt whiskeys.

Not much, that is, until last month, when a single-malt whiskey from the Balcones Distillery in Waco bested nine others, including storied Scottish names like the Balvenie and the Macallan, in a blind panel of British spirits experts.

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We have the technology.

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A fascinating project is making the rounds this weekend that could change the way we think of 3D printers. The Filabot is a robot that can turn scrap plastic into 3D printer filament, thereby allowing an almost endless supply of material for prototyping and manufacturing.

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There’s only one door and it costs you at least $300 to get in.

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The Buckeye Firearms Association (BFA) announced in a January 9 release that over 1,000 educators have applied for its partner foundation’s Armed Teacher Training Program first publicized December 20, 2012. Applications are still being accepted via online survey.

If I had a kid, that’s the kind of teacher I would want him to have.

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Roll Call has estimated Mr. Rockefeller’s personal wealth at $83 million, making him the fifth wealthiest person in the House or Senate, based on his financial disclosures. His Washington residence, for its part, is a 1920s mansion on more than a dozen acres of land just off Rock Creek Park just four miles north of the White House. The property was assessed at $16.5 million by the D.C. government in 2012, and Zillow currently estimates its value at about $17.7 million.

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Starting at $17,000, TrackingPoint is launching a range of Precision Guided Firearms (PGFs) that use a Linux-powered scope and other advanced technologies to provide shooters with real-world auto-aim.

I want one.

According to Ars Technica, the built-in Linux computer automatically accounts for temperature, humidity, wind speed/direction, the age of the barrel, and more, to ensure that your shot hits the target.

Gimme two.

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The incident, which occurred on December 14th, was caught on surveillance video and shows a white man pulling a knife on a female clerk as she began to ring him up for a small purchase.

After the attempted robber pulled his knife and began to yank at the cash register, the female clerk pulled out a handgun from under the counter, causing the attacker to cower to the floor. He then ran out of the store, leaving the cash behind in his haste.

You go, girl.

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Words fail me.

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First you have to knock it on the table to get the weevils out. Or am I thinking of something else?

An American company has developed a technique that it says can make bread stay mould-free for 60 days.

The bread is zapped in a sophisticated microwave array which kills the spores that cause the problem.

We have the technology.

Read it.

We have the technology.

You need one of these. Now.

The Other McCain has a plan.

1. Raise big bucks for Obama’s campaign.
2. Start a “green energy” company.
3. Get an Energy Department grant.
4. Profit!

Read it.

A week after the Newtown massacre, The Journal News published an interactive Google Map with the names and addresses of gun permit owners in select New York cities. The bold move has escalated into a transparency arms race, after a Connecticut lawyer posted the phone number and addresses of the Journal‘s staff, including a Google Maps satellite Image of the Publisher’s home. “I don’t know whether the Journal’s publisher Janet Hasson is a permit holder herself, but here’s how to find her to ask,” read Christopher Fountain’s blog post. The double irony here is that open data was heralded as a tool of enlightened civic dialog, and has been co-opted for fierce partisanship, bordering on public endangerment.

Hm. What’s the appropriate cliché here? Sauce for the goose? The biter bit? Turn about is fair play? Two can play at that game? Take that you jive-ass bitch? It’s hard to choose….

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As I lollygagged around the packed convention floor at the Eastman Gun Show in Gainesville, GA amid thousands of guns and what seemed like millions of bullets, it occurred to me that I’ve never heard of a mass shooting at a gun show.

Funny how that is.

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What we know: The package contained an incredibly detailed replica of “University of Chicago Professor” Abner Ravenwood’s journal from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. It looks only sort of like this one, but almost exactly like this one, so much so that we thought it might have been the one that was for sale on Ebay had we not seen some telling inconsistencies in cover color and “Ex Libris” page (and distinct lack of sword). The book itself is a bit dusty, and the cover is teal fabric with a red velvet spine, with weathered inserts and many postcards/pictures of Marion Ravenwood (and some cool old replica money) included. It’s clear that it is mostly, but not completely handmade, as although the included paper is weathered all of the “handwriting” and calligraphy lacks the telltale pressure marks of actual handwriting.

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A former CEO of Continental Airlines is auctioning his watches because they’ve become too valuable to wear.

Come, join the pity party.

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If I were a rich man … I think I’d want a private library like George Lucas’s at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County.

Check it out.

I especially like the burqa for the SmartCar.

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Entrepreneurship is the heart of America.

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Putting some punch into the term ‘helicopter parent’.

I hope it has a speaker. ‘Hey, you! Get away from my kid or I put a missile up your ass!’

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To mimic nature, Sorenson layered a surface with hydrophilic and hydrophobic coatings, used a fan to pass air over the surface, and eventually managed to get water to condense. This eventually led to the design of a self-filling water bottle.

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I want one of these for my front porch. Trick or Treat! Heh heh heh….

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I must confess that I’ve always thought that Williams-Sonoma was a neurological disorder, like Creutzfeldt-Jacob, or perhaps an accounting firm. But I guess I was wrong.

While certain retailers like Hammacher Schlemmer are almost intentionally ludicrous (“Buy this personal hovercraft for $80,000!”), there’s no wink to be found in a Williams-Sonoma catalog. The people at W-S aren’t the least bit self-conscious about getting you to pay $35 for mailed gravy. So I thought I would go through this holiday season’s catalog, which has spent a solid week atop my shitter, and point out some of the more ridiculous items. Because there are people out there who buy this shit. The question is … who? And why? Let’s try to figure that out now.

Down the alimentary canal with gun and camera….

Check it out.

Unfortunately, you don’t get to pick the target.

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On Election Day, at a rally for Barack Obama in Fountain, Colorado, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar was being interviewed by Dave Phillips, a reporter for the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, about Salazar’s policies in dealing with America’s wild horse populations. When the interview was over, Salazar threatened Phillips, “If you set me up like this again, I’ll punch you out.”

That is quite the most intelligent thing I’ve ever known Ken Salazar to say. Perhaps Obama’s cabinet isn’t just left-wing drones, after all.