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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.”

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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.