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A boon to conspiracy theorists everywhere.

67 percent of vegetarians have dyed their hair, compared with 44 percent of people in general.

Truly, one can find anything on the Internet.

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Intuary, a mobile app startup, recently launched its first app, called Verbally, which is designed to bring speech to those without. Verbally is an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) solution built for the more than six million people in the U.S. suffering from speech disabilities — caused by Lou Gherig’s Disease, stroke, brain injury, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, autism, and more. The app allows users to tap the words they wish to communicate onto the app’s keyboard, or choose from pre-prepared words or phrases, which are then in turn transmitted into audio phrases.

This is the ‘voder’ we all know and love from classic science fiction stories.

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Every worthwhile thing in life has a Greek name.

1. Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it’s still on my list.

3. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

4. If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.

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More than a century ago, it was a fairly common practice for up-and-coming cities to build underground tunnels and shops.

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New Hampshire, appropriately enough, is #1. Indiana, my home state, is #3.

The top 5 are all Red states and the bottom 5 are all Blue states. That ought to tell you something.

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Room 77, which officially launched in public beta in February, has collected and indexed data on more than 500,000 hotel rooms in 2,500 properties and also crowdsources reviews and ratings from travelers.

The site provides travelers with specific details about each hotel room at a property, including the room category, square footage, bed type, elevator proximity and if it is a connecting room. For each room, Room 77 also generates a virtual Room View, simulating the actual view from that room’s window using Google Earth-enabled technology.

The best rooms for each traveler are automatically ranked using Room 77’s proprietary Room Rank algorithm that adjusts to each individual’s preferences for high or low floor, distance from elevator, view importance and need for connecting rooms. Each room is then scored with a color-coded match percentage indicating: “strong match” (green), “fair match” (yellow) and “weak match” (red). Room 77 also gives travelers insider tips on how to request desirable room(s) directly from the hotel and increase the probability of securing one.

The future is here.

For now the company is focusing on indexing every hotel room at every three- to five-star hotel and resort worldwide, which the company estimates to total approximately 25,000 properties.

Although not quite yet for us Best Western types….

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“Dig This” is a construction theme park developed by New Zealand-born Ed Mumm, who stumbled upon the idea while using a rented excavator to build his home in Steamboat Springs, Colo. After a couple of days of digging, he realized that operating machinery was a blast.

As indeed it is.

The 10-employee park has five pieces of machinery, including a pair of Caterpillar D5 track-type bulldozers and three Caterpillar 315CL hydraulic excavators. Dig This sells three-hour packages that consist of a 30-minute safety and operation orientation followed by two hours of maneuvering either a bulldozer or excavator.

Guests can either dig a trench up to 10 ft deep or build an earthen mound; there are also skill tests like picking and moving 2,000-lb tires or scooping basketballs from atop safety cones. ??Packages are priced at $400, which reflects equipment maintenance and insurance costs. Patrons 14 and older can play in the dirt.

Oh, I would so love to do this….

“Half of our customers are females, including housewives and grandmothers,” says company spokeswoman Cathy Wiedemer. “Throttling up a powerful engine and moving mounds of earth is very empowering.”

Remember it.

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Ball’s in your court, Steve.

The Other McCain appreciates one of life’s little ironies.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

Check it out.

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Everybody loves comic books.

Everybody loves dinosaurs.

What’s not to like?

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A blog devoted to food mentioned in George R.R. Martin’s books from Song of Ice and Fire.

I am not making this up. I’m sure there’s one about Tolkien-oriented food, too.

Freeberg has some fun. Watch the  video.

Check it out.

Read it.

The new underground locomotion tech comes from Professor Daniel Goldman of Georgia Tech and his colleagues, funded in their mechanical mole research by the US Army and National Science Foundation. The prof and his team were inspired by the sandfish lizard of the Sahara desert, which “swims” through the sand seas there.

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We have the technology.

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These curved, solar-panel-covered seats rotate on an axis to keep them facing the sun, generating additional energy from the rocking motion created when people climb inside. All that harvested electricity can be used to recharge gadgets plugged into the three USB ports and to illuminate a light strip on the inside of the loop.

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As you can see, it’s not technically an alarm clock, but it does have an alarm of sorts: four tunable strings that are plucked using a spinning guitar pick.

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Virgin Galactic says it has achieved another glide-test milestone in its effort to carry tourists into space.The company said Wednesday its commercial vehicle dubbed SpaceShipTwo successfully performed a key maneuver in which its twin tail booms were rotated upward at a right angle to the fuselage before safely landing

We have the technology.

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An American firm has developed a cunning, beercan-sized robot which can be shot out of a gun, stick to the side of a ship magnetically, and then climb up the ship’s side in the fashion of a pirate with a knife or cutlass between his teeth.

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I want one.

Whether you like it or not.

Read it. And watch the video.

Freeberg creates a new word.

One who begins with the end in mind, such that his vision of the end result is strong, steely and unshakable, like a metal hook sunk deep into a granite wall; while any the variables involved in getting there are outside of his concern. These people can be hazardous to the success of a project if they know barely enough about the details to monopolize the political power. The tendency is for them to envision the completion of some “favorite” minor task, as the end delivery product, so their “grappling hook” vision concerns the completion of some relatively minor task rather than the completion of the overall project itself. Their knowledge is deep but narrow.

An excellent coinage, but awkward. I suggest ‘hook-head’ as being more pithy and so more likely to achieve widespread adoption.

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You know you want one.

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I SO wish I’d had these in college….

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Design and engineering firm PEGA comes to your rescue with a new composite material made of recycled paper and polypropylene alloy. Lightweight, durable, and inexpensive to produce, it acts just like typical ABS plastic — and it even comes in the classic soul-killing beige.

Watch it.

Freeberg lets loose.

The sinful: ‘totally’, ‘utilize’, ‘basically’, ‘(mental) abuse’, ‘LOL’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘stereotype/stereotypical’, ‘Godess/Lilith/Earth-Mother’, and ‘alternative’.

Indeed, these are a good start.

9. Alternative

Because “pot-smoking long-haired flea-bitten, smell like Cheetos & ass” is too long.

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A new promotion by RadioShack electronics chain in the US states of Idaho and Montana is offering free guns to first-time subscribers of satellite TV service Dish Network.

They know their market.

You know you want to.

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There’s two kinds of people in this world: Those that can sleep on buses, trains and planes, and those who can’t. If you are the former, you’re welcome – TravAlert is an GPS enabled iPhone, Blackberry and Android app that allows you to get your precious ZZZs (or read a book, or listen to music) while you travel, without having to worry about whether you’ll miss your stop.

Back when I was riding buses and trains, I would have killed for something like this. It’s a great time to be alive.

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All the fun of the S.C.A. and none of the downers, sounds like.

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The idea: Take a picture of your food, send it in to Meal Snap, and after some techno-sorcery and number crunching, it’ll spit out a rough estimate of the calorie count and track it for you.

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Each of these is guaranteed to get you shot by a nervous Homeland Security  employee. (Harry Connolly obviously doesn’t spend all his time writing Twenty Palaces novels.)

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A terminal cancer patient tackled a would-be bank robber and held the suspect on the ground until police arrived because she “had nothing to lose,” the Orlando Sentinel reported Friday.

Helen Dunsford,66, leaped into action when a woman tried to rob an Oakland Park, Fla., Bank of America branch, tackling the suspect and pinning her to the ground until authorities arrived on the scene.

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The United States Navy has been working on next-gen weaponry ever since the last-gen was present-gen, and if the next next-gen ever actually arrives, well… we don’t stand a chance at lasting very long. According to Wired, the Navy’s Office of Naval Research is expecting laser technology (as it relates to weaponry) to mature in the next score, and if all goes well, a free-electron laser could be mounted on a ship during the 2020s. As of now, FELs produce a 14-kilowatt beam, but that figure needs to hit 100+ in order to seriously defend a ship; unfortunately for those who adore peace, it seems we’re well on our way to having just that.

Yeah, baby.

The Other McCain is on the cutting edge of an emerging public health issue.

We at the Institute appreciate the evident desire of women to contribute to men’s cardiovascular health by providing larger breasts for the purposes of therapeutic staring. However, it is my concern that men seeking treatment might mistakenly stare at these silicone-adulterated fakies, believing themselves to be receiving a large therapeutic dosage, and thereby in actuality under-dose themselves. This could put men at serious risk of cardiac trauma.

Your health is our chief priority.

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In most ways, Sarah McCarthy is your average high schooler. She has a job, college plans, but also a peculiar passion for a 16-year-old: She’s a vinyl junkie.

That’s right, analog. And none of that hipster new stuff or a USB-ready turntable from Urban Outfitters.

To this senior from Centreville, Md., there’s nothing like the raw crackle, the depth of sound, her delicate hand on diamond-tipped stylus to spin from the dusty stash of records she found in the basement of her grandfather _ yes, grandfather.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Today I turn the thermostats from HEAT to COOL, where they will remain until November. (What, you were expecting September? This is Dallas, homeboy.)

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The most unsung birthday in American business and technological history this year may be the 50th anniversary of the Xerox 914 photocopier. Although it was introduced at New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel on September 16, 1959, commercial models were not available until March 1960. The first machine, delivered to a Pennsylvania metal-fastener maker, weighed nearly 650 pounds. It needed a carpenter to uncrate it, an employee with “key operator” training, and its own 20-amp circuit. In an episode of Mad Men, set in 1962, the arrival of the hulking 914 helps get Peggy Olson her own office, after she tells her boss, “It’s hard to do business and be credible when I’m sharing with a Xerox machine.”

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Well, yeah, but who wears cuff links any more? These days, when you say ‘French cuffs’, most people think of Lady Gaga and some manacles.

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You’ve seen them, I’ve seen them. We’ve all seen them. Those screamingly pompous email footers that IT departments append to millions – billions? – of emails every day, urging us to “Consider the environment!” before asking “Do you really need to print this email?”

I’ve become a real fan of Paul Carr at TechCrunch.

Fuck the environment. Print this email immediately. And then burn it.

Oh, I know the feeling.

So, for the sake of human civilization, I urge you to join the fight. Update your footer right now and help us take back our inboxes from the footer fascists. And if you work for a big company’s IT department… well… go on… you know you want to…

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Speaking of optimism….

Nick Gillespie takes the famous writer to the woodshed.

The answer, of course, is that he chooses not to. The IRS is happy to accept extra payments from just about anyone. (And speaking of which, maybe the IRS should look into King’s return based on his claim below. The upper limit of the 28 percent rate is $200,000 for a married couple filing jointly [and lower still for other statuses], which seems far below what the best-selling author would be pulling in annually.)

Every now and then the arrested adolescents of tReason magazine get it right. (Hey, even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.)

If ever anyone needed evidence that expertise in one area of life is completely disconnected from the ability to find one’s butt with both hands in any other area of life, professional writers knock it out of the park.

And don’t get me started on Michael Moore….

Read it. And watch the video.

Airborne refueling is a very tricky operation. This is very encouraging.

Read it.

Arrrrr.