Read it.

One of the benefits of living in a modern industrial society is the people have the disposable income to indulge themselves in this sort of thing.

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And, bright fellow that he is, he agrees with me:

Piracy is not theft. If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.

TechCrunch decides to have some fun.

Now that’s comedy.

Read it.

The Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition, attracting the crème de la milk-fats-encased-in-a-phospholipid-and-protein-membrane of aspiring young scientists. Victors and near-victors in the 69-year-old contest have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants — and now, an Academy Award for best actress in a leading role.

The Natalie Portman Story — soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt.

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I want the Joe Biden map.

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Apparently, a Seattle area restaurant (right near the airport) has announced that it’s refusing to serve TSA agents in protest of the way the TSA treats passengers who wish to fly.

Now that’s comedy.

Read it.

As much as Americans might complain about rising food prices in the U.S. (even though annual CPI food inflation hasn’t been above 2% for almost two years), we’ve got the most affordable food on the planet as a share of income (see chart above).  And compared to previous years, today’s Americans have the most affordable food in U.S. history (see chart below).

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Because, you know, this is America.

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The free iPad app allows doctors to schedule patient appointments, write prescriptions and send them to pharmacies, enable reminders, take clinical notes, access lab results, and input electronic health records. The electronic medical records element is key because the Obama administration is currently offering strong incentives for doctors to start moving their health records online. DrChrono will help doctors start, finish and manage this process.

And DrChono is more than just a simple iPad app. For $99 and up, doctors can upgrade to more storage for records, and complete medical billing. The billing component is another win for doctors, who spend hundreds of dollars each month for medical billing processing. DrChrono’s system integrates with all U.S. insurance companies, even the insurance agents that only use paper billing.

If I were a doctor, I’d be all over this.

Read it.

And about fargin time, too.

Universities in Texas are set to be forced to allow students and academics to carry guns on campus, in a victory for a firearms lobby unbowed after last month’s massacre in Arizona.

A massacre that wouldn’t have happened if people in the crowd had been armed.

Read it.

What’s more, while this particular test didn’t actually involve blowing anything up, the Navy seems confident that the laser will eventually be able to do just that, as it’s just recently awarded Boeing a $163 million contract to package the laser in a weapons system that would be deployed on ships and be able to detect, track, and destroy missiles (or presumably anything else ). According the Office of Naval Research, the Navy hopes to meet that goal by 2015.

Read it.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Too bad it’s in one of the lounge areas of the Titanic.

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President Obama’s Chamber of Commerce speech singling out GE, Dow, Whirlpool, and Caterpillar for praise got me thinking: What if there were some way to invest in companies that have a close relationship to the Obama administration?

Would this be a money-making proposition, allowing an investor a piece of the upside as the companies use the power of the government to their advantage? Or would it be a money-losing proposition, because the companies whose CEOs are spending their time cultivating government relationships are doing so only as a desperate tactic because their firms are otherwise unable to compete successfully in the marketplace on the basis of the value they offer their customers?

Don’t think of it as selling out — think of it as buying in.

Read it.

A game developed by a Boston-based tech company that allows users to drive a truck full of immigrants through the desert and try not to have them tossed out is drawing fire from some immigrant advocates.

Smuggle Truck: Operation Immigration, a proposed iPhone and iPad app by Owlchemy Labs targeted for release in March, lets players navigate through what appears to be the U.S-Mexican border.

As the truck drives over cliffs, mountains and dead animals, immigrants fall off the truck’s bed. Scores are calculated by the number of immigrants helped across the border.

Actually, I can’t think of anything more American.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of President Ronald Reagan.

I had the pleasure of meeting Governor Reagan in 1975 when he came to speak at the Yale Political Union, and then the honor of working on his campaign during spring break the following March. Those were good times.

Read it.

The Rebranding of Indolence as ‘Emerging Adulthood’

There is, for example, Nicole, a young woman Arnett interviews in his book who grew up in a housing project and began working at eight to care for her younger siblings. In a strikingly mature, actually adult way, she managed to hold down a full-time job, take care of her family, and earn a degree. Though this may strike some as a remarkable achievement, this view overlooks how much more fun she could have had if she didn’t have all those pesky responsibilities to weigh her down. “Is it only a grim pessimist like me who sees how many roadblocks there will be on the way to achieving those dreams and who wonders what kind of freewheeling emerging adulthood she is supposed to be having?” Henig laments. Given freedom from economic want, social mores that encourage early marriage, and limits to college access, every poor Vietnamese rice farmer and rural Pakistani bride could be going to yoga classes and selling her handmade textiles on Etsy. Wouldn’t that make the world a better place?

It’s a great time to be a slacker.

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The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population, for example, makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest — extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding.

Read it.

And that’s the important thing, of course.

The Guild does for online gaming what Galaxy Quest did for Star Trek. Herself and I watched the first season during Date Night last night and enjoyed it immensely.

Do you want to date my avatar?

Game on!

If you ever hear anyone complain about ‘no women in tech’, point them to Felicia Day (accepted at Julliard but went to UT Austin instead, double major in math and music, National Merit Scholar, class valedictorian, etc.). She was homeschooled, of course.

Read it. And watch the video.

This is creepy and cool at the same time.

Read it.

We have the technology.

The Midnight Rider.

Representative of the luxury days of railroad travel, she is classified as a “Tractor-Trailer Limousine”, and is the only one ever built.

At 50,000 pounds, it still weighs less than a Sherman tank.

Read it.

College has changed since I went there.

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What he said….

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Just helping the Melting Pot along a little.

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One of the coolest apps we’ve seen at CES 2011 this year has to be Aisle 411, an iPhone app which will help you find out which aisle the grocery item you are looking for is located in. The App is available for the iPhone and will be coming soon to Android and will also be available as a mobile web page.

There’s an app for that.

Read it.

More signs the incoming House Republican leadership gets it. Even before the new Congress took power today, the power of congressional appropriators had been circumscribed, as Republicans forced the committee to surrender its power to place special interest earmarks into the 12 annual spending bills under its purview.

Woo-hoo!

Watch it.

I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

Read it.

Much of my library consists of paper books — 4000 at last estimate. They take up a lot of the space in my house; if it weren’t for them, my wife and I could survive in half the space. If I want to find one, good luck; I know roughly where it ought to be, but there are no guarantees.

The files in my LIBRARY directory (28,704 as of this minute) include full books, short stories, articles, and literally anything I can download from Google Books, Project Gutenberg, or print from the Internet through the Mac’s built in PDF printer driver; they occupy 37 GB on an external drive attached to my Mac Mini that is about the size of a Happy Meal. I keep them classified by LC number but with Spotlight I don’t even need that.

Consequently I am rapidly turning the Real Books into PDFs (what I don’t just buy in MOBI or EPUB format to begin with); they then go to the local public library, where I’m sure they’ll find a loving home.

We live in amazing times.

Read it.

Considering that their government is composed of the PlayStation’s target demographic, what could be more appropriate?

Watch it.

Scott Joplin played by the St Luke’s Bottle Band. This has to be seen to be believed.

God bless America.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Watch it.

Who knew Steve Martin could sing?

Read it.

I love old catalogs.

Charles Murray is a brilliant man.

Read it.

Read it.

A gun-wielding woman burst into a North Carolina television station in America on Tuesday forcing the evening newscast off the air, though no one was injured, the station said.

And who hasn’t wanted to do that?

Read it.

Last month, Iowa voters ousted three of the seven justices on the Iowa Supreme Court – a move that was widely recognized as a referendum on the court’s decision to strike down a ban on same-sex marriage last year.

Apparently the ouster of the trio wasn’t enough for some new members of the Iowa House. Three freshman Republican members are drafting legislation that would begin the process of impeachment for the remaining four justices on the state Supreme Court.

According to this story in the Iowa Independent, the trio is working on the legislation that could result in the removal of the four justices — Mark Cady, David Wiggins, Daryl Hecht and Brent Appel.

Democracy! Such a deal!

“Are Republicans really considering shutting down state government to pursue an extreme, partisan agenda that will do nothing to help middle class families?” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Democrat, said to the Iowa Independent. “The House has no business spending weeks on impeachment proceedings instead of putting Iowans back to work and growing our economy.”

Same old tired Democrat talking points! How stale! Note the tired hack phrases ‘extreme partisan agenda’ and ‘middle class families’ … as well as the standard socialist agenda that it’s the government’s business to ‘put Iowans back to work’ and ‘grow the economy’, when it was the government that caused the problems in the first place.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

Yup, women men do not want to see are bitching away about the women men do like to see. Hey, I wonder if that simple statement just sums it all up. Ya think?

Read it.

Kickstarter is an amazing idea that may just represent the future of technical innovation.

The watch is pretty cool, too.

Watch it.

Read it.

A look into a geeked-out Brooklyn office reveals the beginnings of a product that every nerd in America would buy: a front door that unlocks when you check in.

Hall and his brother Erin Sparling, also a Web developer, installed the Foursquare door a couple of months ago as a way to let their handful of underlings enter the office. He took me through the door system and the rest of his uber-wired stuff, which include a home-built touch-screen media system, improvised satellite T1 connection, and a coffee table made of an Apple X-serve.

Read it.

The Kitara discards old fashioned strings and has you strumming along on a multitouch display instead, populating the fretboard with a litany of buttons that modify the aural output from your digital input. It has an onboard synthesizer, but the real magic will happen once you plug it into your own audio equipment and start experimenting. Basically, it’s like the Kinect of electronic music….

We have the technology.

I received this in an e-mail from my mother-in-law, attributed to Leslie Durham:

I do not like this, Uncle Sam,
I do not like the health care scam.
I do not like these dirty crooks,
or how they lie and cook the books.
I do not like when Congress steals,
I do not like their secret deals.
I do not like this speaker Nan,
I do not like this ‘YES, WE CAN’.
I do not like this spending spree —
I’m smart; I know that nothing’s free!
I do not like your smug replies,
when I complain about your lies.
I do not like this kind of “hope.”
I do not like it — nope, nope, nope!

Read it.

Because you just don’t have anything more important to do today.

Bryan Caplan points out that, yes, Jonah is a really good writer.

Read it.

The free market works, even when you don’t want it to.

Over at the White House, a farmers’ market has sprouted, a garden has been cultivated and holiday guests are being offered poached fruit. But the area surrounding the Capitol is awash in milkshakes, grilled cheese sandwiches and mildly baroque pizza.

That’s because the White House is out of touch with Real America. Duh.

Mr. Mendelsohn has worked with Michelle Obama extensively on her anti-obesity campaign. But that didn’t stop him from starting a Capitol Hill-area burger spot, Good Stuff Eatery, and We, The Pizza, which opened four months ago.

Heh.