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.

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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.

Read it.

… winds up speaking with an Irish accent….

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They wanted me to go to jihad, but I said no, no, no….

Three backpack-clad technicians, standing out of the line of fire, operate the three robots with wireless video-game-style controllers. One swivels the video camera on the armed robot until it spots a sniper on a rooftop. The machine gun pirouettes, points and fires in two rapid bursts. Had the bullets been real, the target would have been destroyed.

No, ‘killed’. The target — a sniper — would have been ‘killed’. C’mon, New York Times, use the word. I dare you.

Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.

“Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs” as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.

Gee, isn’t that what jihadists are doing right now? Except that they aren’t part of the Blame America First crowd, which I suspect Wendell Wallach is.

Civilians will be at greater risk, people in Mr. Wallach’s camp argue, because of the challenges in distinguishing between fighters and innocent bystanders. That job is maddeningly difficult for human beings on the ground. It only becomes more difficult when a device is remotely operated.

No, it will be easier, because a commander won’t be hesitating to do the right thing because of the prospect of some bleeding-heart Cincy Sheehan back home raising a stink because her widdle babykins got killed doing his duty.

Yet the shift to automated warfare may offer only a fleeting strategic advantage to the United States. Fifty-six nations are now developing robotic weapons, said Ron Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist and a government-financed researcher who has argued that it is possible to design “ethical” robots that conform to the laws of war and the military rules of escalation.

But it’s not ‘nations’ that are the problem; it’s two-bit terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who one doubts are spending a lot of their R&D dinars on robot fighting vehicles.

“If the decisions are being made by a human being who has eyes on the target, whether he is sitting in a tank or miles away, the main safeguard is still there,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, which tracks war crimes. “What happens when you automate the decision? Proponents are saying that their systems are win-win, but that doesn’t reassure me.”

Hate to break it to you, Tom, but your reassurance isn’t a high priority with the people who actually have to face the murderous swine of the world. (I love that: ‘… Human Rights Watch, which tracks war crimes’ — but only when they aren’t committed by Muslims. You Can Look It Up.)

Read it.

Reason magazine is having entirely too much fun with the Theater of Security Administration.

Eric Raymond sees the light.

Welcome ashore, Eric. It’s pretty amusing to see all the Big Name People come to the same conclusion I came to ten years ago.

Megan McArdle sees the light.

In fact, I’ve already left.  My cousin’s wedding in Buffalo in October?  Drove eight hours each way.  Going to visit Dad in Boston over Christmas?  We’re taking a slow train from DC rather than subject ourselves to the increasing indignity of flying.  If it’s under 500 miles, I’ll do anything rather than hop on a plane.  And if it’s over 500 miles, it had better be way over . . . or I’d better be carrying a cooler with a still-beating heart in it.

Read it. And listen … if you dare.

You know you want to.

Read it.

Zuckerberg told the audience: “The farm bureau has agreed to give us FB.com and we in return have agreed to not sell Farm subsidies.”

I guess he’s not the semi-autistic jerk that everybody pretends he is.

Read it.

Of course, it’s not a real AK-47, which is a fully automatic weapon that is illegal to own for almost everybody these days. It will probably be a semi-automatic version.

Watch it.

Watch it.

Lynn Viehl enjoyed this conversation entirely too much.

Now he stared at me. “You don’t have any apps on your phone?” In the same tone someone might ask, “You don’t have any panties on?”

To show him I wasn’t lying, I took out the disposable cell phone I’ve been lugging around for the last four years. It still has nearly all of the 1300 minutes I got for free when the disposable phone company forced me to give up the original phone I bought (seven years ago) because their equipment no longer supported the clunky old thing (they also gave me a newer, slimmer phone for free.) P.S., it also has another 1200 free minutes I’ve collected over the last four years when I renew my airtime.

The nice young man examined it with the awe of an Egyptologist discovering a lost king’s tomb. “What does it do?”

“It sends and receives phone calls.” I thought for a minute. “And it rings. That’s pretty much it.” Before he could launch into the “But don’t you want a phone that can take pictures, check the internet, play music, access Twitter and Facebook, realign the Hubble” speech I added, “That’s all I need it to do.”

Read it.

Back in April 2009 a unanimous Iowa Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage was a constitutional right in Iowa notwithstanding law, and several millenia of human tradition, to the contrary. In one fell swoop seven justices used the brute force of their office to intervene in what was clearly a political decision. Unfortunately for three of their number Iowa is a state in which at least some judges remain accountable to the people. Last Tuesday the voters of Iowa created a shockwave by dismissing three Supreme Court justices, Chief Justice Marsha Ternus, Justice David Baker, and Justice Michael Streit, via a retention election.

By investing any group of people with near absolute power and absolute unaccountability you end up with the Ninth Circuit. You end up with the mind bending experience of constitutional amendments being declared unconstitutional.

Read it.

It don’t take long if you’re good.

Read it.

Democracy works every time it’s tried. That’s what drives the Crust insane.

Three Iowa Supreme Court Justices were tossed as a result of their votes mandating that same-sex couples be allowed to marry.  They are the first Justices who failed to be retained since 1962, when the current system was implemented.

Although I don’t understand the complaint of Drake University Law School Dean Allan Vestal that this was a “misuse” of the right of voters to vote on judicial retention.  Isn’t this exactly what the retention power is intended to do?

Heh. Would that the U.S. Supreme Court had the same system.

Read it.

Supposedly every issue from May 1872 to March 2009.

Why we won’t be doing genetic engineering any time soon.

Abstract: We propose a model for the fluctuation dynamics of the local denaturation zones (bubbles) in double-stranded DNA. In our formulation, the DNA strand is model as a one dimensional Rouse chain confined at both the ends. The bubble is formed when the transverse displacement of the chain attains a critical value. This simple model effectively reproduces the autocorrelation function for the tagged base pair in the DNA strand as measured in the seminal single molecule experiment by Altan-Bonnet et. al (Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 138101 (2003)). Although our model is mathematically similar to the one proposed by Chatterjee et al. (J. Chem. Phys. 127, 155104 (2007)) it goes beyond a single reaction coordinate description by incorporating the chain dynamics through a confined Rouse chain and thus considers the collective nature of the dynamics. Our model also shows that the autocorrelation function is very sensitive to the relaxation times of the normal modes of the chain, which is obvious since the fluctuation dynamics of the bubble has the contribution from the different normal modes of the chain.

Read it.

Normally I hate neologisms as vampires do the daystar, but Lynn Viehl is a Professional Writer, so she must know more than me, right?

Although I suppose the ‘wordrobe’ is actually a pun … but I hate them, too.

Ah, well.

Read it.

You can build a mainframe from the things you have at home.

“The 747 represented the single largest industrial achievement in modern history and its abandonment in the deserts make a statement about the obsolescence and ephemeral nature of our technology and our society,” the David Hertz website states. “As a structure and engineering achievement, the aircraft encloses a lot of space using the least amount of materials in a very resourceful and efficient manner. The recycling of the 4.5 million parts of this ‘big aluminum can’ is seen as an extreme example of sustainable reuse and appropriation. American consumers and industry throw away enough aluminum in a year to rebuild our entire airplane commercial fleet every three months.”

Pass the granola, Stardust.

Watch it.

And very well, too.

‘No matter how talented you are, your talent is going to fail you if you’re not skilled.’

‘I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill.’

Read it.

Slow news day.

Read it.

A woman who became the poster girl of Taliban oppression in Afghanistan after being mutilated by her husband has unveiled her new face to the world.

When Aisha was 12, her father vowed to repay a debt by promising her in marriage to a Taliban fighter. She was handed over to the fighter’s family, abused and made to sleep in a stable with animals.

She was caught after trying to escape and her nose and ears were sliced off by her husband as a punishment.

After being left for dead in the mountains, she crawled to her grandfather’s house and was taken to an American medical facility.

Following time time at a shelter in Kabul, she was flown to the US by the Grossman Burn Foundation in August and stayed with an American family.

Read it.

With silver bullets (rather than wood?), it’s really a werewolf hunter’s special. But you know you still want one.

Moe Lane has a point.

I’m pretty sure that trying to get away from pre-potato, pre-maize, pre-chocolate, and pre-tomato cooking was what fueled the European Age of Exploration…

Read it.

That’s modern America for you. Most people these days think that ‘reticence’ is something you use to get rid of fire ants.

I must say, I’m surprised that she didn’t get the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“I regret it with all my heart,” she said. “I would never intentionally hurt the people that are mentioned on that.” She has since declined to comment.

Oh, that’s all right, then.

A Duke spokesman said the college was “reaching out to those who’ve been affected by this incident”.

“Our foremost concern is to provide for the wellbeing of our students, and to respect their privacy,” he said.

I must confess that I don’t see how ‘reaching out to them’ respects their privacy. Perhaps that has a non-obvious meaning in an academic context, much like ‘free speech’ and ‘tolerance’.

Read it.

Michael Pollan, of course, is the author of The Carnivore’s Dilemma and other light classics. He’s heavily into plants, though, so he and I don’t travel in the same circles.

Read it.

Won’t stop the FemiNazis from bitching, of course, but it’s progress.

Read it.

In death notices from around the nation, the recently deceased are reaching back to canvass the living.

“In lieu of flowers, Hal has requested that donations be made to your local animal shelter or to any candidate running against Barack Obama in 2012,” reads the death notice of Harold Groves, a retired Air Force fighter pilot who died at age 77 on Aug. 26 in Myrtle Beach, Fla.

Donations should be sent to “the American Cancer Society or who ever is running against President Barack Obama in 2012,” echoes the notice for Donald Charles Unsworth of Rome, Pa., also an Air Force veteran, who died at age 78.

Read it.

Household chores, for many people, are an annoyance—one more thing to check off on an already lengthy to-do list. But for some folks, doing household tasks, like cooking, cleaning and yard work, is a welcome, relaxing escape from other family and work demands.

Absolutely. Washing dishes, vacuuming, scrubbing the sink, any repetitive mechanical operation that doesn’t take a lot of thought is very relaxing. You can do it at your own speed, and once you’re done your world is better than it was.

Read it.

Some good news for a change.

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The US Navy’s plan to fit its next aircraft carrier with electromagnetic mass-driver catapults instead of steam launchers is reportedly on track, with shore trials using test weights a success. The progress of the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), the first of its kind, is of interest to the Royal Navy as it could offer a way to massively cut the money spent on the Service’s two new carriers – or, more accurately, to cut the money spent on their aeroplanes.