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.

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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.”

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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.

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It don’t take long if you’re good.

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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.

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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.

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Especially fervent in the United States, the enthusiasm has been described as forming a “Bacon Nation”.

We got it.

The Other McCain pulls no punches.

Not since Americans were intoduced to the term “Scozzafava” (a synonym for two-faced backstabber) has any new hipster phrase caught on as quickly as “Murkowski,” meaning selfish bitch.

And that says pretty much all that needs to be said on the subject.

Read it.

At first blush, it’s a familiar story: A small-town girl beats the odds to win fame and fortune at a beauty pageant. But the twist is that the small town of Anysha Panesar, newly crowned America’s Perfect Teen, is not in America at all — and that has some folks up in arms.

Anysha, 16, hails from Llangan, Wales — some 3,500 miles from U.S. shores. While on a family vacation in Kissimmee, Fla., last month, she entered the America’s Perfect Teen pageant on a whim. But lo and behold, when the winner was announced, she was the last young woman standing among 30 contestants.

Had she been Mexican — or Somalian — nobody would have dared say anything.

The pageant’s sponsors also had a few choice words for its founder, Michael Galanes, who steadfastly maintains the right girl won America’s Perfect Teen — even if she doesn’t happen to be American. “There really is no reason for any sort of uproar,” Galanes told NBC’s Michelle Kosinski. “You know how you say, that girl had ‘it’? Well, she truly did.”

We’ve always said that being an American is an attitude, not an ethnicity. This just proves it.

Anysha said she’s going to put her scholarship money to good use; after completing high school in Wales, she plans to relocate to the U.S. to study broadcasting. In fact, she is already in talks to launch her own reality TV show about her year as America’s Perfect Teen’s reigning queen.

There are many people in this world who are Americans at heart; they just haven’t gotten here yet. She’s obviously one of them.

Read it.

A court has ruled that women’s nipples do not enjoy freedom of expression under the US Constitution.

The case was brought by a 16 year old girl, who was one of three women accused of exposing their breasts to passing traffic on an Indianapolis street last year.

According to the Indiana Star, Judge Cale Bradford wrote, “In the end, (the girl) would have us declare by judicial fiat that the public display of fully-uncovered female breasts is no different than the public display of male breasts, when the citizens of Indiana, speaking through their elected representatives, say otherwise. This we will not do.”

Read it.

Freeberg is always worth reading.

This is not a list of one hundred greatest movie scenes, and it isn’t a list of one hundred long movie scenes.

These are movie scenes that promise something wonderful, and compel you to watch them. They assert themselves. They do not merely tempt you to put off a potty break. That would not work; that is what pause buttons are for. These are scenes that you can intuitively sense must be kept intact, no matter how long they are, and you have to consume them that way.

Read it.

The plan is to first upgrade each cell site’s backhaul connection to Gigabit Ethernet so they’ll have the necessary bandwidth to support the 5-12Mbps down and 2-5Mbps up speeds with 30-150ms latency promised for Big Red’s LTE network at launch.

Read it.

Who cares about the corn genome when you can study chocolate instead?

The genome sequence, which enters the public domain today, is the result of a partnership among a few unlikely bedfellows: Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms, Milky Way bars and other treats; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service; and IBM. The trio hopes international agricultural researchers will immediately start refining the sequence. As with any gene mapping project, decoding the complete genome will take some time.

Pogue is. Of course, he’s paid to be.

Hipmunk is a flight-search site, a rival to Travelocity, Kayak, Expedia or Orbitz. But it’s far less cluttered. Its main screen has only 14 buttons and controls (From, To, Depart and various corporate links). Travelocity and Expedia each have over 40—not including ads, which don’t appear on Hipmunk.

So you type in JFK, SFO, 9/30 or whatever, and hit Search. Then, instead of an all-text table, the flights are laid out, color-coded by airline, as bars on a timeline of the day. You see exactly when they leave and land, and how many hours you’re traveling, based on the lengths of the bars.

Sounds like a winner. If I traveled by air — which thank God I don’t — I would love it.

Read it.

Quicksand once offered filmmakers a simple recipe for excitement: A pool of water, thickened with oatmeal, sprinkled over the top with wine corks. It was, in its purest form, a plot device unburdened by character, motivation, or story: My god, we’re sinking! Will we escape this life-threatening situation before time runs out? Those who weren’t rescued simply vanished from the script: It’s too late—he’s gone.

Proof positive that Slate isn’t inhabited solely by humorless leftist tools.

(Or maybe it is, but they occasionally take drugs.)

Freeberg is the gift that keeps on giving.

The President is complaining “they [My critics, special interests, the enemy] talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true.”

I have a lot of thoughts about this. Besides the obvious one: What a whiny-butt.

If a dog makes an accident on the rug, he doesn’t blame it on the previous dog.

Read it.

The free channel, which the Associated Press reports will allow teachers to upload class material and expand upon their research, and students to download podcasts, videos and other multimedia lessons, comes after a nearly year-long effort by the state to gather the best of existing teacher training videos and programs for students. Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, told students at a Houston high school yesterday that the program “will really consolidate” existing content.

Watch it.

This. Is. So. Cool. I want one of these so badly, I’m speechless.

Read it.

When even the fish are against you, it’s time to quit.

Watch it.

The most valuable thing in this video is the lady herself. Where these days can you find a young woman who can build something this? Or even a young man?

Girl, you are worth more than rubies. God grant you many years.

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The device, popularly known as a ‘pain gun,’ is a non-lethal weapon designed to deliver an overwhelming heat to say, members of a mob scene or rioters at a prison, causing an immediate flight response. The Air Force, which helped test the device, has assured the world of its safety, and recently the devices went on sale.

A useful appendage to any public space. (Coming to an anti-WTO riot near you?)

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“I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could take a photograph of her page of music and hear it instantaneously,” he recalled. “She’d know what the right notes are, and what the right rhythms are, and she could imitate what she heard.”

Soon he was dreaming of a device — or maybe just software running on a computer — that could do everything he had learned to do in music theory class: read and play a printed musical score, and listen to a passage of music and transcribe it, down to the key signature, the tempo and the time signature. He said that a quick check showed that nothing then on the market could do all that.

Read it.

There’s a lot of stuff out there that can only be described as “burger junk.” You know, the things sold on late night informercials that try to convince you that your burgers are not good enough, fast enough, or novel enough for discerning modern palates. In the interest of being utterly thorough, this week I’ve decided to round up five of the most popular burger gadgets and put them through their paces.

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Here’s the deal: Remember how Snooki, drunk or sober, was never seen without that Coach bag dangling from the crook of her arm? Snooki and her Coach were as synonymous as The Situation and his six-pack. But then the winds of change started blowing on Jersey Shore. Every photograph of Guido-huntin’ Snooki showed her toting a new designer purse. Why the sudden disloyalty? Was she trading up? Was she vomiting into her purses and then randomly replacing them? The answer is much more intriguing.

Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s the shocker: They are not sending her their own bags. They are sending her each other’s bags! Competitors‘ bags!

The bottom line? Nobody in fashion wants to co-brand with Snooki.