Read it. And watch the video.

Developed by Simicon, this new speed sensor promises to take highway surveillance to new heights of precision. Unlike most photo radar systems, which track only one violator at a time, Simicon’s device can simultaneously identify and follow up to 32 vehicles across four lanes. Whenever a car enters its range, the Cordon will automatically generate two images: one from wide-angle view and one closeup shot of the vehicle’s license plate. It’s also capable of instantly measuring a car’s speed and mapping its position, and can easily be synced with other databases via WiFi, 3G or WiMAX. Plus, this device is compact and durable enough to be mounted upon a tripod or atop a road sign, making it even harder for drivers to spot.

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Farmer and businessman Ryan Carr of Mayfield has four robots on his farm near Ashburton which allow the cows to decide when they want to be milked.

Mr Carr told Country Life that the robotic system also means cows can eat and move at their own pace.

He says that’s doing wonders for their health and they have a longer life expectancy.

Farm production has also improved and is 4% ahead of this time last year.

Mr Carr said each unit costs about $250,000.

As Gibson said, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

(Cue handwringing from leftists over the agricultural jobs lost and stupid people left without work.)

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This is seriously cool.

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German archaeologists have unearthed “sensational” evidence of a lost Roman camp that formed a vital part of the frontier protecting Rome’s empire against the Germanic hordes.

Read it.  And ponder the graphs.

The Democrats are pushing for more spending and more debt, emphasizing the supposed need to spend more on teachers and schools. In fact, however, this country has carried out a laboratory experiment over the past four decades, and we have conclusively proved that more spending on education has nothing to do with successfully educating our children.

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In the remote, windswept state of North Dakota, job fairs often bustle with more recruiters than potential workers. The North Dakota unemployment rate hasn’t risen above five percent since 1987.  In the state’s oil country, unemployment hovers at around two percent, and pretty much everyone who wants a job—as long as they are old enough and not incarcerated—is employed.  North Dakota has either tied for or had the lowest unemployment in the country since 2008.

I’m sure they would even take people from Michigan.

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Let’s do the numbers.

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Fans of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ know the quiet New Zealand town of Matamata as the location of Hobbiton, the home of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, and the beginning and end of their respective quests. Having been vacant for nearly a decade, with just the frames of hobbit holes carved into the hills to mark the location, Matamata has been a favorite stop for fans who take the ‘Lord of the Rings’ tours in New Zealand.

Well, fans have good and bad news. The bad news: as of last week, Matamata is closed to the public. The good news: it’s because they’re rebuilding the Hobbiton set for a two week shoot. As location shooting for ‘The Hobbit’ ramps up, Hobbiton is back and in full swing once again!

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Treasure hunters claim they have discovered two ships from Sir Francis Drake’s fleet off the coast of Panama and believe his coffin could lie on the seabed nearby.

Aaaaarrrrr….

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From Nazis and film buffs to heckling and humble pie, the obscure origins of commonly-used words and phrases are explained in a new etymological guide.

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Watchmaker Hublot has recreated the mechanism using modern techniques and shrunk it down to nearly postage-stamp size. The new watch – a one of a kind – features the full mechanism as historians and scientists understand it along with a standard three-hand tourbillon as well as a date register.

Available soon from Mattel, if they can persuade the Consumer Protection Agency that it’s safe for kids.

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I knew about the churches but didn’t think about the satellite dishes.

Urban Boy Scouts, take note.

Freedman gives us another new word.

‘A system of government where the least capable are elected by the least capable of producing and where the members of society least capable of sustaining themselves or succeed are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.’

No, he didn’t invent it, but if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t know about it. So to him be the glory.

Unlike what you might call a “left-wing-tocracy,” an ineptocracy is to be criticized not quite so much for being lefty, as for putting all persons & classes in roles that are polar-opposite from where they belong. The mediocre are examples of excellence, the undecided & apathetic are examples of great leadership, children are examples of wisdom and the indigent are examples of desirable, productive living. But left-wing-ocracies mutate into ineptocracies, or vice-versa, so they could be regarded as synonymous. Of all American cities that are home to five million people or more, perhaps 4 out of 5 could be fairly characterized as both. Ineptocracies are governed by left-wing pukes. Left-wing pukes create ineptocracies.

Read the whole thing.

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The fuss over Siri’s sex also raises a larger question: From voice-mail systems to GPS devices to Siri and beyond, why are so many computerized voices female?

One answer may lie in biology. Scientific studies have shown that people generally find women’s voices more pleasing than men’s.

“It’s much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,” said Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass, author of “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.” “It’s a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.”

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Thinfilm, a Norwegian developer of printable memory, has co-announced with California’s Xerox PARC a development that takes a big step towards the day when every manufactured object will report in to the internet.

Thinfilm and PARC’s breakthrough is a technology that can print not only memory onto, well, thin films, but can now also print transistors to address and manage that memory.

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Designed by Stefano Boeri – architect, academic and former editor of design and architecture magazine Domus – his Bosco Verticale is a towering 27-story structure, currently under construction in Milan, Italy. Once complete, the tower will be home to the world’s first vertical forest.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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A huge early Celtic calendar construction has been discovered in the royal tomb of Magdalenenberg, nearby Villingen-Schwenningen in Germany’s Black Forest. This discovery was made by researchers at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum at Mainz in Germany when they evaluated old excavation plans. The order of the burials around the central royal tomb fits exactly with the sky constellations of the Northern hemisphere.

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But this week, in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics, researchers provide evidence for such a theory.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Oh, this would be so much fun.

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Hey, that’s a serious question.

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Those corpses in the corner? Just collateral damage.

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With its vote on September 21, the Senate Appropriations Committee ended the rail boosters’ hopes of getting a meaningful appropriation for high-speed rail in the new (FY 2012) fiscal year. It probably also dealt a decisive death blow to President Obama’s loopy goal of “giving 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.”

By including only a token $100 million for high-speed rail as a “placeholder” in their FY 2012 budget recommendations (a sum that is likely to be further cut in the House-Senate negotiations on the FY 2012 appropriations), Senate appropriators have done more than merely declare a temporary slowdown in the high-speed rail program. They have effectively given a vote of “no confidence” to President Obama’s signature infrastructure initiative. Along with their House counterparts who had denied the program any new money, the Senate lawmakers have sent a bipartisan signal that Congress has no appetite for pouring more money into a venture that many lawmakers have come to view as a poster child for wasteful government spending.

And one more attempt by ‘progressives’ to revert to the nineteenth century bites the dust. Good riddance. I just wish that taxpayers could get their money back.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

An Informative Chart.

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No more Russian boomers. The end of a era.

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Mossberg likes it:

I’ve been testing this new iPad app, and I like it. It is much cleaner and more attractive than the cluttered Britannica website and sports some nice features, including a dynamic “link map” showing the relationship between topics in a visual format. Unlike the Web version, it is free of ads. The app is expected to be available in a couple of weeks.

Ignorant? There’s an app for that….

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What’s that in the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Yup, it’s a plane, and it is currently 31,100 feet high and traveling to St. Louis from Chicago. Simply enter “planes overhead”, and Wolfram|Alpha will provide a list of flights overhead based on your current geoIP location.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Ooops — sorry — Predator drone. Well, we’ll miss you.

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Dubbed G.hn, the ITU standard promises up to 1Gbps theoretical throughput, with real-world usage over electrical lines expected to reach between 250Mbps and 400Mbps. If that sounds appealing to you, you’re not alone. Service providers like the idea of G.hn since it allows them more flexibility than previous efforts. In fact, they like it so much that — despite G.hn’s capacity — they have insisted on quality of service standards that could limit or prevent consumers from installing it themselves after they buy adapters from retailers.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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They asked if he would take a bullet for the President, and he said ‘Of course!’. I guess that’s what Nobel Laureates do.

Read it. And watch the video.

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Huh — perhaps AlGore really can serve as an alternative to fossil fuels.

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US researchers say they have demonstrated how cells fuelled by bacteria can be “self-powered” and produce a limitless supply of hydrogen.

Cool.

However, the team added, the current cost of operating the new technology is too high to be used commercially.

Oh … another ‘green’ ‘alternative’ source of energy that will no doubt require massive taxpayer subsidies. Boring….

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And you think your job is tough….

Tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Check it out.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Old-time egalitarian societies were just too stable to survive in a dog-eat-dog world, according to Stanford University researchers, a situation which led to them being overrun by the stratified societies which dominate humanity today.

The study used a computer simulation to compare demographic stability and rates of migration for societies that shared everything equally and those that had a class structure with those on top controlling most of the resources.

 The researchers found that, when resources were consistently scarce, egalitarian societies didn’t have the motivation to change their ways because they shared out the pain, but in unequal communities, the have-nots tended to go in search of a better life when things got bad.

If resources fluctuated, the class societies were the ones that were stable because the ruling class always had plenty, so they expanded, while the sharing and caring communities found it hard to adapt and once again stayed as they were.

I hope this isn’t the same computer software they use to do the Global Warming simulations.

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When your alarm clock doesn’t go off, you can thank a humble enzyme for getting you out of bed, scientists at the Salk Institute reveal in research published today.

Researchers examining the mechanisms that control our sleep have found the chemical reaction that makes us stir abruptly, throw the cat off the bed and stumble blinking into the bathroom.

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Supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Schlein and his research partner Günter C. Müller concocted an array of nectar poisons known as Attractive Toxic Sugar Baits that are easy to make, environmentally friendly and inexpensive.

In tests in Israel and in West Africa, the baits knocked down mosquito populations by 90 percent. Even better, they nearly eliminated older females, the most dangerous mosquitoes. (Only females bite humans, and only mosquitoes that have already picked up malaria, dengue or another disease from one human can inject it with their saliva into another human.)

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All your Crayola questions answered.

Starting with a fresh box of twenty-four Crayola crayons I measured each with an i1 pro spectrophotometer to create a set of spectral power distributions (SPD) of the reflected light. You may not know this, but a spectrophotometer is good for much more than creating screen and printer profiles—for instance, I can tell you with some precision the color of my tongue (and my dog’s).

Well. There it is.

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Good. I hate those damned things.

When Keith Wearne goes grocery shopping, checking out with a cashier is worth the few extra moments, rather than risking that a self-serve machine might go awry and delay him even more.

Most shoppers side with Wearne, studies show. And with that in mind, some grocery store chains nationwide are bagging the do-it-yourself option, once considered the wave of the future, in the name of customer service.

“It’s just more interactive,” Wearne said during a recent shopping trip at Manchester’s Big Y Foods. “You get someone who says hello; you get a person to talk to if there’s a problem.”

And you provide jobs for young people, partially disabled people, and those on the left side of the bell curve who, let’s face it, don’t have a lot of options.

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Sarah Dutton of CBS News crunched the numbers from the latest CBS/New York Times poll and found that of the last 6 presidents, only Jimmy Carter had worse CBS/NYT polling numbers at this point in his presidency. His approval is 7 points below his disapproval numbers — a minus 7 overall.

Only Jimmy Carter had a negative number at this point — minus 18.

Obama has the highest disapproval number — 50%. Even Carter’s disapproval was not that high, at 49%.

But hang in there, Barry; you’ve still got a year to go.