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Just a little reminder that Islam isn’t the only enemy out there.

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The Knigge Society says the practice of greeting colleagues and business partners with a kiss on the cheek is uncomfortable for many Germans.

Yeah, if they wanted to be French, they’d move.

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If, of course, that’s what you should want to do.

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Scientists are reporting the first clear success with a new approach for treating leukemia _ turning the patients’ own blood cells into assassins that hunt and destroy their cancer cells.

They’ve only done it in three patients so far, but the results were striking: Two appear cancer-free up to a year after treatment, and the third patient is improved but still has some cancer. Scientists are already preparing to try the same gene therapy technique for other kinds of cancer.

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When asked by reporters whether officers would consider arresting tweeters in relation to incitement to violence, Mr Kavanagh said “absolutely”.

He later added: “That investigation is already under way and that is exactly the sort of thing we are looking at.”

Just a reminder: Ain’t no Bill of Rights in Britain, and the European Human Rights Commission is already backed up.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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For all those poor people out there who can’t eat healthy food because capitalism is ‘pressin’ ’em.

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 It’s taken three years to find a winner that could meet the high standards set forth by the DOE, specifically “ensuring that performance, quality, lifetime, cost, and availability meet expectations for widespread adoption and mass manufacturing.” Requirements further stipulated that the 60W incandescent killer use less than 10 watts of power, and provide energy savings of 83 percent.

Lileks is on the case.

On this web page I will be showing some of the buildings of Mayberry that were used in 2 episodes of Star Trek, the orginal series. The Episodes are “Miri” and “The City on the Edge of Forever”. Both have some great glimpses of Mayberry that we normally never see in a TAGS episode.

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And, even if they haven’t, can they convince a gullible public that they have?

In reality, based on the somewhat blurry images, no one is quite sure what exactly the object is; its mysterious dimensions have already caused quite a bit of speculation, and of course UFO enthusiasts are already preparing their “I told ya so” stories. Whatever it may be, its seemingly circular shape is somewhat of an anomaly for the sea floor.

Take a close look at the picture and see for yourself.

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Wouldn’t it be amusing if some Presbyterian flew a plane into it?

Just sayin’.

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Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

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This fearsome contraption is the handiwork of a couple of amateur DEFCON-types who reckoned that any self-respecting spy plane ought to be able to impersonate cellphone towers. And that’s exactly what the Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform does — it tricks AT&T and T-Mobile handsets into connecting to it, then re-routes the incoming calls via VOIP so they don’t drop, while simultaneously recording all conversations to 32GB of onboard storage. It can also handle a bit of WiFi snooping on the side, thanks to a Linux-based hacking toolkit and a 340 million word dictionary for guessing passwords. What’s more, the WASP apparently achieves all of this without breaking a single FCC regulation.

Women and minorities hardest hit.

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A team from the University of Southampton has produced the world’s first fully “printed” airworthy plane – a 1.5-metre-wingspan UAV created in just five days by selective laser sintering (SLS).

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One of the world’s most famous fossil creatures, widely considered the earliest known bird, is getting a rude present on the 150th birthday of its discovery: A new analysis suggests it isn’t a bird at all.

Chinese scientists are proposing a change to the evolutionary family tree that boots Archaeopteryx off the “bird” branch and onto a closely related branch of birdlike dinosaurs.

Well, that’s a disappointment.

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The law was challenged on the grounds that it does not include an intent requirement, meaning that a defendant can be convicted of a cocaine offense in Florida even if the defendant did not know he was selling cocaine. Or, as the judge put it in her ruling, in Florida, a “person is guilty of a drug offense if he delivers a controlled substance without regard to whether he does so purposefully, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently.”

Florida is the only state in the nation to have expressly eliminated intent as an element of drug offenses, according to the ruling.

“Other states have rejected such a draconian and unreasonable construction of the law that would criminalize the ‘unknowing’ possession of a controlled substance,” Judge Scriven wrote, concluding that Florida’s drug law is unconstitutional “on its face.”

Well done, thou good and faithful (public) servant. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of laws on the books, especially federal laws, where you can get it packed up your pooper regardless of intent (which has always been a component of criminal offenses, until the present degenerate age).

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We have the technology.

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Remember: Just because it’s irrational doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

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A 63-year-old California man has tried to operate on his own hernia by cutting open his stomach with a six-inch butter knife.

Hey, if it was easy, anybody could do it.

Read it. And watch the video.

Prices for rare earth elements have gone through the roof in recent years, with China basically monopolizing the market for these rare substances (the country currently produces a whopping 97 percent of all rare earths used globally). But in the field of electric vehicles, the dependence on rare earths could be a thing of the past soon: Professor Nobukazu Hoshi’s Lab from the Tokyo University of Science has developed an electric car that doesn’t require any kind of rare earths.

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Is nothing sacred? Some fiends apparently fake Scotch brands. Fortunately, researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland have devised some new methods involving optic fibers for distinguishing between authentic and counterfeit Scotch whisky brands

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Guess he’s not all that disabled, after all.

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I am not making this up.

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Siegel-Spaeth ideology scores that indicate “progressive” ideology were negatively correlated with the Stanford-Benet estimates.  The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (-0.61) provides strong evidence of a negative relationship between progressive ideology and intelligence.

Read it and be prepared.

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Never say that we don’t have useful stuff here.

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I’m sure he’ll be pleased.

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Well, isn’t that convenient.

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Slow news day.

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Police in England are to use new laser scanners at the scene of serious motorway crashes so they can clear the roads more quickly.

The technology saves time by making a 3D image of the site, rather than investigators having to painstakingly log everything at the scene.

It is hoped that getting traffic moving again will save the economy hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.

This is a superb idea. We already have the technology. (Google, are you listening?)

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Nature is more resilient than people give it credit for.

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The British Library is attempting to raise the money to buy the St Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest intact book in Europe.

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Melinda Beck looks at health quality in urban areas compared with that in rural ones, finding that cities generally come out on top. But the suburbs fare better than either, she writes, with fewer low-birth-weight babies, homicides, sexually transmitted diseases and premature deaths than either their urban or rural counterparts.

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We have the technology.

Read it. And watch the video.

Any why not? We’ve already got humans who talk like robots. AlGore comes immediately to mind.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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China’s most senior military officer has criticised the United States for claiming to want peace in the South China Sea and then carrying out repeated naval war games.

Who knew the Chinese were Democrats?

Oh, wait, no … they’re Communists.

I’m sure there’s a difference. Let me think about that for a while.

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Once again, rats get all the good stuff.

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“Basically what it says is, this person, and it lists his name, complained and so I actually have the personal information of the people complaining, and I will then be turning that info over to the police as well.”

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Orange sherbet will do much the same thing.

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Over 1.5 million Americans travel abroad each year for medical procedures in what is called Medical Tourism. Services typically sought by medical tourists include elective procedures as well as complex specialized surgeries such as heart surgery, dental surgery, joint replacement, and cosmetic surgeries. However, virtually every type of health care, including complementary & alternative treatments, psychiatry, and convalescent care are attracting Americans by saving as much as 90% off of medical procedures.

U.S. based healthcare providers have taken notice as have self-funded employers and health plans. The reality is most people, if given the choice, would rather travel for medical purposes to Tucson than Thailand to save time and uncertainty. Top surgical facilities realized they can be price competitive and have extra capacity so they have embarked on a program of domestic medical tourism. The byproduct, if you follow it to the logical extreme, is the creation of a national market for non-emergent surgery that has historically been strictly a local market. As the USA Today recently reported, costs commonly vary in healthcare by 600% or more (Source: change:healthcare) for the same procedure and same outcome even in the same city let alone from one to another.

The less friction there is to impede information flow, the more efficient markets become.

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Hydrostor takes the excess energy created during periods of off-peak consumption and converts that energy into compressed air via an air compressor, which in turn inflates accumulators placed under the surface of a body of water. The depth of the water keeps the air at a constant pressure, helping to store the energy potential.

When power is required, the air is released through an expander and electricity is produced. Through the heat-exchanger, modern compressors and expanders, the system approaches adiabatic operation, achieving efficiencies over 70 percent.

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The D-Dalus (a play on Daedalus from Greek mythology) is neither fixed wing or rotor craft and uses four, mechanically-linked, contra-rotating cylindrical turbines, each running at the same 2200 rpm, for its propulsion.

The key to the D-Dalus’ extreme maneuverability is the facility to alter the angle of the blades (using servos) to vector the forces, meaning that the thrust can be delivered in your choice of 360 degrees around any of the three axes. Hence D-Dalus can launch vertically, hover perfectly still and move in any direction, and that’s just the start of the story.

…

D-Dalus is particularly suited for such conditions and can thrust upwards and hence “glue down” on landing, which it can also do on a moving vehicle. Indeed, landing on a moving vehicle is one of the D-Dalus’ many party tricks, and it’s a natural for landing on watercraft. Not surprisingly, since it initially broke cover at the Royal Aeronautical Society conference a few days ago, it has already attracted a lot of interest from military quarters.

The D-Dalus is also near-silent, and has the dynamic stability to enter buildings and handle rough weather with ease – things which existing rotorcraft simply cannot achieve. The aircraft also has a sense-and-avoid system which, in conjunction with its complete lack of vulnerable external parts (such as rotors), means it can hover in very close proximity to vertical rock faces and walls, making it suitable for search-and-rescue operations, as a surveillance drone with hover-and-stare capabilities and as a proactive tool for urban battlefield situational awareness.

We also might see the return of helicopter transport to and from airports again, long since banned due to safety concerns. The conjunction of improved safety with decreased noise are going to make the military jump on this like a duck on a junebug.

This will also go a long way toward a true ‘flying car’.

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I predict that it will be used primarily by non-English speakers to practice English than by English-speakers wanting to practice foreign languages.

Just a hunch.

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The front teeth have horizontal lines that were so neatly filed, archaeologists believe it must have been done by a skilled craftsman rather than by their owners, and the process undoubtedly would have been excruciating.

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Ah, the cry of we-want-the-future-now folks has been “where’s my flying car?” Well, a very simple version of one may finally be coming to market. A year ago, we noted that the Terrafugia Transition “roadable aircraft” had been approved by the FAA for flight as a light sports aircraft (meaning you don’t even need a full pilots license). But it apparently took another year for the Transition to get the necessary “exemptions” from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to let the thing go on the road.

Note that the key roadblocks to ‘the future’ are caused by the government … for our own good, of course.

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Shear-thickening fluids, whose properties are so strange they earn the moniker “non-Newtonian,” increase in viscosity when under great strain. A simple shear-thickening fluid can be made by combining cornflour with water, Sheffield informs. Get the ratio just right, and you’ll have a substance that will remain a fluid when left alone, but will turn rigid and behave like a bouncing ball if you throw it against concrete. Explains Sheffield: “Under normal circumstances, the particles in STFs repel each other slightly, however following sudden impact, the extra energy in the system proves stronger than the repulsive forces, causing the particles to clump together in structures called hydroclusters, which bump into each other, consequently thickening the fluid.”

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Australian scientists have uncovered the world’s biggest marsupial – a “three-tonne monster” the size of a four-wheel drive that lived up to two million years ago.

It’s amazing what you find when you look hard enough.

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No doubt to give him a reward.