A dog with a prosthetic foot.

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To become an exorcist you must be a Roman Catholic priest and have permission from your bishop to join the International Association of Exorcists.

No doubt Federal tuition assistance programs and the usual ‘diversity’ affirmative action regulations apply, so don’t get discouraged if you aren’t a priest or a Roman Catholic.

(‘International Association of Exorcists’ looks funny without ‘AFL-CIO’ after it, somehow.)

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So all you ‘activists’ can STFU. (Yeah, I’m lookin’ at *you*, Michelle.)

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A genomic survey of the microbial life in an Antarctic lake has revealed a new virophage — a virus that attacks viruses. The discovery suggests that these life forms are more common, and have a larger role in the environment, than was once thought.

Let’s watch the race to patent it.

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Cademartiri and his fellow boffins at Harvard uni have tested their flame-zapping gizmo in the lab, using a 600-watt amplifier hooked up to a “wand-like probe”. This setup was apparently able to snuff out test flames “more than a foot high”. The team think that it should be possible to get similar effects with a less power-hungry system using 60W or less, raising the possibility of portable equipment.

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Scientists have found the strongest evidence yet that a puzzling gap in the electronic structures of some high-temperature superconductors could indicate a new phase of matter. Understanding this “pseudogap” has been a 20-year quest for researchers who are trying to control and improve these breakthrough materials, with the ultimate goal of finding superconductors that operate at room temperature.

“Our findings point to management and control of this other phase as the correct path toward optimizing these novel superconductors for energy applications, as well as searching for new superconductors,” said Zhi-Xun Shen of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES), a joint institute of the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University.

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It’s basically a version of graphene constructed out of silicon, which doesn’t naturally align itself into the same eminently useful honeycomb shape — but, given a little prod here and a layer of silver or ceramic compound there, can do much the same thing, and with better computing compatibility.

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Better living through chemistry. Such people make our lives better but don’t get the attention that accrues to those who make our lives worse.

May his memory be eternal.

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Pretty sad, when the Russians are smarter than we are.

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Good thing Communists don’t do Social Security, or they’d be in trouble.

Steve Sailer, as you might expect, has a bit of fun with this one.

Next stop: Portland, whitest blue-state city in the country.

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It can carry two people up to 250 miles at speeds of up to 20mph on a single charge of the battery underneath the driver’s seat.

In case you should want to do that.

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Our understanding is that the Tapestry features 45 to 48 threads per inch which gives us a resolution approximating 47dpi with a colour depth of 8, ignoring later repairs. Thus, in information terms, the tapestry contains 2.429MB of information, assuming 1-bit per colour, 47dpi, and a 51,678.72 square inch surface area.

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

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I guess the Republican Party is older than we thought.

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Hammered by the auto industry’s slump, Detroit saw its population plummet 25 per cent over the past decade, according to census data released on Tuesday that reflects the severity of an economic downturn in the only state whose population declined since 2000.

Needless to say, a blue state.

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“House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was briefly hospitalized today in Rome after she inexplicably came in contact with holy water in the foyer of St. Peter’s Cathedral.

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Andreessen argues that people ask for many things from a company: salary, bonus, stock options, span of control, and titles. Of those, title is by far the cheapest, so it makes sense to give the highest titles possible. The hierarchy should have Presidents, Chiefs, and Senior Executive Vice Presidents. If it makes people feel better, let them feel better. Titles cost nothing. Better yet, when competing for new employees with other companies, using Andreessen’s method you can always outbid the competition in at least one dimension.

And they laughed when I created Pursuivants….

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Well, I think it’s funny.

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

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A founder member of the rock group Electric Light Orchestra died when a 63 stone (400kg) bale of silage rolled nearly 200ft (60m) down a steep field on to his moving car.

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What this has to do with religion (it’s in the ‘On Faith’ column) is far from clear, but it’s an interesting technology story nevertheless.

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What should you do when you really, REALLY have to “go”? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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I run a small software business in central Japan.  Over the years, I’ve worked both in the local Japanese government (as a translator) and in Japanese industry (as a systems engineer), and have some minor knowledge of how things are done here.  English-language reporting on the matter has been so bad that my mother is worried for my safety, so in the interests of clearing the air I thought I would write up a bit of what I know.

See, the thing that people don’t realize is that Honshu is massive. It is larger than Great Britain.  (A country which does not typically refer to itself as a “tiny island nation.”)  At about 800 miles long, it stretches from roughly Chicago to New Orleans.  Quite a lot of the reporting on Japan, including that which is scaring the heck out of my friends and family, is the equivalent of someone ringing up Mayor Daley during Katrina and saying “My God man, that’s terrible?—?how are you coping?”

Miyagi is the prefecture hardest hit by the tsunami, and Japanese TV is reporting that they expect fatalities in the prefecture to exceed 10,000.  Miyagi is 200 miles from Tokyo.  (Remember?—?Honshu is massive.)  That’s about the distance between New York and Washington DC.

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A mother and four of her children have been killed in South Africa after a bolt of lightning struck their thatched home during a thunderstorm on Wednesday night.

Let that be a lesson to us all. Stay out of thatched huts during thunderstorms.

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

The Pilcrow.

This is a pilcrow: ¶. They crop up surprisingly frequently, bookending paragraphs on websites with a typographic bent, for instance, and teaming up with the section symbol in legal documents to form picturesque reference marks such as §3, ¶7. The pilcrow even appears in Microsoft Word, where it adorns a button which reveals hidden characters such as spaces and carriage returns. (Click on that button, in fact, and a multitude of pilcrows will appear, one at the end of each line of text.)

Even now, many marks of punctuation still function wholly or largely as vocal stage direction: parentheses are the typographical signposts of a spoken aside, the exclamation mark implies a surprised, rising tone of voice, and the question mark is as much about inflection as it is about interrogation.

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The way things are going, we may actually need it.

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Domestic cats roll. Oh, they roll and roll and roll – not constantly, but often enough that the behaviour eventually caught the attention of scientists. In 1994, Hilary N Feldman of Cambridge University’s Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, did a formal study of the phenomenon. Feldman’s monograph, called Domestic Cats and Passive Submission, appeared in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Stephen Stigler has a cool piece on a machine that Francis Galton built in 1877 that calculated a posterior distribution from a prior and a likelihood function. Galton’s originality continues to astound.

If you don’t know what that means, trust me, it’s useful. Being able to do it with a machine is astonishing.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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“While it’s very rare, this spider’s distinguishing characteristic is that it likes the smell of gasoline, caused by the hydrogen oxide,” said Mitsuhiro Kunisawa, an automotive journalist.

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Life imitates Art.

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

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Produced by Nanolux, an arm of AIST, the camera uses a series of algorithms to read and process wavelengths reflected by objects lit with infrareds, allowing it to successfully reproduce reds, blues, and greens in the darkest of conditions.

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The inner workings of solid state storage devices are so fundamentally different from traditional hard drives that forensic investigators can no longer rely on current preservation techniques when admitting evidence stored on them in court cases, Australian scientists said in a research paper.

Data stored on Flash drives is often subject to a process the scientists called “self-corrosion,” in which evidence is permanently erased or contaminated in ways that bits stored on magnetic-based hard drives are not. The alterations happen in the absence of any instructions from the user. The findings introduce a “grey area” into the integrity of files that are forensically extracted from the devices and threaten to end a “golden age” of digital evidence gathering offered by older storage types.

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And they’re doing them in the right order this time.

As a special treat for ‘Firefly’ fans, star of Science Channel’s ‘Sci-Fi Science,’ and the co-founder of string field theory, Dr. Michio Kaku, will be commentating on the science behind ‘Firefly’ for each episode. From terra-forming to anti-matter, Kaku will be explaining why the science fiction featured in the show really isn’t that far from “science fact.”

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The problem with a totally left-wing media is that they try to re-write history to suit their agenda. As a result, we need people to keep the truth alive.

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‘My hovercraft is full of eels.’ means ‘The revolution starts Wednesday.’ Pass it on.

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The question then becomes, I guess, why were medieval books the size they were?  And the answer to that is simple: medieval books were the size they were because medieval sheep were the size they were.

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Unpublished Government research suggests the plastic carrier may not be an eco villain after all – but, whisper it, an unsung hero. Hated by environmentalists and shunned by shoppers, the disposable plastic bag is piling up in a shame-filled corner of retail history. But a draft report by the Environment Agency, obtained by the Independent on Sunday, has found that ordinary high density polythene (HDPE) bags used by shops are actually greener than supposedly low impact choices.

I don’t give a shit about Libya, either.

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Chemists have found a new way of producing plastic that conducts electricity, potentially paving the way to cheaper, more robust and er, more plasticky computers.

A team led by Professors Paul Meredith and Ben Powell at the University of Queensland, Associate Professor Adam Micolich of the University of New South Wales School of Physics and UNSW doctoral student Andrew Stephenson used an ion beam to “tune” the plastic film.

“In theory, we can make plastics that conduct no electricity at all or as well as metals do – and everything in between,” says Stephenson.

Gotta love Australians.

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The other day I needed to go to the emergency room. Not wanting to sit there for 4 hours, I put on my Magic Green Hat. When I went into the E.R., I noticed that 3/4 of the people got up and left.

I guess they decided that they weren’t that sick after all. Cut at least 3 hours off my waiting time.

Need help at the Emergency Room? Don’t want to wait six hours to see somebody? No problem! Wear the Magic Green Border Patrol Hat.

It also works at DMV. It saved me 5 hours.

At the Laundromat, three minutes after entering, I had my choice of any machine, most still running.

If you live in Texas, it might cut your wait time at the grocery store.

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Scientists have identified a new species of Early Cretaceous sauropod – a six-tonne beast with a fearsome set of rear legs which have prompted paleontologists to dub it “thunder-thighs”.

“If predators came after it, it would have been able to boot them out of the way.”

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Cornish food manufacturers have won a nine-year battle to win special protection for their most famous snack, banning any products made in Devon, Wales or the rest of Britain from being called Cornish pasties.

And, perhaps, relieving those outside of Cornwall from any necessity of eating them.

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There is a movement afoot to assemble the funds, Kickstarter-fashion, to enable Nathan Fillian to buy the rights to Firefly.

Take whatever action you think appropriate.