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We have the technology.

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An Italian man who was struck in the head by a stray bullet during New Year’s Eve celebrations is recovering after sneezing the projectile out of his nose.

Next time you get the urge to sneeze, let ‘er rip.

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The New York Times’ “Mapping America” visualization is a good illustration of this strong heritage between cartography and data visualization. It consists of an interactive map of data extracted from the American Community Survey Census, based on samples from 2005 to 2009 and including indicators such as ethnic groups, income, housing, families and education.

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The Leicestershire Trekkie who turned his flat into a replica of the Starship Voyager spent two years battling an alien mould attack, unaware that it was caused by a dope farm in the property below.

The matter was resolved in November, when cops busted the downstairs flat. Alleyne explained: “The police came and knocked on the door of the place below and took away 25 cannabis plants and the equipment. I couldn’t believe there was something like that going on right below me.

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“What the Deepwater Horizon incident has taught us is that releases of methane with similar characteristics will not have the capacity to influence climate,” Kessler said.

The question of what happened to the more than four million barrels of crude oil spilled after the blow out, which also dissipated sooner than expected, remains under debate. Factors including high winds, natural breakdown, evaporation and the clean-up operation have all been suggested.

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A converted church would make a great house. Many of the older ones are in a pretty Gothic style.

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While others wish the new Congress well today on its swearing-in, I plan to light a 100-watt incandescent bulb and hoist a caffeinated alcoholic beverage in honor of a different milestone: starting today, the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee will no longer be under the control of Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).

Some lawmakers can talk a decent game about lean ‘n’ smart regulation, but no one ever accused Waxman of having a light touch. (The 900-page Waxman-Markey environmental bill, mercifully killed by the Senate, included provisions letting Washington rewrite local building codes.) He’s known for aggressive micromanagement even of agencies run by putative allies: his staff has repeatedly twisted the ears of Obamanaut appointees to complain that their approach to regulation is too moderate and gradual. More than any other lawmaker on the Hill, he’s stood in the way of any meaningful reform of the 2008 CPSIA law, which piles impractical burdens on small makers of children’s products, thrift stores, bicycles and others.

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Upon examining the US, we find out that Texas fits the bill nicely.  In fact, Texas has 261,797.12 square miles of land, and that is (261792.12<ENTER> 1.602<ENTER> 1.602 × ×) 671,877.17 square kilometers!  Which is, in fact, more than the area we need to house all 7 billion of us at typical New York City densities.  Meaning every man, woman, and child living and breathing on the face of the Earth could fit in relative comfort within the land territory of the State of Texas.

The other 49 states: empty.  Canada?  A wasteland as empty as the northern extremes of Nunavut.  Europe?  Empty.  Asia?  Nobody home.  Africa, Australia, South and Central America, all the islands?  None left.  The entire world outside of Texas contains not a single living, breathing person.

With just over half the daily average outflow of the Columbia River, we could meet the freshwater needs of the entire world’s population.  Now, that is a big pipeline to Texas, but if we could get everyone there in the first place, the pipeline is child’s play!

To recap: so far, we can put every living person on the planet within the land territory of Texas, with density about equal to New York City (not just Manhattan; all 5 boroughs).  And we can give them all adequate water with just over half the water from the Columbia River.

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One question that we get frequently here on Law and the Multiverse is whether superheroes that wear identity-concealing costumes could wear them in court.  A closely related question is whether a superhero could testify under his or her alias and refuse to answer questions about his or her secret identity.  In the US, these are important issues because of the Confrontation Clause, which is where our analysis will focus. We briefly discussed this issue as part of the alter ego post from Dec. 2010; this is a fuller treatment of the specific question of the legal issues related to testifying while disguised.

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Alfie Boe sings for his supper.

Watch ’em.

In praise of Dead White Males.

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Fast forward to today, and ScienceFiction.com has launched as a way for fans to access information about all things science fiction, ranging from movies, TV shows, games, books, comic books and technology.

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Good news — if they do it right.

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I don’t see any indicia of Pravda here (other than the innate intellectual resemblance of the Pacific Northwest to the old Soviet Union), so Jay can rest easy.

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Of course it does.

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He told police: “I received a phone call anonymously that my daughter was involved with a guy 40 years older than her. You said you couldn’t stop him – so I did.

“I saw it as my duty as a father.”

Sometimes the old ways are best. In related news:

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner to marry girlfriend

Be careful out there, Hef. Just sayin’.

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Perhaps they heard about the Mayan Calendar and decided to loot the rubble.

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), an independent non-commercial organization, released a sensational statement.

Three giant spaceships are heading towards Earth. The largest one of them is 240 kilometers wide. Two others are smaller. At present, the objects are beyond the orbit of Pluto.

The spaceships were detected by HAARP search system. The system, based in Alaska, was designed to study the phenomenon of northern lights. According to SETI researchers, the objects are nothing but extraterrestrial spaceships. They will be visible in optical telescopes as soon as they reach Mars’s orbit. The US government has been reportedly informed about the event. The ships will reach Earth in December 2012.

Read it. People are moving from Blue to Red.

The South is our largest region. For the first time, it now has more population than the Northeast and Midwest combined. The South has nearly 115 million people, the Northeast 55 million, and the Midwest 67 million. The West is now the second-largest region, with 72 million, surpassing the Midwest in the ten years since the 2000 census. The South added more population from 2000-2010 (14.3 million) than the three other regions combined.

No state in either the Midwest or Northeast grew faster than the national growth rate. No state in the West grew slower than the national growth rate. Montana grew at exactly the national growth rate of 9.7 percent. California was the second-slowest growing Western state at 10 percent, a growth rate which would be remarkable for a Midwestern or Northeastern state.

These figures are distorted somewhat by the fact that they count Texas as in the South; I’d put it in the West, myself.

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No wonder they’re extinct.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

The Other McCain is on the case.

It is vitally important that beautiful people have babies, because otherwise the human race would become progressively uglier with each succeeding generation.

Go to any trailer court or public housing project and look around: Ugly people are having lots of babies. The world’s great beauties must be encouraged to do their share procreatively, or else the future will look like the green room for the Maury Povitch show.

And you can’t say any fairer than that.

Iowahawk provides some advice for out-of-work Democrats.

Whether you’re a recently displaced 23-term committee chairman or a formerly smug unemployed staffer with $180,000 of Georgetown student loans, it’s important not to give in to despair. Psychological studies tell us a lost re-election campaign is the single most stressful event in the life of a congressional incumbent, even topping the indictment of a campaign contributor or an appearance at an unscripted town hall meeting. Also, a ballot box layoff is, next to death, the second-leading cause of leaving Congress. The good news is that there are positive, proactive steps you can take to reduce stress and smooth your transition to your new life in the great unknown outside I-95.

Megan McArdle has some seriously wicked friends.

So first, the serious tip: Commenting is a performance, not a conversation.. Most people who read your work will never respond. Sure, when you get into a reply string, you should always address the comment above yours, because it’s kind of rude to be mugging for the spectators in a reply (“Look at this idiot! He doesn’t know anything!”). But the fact is, your interlocutor is not your audience, so your goal is not to persuade that person, it’s to persuade (or perhaps merely entertain) the silent majority, or what we in the business call “the jury.”

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We have the technology.

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

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Soon, your gut feeling may actually qualify as an informed decision.

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The US Navy says it has successfully launched a jet fighter into flight using a radical new electromagnetically powered catapult. The feat is important for the Americans, whose next supercarrier will be a disastrous botch without the new tech: it is even more critical for the future of the Royal Navy.

The next US fleet carrier – CVN 78, aka USS Gerald R Ford – is now at an advanced stage of build, and was designed around the EMALS. If EMALS couldn’t be made to work, the US Navy would have found itself in possession of the world’s biggest helicopter carrier. There will be much celebration at NAVAIR following Saturday’s success.

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The mighty Basilosaurus isis was discovered along with more than a thousand other aeons-dead whale skeletons in an area of Egyptian desert known as the “Valley of the Whales”.

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Something actually useful in the New York Times. Grab it while you can.

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Cyber-gumshoe?

The focus on background screenings comes as some 20 million Americans are using dating sites, more than double the number five years ago, according to the market research firm IBISWorld. While they are finding casual dates and even love, they are also encountering married people pretending to be single or, worse, sexual predators and convicted felons.

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Because, you know, it couldn’t have been a miracle or anything that. No, no, perish the thought. It was merely by some odd quirk of fate that some Jewish kid was born around the same time. Purely a coincidence. Entirely unconnected. I was just poking around the sky and happened to notice it, and I said ‘Huh. Look at that.’ Otherwise the date is of absolutely no significance.

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The New York Times Sunday Week in Review section has an article headlined, “Is Going to an Elite College Worth the Cost?”

Not mentioned are Harvard dropouts Bill Gates (Microsoft founder) and Time magazine person of the year Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder).

Maybe the answer to the Times question is, “Yes, so long as you don’t stay too long.”

Yeah, staying too long at Harvard will rot your brain. Look at Larry Summers.

Well, there it is.

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The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear, represents the first time a data set of this magnitude and searching tools are at the disposal of Ph.D.’s, middle school students and anyone else who likes to spend time in front of a small screen. It consists of the 500 billion words that are contained in books published between 1800 and 2000 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian and Hebrew.

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Don’t ever say we never have useful stuff here.

The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.

The Other McCain is, as you may imagine, having a great deal of fun with this one.

Check it out.

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This is from some outfit named Glassdoor.com, and I have no idea what qualifies them to issue these awards. Nevertheless, I am eager to embrace any external validation of the fact that my employer (whoever it may be) will never be on one of these lists.

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Towards the end of the 1970s, the Mother and Child Institute in Bogota, Colombia, was in deep trouble. The institute was the city’s obstetrical reference hospital, where most of the city’s poor women went to give birth. Nurses and doctors were in short supply. In the newly created neonatal intensive care unit, there were so few incubators that premature babies had to share them — sometimes three to an incubator. The crowded conditions spread infections, which are particularly dangerous for preemies. The death rate was high.

In Rey’s system, a mother of a preemie puts the baby on her exposed chest, dressed only in a diaper and sometimes a cap, in an upright or semi-upright position. The baby is strapped in by a scarf or other cloth sling supporting its bottom, and all but its head is covered by mom’s shirt. The mother keeps the baby like that, skin-to-skin, as much as possible, even sleeping in a reclining chair. Fathers and other relatives or friends can wear the baby as well to give the mother a break. Even very premature infants can go home with their families (with regular follow-up visits) once they are stable and their mothers are given training.

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Blue states just can’t seem to do anything right.

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The fragment, believed to be from a human finger, was found on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the southwest Pacific, Discovery News reported.

Researchers investigating Earhart’s disappearance found the fragment of bone in June 2009 along with pieces of a pocketknife, prewar American bottles and makeup from a woman’s compact.

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Would that our political institutions were so resilient.

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The research, reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology, shows that Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), do not just retrace their steps when presented with a barrier — as might be expected. Instead, the ants begin a localized search that seems to take into account the direction in which they were planning to go. Because there are many network-management programs that mimic the search behaviour of this ant species, systems engineers are taking notice and wondering what they can learn.

‘Experimental biology’ sounds like a great field in which to be.

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So if one part is ruled unconstitutional, the whole thing falls down.

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[E]ach unit has “a complex internal structure whose large internal surface area efficiently conditions air passing through it by evaporative cooling. Each cooling tower is made from 3D-printed sand using technology developed by D-Shape.”

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While in Spain last month, I found that some Spaniards have invented a new plural form. When writing about a mixed group of boys and girls, they write chic@s.   Pretty clever, in my estimation. Except for the problem of auto-correct trying to convert the word into an e-mail address. The new letter “@” is not yet part of formal usage. I read a variety of newspapers, and never saw the @ used as a letter. But on the Madrid subway, some cars have slim TV monitors attached to the center poles, and those televisions show short news items and commercials, along with captioning. On one news report, I did see the “@” used in the captioning for a mixed-gender plural.

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I love online books.