Read it.

Alfie Boe sings for his supper.

Watch ’em.

In praise of Dead White Males.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Good news — if they do it right.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Of course it does.

Read it.

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’.

Read it.

Read it.

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.

Check it out.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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”.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Watch it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Would that our political institutions were so resilient.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

[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.”

Read it.

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.

Read it.

I love online books.

Read it.

The Groningen professors Bauke Dijkstra and Lubbert Dijkhuizen have deciphered the structure and functional mechanism of the glucansucrase enzyme that is responsible for dental plaque sticking to teeth. This knowledge will stimulate the identification of substances that inhibit the enzyme. Just add that substance to toothpaste, or even sweets, and caries will be a thing of the past.

Read it.

We have the technology … almost.

Read it.

British news is always much more interesting than American news.

Read it.

Get in touch with your inner Corleone.

‘Realtor Connie Profaci’? A good touch….

Read it.

We have the technology.

My question is: How did they find out he had this setup? Eh?

Read it.

Here’s the part I like:

A fisherman holds the shark which was identified by an Egyptian diver as the shark which attacked four tourists in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

How? Fingerprints?

Read it.

Yes, it’s a steam powered record player. Playing a punk LP. The Sex Pistols – God save the Queen (Victoria obviously).

You know you want one.

Read it.

EVERYTHING YOU’D WANT TO KNOW ABOUT VIKINGS is IN THAT BOOK.

Read it.