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That reminds me of a terribly politically incorrect joke from my youth.

The sound you don’t hear is me smiling quietly to myself.

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Cashews. Mmmmm. (Although cashews are technically not nuts, they are still delicious.)

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Well, he’ll have to run against the rest of the Democrat clown-car field first.

Prediction: Too pale, too male, too stale.

Jambalaya Harris will be the nominee; wait and see.

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Nine years ago, Riman, a distinguished professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering, invented an energy-efficient technology that harnesses largely low-temperature, water-based reactions. As a result, he and his team can make things in water that previously were made at temperatures well above those required to thermally decompose plastics.

So far, the revolutionary technology has been used to make more than 30 different materials, including concrete that stores carbon dioxide, the prime greenhouse gas linked to climate change. Other materials include multiple families of composites that incorporate a wide range of metals, polymers and ceramics whose behavior can be processed to resemble wood, bone, seashells and even steel.

Ordinarily, when I see a product described as being ‘eco-friendly’ I ignore it, but in this case I’ll make an exception.

I guess you have to call something ‘eco-friendly’ these days in order to get any attention.

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In case you didn’t know it, Jambalaya Harris is the DemLegHump Media candidate for President in 2020.

UPDATE: Fangirls? TV Reporters from CBS, CNN and NBC Help Kamala Harris Pick Out ‘Amazing’ Coat

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Dr Melik Demirel has been leading a project at Pennsylvania State University growing new fibres in large fermentation tanks using the same substances that make up natural materials.

“We are developing different types of protein-based fibres, similar to silk and wool and so on,” said Dr Demirel.

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The Swiss are strange people.

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If you feel the need to wear a bracelet with 5 survival gadgets in it, you have problems that a bracelet with 5 survival gadgets won’t solve.

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I doubt that she’ll run in 2020.

Hobble, maybe.

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President Donald Trump has freed up $8 billion from various government agencies to build the wall, according to Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade.

Agent Orange for the win.

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The more accurately we can model chemical reactions, the better we can predict what combinations will do.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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There has been tons of speculation about whether or not the AAF would get off the ground. Judging from what I saw Saturday night and Sunday, I think it’s safe to say the eight-team league will be just fine.

I didn’t know white people were allowed to play football.

If you have any interest in football — which I don’t — you might check it out.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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The story of Colombia’s hippos starts in Villa Napoles, the former estate of Pablo Escobar, who in his heyday had four hippos smuggled there for his private zoo.

Escobar’s ranch housed hundreds of exotic animals including rhinos, elephants and giraffes. By the 1980s, his cocaine empire made him the wealthiest and most feared drug lord in the world. For Colombia, it was a reign of terror. He’s said to be responsible for some 7,000 deaths.

Around the time Escobar met his death in the early 90s, the government relocated most of the animals but not the hippos who were basically allowed to roam free.

“People forgot the hippos,” said biologist David Echeverri, who works with CORNARE, the environmental agency in charge of tracking and managing the hippos in the region. He estimates there are about 50 or more of them now.

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Sounds reasonable to me.

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“Your government has breached our terms of service. Until you replace them we are unable to provide your country with service.”

Want access to login to your Gmail?

Sorry.

Need files from your Google Drive?

Nope.

Lost and in need of directions from Google Maps?

I hear you can use the sun for that.

Visiting a site hosted in Google Cloud?

Not anymore.

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I rather doubt that The Independent’s campaign had anything to do with it, though.

I guess he didn’t get the memo that Trump is the New Hitler.

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I’m impressed.

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The Equilateral Triangle of a Perfect Paragraph is a theory developed by Matej Latin in the Better Web Type course about web typography for web designers and web developers. Too many of them still set line-height, font size and line width as independent features when in fact they should all be considered together. The equilateral triangle is a perfect representation of how the three features work in harmony. The theory is explained in details in an article on CSS-Tricks.

This game elaborates on the theory and puts it into practice. Its goal is to teach you about the three features that need to be considered for a perfect paragraph and help you train your eye.

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Proponents of government control and coercion suffered a big loss last week.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, well-known for its liberal leanings, helped deliver the blow to those big-government proponents.

The court granted a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the city and county of San Francisco’s Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Warning Ordinance.

Check it out.

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

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

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To be completely honest, I’m not really sure I want a toilet seat that monitors my ‘heart health’.

UPDATE: Techies tinker with toilet-topper to turn it into ticker-tracker

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The lost monastery is known as Whitefriars, also called The College of Carmelites, and was founded in 1268 outside the city walls of old Gloucester, where it stood until the 16th century when King Henry VIII had it demolished during his purge of Catholic church property in England. Archaeologists said according to past findings and historic maps, the remains of the Carmelite monastery should be right under the old bus station in Market Parade.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

It is not, of course, a monastery, which is used by monks, but rather a friary, because the Carmelites were one of the four great orders of Friars in the middle ages. (Monks stay in one place, friars wander around, if you want to know the difference)

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President Donald Trump is moving to make over the liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has delivered some of the most stinging judicial setbacks to his agenda.

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John Dougherty, the business manager of Philadelphia’s branch of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), and six other labor officials were indicted on 116 charges related to lavish misuse of union funds and buying influence with corrupt politicians, Philadelphia’s The Inquirer and CBS Philly report.

…

Dougherty has wielded significant influence across the battleground state, throwing the union’s power and purse behind politicians, largely democrats, running for local, state and national offices.

“I would argue they’re the single-most effective political organization in the state,” former Republican Rep. Ryan Costello told Politico. “They’re thinking five, six, seven steps ahead.”

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Somehow I don’t think they minded.

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Well, we now have two Fake Black People in the race. (Who wouldn’t vote for Spartacus?)

Unfortunately, Jumbalaya Harris has already won the Media Primary. So sorry, Cory.

UPDATE: CNN Swoons for ‘Energy’ Inside ‘Force of Nature’ Cory Booker Who ‘People Want to Touch’

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In a new study published in Nature Scientific Reports, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Cambridge have done just that. They have built a sheet of nickel with nanoscale pores that make it as strong as titanium but four to five times lighter.

The empty space of the pores, and the self-assembly process in which they’re made, make the porous metal akin to a natural material, such as wood.

And just as the porosity of wood grain serves the biological function of transporting energy, the empty space in the researchers’ “metallic wood” could be infused with other materials. Infusing the scaffolding with anode and cathode materials would enable this metallic wood to serve double duty: a plane wing or prosthetic leg that’s also a battery.

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Scientists from University College Cork (UCC) have discovered that pterosaurs had four kinds of feathers, shifting the origin of feathers back by 70 million years

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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I must confess to not having given all that much attention to my pelvic floor.

Perhaps that was a mistake.

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Washington, D.C. Antifa leader Joseph “Jose” Alcoff, also known as “Chepe,” was arrested and charged with multiple felonies in Philadelphia on Jan. 10 in connection to the Antifa mob attack against two Marines in November.

Alcoff faces 17 charges, including multiple counts of aggravated assault, ethnic intimidation, conspiracy and terroristic threats, and one count of robbery while inflicting serious bodily injury.

Sometimes the Brown Shirts lose.

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One must have peace in order to pee.

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Well, that’s good to know. I was worried, there, for a minute.

More good news.

Traditionally, Appalachia is thought of as coal country. Coal created steady jobs, many of them dangerous, to the people who lived here and kept the heat and lights on for most of the country for generations.

But new production methods, such as hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling, have changed the regional energy picture and now allow extraction of vast amounts of natural gas from the region’s shale formations. Many sons and daughters of coal miners, and former miners themselves, are finding safer, well-paying energy jobs in the shale industry.

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But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

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Cue outrage from the anti-vaxxers.

UPDATE: Anti-vaxxers linked to spread of measles outbreak in US

The Atlantic knows what you want to read.

Sometimes, everything goes wrong. The river might be especially deep or strong at that point. The opposite bank could be slippery or steep. The herd might be too big. Aggressive tourists can push them to more dangerous crossing points. “If there’s anything that keeps them from getting out on the other side, they’ll start to pile up. And even as they’re drowning on one side of the river, there are still wildebeest following them in.”

The result is an annual mass drowning. “We’ve seen up to 300 carcasses wedged into the river bank in some places,” says Subalusky. “It’s quite a sensory experience. The smell is potent for a quarter mile, and lasts for weeks. There’s a ranger station nearby and they really hate it when the drownings happen.”

Start your day a little bit better.

I don’t suppose anybody ever thought of building a big fargin bridge there.

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We have the technology.

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Cue enviro-Nazi outrage and PETA hand-wringing.

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When Google Glass was launched in 2013, it was supposed to be the future: lightweight AR glasses that could take photographs and give directions from the bridge of your nose. As you know — now that we’re in the future — it didn’t quite pan out. But calling it a total flop would seem unfair, too, given that in 2019, six years after the first prototype first appeared, Google Glass fans still haunt the internet — particularly on Reddit, where r/googleglass continues to see updates years after its namesake’s heyday has passed. Yes, there are still “glassholes.” And honestly? They’re pretty nice.

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An encouraging trend.

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Amazon’s purchase of the .book generic top-level domain has prompted speculation about how the e-tailer plans to use it. Amazon bought the TLD for a reported $10 million last week, allowing it to sell domain names with the .book suffix.

Amazon declined to comment on its plans for the TLD, but Raymond King, CEO of Top Level Design, owner of the generic TLD .ink, said he expects Amazon to offer .book domain names for sale to the public as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) intended, as well as using the TLD for its own business purposes. “Why would they close it off?” King asked, in response to speculation that Amazon might keep the domain name solely for its own use. “You don’t want to limit your TLD. Amazon is known for being a visionary company, and it’s in their interest to make .book available to all authors.”

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It has always puzzled me why dresses don’t have pockets.

(And holsters! Yeah, that’s the ticket….)

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Almost four years after the nation’s first “food freedom” law was enacted, hundreds of new local businesses have sprouted across three states, and without a single outbreak of a foodborne illness. Completely exempt from any licensing, permitting, or inspection requirements, residents operating under their state’s food freedom act can create and sell almost any homemade dish imaginable, except those that contain meat.

Homemade food businesses are also free to sell at farmers’ markets, roadside stands, and from farms, ranches, and homes, so long as they sell their goods directly to an “informed end consumer,” i.e. someone who knows they’re buying something not regulated by the government. Selling food freedom products across state lines or through grocery stores, restaurants, or wholesalers does remain verboten.

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The tiny gribble?—?less than an inch long?—?lives in coastal marine environments and feasts upon wood. It gobbles up sticks and logs that wash into the sea from river estuaries, performing an important ecological function. But it also can be a damaging nuisance, eating the wood from boats and piers, causing considerable damage.

Unlike other wood-eating creatures, such as termites, that require thousands of microbes for digestion, the gribble’s gut needs no such help. Its digestive system is sterile, meaning it’s free of the complex microbial communities that inhabit other intestines, including ours. Scientists say that understanding how the gribble breaks down wood could help them develop better methods for turning timber into fuel. Currently, wood that is burned to generate energy must first be broken down in costly and energy-intensive processes. Gribbles may hold the key to a cheaper and energy-efficient means of unlocking the energy in wood.

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

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I haven’t tried using these but they look as if they would be useful.

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Don’t laugh. It might come in handy during the post-socialism apocalypse.

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hey hitchhike across Europe, instantly recognizable in the wide-bottomed, corduroy trousers, white shirts and colored jackets that identify them as bricklayers, bakers, carpenters, stonemasons and roofers.

They are “Wandergesellen,” or journeymen — a vestige of the Middle Ages in modern Europe — young men, and these days women, too, who have finished their required training in any number of trades and are traveling to gather experience. Most are from German-speaking countries.

In the past, journeymen traveled under the auspices of a trade association, and today many still do. But many also take up the practice freely, though still adhering to the strict, often arcane, rules handed down largely through word of mouth to preserve the tradition.

Sometimes the old ways are best.