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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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I use ApplePay, so I can’t remember the last time I had to do a signature for a charge.

For nearly a decade, Doug Taylor, a sales manager who travels often for work, has signed credit card receipts with a doodle of a dog wagging its tail.

No cashier has ever rejected his “signature” as invalid.

“It gets a laugh, most of the time,” said Mr. Taylor, 44, who lives in Mobile, Ala. “Or they just glance at it and don’t really notice.”

Credit card networks are finally ready to concede what has been obvious to shoppers and merchants for years: Signatures are not a useful way to prove someone’s identity. Later this month, four of the largest networks — American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa — will stop requiring them to complete card transactions.

On the signature line of the card, I write PLEASE CHECK ID. I am rarely asked.

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Infusing foods with smoke can impart delicious nuanced flavors, but could also come with an unwelcome side of carcinogens. To reduce the carcinogen content of smoked foods, researchers took a lesson from the automobile industry, running the smoke through a zeolite filter to remove harmful compounds. It worked, and with a happy bonus: superior smoke flavor.

Viscount Ridley notices some changes.

Like other cities, London is increasingly home to exotic wildlife and is as biodiverse as some wildernesses. Mumbai has leopards, Boston turkeys, Chicago coyotes and Newcastle kittiwakes. Suburbs are already richer in wildlife than most arable fields in the so-called green belt, making environmental objections to housing development perverse. Gardens, ledges, drains, walls, trees and roofs are full of niches for everything from foxes to flowers and moths.

…

Since most animals have shorter lifespans than us and no welfare state, they are genetically adapting faster to the concrete world than we are. A fascinating book by a Dutch biologist, Menno Schilthuizen, called Darwin Comes to Town, documents just how wide and deep this urban wildlife evolutionary pulse is. We have unleashed an unprecedented burst of natural selection.

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Instead of filling in the hole, this monster equipment precision-cuts out the pothole and an area around it, as if it were extracting a cancerous tumor. The machine vacuums up excess materials, leaving a clean hole of exact size. Next, its robotic arm grabs a pre-made concrete “plug” from onboard, and inserts the plug with the accuracy of a surgeon. The plug materials expand once in place, to create a form-fitting bond, as if the pothole never existed.

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Women and minorities hardest hit, I’m sure.

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Sometimes it is good to be the king.

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I am not making this up.

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It looks like a tube made of glass but it’s actually aluminum. Well, aluminum with an asterisk beside it — this is not elemental aluminum but rather a material made using it.

Scotty, you’re in there, I know you are….

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I’m impressed.

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Sauce for the goose….

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

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Deploy that extra finger on each hand and make it count.

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Extra points if you can correctly guess how many times we’ve heard that before.

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There’s a certain romance to wooden baseball bats that goes away the second you swing one. For those of us not trying to make it to the majors, using a wooden bat is mostly just a reminder that hitting a baseball is either painful or frustrating, depending on whether you’ve made contact with the ball or not.

See, the trouble with wood is that it vibrates. If you hit a baseball anywhere but at the bat’s so-called sweet spot, you feel all those vibrations in your hands, and about 10 swings laters you’ll have a bruise. But man, hit it right on the sweet spot and it feels like you are a baseball god.

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Perhaps no name conveys superiority quite like Stradivarius. The roughly 650 extant violins fashioned by Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737) and his family are worth millions, and they’re thought to outshine even the best modern instruments. But in a pair of “double-blind” tests, in which neither musician nor audience knew which instrument was played, listeners clearly preferred the new fiddles to the old classics.

Steve Sailer reports some actual science.

Unfortunately, the proglodyte witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners doesn’t stop for, you know, actual science.

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A few people have occasionally claimed that natural selection takes a long time to change any trait that might bother them – sometimes, they say this of polygenic traits, ones influenced by many genes, like height and intelligence. Kevin Mitchell has said this (“at least 100 millennia to evolve appreciably”), so has Brad Delong (an economist at Berkeley). David Reich mentions Joseph Graves, a biologist at Harvard, saying something similar in a lecture in 2016. They’re all 100% wrong: it is easy to select on polygenic quantitative traits, and we do it every day. Dogs vary a lot in height and most of the big differences are the result of fairly recent selection: nobody had Chihuahuas or Great Danes back in the Ice Age.

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

I’m surprised that ‘arteriosclerosis from eating red meat you bad boy you’ didn’t make the list, but I guess things haven’t degenerated quite that far yet. Yet.

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Apple fans with a bent for nostalgia have some to wallow in after a HyperCard clone debuted on Monday.

The brainchild of one Ben Fisher, ViperCard made itself known….

…

HyperCard was created after Apple decided it wanted a “programming for non-programmers” environment, and in 1987, HyperCard arrived with a price point of US$49.95. It featured database capabilities, a graphical UI users could modify, and the HyperTalk programming language that let users create something not a million miles away from a static HTML website, only on the desktop. Hyperlinks were moderately-brain bending stuff in 1987, and HyperCard became a success on Mac Classic environments. The product made it to Version 3.0 before Steve Jobs abandoned it, and end-of-sale arrived in 2004.

HyperCard was a powerful and flexible tool that a lot of people greatly missed.

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You aren’t what you eat, exactly. But over many generations, what we eat does shape our evolutionary path. “Diet,” says anthropologist John Hawks, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “has been a fundamental story throughout our evolutionary history. Over the last million years there have been changes in human anatomy, teeth and the skull, that we think are probably related to changes in diet.”

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How is this news? It’s an obvious thing.

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A useful thing.

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Blaine Gaskill is a hero.

Officer Gaskill was stationed as the school resource officer at Great Mills High School in Maryland Tuesday morning when he heard reports of a shooter in the building.  Gaskill engaged the shooter in under a minute, according to reports, and fired on him. The school shooter had already wounded two other students severely and may have continued his rampage were not for the actions of Officer Gaskill.

The school shooter was pronounced dead at the hospital.

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I’m waiting for them to discover that whale snot is superconducting and cure’s Alzheimer’s.

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

For all of your yuppie hipster job site needs.

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Don’t think it will work with proglodytes, though. Theirs is more a brain problem.

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In 2016, Irina Conboy’s research team used a blood exchange technique between old and young mice, without surgically joining them. The results of this method would be easier to translate into a human medical setting than parabiosis, as it resembles exchange transfusions that are already used medically.

When they received old blood, the muscle strength of young mice decreased, and the growth of their brain cells slowed down.

Ever notice how mice always get the good stuff?

Matt Welch documents the virtue signaling by the Republican coastal establishment.

Also, Trey Gowdy looks like a space alien, perhaps on purpose.

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Early results from a clinical trial run from four international centres show that wiping out the patients’ immune systems with chemotherapy, and restoring them with the new stem cell treatment, appears to halt the disease and improve symptoms.

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I especially have my eyes on Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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If, as proglodytes proclaim, ‘there is no such thing as race’, then these numbers are hard to explain.

If, however, as race realists proclaim, races are inbred extended family groups, then the explanation is perfectly straightforward.

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I would imagine so.

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Not something you read about every day.

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

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Best of all, you don’t have to smell it.

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Hah!

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The Wall is one of many ways in which Trump controls the National Conversation about immigration that the chatterati would really prefer not to happen.

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But it’s by a Republican, so it doesn’t count.

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It didn’t matter how “infatuatedly in love” she was then with everything about Jeremie — his long chocolate hair, his bad-boy attitude, tongue stud and 28 tattoos. In Iowa, a 21-year-old having sex with a 15-year-old is statutory rape. The evidence was alive in her womb.

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Scientists have discovered Antarctic Krill can digest or at least break up lumps of plastic into even smaller lumps.

…

The expression of concern about nano-plastic seems a stretch. Breaking micro-plastic into smaller chunks, making it available to even more versatile and varied microorganisms further down the food chain, is likely enough to effect complete clearance. Anyone who has ever owned a boat knows how difficult it is to protect fuel from contamination by the ubiquitous fungus and bacteria which thrives in sea water. It seems highly likely that at least one other organism, somewhere in the world’s oceans, has developed a taste for our plastic waste.

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That would be another huge (excuse me, yuge) win for Trump — and America.

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Citrus trees migrated from the Himalayas to the rest of the world after sudden changes in the climate 6 to 8 million years ago, according to new research. As citrus spread, it changed, eventually bringing sweet orange juice to our kitchen tables.

I, for one, am looking forward to Global Warming.

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This started with the “Challenge”: feeding four for less than twelve dollars.

I wish I’d had this when I was younger.

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Be the first on your block to survive the Socialist Apocalypse.

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Good news can’t be allowed to remain unqualified because people might get the mistaken totally wrong don’t even think about it idea that some credit is due to the New Hitler Trump.

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The dream of nuclear fusion is on the brink of being realised, according to a major new US initiative that says it will put fusion power on the grid within 15 years.

The project, a collaboration between scientists at MIT and a private company, will take a radically different approach to other efforts to transform fusion from an expensive science experiment into a viable commercial energy source. The team intend to use a new class of high-temperature superconductors they predict will allow them to create the world’s first fusion reactor that produces more energy than needs to be put in to get the fusion reaction going.

That would be nice.

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Canadians have yet to apologize.

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The ‘Lincoln Charters Project’, which is a partnership between the University of Lincoln, UK, and the City of Lincoln Council, will see conservators and medieval experts at the University working to preserve, digitally record, and analyse some of the city’s most prized manuscripts.

The collection of royal charters, which belong to the City of Lincoln, span nearly 400 years and include important documents from the reigns 25 kings, including King John, King Richard II and King Henry V.

This will be the first time that the city’s charters have been inspected and repaired since 1788 when Samuel Lyon, the city’s Town Clerk, carried out the work. While some of the documents have been put on display in the city’s Guildhall, many have not been seen since they were placed into the Lincolnshire Archives in 1904.