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Don’t automatically assume you need special food-storage containers. Why not just put leftovers in a bowl with a saucer or bread-and-butter plate on top? If it fits snugly, it’s no different than aluminum foil or a plastic lid. (What? You thought that “burping” a Tupperware container got all the air out?)

The next time you finish up some jam, pickles or spaghetti sauce, save the jar. (Quart canning jars are good for food storage, too, if you can get them cheaply. More on that below.)

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Though suburban cul-de-sacs have long been attractive as quiet, safe places for families, their disadvantages are becoming clear. One of the biggest problems is interference with motor- and foot-traffic flow. Research by Lawrence Frank, Bombardier Chair in Sustainable Transportation at the University of British Columbia, looks at neighborhoods in King County, Washington: Residents in areas with the most interconnected streets travel 26% fewer vehicle miles than those in areas with many cul-de-sacs. Recent studies by Frank and others show that as a neighborhood’s overall walkability increases, so does the amount of walking and biking—while, per capita, air pollution and body mass index decrease.

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A scientific conference at Megiddo, “Synchronizing Clocks at Armageddon,” launched a project to analyze 10 separate Iron Age destruction layers using four state-of-the-art scientific techniques: radiocarbon dating, optical luminescence, archaeo-magnetism and rehydroxilation — a new method pioneered in Britain within the last two years.

Megiddo is the only place in the world with so many destruction layers — archaeological strata resulting from a calamity such as a fire, earthquake or conquest — that resulted from a specific event in history.

Megan McArdle runs up against government stupidity.

My husband is suffering from a pretty nasty cold.  Last night he had to duck out before dinner with my family to purchase some Sudafed, because he was miserably congested.  Alas, not being aware of the difference, he decided it wasn’t worth waiting in line to buy cold medicine from behind the counter, and instead bought the stuff on the shelf.  He took some, and then suffered through dinner until we could get home to my box of 24-hour Sudafed.  This morning he came down and said, “It’s amazing how much better you feel when you take medicine that actually does something.”  Then after a pause, he said, “So why do they sell you cold medicine that doesn’t do anything?”

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Accused terrorists planned to cut the throats of reporters at a Danish newspaper that printed Mohammed cartoons, police wiretaps reveal.

The men hoped to kill as many people as possible at Jyllands-Posten within 20 minutes, recordings made by the Danish security service PET and published Monday in the Ekstra Bladet newspaper show.

Megan McCardle casts her mind back.

“Food prepared in the home” consumes less than 10% of the average family budget; in 1950, that figure was almost 30%.  It shows in the cookbooks.  The Betty Crocker is full of economizing tips: ways to stretch ground beef by adding Wheaties; noodle and rice rings that artfully disguise the fact that there isn’t much protein to go around; “one egg” cakes praised for being economical.  This was not a handout for welfare recipients; it was expected that the average housewife would be anxiously counting the cost of the eggs and milk used in her baked goods, and looking for ways to stretch out even cheap cuts of meat at the end of the month.  Now, I’m sure there are still people in this country who worry about the price of adding an extra egg to their cakes–but they are not the average, or even close to the average.  Cooking is both much better, and much easier for those who choose to do it, than it was when my kitchen was built.  And the dishwasher knocks twenty or thirty minutes off the time cost of that cooking–not a small improvement.

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After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same. West isn’t shy about describing the magnitude of this accomplishment. “What we found are the constants that describe every city,” he says. “I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes and the surface area of roads in a city in Japan with 200,000 people. I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.” After a pause, as if reflecting on his hyperbole, West adds: “Look, we all know that every city is unique. That’s all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.”

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How can you get your own free pass from Obamacare? Maybe you can just donate $27 million to President Obama‘s campaign efforts. That’s what Andy Stern did as president of SEIU in 2008. He has been the most frequent guest at Mr. Obama‘s White House.

Backroom deals have become par for the course for proponents of Obamacare. Senators were greased with special favors, like Nebraska Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson and his Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary L. Landrieu and her Louisiana Purchase. Even the American Medical Association was brought in line under threat of losing its exclusive and lucrative medical coding contracts with the government.

The devil is in the details … grinning back at you as he helps himself to the contents of your wallet. The Obama mask is just his sense of humor.

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Guess Indiana just wasn’t big enough for him.

Don’t think of it as selling out … think of it as buying in.

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This article from Fast Company illustrates the myopia with which much, if not most, of the Crust is afflicted. Guys: There are much more important things going on it Egypt right now than lack of access to the Internet. Back up a bit and gain some perspective.

Steve Sailer puts the Crust under a spotlight.

Presumably “HYPS” stands for “Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Stanford”, although Stanford isn’t technically an Ivy League school. I’m always astonished that MIT is frequently left out of groupings of “top tier” schools; my experience has been that they’re right up with the best.

Wisdom. Attend.

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I’m definitely in the wrong line of work.

Tim Cavanaugh has some fun with the self-righteous.

In the grand ol’ tradition of “Libertarian reluctantly calls fire department,” all and sundry are having fun with the news that Ayn Rand received Social Security and (apparently) Medicare in her dotage.

But the Randicare brouhaha is completely opportunistic. This is all part of the game of holding libertarians to some standard you would never imagine imposing on a follower of mainstream politics. If a Democrat complains about a bad day at the DMV, nobody claims he deserves it because he wants the regulations that make the DMV inevitable. But let a libertarian send a letter through the U.S. Postal Service and he’s fricking Tartuffe. It’s a goofy game, but you can see why it’s so tempting to play, given that libertarians have such a stranglehold on foreign policy, drug prohibition, financial regulation, health care, and so many areas of public policy.

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IN LAHORE, PAKISTAN Following the assassination of a liberal politician who criticized federal blasphemy laws, loud support for the confessed killer is coming from an unlikely quarter: a violence-eschewing, anti-Taliban school of Islam steeped in Sufism.

The notion of a moderate but silent Pakistani majority has also been undermined by the stance taken by the nation’s young black-suited lawyers, who three years ago led massive pro-democracy strikes but this month showered rose petals on Mumtaz Qadri, the killer of Punjab governor Salman Taseer. Civilian and military officials have responded with little more than tepid disapproval to the killing.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The really sad part is that this writer from the Washington Post seems to be so surprised as well.

Violence and intolerance are essential characteristics of Islam. Let’s just hope that our Ruling Class wakes up to that fact before we’re all slaves.

Jerry Pournelle draws some historical parallels.

I remember September 1970 — my ship was at Gitmo doing workups prior to deployment, which wasn’t scheduled for several months more. We woke up one morning to an announcement that, Surprise!, we were on our way to the Mediterranean. Those were interesting times. I don’t like interesting times.

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Makes you wonder how come we take so much shit from these piss-ant places.

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Not a good sign.

More here.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in the 1920s and is the source of pretty much every extremist Muslim group, including Hamas. The Muslim Brotherhood continues to be active in Egypt and is the most obvious alternative to the Army/Mubarak regime should that regime fall. Stratfor, citing a source inside Hamas, says members of that organization may be slipping into Egypt to aid the Brotherhood:

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Ever wish Angry Birds had more poop in it? Well look no further than the App Store today, as Apps Genius has launched Angry Turds. As a monkey in Angry Turds, you get to battle evil island explorers who have stolen your monkey babies with various projectile weapons.

You knew it had to happen.

Todd Zywicki is shocked, shocked that credit card issuers are fulfilling his predictions.

Wow, who could have possibly predicted that the Credit CARD Act’s rules that limit non-interest fees and the ability to raise interest rates when a borrower’s risk changes would result in “record high” interest rates (other than me, of course, when I testified to the Senate Banking Committee in 2009 that the act would result in higher interest rates and other than the sponsor of the law, who has acknowledged that it has resulted in higher interest rates but has decided for the rest of us that higher rates is a good thing)?  Even more amazing, it appears that these restrictions on risk-based pricing has hit poor credit risks even harder than less-risky consumers.

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Ferran Adrià, one of the world’s most celebrated chefs, has unveiled plans to transform his restaurant, El Bulli, into an environmentally friendly academic research foundation dedicated to pioneering molecular gastronomy to even greater heights.

The Catalan chef announced a year ago that the three Michelin-starred establishment, crowned best in the world five times, would be closed throughout 2012 and 2013.

This is like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton shutting down for two years to rethink university education — only, in this case, the people in charge know what they’re doing.

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When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will cheerfully blow each other up.

Freeberg lays it out.

We humans in this day and age don’t have to do a whole lot to stay alive, and we have no natural predators. We’re starting to become idiots.

When I made a list of all the ways our thinking has started to suck green donkey balls, busted them out into their most simplistic elements and eliminated the duplicates, I found the resulting list had exactly thirty items. That seems like a good, round number. Let’s blog it.

Mencius Moldbug does what he does best.

Egypt a century ago, under the firm and inspired hand of Lord Cromer, was a boomtown, a miracle and a paradise. A multicultural paradise, even, with Frenchmen and Brits and Greeks and Jews and Turks and Armenians – all of whom the Century of Fear would later send fleeing with a single suitcase. But as late as the ’30s “Alex” was a city of the civilized world – a place where boho trustafarians, like Lawrence Durrell, would move as if to Prague, just because it was a fun cool cheap place to live. Architecture from this period can still be seen, chipped and obscured by smoke, behind the howling mobs and growling tanks in your YouTube clip.

There are many old Egypts. Stray bits of some survive. But somehow, now, Egypt has offended the gods. They have ordered her to pass through the fire – and slowly. In the last century she got a taste. In this she bids fair to endure the full ordeal. At full heat, even the pyramids will burn. There is nothing, nothing, that politics cannot reduce to ash.

For we have seen this movie before. When the student of history contemplates the “Jasmine Revolution,” applauded deliriously by the entire “international community,” by Americans right and left, Brahmins and rednecks, neocons and paleocons and progressives, post-Trotskyists, post-Maoists and post-Stalinists, not to mention every human being on Earth who has so much as heard of Egypt, all serenading pure chaos with gladiatorial bloodlust – CNN had become so boring lately – the student does not even need to set his time machine. The pattern is simply too familiar. The autopilot can see it. The pony knows his way back home.

But Hamlet can be played by pygmies, and history rhymes even as farce. Mubarak can play Nicholas II, Mohammed El-Baradei can appear in the role of Pavel Milyukov, Charles R. Crane can be performed by George Soros, and Hillary Clinton (who has as I write just knifed Mubarak in the back, a deed which can surprise no one over the age of three) does a marvelous Sir George Buchanan. All the details are different, of course; the thing is the same.

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Some news for all of you wine snobs out there.

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I understand the impulse — I’ve often wanted to beat BBC employees — but I suspect they had different motives.

Ruh-roh.

In this article, I will show you several examples of where Google’s search is absolutely broken (and by broken, I mean that 10 out of 10 page one search results are entirely fraud). I will also show you exactly how these rankings are achieved and take a look at what the impact on consumer’s may very possibly be. Last but not least, I’ll try to help you recognize these kinds of websites so you can avoid them as they become increasingly difficult to identify.

Megan McArdle ponders the issue of the day.

I have had a hard time tearing myself away from CNN to write about business news, so I might as well write about the topic on everyone’s mind: when does rioting produce regime change?

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Well, you know, that sort of thing happens.

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That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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But don’t forget that we’re running out of oil. All the Smart People say so.

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Airport officials ordered a holidaymaker carrying a toy soldier onto a plane to remove its three-inch gun – because it was a safety threat.

Ken Lloyd was stunned when he was told he could not go on the plane with the nine-inch model soldier because it was carrying a ‘firearm’.

Apparently the British figure that if the TSA can be stupid, they can be stupid too.

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A US embassy employee shot dead two motorcyclists after they pulled a pistol on him in traffic, sparking angry anti-American protests in the Pakistani city of Lahore

I suppose he was just supposed to let himself be robbed and perhaps murdered.

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The couple — who it should be mentioned are constituents of Alesi — were having a home built. While it was under construction, but no one was there, Alesi suddenly decided to just go into the house and have a look (he says he was checking it out “for a friend.”) The door was locked, but he walked around back and found a basement door that was unlocked. Once inside, he tried to climb a ladder to get to the first floor, since no stairs had been built yet… and suffered serious leg injuries, requiring surgery. And now, he’s suing the homeowners and the builder.

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U.S. border authorities have arrested a controversial Muslim cleric who was deported from Canada to Tunisia three years ago and was caught earlier this month trying to sneak into California inside the trunk of a BMW, according to court documents.

Said Jaziri, the former Imam of a Muslim congregation in Montreal, was hidden inside a car driven by a San Diego-area man who was pulled over by U.S. Border Patrol agents near an Indian casino east of San Diego. Jaziri allegedly paid a Tijuana-based smuggling group $5,000 to get him across the border near Tecate, saying he wanted to be taken to a “safe place anywhere in the U.S.”

So much for the theory that only Mexicans sneak across the southern border.

Hey, perhaps we ought to bring some of those fine young men back from Afghanistan to guard our own border — and, maybe, you know, like, build a fence or something.

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A man died during a jousting re-enactment when a fragment from his lance flew through his visor and penetrated his eye, an inquest heard.

Very medieval. Henry II of France went much the same way.

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Not all people are good candidates for this type of technology, but those who are benefit from it greatly. ReWalk’s purpose is to enable these individuals to once again stand, walk and climb stairs, thus giving them the freedom so many of us take for granted every day. These robotic legs make a huge difference in the lives of many people with lower limb paralysis.

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The Washington Post reports that “[President] Obama won’t endorse raising retirement age or reducing Social Security benefits,” scotching rumors that Obama would support the recommendations of his deficit commission to do both those things. Of course, ruling out those two options for Social Security reform means you only have one left: raising taxes, and by a lot.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The worst part about late January is that my RSS reader becomes choked with crap from people who think that the world is waiting with bated breath for what they have to say about the most useless piece of political theatre outside of an airport.

One thing Barry won’t say is, “Take a look at Michelle’s butt and tell me we don’t have an obesity crisis in this country.” That would demonstrate a sense of humor; I’d pay to see that.

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The international community must hunt the dozen Somali clan chiefs who run the pirate attacks on international shipping in the Indian Ocean, a UN adviser told the Security Council on Tuesday.

Which means that nothing will ever get done, as happens with every such ‘U.N. call’.

The way to get this done is to call Erik Prince at Blackwater and say, ‘Here’s the list. $1,000,000 a head. You can send the body, too, but we’re paying for the head.’ Poof. No pirate problem within about three months.

Charlie Stross tours a nuclear reactor in Scotland.

Unfortunately, it’s due to socialists like him that ‘nothing like this will be built again’, but Charlie is apparently too busy with life to connect the dots. Ah, well. Enjoy the tour.

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Google Voice is a free service, but porting your existing mobile phone number will cost you $20. Number porting is available to existing Google Voice users right now – there’s a “Change/Port” option on the Settings page once you log in to your account – and according to Google, numbers are typically ported within 24 hours.

When you port your number to Google Voice, doing so actually cancels the existing service plan you have with your mobile carrier. So you’ll have to contact your mobile service provider to set up a new plan under a new number.

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A Seattle man has been acquitted of all charges brought against him when he refused to show ID to TSA officials and videotaped the incident at an airport security checkpoint.

Apparently resistance is not necessarily futile.

Mocek’s video, shot in November 2009 at the Albuquerque International Airport, portrays a passenger politely refusing officers’ request that he show ID and stop videotaping his encounter with them.

“Is there a problem with using a camera in the airport in publicly – in publicly accessible areas?” Mocek calmly asks.

“Yes, there is,” an officer answers.

“I think you’re incorrect,” the passenger replies.

As the confrontation continues, one officer tells the man: “You pushing it, OK? You’re really pushing it.”

Another officer says: “Buster, you’re in trouble.”

Papers, Please! says the acquittal proves what TSA critics have said all along: That checkpoint staff have no police powers, that contrary to TSA claims, passengers have the right to fly without providing ID, and yes, passengers are free to video record checkpoints as long as images on screening monitors aren’t captured.

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Even socialists can be bought — but they don’t come cheap.

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Thanks to some bad (and mostly Democratic) decision-making over in Washington state, major dishwasher detergent manufacturers had to drastically cut its phosphate content; which is why your dishwasher recently and suddenly stopped working properly.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Presumably they won’t be happy until everybody has a dog to lick the dishes clean for them. Hey, it’s organic.

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Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

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Hundreds of priests filed into Verizon Center in downtown Washington on Monday morning as contemporary praise music boomed from the speakers.

The arena was packed with thousands of swaying, praying teenagers, many wearing sweat shirts from the Catholic schools they attend or knit hats that said “We believe” or “March for Life.”

The message, of course, is that religion is some sort of huge rock concert; the subtext is that the Catholic Church needs young people more than young people need the Catholic Church.

I guess this accounts for the fact that Catholic congregations are shrinking and religious vocations are drying up. My advice to the kids is to hold out for top dollar.

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No surprises here. Used to be that women could depend on their husbands (however termed) to support them and their children during those periods when they were occupied with growing up. That doesn’t happen any more. Women in these degenerate modern times feel free to dispense their sexual favors without insisting on commitment, and so men feel free to dispense with commitment. “You’re pregnant? Hey, sucks to be you. See you around some time.” Hence the push for a husband-substitute, which in the modern age means the welfare state.

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Ikea’s store layout is a psychological weapon used to confuse and disorientate shoppers into spending more, an expert claimed.

Alan Penn, director of the Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment at University College London, said visitors to the firm’s shops were so baffled by their surroundings that if they see something they like, they pick it up straightaway because it would be too hard to find it later.

I’ve only been in an Ikea once and I can testify that I was totally confused.

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The last publishers discontinued their participation in 2011.

The end of an era.