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And I, for one, am looking forward to it.

Toilet seat wars.

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A Russian woman died of a heart attack at her own funeral, after waking up to find praying mourners filing past her coffin.

Not something you see every day.

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One of the killer features of the Desmos Whiteboard is an interactive calculator that graphs equations as you write them. (Founder Eli Luberoff was a double math and physics major at Yale). Desmos has now taken that and rewritten it as a standalone online graphing calculator. It instantly draws the equations as you update them, it’s free, browser-based, color-coded, and you can share any graph with a bitly link.

Who could ask for anything more?

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At various times in the past, New England has threatened to secede.

Perhaps we could encourage them to do so. It would solve a lot of problems.

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In January, Delta Airlines announced that Saudi Arabian Airlines is joining Delta’s SkyTeam network of international airline partners. Yesterday, WorldNet Daily reported that Delta employees would be enforcing a no-Jews policy when checking in passengers on SAA flights from the United States to Saudi Arabia.

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I’ll bet that was a surprise.

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In a federal announcement issued on Tuesday, famous crazytech company General Atomics was awarded a $39,833,499 contract for “High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) Phase 4, Demonstration Laser Weapon System”.

…

DARPA wants the HELLADS programme to produce a directed-energy weapon of war-grade power (say 150 kilowatts) and weighing no more than 750kg, light enough to put onto a US combat jet. Existing lasers are so heavy that they require at least a cargo plane or a monster jumbo to carry them.

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The guy keeps trying to come up with reasons to get her to leave her front yard, first suggesting that she can’t film from the sidewalk (so she takes a step back) and then complaining that she’s “anti-police” and that he doesn’t feel safe unless she goes inside. She points out that she’s in her own front yard and not doing anything wrong. The cop then threatens her with arrest, and quickly arrests her, claiming that she didn’t obey a police order.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

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

The European Union is, of course, merely an additional layer of Crust on top of the existing sclerotic European governments, cleverly crafted to multiply the number of pigs at the public trough while further insulating them from either scrutiny or accountability.

Much like the U.N., come to think of it….

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Sad news indeed.

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Oh, really? Imagine that.

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Hey, gotta bring that price of gas down if there’s to be any re-election chances in 2012, don’t you know.

National interest be damned, it’s all about Democrats keeping power. First things first.

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Look, the West can’t help everyone and the regimes would be insulted if we tried. But they don’t need our help. The greatest poverty in our time has been in China and India. Did these countries reduce poverty because of our help? No. They did it themselves.

Giving is problematic. We take money from poor people in rich countries and give it to rich people in poor countries. Aid sometimes creates corruption.

‘Sometimes’?

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

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Confused about which 4G wireless broadband service really is the fastest? U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) wants wireless operators to disclose the true speeds of their self-proclaimed “4G” services.

The congresswoman today introduced a billed called the “Next Generation Wireless Disclosure Act,” which, if passed, would require carriers to inform consumers at the point of sale of the minimum data speeds, network reliability, and coverage of their advertised 4G services.

I am trying — and failing — to understand how this is the business of the Federal government. What is it about Democrat Congresspeople that whenever they run across something they dislike they introduce legislation? Is this just political posturing? “Look, I’m doing something! Vote for me in 2012! I’m you’re only friend!”

Read it.

Apple has worked on “directional audio” technology, specifically employed as an audio user interface, allowing users to make selections and navigate menus based on audio cues in a three-dimensional surround sound environment.

The concept was revealed this week in a new patent application made public by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office named “Directional Audio Interface for Portable Media Device.” Discovered by AppleInsider, the filing shows Apple’s interest in creating advanced portable devices and accompanying headphones to augment the user interface of the device.

This sounds very odd.

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Against the advice of his military commanders, Obama announced a drawdown of forces on a transparently political timetable — the timetable of American presidential politics.

I don’t profess to know the right thing to do, but whatever it is, that ain’t it. And placing the context of the drawdown on the need for “nation building” at home: that’s not right either. It makes me want to say that nation building at home will begin with the departure of Obama from office.

National interest? Who cares? What’s important is Democrats hanging on to power….

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Because of that pesky GPS bracelet on her calf.  Those big meanies in Massachusetts, making her stay under the indignity of house arrest for one, itty-bitty conviction of “iding and abetting the filing of false tax returns by her brother, Robert Eremian, a fugitive from federal charges of racketeering, illegal gambling, money laundering and witness tampering.”  I mean, she served a whole month of jail time for that!  What do they want, blood?

Funny how sitting Democrat Congressmen seem to have connections that would get a Republic hounded out of office — and excluded from any future party activities. But the Party of Crime apparently has a broader view.

Take, for example, Alcee Hastings — removed as a Federal judge for bribery, the Democrats in Florida elected him to Congress, where he is fighting the good fight through sexual harassment. Pure class, those Democrats.

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Crews on Wednesday night removed the Surfing Madonna mosaic from the base of a train bridge on Encinitas Boulevard.

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

The piece depicts Our Lady of Guadalupe on a surfboard with the words “Save the Ocean” down the side. Patterson and another person installed the mosaic April 22 without permission from the city.

The mosaic, however, is graffiti under Encinitas municipal code, and city officials said it must come down.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

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Using a multiferroic alloy of nickel, cobalt, manganese, and tin, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered a method of creating green electricity from waste heat sources. This alloy could be placed near your car’s exhaust to create electricity — or in the cooling towers of power stations to convert wasted heat into electricity. Beyond creating the alloy itself, which is made from common and abundant elements, there are no extra costs — and no additional pollution, either.

No word on whether it comes with a free pony.

Prominent author Holly Lisle learns a hard lesson.

If you’re on Facebook, Facebook owns you. They own your information, they own your contacts, they own your family members, they own your mailbox, they own whatever you create on the site. And in an instant they can take it away, and you cannot get it back. You have no other way to contact friends you connect with through the site but the way they offer you—so all the people you love can disappear out of your reach in an instant’s notice, through no fault of your own.

If you friended me on Facebook, I’m very sorry I could not reach you. I’ll apologize here and hope anyone who knows me from both Facebook and my weblog, mailing list, or Twitter, will pass this along so the people I care about, with whom I have once again lost contact, will at least know where to find me if they want to.

Charlie Stross, Hugo-Award-winning author, wades in on one of the most interesting topics of our time.

Watch it.

Read it.

By morphing and repositioning a small aircraft’s vertical tail to resemble the cranial crest of a pterosaur, researchers have shown that the aircraft’s turn radius can be reduced by 14%. The ability to make sharper turns is especially important for small aircraft that operate in urban environments and in the presence of obstacles.

Read it.

That ‘India’ is considered one country has always struck me as about as silly has considering ‘Europe’ one country. The only reason India is together is that they were all conquered by the British, which I should think they would consider an inadequate reason. (But, then, I’m not ‘Indian’, so I have no idea.)

Steve Sailer takes the shot.

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Somehow California manages to spend a whole lot on something it’s not even doing. Our friends on the left coast haven’t executed anyone since 2006 but they have more than 700 prisoners waiting on death row — the most of any state. More impressively, according to a new study from the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, California managed to spend $4 billion on death penalty expenses, with 13 prisoners executed since the reinstatement of the state death penalty in 1978. (54 prisoners, on the other hand, have died of “natural causes.”)

My granddaddy used to say that the only thing that saves us is, we don’t get all the government we pay for. But this is ridiculous.

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An environmental group threatened to sue two of the nation’s biggest rail owners Tuesday under a novel legal theory that would classify diesel exhaust as hazardous waste.

The Natural Resources Defense Council sent letters to Union Pacific Corp. and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, saying it will file a lawsuit within 90 days under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which regulates hazardous solid waste disposal.

Environmentalists! Of course! If horses were good enough for Queen Victoria, they ought to be good enough for you, dammit.

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(Actually, the picture tells you everything you need to know. This guy is obviously the Upper Class Twit of the Year’s simple-minded younger brother, given a job on the public payroll because he hasn’t a prayer out in the real world.)

The assumption that who gets what job is somehow a ‘representative’ function in a free-market economy is, of course, unexamined.

This schlub is the Education Secretary in a British government nominally run by the Conservative Party, which I suppose just goes to show how the meaning of the term ‘conservative’ has degenerated since Lady Thatcher was PM.

So it has nothing to do with the talents of the individual pupil, and everything to do with the quality of the school. One could presumably pluck any urchin off the street, send him to Eton or Rugby, and wind up with a productive member of the Ruling Class. This common modern notion has merely to be stated to demonstrate its inherent idiocy. It is, of course, very comforting to the losers in life to embrace the notion that they’re just as good as everybody else, so that the fact that they live on the bottom is not their fault but society’s, in that they were ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘underprivileged’ through no fault of their own. (Another obviously silly notion.)

Unfortunately, these days one cannot even count on children from rich backgrounds having access to a decent education, what with the absurdities of modern educational theories having penetrated even the most famous institutions.

The use of the term ‘deprived’ accurately signals the presumption that this performance is due to the poor tykes having had their otherwise-inalienable right to good exam results ripped from their tender fingers by a nasty and inequitable social system. News Flash: Even the performance of the non-deprived pupils in the U.K. sucks big hairy ones; it’s not the inequity of the system, but the total failure of the system to do what it’s supposed to, that is the problem — a problem that doesn’t look likely to be solved any time soon, with nimrods like this in charge.

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The motif reminded an audience in little peril of forgetting that the occasion solemnized a transition from one phase of life, marked by potty-training and learning to sit criss-cross applesauce for story time, to a period of loftier pursuits: tying your own shoes, sounding out words, being the line leader, and other such stuff as dreams are made on.

How precious.

Cynics, of course, are fond of scoffing at occasions such as these. Graduation ceremonies—for pre-kindergarteners? You cannot be serious!

No. They cannot. Pre-schoolers have not yet learned what a serious place the world can be—which is why they remain, to borrow a phrase from Robert Brustein’s Letters to a Young Actor, “the living embodiment of the audience’s joys and fears.”

Not to mention a bottomless hole for cookies and juice.

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I am not making this up.

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It’s nice to know that at least somebody in this world has a realistic appreciation of where the threat lies.

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Sens. John McCain and John Kerry introduced a resolution Tuesday that would give President Barack Obama the green light to continue limited military operations in Libya.

Which tells you everything you need to know about John McCain, the guy who could manage to lose to somebody with no experience, no skills, and no program.

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Not that it matters a damn what ‘scholars say’. Crustians only obey the law when it’s convenient.

The White House bypassed the administration’s own written guidelines for resolving major legal disputes when it overruled the Justice Department’s advice that the president seek congressional approval for U.S. military operations in Libya, according to some legal scholars.

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

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How like the New York Times to worry more about how Pakistanis see the U.S. than about how Americans see Pakistan. After all, they’re not sending us billions of dollars in aid, and we’re not betraying their troops to terrorists.

Most Pakistanis disapprove of the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden and think it will have harmful effects on relations between Pakistan and the United States, according to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.

Which is why we shouldn’t give them another dime. These people are our enemies, not our friends.

Read it.

“This could ultimately be the cleanest, most efficient and cost-effective way of converting coal into electricity,” says Professor Meilin Liu, engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “And by providing an exhaust stream of pure carbon dioxide, this technique could also facilitate carbon sequestration without the separation and purification steps now required for conventional coal-burning power plants.”

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Keith McMillen Instruments of Berkeley, California, has released the SoftStep KeyWorx, a USB foot-operated input device that combines the company’s SoftStep USB/MIDI foot controller – a musician’s stomp-pad – with KeyWorx software to, as the company’s marketing blurb explains, “Get your feet in the game”.

But the SoftStep KeyWorx is not only designed to give “computer gamers a competitive edge.” It can also, the company claims, put to use the pedal extremities of video editors, programmers, and “data entry professionals”.

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Not so surprising when you realize that most military submarines are playing blind man’s buff – they go forward into the dark and rely on charts to avoid stationary obstacles and depend on their sense of hearing (sonar) to avoid moving objects. Using active echolocation would, of course, make things a lot safer, but the whole point of a military submarine would be sort of undercut by their emitting loud noises at regular intervals.

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The looming problem of too many Kindle books.

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It would appear that Mexico seems to think they have a right to send us all their discontented people. If they were cars, this would be called ‘dumping’ and the government would give them such a noogie….

The bill would also make it illegal for illegal aliens to receive public benefits. Again, I’m pretty sure that’s how it works down in Mexico, too, assuming there’s much in the way of beneficios públicos to be had. Either way, I’d consider it ill-mannered if I were to barge into an emergency room somewhere in the Free and Sovereign State of Chihuahua and demand that they yank out my gall bladder for free.

Georgia’s bill also specifies that when making such inquiries, police “shall not consider race, color, or national origin,” which seems rather gallant given the fact that four out of every five illegal immigrants in America is from south of the border.

I guess American Exceptionalism means never getting to play by the same rules as everybody else….

In their legal brief, the entire country of Mexico, as well as every last inhabitant of nearly every other maize-kneading nation south of Texas, complained that those meddlesome busybodies in Georgia who write Georgia’s laws had enacted legislation that “substantially and inappropriately burdens the consistent country to country relations between Mexico and the United States of America…interfering with the strategic diplomatic interests of the two countries and encouraging an imminent threat of state-sanctioned bias or discrimination.”

Such as the state-sanctioned bias or discrimination that Mexico (to choose a purely random example) uses on its neighbors to the south? That sort of state-sanctioned bias or discrimination?

According to the most reliable accounting I’ve seen—one which excludes legal adult immigrants but includes the educational and medical tabs run up by the “anchor babies”—each one of those oft-scorned “average American households” is forced to pay over $1,000 a year to cover the costs accrued by these “undocumented individuals” and their spawn. And that calculation includes all of the tax revenues that these brave and humble un-naturalized soil-tillers reputedly pump into our system. Even after the taxes are tallied, illegal immigrants cost America over a hundred freakin’ billion dollars yearly.

Funny how that works….

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How accommodating.

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No doubt for some warranty repair.

[Wheel of the Crust keeps on turnin’, don’ know where I’ll be tomorrow….]

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What’s cooler than jetting from Paris to Tokyo in under three hours?

Trying to figure out how many people actually need to do that — you might have to take your shoes off — and how many could afford to take this inevitably-absurdly-expensive service, almost all of whom have their own jets already. Oh, and UN officials, who’ll be riding on our dime; can’t forget them.

Yet another Crustian toy masquerading as technological progress.

Class warfare comes to Britain.

Or maybe it never left.

There may be an argument for high-speed rail in places that have people wanting to go long distances between major metropolitan areas, such as the U.S., China, India, Russia, etc., but no case whatever has been made for needing it in Britain, where you can get pretty much anywhere in the country in six hours by car and ten by rail. The railroads in Britain suck, and have ever since they were nationalized after WWII; this is not Sherlock Holmes territory any more).

So why build high-speed rail in Britain? Why, because all the Cool Kids are doing high-speed rail.

“A vocal minority are determined to block our ambitious proposals to create a railway fit for the 21st century,” he said.

“It is important that all those who are in favour make themselves heard by responding to the consultation under way so that we put the national interest ahead of purely local interests. ”

Can’t have Britain without the latest toys, even though they can’t even afford a decent Navy any more.

Read it.

Chinese developers are making knock-offs of European towns.

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California currently ranks #49 among U.S. states for “business tax climate” (Tax Foundation) and #48 for for “economic freedom” (Mercatus).  It shouldn’t be any surprise then that companies are leaving the “Golden State” in record numbers this year (see chart above) for “golder pastures” and more business-friendly climates in other states.

And who could blame them?

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I am not making this up.

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A commenter on Jerry Pournelle’s site has said that it would be cheaper to have Pakistan as an enemy than as an ally, and it struck me that one could make a long list of places for which that would be true.