Read it.

Well, some people worry about these things.

Last month, a 114-year-old former schoolteacher from Georgia named Besse Cooper became the world’s oldest living person. Her predecessor, Brazil’s Maria Gomes Valentim, was 114 when she died. So was the oldest living person before her, and the one before her. In fact, eight of the last nine “world’s oldest” titleholders were 114 when they achieved the distinction. Here’s the morbid part: All but two were still 114 when they passed it on. Those two? They died at 115.

Check it out.

 Test Your Vocab is a research project to measure vocabulary sizes according to age and education, and particularly to compare native learning rates with foreign language classroom learning rates. It functions by means of a test: the first part with a handful of words to determine the general vocabulary level, and a second part with a larger but narrower selection of words to determine the vocabulary level with greater precision.

Remembering always that this is just an estimate. My score was 39,900; don’t know whether that’s good or bad. Robin can probably beat me, since he’s more of a polymath than I am.

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 Zhang Yue, 52, says his 220-storey, 2,750ft-tall building in Changsha, which he has called “Sky City”, will be the world’s first standardised, factory-built skyscraper: bringing China’s mass manufacturing skills to our cities.

Read it.

 Parents have been banned from watching their children compete at sports unless they have been vetted by police.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

Read it.

Mark Bittman, who for years wrote “The Minimalist,” a useful and entertaining recipe column in the food section of The New York Times, is now an op-ed columnist for the paper. That’s too bad, because he was much better at the former job. In an essay that ran in the Sunday edition of the Times, Bittman gets excited about the “fun” and “inspiring” project of taxing Americans into better eating habits. Like Kelly Brownell, who runs the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, Bittman wants to “tax things like soda, French fries, doughnuts and hyperprocessed snacks” while subsidizing “the purchase of staple foods like seasonal greens, vegetables, whole grains, dried legumes and fruit.”

Too many people in this world think that it’s the primary function of government to make other people do it their way. That’s what we’re fighting.

Read it.

I don’t think they mean Julie the receptionist.

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To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you are not allowed to criticize.

Steve Sailer explains it all to you.

 As you can see from the map, you can now go anywhere … except for the huge chunk of the left side of the map that represents the Westside, which is where most of the money and good jobs are. In theory, Westside liberals are all in favor of rail transit, except in practice they don’t seem to either use it or want others using it near them.

Back in 1986, the feds were offering to help build a subway down Wilshire Blvd., but Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) blocked it, so the Purple Line peters out in Koreatown.

Mass transit is fine for the Little People, but we can’t have them riding though our neighborhoods.

 The question with mass transit in Los Angeles is one of class transit. The poor have always ridden mass transit, and the poor we shall always have with us. But higher classes have always taken their cues from the top. In Los Angeles, the top people have always attempted to live as inaccessibly as possible. Last May, for instance, I looked up as President Obama’s Marine Corps One helicopter droned overhead on one stage of his labyrinthine passage to a fundraiser at George Clooney’s house in Fryman Canyon. Even if you are President, you can’t get to Clooney’s house easily.

That’s why God made SUVs, obviously.

 If your fondest career hope is that Steven Spielberg’s personal assistant calls you up and invites you over to Steve’s house in Pacific Palisades to talk about that idea you have, you’d better have a car because you can’t get to his house any other way. And it better be a nice car to park in his curving driveway because you don’t want to look like some kind of a loser. And similar thinking goes for all the people hoping to get invited to the house of somebody who is hoping to get invited to Spielberg’s house, and on down the line.

Hey, one must have standards.

Read it.

Pretty soon the only ones left will be the stupid ones.

With results as you see them….

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The new school year is only a few weeks old, but it’s already becoming clear that the federal government’s new school lunch guidelines are about as popular as the NFL’s replacement referees.

After EAGnews.org published a recent article about how the Obama administration’s new calorie limitations for school lunches are leaving many American students hungry (especially high school athletes), a concerned food service worker from a western Montana school district contacted us with news about how the guidelines are impacting her students.

She only agreed to an interview on the condition of anonymity.

According to our source, the new federal guidelines require vegetables to comprise the largest portion of a student’s lunch, while the entrée is now being treated as a side dish. That means a lot more of the stuff most kids don’t eat and just a tiny portion of the palatable item.

“It’s completely flip-flopped in terms of portion size,” our source says. “I’m appalled at the serving sizes we’re required to give high school students.”

Even though some kids may be leaving the lunch room hungry, the new Obama-imposed rules prohibit students from receiving additional helpings, even when there’s food left over.

“We’re told we cannot serve seconds, that we cannot save leftover food for the next day. We must throw it away,” our source says. “What a waste for hungry kids who aren’t getting enough to eat to begin with.”

Hey, wasting money is what government does best.

Read it.

President Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 on a promise to make his administration the most transparent administration ever, but a recent Bloomberg News survey found that 19 out of 20 cabinet-level agencies failed to obey the law to disclose the cost of travel by its top officials. In addition, just eight of the 57 federal agencies met the news organization’s request within the 20-day time period required by law.

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

Read it.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has jumped into the food fight over school breakfast, calling for schools nationwide to adopt new programs to provide free morning meals, which Mayor Bloomberg’s administration warns might lead city kids to pack on the pounds.

Hm, which approach to Big Brother shall we take today? Increase dependence on the nanny state by providing ‘free’ food for their kids? Or increase subjection to the nanny state by dictating the composition of what food those kids will eat? What to do, what to do….

Of course, once we’ve got them hooked, if the proles refuse to get with the program, we can just cut their kids’ rations.

The Wobbly Boot Pico-Brewery

i-Ruler

Actifry

The Ostrich Pillow. Wouldn’t mind having one of these.

5 High-Tech Toys for Your Geeky Cat.

Bacon Bubbles for Your Dog. I am not making this up.

Pollution-Eating Clothing.

Recording Police Encounters? There’s An App for That.

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But the sad secret is that streetcars of all descriptions and vintages are at best modestly successful transportation projects, at worst expensive objets d’art that very few people use. Demand for the vehicles is driven not by the public but by the dreams of land-use planners and downtown boosters who imagine that aesthetically pleasing vehicles lumbering in slow circles through walkable areas will somehow prompt a boom in economic activity. Streetcar booster Gloria Ohland has often written that streetcars should be considered “economic development projects with transportation benefits.”

Yet the fantasy that people will travel or move to a particular location purely for the pleasure of tootling around in a trolley has consistently failed to materialize. Because the urban circulator is not tailored to the needs of modern city dwellers who use mass transit to get around, there is no natural constituency to ride them. The result: Many communities get stuck with an eternal loop of empty, expensive white elephants.

And yet the people who tout these attempts to revert to the way things were in the 19th century invariably think of themselves as ‘progressives’. What’s up with that?

Read it.

It is axiomatic that if the federal government had realized five or six years ago that the technological advances in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing that have set off the current domestic oil and natural gas boom were coming, they surely would have done something to stop it.  Now the greens and federal regulators are trying to play catch up: they can’t openly try to stop the boon of new domestic energy because its benefits (like cheap natural gas and 1 percent unemployment in North Dakota) are too evident, so they are trying to slow it up with “concern” about “issues.”

God forbid we should actually have, you know, energy independence.

Read it.

Be prepared.

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Time-rich psychologists in the USA say they have discovered that female Democratic politicians are significantly less feminine in appearance than Republican ones – so much so that it’s often possible to tell which party a woman politico belongs to just by looking at her.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

I’ve always thought that Congresswoman DeLauro looks like somebody that Indian Jones ought to be battling in a third-world country. But I thought it was just me.

And a survey among undergraduate volunteers showed that you can actually tell what party a US lady politico is by gauging how feminine she appears:

In fact, the relationship is so strong that politically uninformed undergraduates were able to determine the political affiliation of the representatives with an overall accuracy rate that exceeded chance, and the accuracy of those predications increased in direct relation to the lawmaker’s proximity to feminine norms.

Well. There it is.

“Female politicians with stereotypically feminine facial features are more likely to be Republican than Democrat, and the correlation increases the more conservative the lawmaker’s voting record,” adds Colleen M Carpinella, a UCLA graduate student in psychology.

Hey, right-wing chicks are hot. Anne Coulter. Michelle Malkin. Laura Ingraham. Sara Palin. Pamela Geller. Bo Derek.

Perhaps interestingly, Democrat congressmen also appeared more masculine than Republican ones.

Sadly, that doesn’t surprise me a bit.

Read it.

Enquiring minds want to know.

Read it.

Firefly was wickedly creative, well-written and had fantastic humor. Spaceships and wardrobe that ranged from Western to Steampunk to Chinese aside, Firefly presented excellent Contract formation issues.

Contract formation consists of 1) Offer; 2) Acceptance; 3) Consideration; and 4) Performance.

In the world of Firefly, it was often 1) Offer 2) Acceptance 3) Gunfight (also known as breach). Let’s review three episodes to examine these contract issues.

Malcolm Reynolds, Esq.?

Steve Sailer.

 Perhaps my assumption that we owe certain debts to our fellow citizens, whether or not we like them or approve of their politics, is simply outmoded. The contemporary mindset seems to be that nobody is more annoying than your fellow citizens who don’t agree with you, in contrast to those blank slates from Randomistan.

Read it.

Do you feel more secure? I sure feel more secure.

TSA: Bringing Third-World corruption to a First-World neighborhood near you, all at the expense of the American taxpayer.

Aren’t you proud?

Read it.

 Eating cherries can reduce the risk of gout by more than a third, according to new research.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

Read it.

President Barack Obama has signed into law twenty-one new or higher taxes on the American people.

Read it.

Two species of African spiny mouse have been caught at something no other mammal is known to do — completely regenerating damaged tissue1. The work could help improve wound healing in humans.

And they did it without using embryonic stem cells. Don’t tell the Huffington Post.

Read it.

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

Read it.

 Since the dawn of the space age, more than 20 000 objects larger than a softball have accumulated in Earth’s orbit. About 1000 of those objects are spacecraft that carry active payloads, serving many valuable missions for mankind. But the rest could best be called junk, the by-product of thousands of launches and routine spacecraft deployments, nearly 200 explosions, and several collisions. And this junk poses a serious problem.

Not to me, it doesn’t. I’m sure that the people for whom it does represent a problem, i.e. the people (mostly governments and corporations) who have satellites up, are aware of it and taking whatever action they think is appropriate. (Or maybe not – the chief achievement of government employees, including NASA, is to kick the can down the road.)

This sort of the-sky-is-falling thumbsucker of an article is why there are so many hysterical buttinskys wandering around.

How do we change our ways?

What do you mean ‘we’, paleface? ‘We’ don’t. It’s not been demonstrated that it’s any of ‘our’ business.

One of the ugliest features of modern ‘journalism’ is the habitual, reflexive tendency to find something that can be characterized as a problem, and then JUMP to the conclusion that it’s some sort of character flaw in ‘us’ that ‘we’ need to fix. And the MUST HAVE proposed solution is invariably something that the government MUST DO, at taxpayer expense.

NASA continues to fight a growing hazard with what has been, at best, a level budget.

Translation: WE NEED MORE MONEY!!!!! (Not surprising when you look at who’s writing the article..)

What NASA—and the world—needs is a clear mandate.

I’ll give you a ‘clear mandate’: Mind your own bloody business.

You want to ‘fix’ this ‘problem’, fine, it’s your problem, you pay for the fix. Put YOUR money where YOUR mouth is, leech.

Read it.

Saudi authorities have deported 150 female Nigerian pilgrims and detained another 1,000 because they came unaccompanied by men, Nigeria’s government announced on Wednesday.

Mohammed Bello, chairman of Nigeria’s national haj, or Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, said 150 women on one flight had been stopped at the airport for “lack of … lawful male accompanying pilgrim”.

But hey, Muslims are just like you and me, right?

And the feminists say: [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp] ….

Read it.

An interesting way of putting it — well, it is Slate, a Voice of the Crust — but at least they recognize the problem.

So what explains the lingering suspicions that some people (even those who aren’t Monsanto-hating, organic-food-only eaters) still harbor? Some of these folks are worried about new genes being introduced into plant and animal species. But humans have been selectively breeding plants and animals pretty much since we moved out of caves, manipulating their genes all the while. The process was just slower before biotechnology came along.

Obviously, the way it was done prior to 1900 was Good, and the modern efficient scientific way is Bad. (Honestly, how these people can call themselves ‘progressives’ with a straight face is beyond me….)

Many environmentalists are concerned that genetically modified animals such as “Franken-salmon” could get loose in the wild and out-compete their nonengineered cousins, or lead to breeding problems for the wild members of the species. But even the scientist on whose research the “Trojan gene” hypothesis is based says the risk to wild salmon is “low” and that his work has been misrepresented by GMO opponents.

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

The bottom line for people worried about GMO ingredients in their food is that there is no credible scientific evidence that GMOs pose a health risk.

It never stopped them before, and it won’t stop them now….

Read it.

Some good news for a change. (Why can’t we ever have a President with a name like ‘Goodluck Jonathan’?)

Read  it.

Barrie Heyman and his duck Star have already raised about £6,500 for a children’s hospice by visiting businesses in Devon, England, and asking for donations. But members of the North Devon District Council are trying to put a stop to that. They say Heyman must apply 28 days in advance for a street collection permit. That permit is good for one day only.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Read it. And watch the video.

This trend could bring some serious automation to the construction industry. Speed the day.

Watch it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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 The FORM 1 is capable of creating objects with layers as thin as 25 microns — that’s 75 percent thinner than even the new Replicator 2. The company didn’t scrimp on design and polish to meet its affordability goals either. The base is a stylish brushed metal with the small build platform protected by an orange plastic shell. There’s even a companion software tool for simple model creation. You can still get one, though the price of entry is now $2,500, at the Kickstarter page. Or you can simply get a sneak peek in the gallery and video below.

Read  it.

WHEN Mexican police found a body in the woods it was burned beyond recognition, its DNA too damaged to be used for identification. Luckily, investigators were able to extract DNA from elsewhere – the digestive systems of maggots that had been feeding on the body. This is the first time that human DNA from a maggot gut has been analysed in this way to successfully identify a victim in a legal case.

We have the technology.

Read it.

A draft report by the Virginia State Crime Commission, quotes a Virginia State Police Officer suggesting that cigarette bootlegging is now more profitable than trade in cocaine, heroin, pot, or guns.

You’d think that the whole Prohibition era had never happened.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

I have this image of a stuffed penguin with an eye-patch and a parrot perched on his head….

Read it.

Prosecutors in Italy have called for a group of scientists to be sent to prison for four years each for allegedly failing to give adequate warning of the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009 that killed 309 people and injured hundreds more.

I predict a sudden and catastrophic fall in Italian interest in pursuing a scientific career.

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In Silent Spring, Carson crafted a passionate denunciation of modern technology that drives environmentalist ideology today. At its heart is this belief: Nature is beneficent, stable, and even a source of moral good; humanity is arrogant, heedless, and often the source of moral evil. Rachel Carson, more than any other person, is responsible for the politicized science that afflicts our public policy debates today.

Rachel Carson and her disciples are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of malaria victims in developing nations. This is what happens when ‘progressives’ try to solve First World ‘problems’ with ham-handed prescriptions that wind up costing lives.

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Bankers can be forgiven if they can’t figure out this regulatory whipsaw. They get punished if they make loans that are too risky, but they also get fined if they don’t make risky loans to enough minority borrowers based solely on some Washington quota.

In these degenerate modern times, the highly-politicized Justice Department will jump on you, not just for possibly breaking the law, but for insufficient zeal in the service of the Administration’s political agenda.

I rather suspect that Thomas Jefferson would not be comfortable with that.

Read it.

Confusion for whom?

Pop star Madonna urged Americans to support President Barack Obama during a concert in Washington DC but incorrectly referred to him as a Muslim.

Perhaps  she knows something you don’t.

It’s a trend.

Thanks to the United States Department of Agriculture and First Lady Michelle Obama and their insistence on changing the diet served at public schools, students across the country are giving up eating the food served at school and starving.

And now black markets are emerging; some kids in New Bedford, Massachusetts are smuggling in bottles of chocolate syrup and selling it by the squeeze because other students have resigned themselves to simply drinking milk for lunch. Nancy Carvalho, director of food services for New Bedford Public Schools, allowed that hummus and black bean salads don’t exactly draw long lines of students. These items have been tough sells in elementary cafeterias.

This is what happens when incompetent amateurs wind up in charge of important areas of life.

Read it.

But I’m sure that somehow it’s all George W Bush’s fault.

Read it.

2012’s high school seniors have the worst SAT reading score since 1972; they scored 486 on reading, out of a possible 800. In writing, students also dropped dramatically, down to 488. That’s a nine-point drop since 2006.

But I’m sure it’s somehow George W Bush’s fault.

Read it.

The fine minds at MIT combined the Kinect with a laser range finder and a laptop to create a real-time mapping rig for firefighters and other rescue workers. The prototype, called SLAM (for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) received funding from the US Air Force and the Office of Naval Research, and it stands out among other indoor mapping systems for its focus on human (rather than robot) use and its ability to produce maps without the aid of any outside information, thanks to an on-board processor.

This is an amazingly good idea.

Read it.

Led by the United States, the founders of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the institution tasked with oversight of the Palestine refugees, conceived of it as a temporary instrument to help relieve the plight of the Arab refugees displaced by the struggle over Israel’s creation in 1948-49. But over the ensuing sixty-three years, UNRWA has evolved into an agency that perpetuates the refugee problem as a source of conflict rather than contributing to its resolution. Its refugee camps and educational programs keep alive the impossible dream that millions of descendants of the original refugees will “return” to today’s Israel. Its social service delivery programs create permanent dependency and impede local integration into the societies and countries where its beneficiaries have resided for decades. Unlike its sister agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which is responsible for millions of non-Palestinian refugees worldwide, it does not have an active program for “local integration” of refugees where they now reside nor “resettlement” in third countries.

With thanks to Freeberg.

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Built inside a 20-foot shipping container placed on its end, the Kamermaker – ” room maker” in Dutch – is one of the largest 3D printers we’ve ever seen. Able to print objects as big as 2 meter square and 3.5 meters high, the Kamermaker is designed to print huge objects including furniture, architectural elements, and even entire rooms.

The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

At least in Wisconsin.

A frequent state Capitol protester known for navigating the statehouse on a Segway was charged Monday with two counts of misdemeanor disorderly conduct for allegedly harassing journalists working in and near the second-floor Capitol press room.

Of course, when they do it to you, they’re just doing their jobs….

Paul Mirengoff reminds us of an inconvenient truth.

Nearly twelve years after the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency it has become easy to forget this central fact about the former president: he is a pathological liar. For better or for worse, Clinton’s active participation in this year’s presidential campaign reminds us of this sad reality.

Forgetting that Bill Clinton is a world-class liar is like forgetting that Hulk Hogan is a wrestler or Barbra Streisand a singer.

Bryan Caplan scratches his head.

 Before I studied public opinion, I often wondered, “Why are democracies’ policies so bad?”  After I studied public opinion, I started asking myself the opposite question: “Why aren’t democracies’ policies even worse?”  The median American is no Nazi, but he is a moderate national socialist – statist to the core on both economic and social policy.  Given public opinion, the policies of First World democracies are surprisingly libertarian.