Read it.

A “recipe” to deliver the perfect kilogram as a mass standard that the world can trust is coming closer to completion as the physicists behind the project bake their raw numbers.

International scientists met in late November and pushed forward a 21-page document that’ll eventually instruct boffins responsible for managing weights and measures how to adopt a planned quantum kilogram as an SI standard. This comes after decades of work attempting to redefine the kilo in terms of a fundamental constant of nature. It is the only SI unit still directly defined by an artefact.

I’m sure you were as worried about this as I was.

Read it.

Colin Wright is a mathematician who in the 1980s helped develop a notation system for juggling while at Cambridge University.

He was frustrated that there was no way to write down juggling moves.

“There was a juggling move called Mills Mess and when I tried to write it down I couldn’t. When I finally did get a description after a few days of working, it took two and a half sides of A4 and I thought, for a juggling move that lasts one second there must be an easier way,” says Wright.

Read it.

It’s that time of year again. As the Christmas lights go up, Wikipedia’s donation drive kicks off. Wikipedia claims that the donations are needed to keep the site online. Guilt-tripped journalists including Heather Brooke and Toby Young have contributed to Wikipedia in the belief that donations help fund operating costs. Students, who are already heavily in debt, are urged to donate in case Wikipedia “disappears”.

But what Wikipedia doesn’t tell us is that it is awash with cash – and raises far more money each year than it needs to keep operating.

Donations are funding a huge expansion in professional administrative staff and “research projects”. Amazingly, this year for the first time Wikipedia – the web encyclopaedia anyone can edit – has even found the cash to fund a lobbyist.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, looks at Sandy Hook.

To fix it! Once and for all! Just like that! Bloomie’s criminal-justice coordinator, a chap named John Feinblatt, chimed in: “I think the American public wants a plan—is demanding a plan—how the president is going to keep them safe.”

Because, you know, if the president can’t keep us safe, who can? We will lift up our eyes unto the hills. Whence cometh our help? Our help cometh from Obama.

For the left it’s all about gun control. The people who’ve been telling us for years that we can’t possibly deport eleven million illegal infiltrators without gross violations of human rights are insisting that we can confiscate three hundred million privately held firearms.

Read it.

If you’re a professional chess player, you’ll spend thousands of hours dissecting the games of better players.

If you’re a promising young violin player, you’ll attend programs like Meadowmount’s brutal 7-week crash course, where you’ll learn how to wring every last drop of value from your practicing.

If you’re a veteran knowledge worker, you’ll spend most of your day answering e-mail.

True dat.

The main problem is that knowledge workers spend a lot of time doing self-management. Unlike chess players and musicians, they don’t have well-designed, comprehensive plans set in front of them, leaving their only task optimal execution. How much time would chess players have for self improvement if they had to run around finding out what pieces were needed, where they were located, and what rules might produce some sort of game that matches the vague description given them by their boss? Who ever asks a chess player ‘how much time do you thing you’ll need for this game?’ before he even knows what rules and pieces he’ll have to work with? ‘You said it would take two hours. Here it is going on three with no end in sight. I have to have a status report on the Chief Games Officer’s desk at 5:00. What’s the holdup?’

Read it.

Secretary Clinton’s “Accountability Review Board” (ARB) declared multiple times in its unclassified report that although there were multiple failures in leadership, “management ability,” allocation of security resources and communication, the board could not find “reasonable cause” to discipline (or even name) one person in the State Department.

I can see Hillary’s t-shirt now: ‘Four people, including the Ambassador, were murdered in Benghazi and all I got was this lousy concussion.’

But that’s life in the Obamanation.

Read it.

The school board in Alisal Union School District in Salinas, California, is going to name a new elementary school after Tiburcio Vasquez, a man who was convicted of killing at least two people and as many as six and was hanged in 1875.

Hey, one man’s murderer is another man’s freedom fighter, don’t you know — after all, who are we to judge?

And Identity Politics trumps truth, justice, and the American Way in blue states.

Read it.

Researchers for the Institute for Law and Economics have released a new paper that draws a correlation between mobile phone adoption and a dramatic drop in crime in the 1990s, especially instances of rape and assault. In the paper, Mobile Phones and Crime Deterrence: An Underappreciated Link, authors University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Jonathan Klick, Penn criminology professor John MacDonald, and George Mason University professor Thomas Stratmann speculate that the ability of mobile phones to allow victims to more quickly report crimes acts as a deterrent for criminals, who faced more risk in the 1990s as mobile technology became more widespread. “Mobile phones allow for quicker reporting of crimes, and, in some cases, real time communication of details about the crime and the criminal,” Klick and his colleagues write. “The presence of mobile phones increases the likelihood of punishment along a number of different margins.”

Read it.

And about damned time, too.

In short: We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide. We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models. Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in “radiative forcing” (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.

The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).

This is much lower than the IPCC’s current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).

Wearable Wagging Tail Matches Your Mood  I am not making this up.

Bladeless Ceiling Fan

Read it.

He makes a good case.

Sigh. Tolkien’s Bilbo doesn’t win by being lost in a warrior’s fury. He’s plucky and creative, tough and strong enough to execute his plans. But crazy-violent? Not hardly.

And even in the magical unreality of Middle-earth where wizards and elves are part of the background, Bilbo successfully taking on the warg seemed unbelievable. Or at least inconsistent. Tolkien’s Bilbo is a hero, never a superhero.

And that’s central to The Hobbit, a story that was initially and principally about and seen through eyes of, well, a hobbit.

But Jackson has that additional six hours of so of movie to fill. He’s already said that Bilbo’s tale is only a fraction of the story he wants to tell. Maybe it will all make eventual sense and his Bilbo will become a mini-barbarian who spears Smaug. And maybe Radagast and Jar Jar Binks will show up in a grand alliance.

But whatever it becomes, it’s already pretty clear that Jackson’s Hobbit will never be Tolkien’s.

Read it.

The typical accusation about the Post and its decline over the last several years is that the paper is too liberal. The problem is even more fundamental than that. The Post‘s writers and editors no longer have any idea what makes an interesting story. It’s as if a hospital hired doctors who did not know the human body. I genuinely think the problem is that simple, and that profound.

Read it.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

Neurophysiology student Katy Presland, 29, said: “We’re talking about a green luminescent Christmas tree that glows in the dark and produces a noticeable light during the day.

And perhaps your children will be able to breathe under water.  Ah, I can feel it working already….

Read it.

The amendment — intended satirically, one should hasten to add –”passed with a unanimous Senate vote” but was removed from its bill before consideration by the state house and never became law.

Shucks.

Read it.

Let the finger-pointing begin.

Why is it that mass murderers are almost always young men?  Why don’t young women behave the same way?  Sadly, Adam Lanza and James Holmes are just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem in our society.  Our young women vastly outperform our young men in almost every important statistical category.  Young men are much more likely to perform poorly in school, they are much more likely to have disciplinary problems and they are much more likely to commit suicide.  In the old days, our young men would gather in the streets or in the parks to play with one another after school, but today most of them are content to spend countless hours feeding their addictions to video games, movies and other forms of entertainment.  When our young men grow up, many of them are extremely averse to taking on responsibility.  They want to have lots of sex, but they aren’t interested in marriage.  They enjoy the comforts of living at home, but they don’t want to go out and pursue career goals so that they can provide those things for themselves.  Our young men are supposed to be “the leaders of tomorrow”, but instead many of them are a major burden on society.  When are we finally going to admit that something has gone horribly wrong?

Read it.

The more government covers the cost of college, the more people can afford, and want, to go to college. Duh.

The more people want to go to college, the higher the price colleges can charge, since the supply of ‘accredited’ colleges is effectively fixed. Duh.

Our politicians and educators are substantially ignorant of elementary economics. Duh.

Read it.

A new report in China shows that 150,000 Chinese – most of them wealthy – emigrated to other countries in 2011. While that number may not seem high for a country of more than a billion people, the flight of China’s richest – and the offshoring of their fortunes – could cost the country jobs and economic growth, according to the study from the Center for China and Globalization and the Beijing Institute of Technology.

Duh. ‘Let’s see – I’ve got pots of money. Should I stay in a Communist country? Or go to a free country?’

Read it.

California Treasurer Bill Lockyer said today that state pension funds should stop investing in companies that produce guns that can’t be sold in the state legally. He has asked his staff to review all state investments.

Which is stark ‘progressive’ feel-good-ism masquerading as concern — once they’ve sold the stock, the company doesn’t give a shit what they think any more. If they were really interested in affecting what gun companies do, they’d buy up their stock and exercise their rights as shareholders to affect what the company does. But no. it’s all about the SWPL desire for self-esteem in a Clever Plastic Disguise.

Despite its heavy gun restrictions, California  ranks fourth in the nation in gun homicide rate, and leads the nation by a wide margin in terms of absolute number of homicides.

Unfortunately there isn’t anybody in the state with sufficient intelligence to draw the obvious conclusion.

Read it.

I noted here that the news media’s performance on the Sandy Hook elementary school murders has been terrible, with news outlets committing one factual error after another. Yet in all the calls for “soul searching” that have followed Adam Lanza’s rampage, I haven’t seen a single one suggesting that reporters and editors should reflect on their own conduct, either in publicizing (and thereby encouraging) mass murderers like Lanza, or in making sure they have their facts straight before going public with information.

Read it.

 No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but most suspicion focused on the Pakistani Taliban, which has previously blocked polio vaccinators and complained that the United States is using the program as a cover for espionage.

The killings were a serious reversal for the multibillion-dollar global polio immunization effort, which over the past quarter century has reduced the number of endemic countries from 120 to just three: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

Erik Loomis is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Rhode Island. He also blogs at “Lawyers Guns and Money” blog.

In reaction to the murders in Connecticut, Loomis tweeted that he had never been so angry except maybe for the invasion of Iraq (I guess 9/11 was chopped liver to him), and that he wanted the NRA chief’s “head on a stick”….

These guys are teaching your children. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Read it.

Kinda scary, when you think about it.

Read it.

I have to assume that it’s fundraising time at the Southern Poverty Law Center, because Morris Dees and company have gone looking for new people to label enemies of the republic. This time, they’ve found those long underappreciated serpents nesting in our midst, notorious fellow-travelers of the Patriot Movement knows as … anarcho-capitalists?

Be sure to check your sock drawer — you never know where they’ll show up.

That even SPLC writer Leah Nelson, may think her organization is reaching a bit far with this one might be indicated by the oddly passive title of the piece, “‘Anarcho-Capitalists’ Seen as Cousins of the ‘Patriot’ Movement.” They are? By whom? Oh. You mean the SPLC sees them as “cousins” yada yada and somehow potentially dangerous and hateful.

We’re self-referential, we’re proud, and we’re in your face. Not to mention your wallet.

Read it.

Note that gun-control laws in 1927 were almost non-existent.

Note further that the only gun used was as a detonator in the perpetrator’s suicide..

Read it. And more here.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Holly Bell points out that California is a ‘progressive’ dreamland.

Read it.

Hint: No. The purpose of government, as Jerry Pournelle never tires of saying, is to hire and pay government workers. Any money that eventually survives to reach it’s intended uses is an anomaly that they seek constantly to eliminate.

Read it.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

As I lollygagged around the packed convention floor at the Eastman Gun Show in Gainesville, GA amid thousands of guns and what seemed like millions of bullets, it occurred to me that I’ve never heard of a mass shooting at a gun show.

Funny how that is.

Read it.

A new pacemaker has been built inside a heart by converting beating muscle into cells which can organise the organ’s rhythm, US researchers report.

Read it.

A squad of attackers wearing suicide-vests began the attack by ramming an explosives-laden vehicle into a boundary wall before trading fire with security forces for more than 30 minutes. Three rockets slammed into a nearby residential area.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

Of course. Students vote Left, so they’re in the bag — the important thing is to use tax money where it counts, to buy votes from the underclass.

Read it.

Gord Young, from Peterborough, in Ontario, says it took him 17 minutes to decypher the message after realising a code book he inherited was the key.

Mr Young says the 1944 note uses a simple World War I code to detail German troop positions in Normandy.

Read it.

Kyriarchy – a neologism coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and derived from the Greek words for “lord” or “master” (kyrios) and “to rule or dominate” (archein) which seeks to redefine the analytic category of patriarchy in terms of multiplicative intersecting structures of domination…Kyriarchy is best theorized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression.

I am not making this up.

Joe Engel is tired of people obsessing about race.

Black people don’t eat Ritz crackers and cheese?  That’s news to me, same as it would be to Fuzzy Zoeller, if he still had a career after making “racist comments” about Tiger Woods’s presumed culinary preferences.

So apparently Jamie Foxx wants the craft services people to lay out a platter of fried chicken and watermelon.  Uh, no, not that either.

In the same vein he explained that if he turned up to the photo shoot and there was fried chicken and watermelon, he would also be annoyed at the stereotype.

Which is the same as saying that there’s no pleasing Jamie Foxx, not with that concrete chip on his shoulder. Indeed:

Jamie also admitted that he feels that he must act and talk in a certain way around white people and in his day-to-day job as an actor.

So there’s a black way of being and a white way of being.  Good to know. I eagerly await my updated 2013 manual.

How tiresome this has become.

Read it.

Amid the push for more gun control in the wake of the Conn. shooting, it’s important to remember the lesson gun control laws have taught us in other countries — namely, that less guns lead to more crime.

We saw this clearly in Australia when Aussies were disarmed by de jure measures in 1997.

To accomplish this, the Australian government sponsored a $500 million buyback on all privately owned firearms that led to a ban. Australian politicians who supported the move “promised a lower crime rate once the ban was in place.”

Did lower crime result? No. Instead armed robberies rose significantly and home invasions rose as well.

Moreover, assaults involving guns rose more than a 25% and murders with a gun rose nearly 20%.

Sarah Palin’s kid’s divorce.

Al Gore’s kid’s divorce.

Media bias? What media bias?

Read it.

The ugly chickens launched by the hatching of ObamaCare are beginning to come home to roost.  More and more workers are having their hours cut to below 30 per week because full-time workers must receive health insurance, the cost of which cripples small businesses. The double whammy is this: not only are hours being cut, but jobs in general are being cut, as businesses that employ more than 50 people must also comply with ObamaCare regulations requiring health insurance for employees.

Those who lose their full-time jobs will have to look for two part-time jobs, which will enable the Obama Administration to claim that there are more jobs being created.

“The biggest and most deadly “tax” rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits– food stamps, housing subsidies and the like– if their income goes up.

Someone who is trying to climb out of poverty by working their way up can easily reach a point where a $10,000 increase in pay can cost them $15,000 in lost benefits that they no longer qualify for. That amounts to a marginal tax rate of 150 percent– far more than millionaires pay. Some government policies help some people at the expense of other people. But some policies can hurt welfare recipients, the taxpayers and others, all at the same time, even though in different ways.”

— Thomas Sowell

Read it.

Of course, that could just be the Obama budget cuts. How would we know?

Read it.

Eighteen Democratic U.S. Senators and senators-elect sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week calling for a “delay in the implementation” of the medical device tax in Obamacare, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Perhaps they ought to have thought it through before they passed Obamacare.

Sorry — I knew I couldn’t type that with a straight face….

Read it.

The weapons used in Friday’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., were legally purchased and registered to Nancy Lanza, the mother of the gunman, Adam Lanza, two law enforcement officials told NBC News.

In other words, her son stole them. So much for your strict gun control laws.

Butterfly Bottle Opener

Remote Control Water Cannon Helicopter.  Here, kitty, kitty, kitty….

How to Unlock a Car Door Without Keys

Fully Enclosed Self-Balancing Electric Motorcycle

Motorized Monocycle

Auto Insurance by the mile

The Science Behind Gifting (and Regifting)

Cerego Online Learning Tool

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

You press a button and wait for your elevator. How long before you get impatient and agitated? Theresa Christy says 20 seconds.

Read it.

The top 10 states with the largest percentage of “rich” households under the Obama formula include true blue bastions Washington, D.C., which has the highest concentration of big earners, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, California and Hawaii. The only historic “swing state” in the top six is Virginia, due largely to the presence of the affluent suburbs of the capital. These same states, according to the Tax Foundation, would benefit the most from an extension of the much-lambasted Bush tax cuts.

The pattern of distribution of “the rich” is even more marked when we focus on metropolitan areas. Big metro areas supported Obama, particularly their core cities, by margins as high as four to one. Besides New York, the metro areas with the highest percentage of high-earning households include such lockstep blue cities as San Francisco, Washington, San Jose, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Read it.

What would the University of Chicago do with this property if it was Barack Obama’s childhood home? Museum? Shrine?

Read it.

What we know: The package contained an incredibly detailed replica of “University of Chicago Professor” Abner Ravenwood’s journal from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. It looks only sort of like this one, but almost exactly like this one, so much so that we thought it might have been the one that was for sale on Ebay had we not seen some telling inconsistencies in cover color and “Ex Libris” page (and distinct lack of sword). The book itself is a bit dusty, and the cover is teal fabric with a red velvet spine, with weathered inserts and many postcards/pictures of Marion Ravenwood (and some cool old replica money) included. It’s clear that it is mostly, but not completely handmade, as although the included paper is weathered all of the “handwriting” and calligraphy lacks the telltale pressure marks of actual handwriting.

Read it.

Despite rock-bottom congressional approval ratings, voters reelected their incumbents at near-banana-republic levels in 2012.

The difference being, of course, that elections in a ‘banana republic’ are corrupt and manipulated, and American Congressional elections are relatively fair, despite Democrat attempts to the contrary.

The author obviously thinks that this high-re-election rate is a Bad Thing. On the contrary, I suggest that this means the system is working: A Congressman is supposed to represent his district; if the district’s voters (or those that care enough to vote) think that s/he’s doing that effectively, then re-election happens. There is no value in having a ‘competitive district’ except in the newsroom or studio that is desperate for a ‘horse-race’ to report on.

Yes, there are stupid people in Congress. Witness the Congressional Black Caucus, most of whom would have trouble getting admitted to a selective Charter High School. But they reflect their districts, or they wouldn’t get re-elected, and there are obviously a lot of stupid (and foolish) voters out there. There is nothing in democratic political theory that says they don’t have a right to be represented, too.

The reason Congress is in low esteem is that Congressional votes don’t just affect their own district, but the country as a whole; one might characterize it as ‘think locally, vote globally’. People don’t mind their own Congressman, but rather than butt-head in the district next door who is getting more pork for his district than we think they’re entitled to … rr destroying historical American freedoms or bringing back slavery or whatever bugaboo the local Congressman isn’t guilty of.

Saying ‘voters hate Congress but like their own member’ is about as paradoxical as saying ‘people hate foreigners but like their own neighbor’, which illustrates how silly this whole discussion actually is.