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Oh, noes! Do you mean Bary lied to us?

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On a sponsored media trip to McDonald’s US headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, Barbara J. Booth, the company’s director of sensory science, told Kim Bhasin of Business Insider that Chicken McNuggets come in four carefully designed shapes: the “bell,” the “bone,” the “ball,” and the “boot.”

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Congress never lets the Constitution get in the way of passing a law with a catchy title. Thus, the Senate’s version of the bill reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act will likely pass the House this week, even though UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, a leading First Amendment scholar, earlier noted that provisions in it violate the First Amendment. (Legal scholars have criticized other provisions in the bill as violating Articles II and III of the Constitution, and for undermining due-process safeguards.) The House GOP had earlier objected to the Senate’s version, citing various flaws in the bill, but under political pressure, some GOP members in swing districts have switched sides and endorsed the bill, which is backed by Democratic leaders and the White House.

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In this video, we are reminded that spiders are weird little assholes and that we probably shouldn’t model our superheros after them.

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Don’t you wonder, sometimes, how the Times’s reporters and editors did on their SATs? Just remember, next time that paper tells you the science on some topic or other is settled, that you are getting that assurance from people who don’t know the difference between diameter and circumference.

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Where she was beheaded, no doubt, because she wasn’t Muslim. Hey … it happens.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Angelina Jolie. I hope.

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A Louisiana state health inspector poured bleach on 1,600 pounds of venison donated to a homeless shelter last month because the health department doesn’t recognize the group that provided it.

Just wait until people like this are put in charge of our health care. Won’t that be fun.

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I always assumed it was for visibility.

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It has been said that Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal and Bill Clinton’s lies about his affair with Monica Lewinsky respectively started and accelerated the distrust Americans have for both political parties, elected officials, its institutions, and the federal government.

But a new film, “District of Corruption,” directed by Stephen K. Bannon, exposes the real roots of the modern disenchantment with the political system — the commercialization of government started by the Clinton administration, continued under George W. Bush’s administration, and put on steroids by the Obama administration.

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‘Britain’s Atlantis’ – a hidden underwater world swallowed by the North Sea – has been discovered by divers working with science teams from the University of St Andrews.

Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that stretched from Scotland to Denmark was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC.

Cue hordes of Global Warming lemming running around and screaming about how we’re all gonna die when the sea levels rise.

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Mostly because not every author is the best expressor of a particular thought, even though the originator thereof. Look at the third line of Spenser’s THE FAERIE QUEEN and tell me that it doesn’t read better as ‘Wherein deep dints of old wounds did remain’ than the original ‘Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine’. Or Pope: ‘Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.’ is just not as good as ‘Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to cast the old aside.’

Have you noticed how incorrect quotes often just sound right—sometimes, more right than actual quotations? There’s a reason for that. Our brains really like fluency, or the experience of cognitive ease (as opposed to cognitive strain) in taking in and retrieving information. The more fluent the experience of reading a quote—or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind—the less likely we are to question the actual quotation. Those right-sounding misquotes are just taking that tendency to the next step: cleaning up, so to speak, quotations so that they are more mellifluous, more all-around quotable, easier to store and recall at a later point. We might not even be misquoting on purpose, but once we do, the result tends to be catchier than the original.

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The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today’s fast-changing job market.

Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of “badges” to certify skills and abilities. If scouting focuses on outdoorsy skills like tying knots, these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain—intentionally so—to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills that are not formally recognized in a traditional classroom.

I think this is a great idea. Establish ‘merit badges’ for specific skills, and establish various educational ‘ranks’ — perhaps even ‘degrees’ — based on specified numbers and types of badges. We could do a lot worse than emulate the Boy Scouts.

Patrick Rothfuss, one of my Recommended Writers, undergoes a life-changing experience.

Because you only get wrapped in duct tape so often in your life, (this is #2 for me) I figured I might as well take some pictures.

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Strong future-time reference languages (strong FTR) require their speakers to use a different tense when speaking of the future. Weak future-time reference (weak FTR) languages do not.

…

Speakers of languages which only use the present tense when dealing with the future are likely to save more money than those who speak languages which require the use a future tense, he argues.

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The Hindu genocide at the hands of Islam lasted more than a thousand years, and continues in a reduced fashion to this day. It is the largest genocide in recorded history, with many millions of Hindus — possibly over a hundred million — slaughtered by the Muslim invaders, and countless millions more enslaved or forcibly converted to Islam. The sheer wanton destruction wielded by the Islamic conquest staggers the mind — the opulent flower of Hindu civilization was simply wiped out, with idols broken and burned, temples razed, and untold quantities of exquisite artifacts destroyed or melted down for their precious metals. Although it guttered, the flame of Hindu learning was never fully extinguished, but only after the arrival of the Pax Britannica did Hindu scholars regain the ability to realize their intellectual potential.

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On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it.

Aha! Obesity isn’t related at all to, you know, actual personal choices that people make! It’s an EPIDEMIC! You catch fatness, like a DISEASE! It’s obviously a Public Health Problem that is (as with all other Public Health Problems, like trans-fats and how much salt to use or soda to put in a container) The Job Of The Government!

“We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.”

In other words, they anticipated (rightly so, based on recent history) that they were about to get butt-fucked by politicians ginning up a crisis in order to demagogue their way to retaining their taxpayer-funded jobs, and so (like prey everywhere) were trying to figure out how to escape — the swine.

A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food science, Behnke became Pillsbury’s chief technical officer in 1979 and was instrumental in creating a long line of hit products, including microwaveable popcorn. He deeply admired Pillsbury but in recent years had grown troubled by pictures of obese children suffering from diabetes and the earliest signs of hypertension and heart disease.

Pillsbury, of course, was obviously holding the little brats down and stuffing popcorn down their maws — the swine.

Food manufacturers were now being blamed for the problem from all sides — academia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a “national epidemic.”

Oh noes! Food companies actually try to make food that people will like! And BUY! The horror! The horror!

Message: You’re too stoopid to know what’s good for you — that’s why God gave you food columnists in the New York Times.

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Today, Foursquare is expanding Specials to the rest of the world through partnerships with Visa and MasterCard for both credit and debit cards. This means that Visa and MasterCard can approach Foursquare to reward cardholders for checking in to places like Burger King. Merchants, on the other hand, get enhanced analytics from Foursquare about the kinds of people spending money at their location. “Every person in the US has an American Express, Visa, or MasterCard credit or debit card, and the offers now work for all of them,” Product Manager Noah Weiss says.

I wish someone would tell this to the stupid women who stand in the grocery checkout lane taking half an hour to write a check. Sheesh.

Once you’ve initially added a credit card to your Foursquare account, discounts activate automatically any time you check in to an eligible location, like a restaurant or bar.

My bank has a similar program that gives me rebates (miniscule, but better than nothing) when I shop with local merchants and use their debit card. Once I ‘load’ the discount on the card (which takes about a second), I get the rebate whenever I use the card at that merchant. Since I use the card to pay for damned near everything, it’s totally painless for me. At the end of the month, they total up the rebate and credit my account. Granted, the rebates are miniscule, but they’re nevertheless greater than any interest I could earn on my checking or savings account in the Ben Bernanke Era, so I am content.

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

In fact, the physicists found that just one spider web could do the job — if it were the web of Darwin’s bark spider from Madagascar. The silk has been found to be tougher than any other known material and more than 10 times stronger than Kevlar.

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Why Priests? falls below his usual low standards. The main thesis is that priests ruin everything. They’re power-hungry monsters who’ve taken over the Church, destroying the affirming, companionable, and egalitarian message of Jesus. Moreover, the priestly fixation on ritual sacrifice adds a bloodthirsty, prosecutorial, and altogether primitive cast to Christianity, which Garry Wills promises to deliver us from, restoring for the first time in two millennia the original spirit of Jesus and his followers.

Wills has been coasting on the virtues of his one good book, Nixon Agonistes, for about 40 years now. (If you haven’t read it, I urge you to do so; it contains valuable insights about the sixties and seventies, even to those of  us who lived through them.) Like the Republican apparatchik who hates Republican principles (cue Kevin Phillips, David Frum, Conor Friedersdorf, and David Brooks), he makes his living off of pandering to the Crust while pretending to be from the other side. (You’d think they’d get tired of this sort of thing, but they don’t.)

Like many other pretend Catholics, Wills makes the Protestant mistake of thinking that he knows more about what Christ intended than the people who were taught by Christ and or the people whom they taught. (This is an attitude that I have never been able to understand, myself, but it’s sufficiently widespread that it appears to be deeply rooted in human nature.) Odd thought: Nobody ever tries to tell the Latter Day Saints that they’ve got Joseph Smith all wrong. I wonder why that is….

There’s a lot of angry bluster in Garry Wills, but little else.

And that pretty much sums it up.

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Next step: Mayor Bloomberg does the same for New York City.

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This was in Tel Aviv, demonstrating that government workers are much the same the world over.

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Beretta USA in Maryland is thinking of pulling up stakes and moving out of the state because of pending assault-weapons ban legislation. Beretta USA is a division of Beretta, the 500-year-old family owned company which won a contract in 1985 to become the standard sidearm of all U.S. servicemen, replacing the Colt 45.

Funny how that works.

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In a recent study (Anelli and Peri 2013) we ask if the gender composition of the high-school class attended by an individual affects his/her choice of study programme and subsequent long-term earning potentials. We use data that we collected on 30,000 students in Italian high schools over the period 1985-2005, including information on their high school, college career, family background and income as of 2005. We find that the gender ratio of high-school classmates significantly affected their choice of college major. In particular, women who attended a high-school class with a significant larger percentage of other female students (more than 75%) were significantly more likely to go on to choose college majors leading to high-paying jobs, namely engineering, economics, business and medicine. Those are also majors typically dominated by male students. On the other hand, female students in classes with a balanced gender mix were more likely to choose typically ‘female’ majors, that is, largely in the humanities and arts, and leading to lower earnings and limited overall career potential.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Jim Goad undertakes to be politically incorrect, with a modicum of success.

When is a ridiculous black name too ridiculous for the proper functioning of a sane society? Personally, I think we’ve reached Peak Black Name and it’s time to start dialing it back a tad.

…

Can we all get along? No, not when you have silly-ass, fundamentally divisive names like that.

Freeberg speaks truth to glower.

Young girls, their heads crammed full of feminist claptrap, no longer want to grow up to look like real women. They’d rather be walking skeletons. And then this is supposed to be mens’ fault.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, applies the logic of the Minimum Wage to academia.

In a bold effort to improve the educational fortunes of students who perform at academic levels significantly below the average of their peers, Congress has mandated a minimum grade to be assigned to each student in each course taught at any school in the country.  Starting in September, it shall be unlawful for any teacher, professor, or instructor charged with assigning course grades to assign to any student a grade lower than C-.

Sponsors of the Fair Academic Standards Act decry the injustice that occurs each time a student earns a low grade, such as a D or an F.  ”It’s impossible for students with ‘D’s and ‘F’s on their transcripts to succeed as they deserve in life,” remarked Sen. Bernie Franken, an Independent from Elitia.  ”This law ensures that no American will ever again suffer that hardship.”

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There’s an idea that the person with a degree is “better” than a person without one. Indeed, The New York Times recently reported on the relatively new phenomenon of companies hiring people with college degrees for jobs that historically didn’t require college degrees. Are you doing this in your business?

If so, I have to ask, better for what? Yes, having a four year degree does show a degree of dedication. You have to pick a major, take class after class, write paper after paper and work on dreaded group projects. (Which, in my humble opinion, should be banished off the face of the educational earth unless the professor is willing to act as a proper manager, which most are not.) But, anyway, in theory you learn some things and you demonstrate that you have stick-to-itiveness. This is worth something.

But what? You also have to assume that no one enrolled in college, shelled out fantastic amounts of tuition and studied for hours to memorize the philosophies of 40 different dead people with ambitions of becoming an administrative assistant. No, they had other goals.

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Lot of that going around.

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In addition to making our lives more comfortable, advancing technology allows us to waste time in ever new and different ways.

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A federal appeals court has agreed to hear arguments from a German couple who are seeking asylum in the U.S. According to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, the German authorities could take their five children away from them if they return to Germany because they want to homeschool their children.

This sort of thing is why America is superior to Europe. Our bureaucrats are assholes idiosyncratically, but their are assholes systematically.

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I learned some things about how the world works that I couldn’t figure out how to write about without coming across like a paranoid loon, and I couldn’t get them far enough out of my head to write cogently about anything else.  I’m still not sure I can tell this story without sounding like a paranoid loon, but I’ve decided to take that chance.

There are some fairly straightforward technical solution to the problem of credit card fraud.  Some of them are new and innovative, while others are already in widespread use throughout the world, but not in the U.S.  But none of these solutions will be deployed in the U.S. any time soon, not because it’s hard, but because the established players in the financial industry won’t allow it.

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

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Some people just have entirely too much time on their hands.

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Flowers’ methods of communicating are at least as sophisticated as any devised by an advertising agency, according to a new study, published today in Science Express by researchers from the University of Bristol.  However, for any advert to be successful, it has to reach, and be perceived by, its target audience.  The research shows for the first time that pollinators such as bumblebees are able to find and distinguish electric signals given out by flowers.

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For a surprisingly long time, the British were proud of their system of socialized medicine, apparently because it was considered egalitarian. Now, however, a series of scandals in the National Health Service has focused attention on how low-quality government medicine is. The National Health Service has been rocked by one report after another of appallingly bad care, with many Britons demanding that NHS officials be criminally prosecuted.

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

Anybody who would trust their health care to the functional equivalent of the Post Office deserves what they get.

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 Class mobility is not what it used to be in our country, but there are few notions less constructive than that the only way to a middle class life is college. Vocational training should be thought of as the American Dream just as much as four years in a dorm.

For one thing, plenty of people without B.A.s have nice homes and raise nice kids. Besides, too many people in college are there only to get “that piece of paper” for things college has nothing to do with. In a better America, we’d let them realize themselves years earlier.

I like a report by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce . First, mandatory schooling should end after 10th grade. That 10-year education would be fully packed, based on schooling techniques proven to work.

This is how it works in Britain. People who finish what we would call 10th grade get their GCSE; only those headed to college take the two-year program called Sixth Form.

 But factory jobs are not the only ones that don’t require college. Did the guy who installed your cable-TV service have a college degree? How many sound technicians, mechanics or building inspectors spent four years on a college campus? How about the person who did your ultrasound? They are perfectly skilled — without having gone to college.

Most jobs in Information Technology are the same way. Nothing that I do in my daily job, for which I get paid six figures, is built on any one of my three degree programs. What matters in native intelligence — as notorious college dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg demonstrate quite handily.

 You will hear that some employers are requiring college degrees for low-level jobs, but this is static amid a larger reality. Commonly, those employers are grooming these people for higher-level jobs that have always required college.

Horseshit. They require a college degree to have some confidence that their applicants know at least what high school graduates of our parents’ generation knew — our educational system sucks that bad. Modern American high school graduates are lucky if they graduate with the literacy and numeracy skills that elementary school graduates had back before WWII.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, elaborates.

Many people – including a seemingly growing number of economists – intuitively sense that a mandated higher minimum-wage will have little or no negative impact on unskilled-workers’ employment options.  For the person-in-the-street, this intuition, I suspect, springs from the common perception that employers generally have some sort of undue power over both workers and consumers and, as a result of that power, rake in excess profits.  These profits can therefore be tapped into by government diktats such as minimum-wage legislation without causing employers to adjust their operations in response.  For example, a minimum-wate diktat simply effects a redistribution of wealth; employees’ gains are employers’ losses, but losses only of some surplus that serves no economic function.

The intuition of economists who support the legislated minimum-wage is not much different from that of the person-in-the-street, although it is expressed more analytically.

…

My suspicion – and that is all it is, a suspicion – is that some of the more thoughtful proponents of the minimum-wage would pause to realize that, when seen as a a kind of tax upon the employment of unskilled workers, a minimum-wage hike might not be so lacking in negative consequences after all.

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Indeed, the entire premise of the blue-state anti-gun proposals is based on an absurd fallacy: that honest citizens who own guns are potential criminals, and that real criminals will dutifully conform to the new laws, even though they’ve defied all the earlier ones.

And that’s it, in a nutshell.

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From my interaction with Google recruiters, I can tell that by not knowing anyone at Google I am unfit to work at Google. This reminds me of the classic Economist article on the topic of teacher credentialing that shows a picture of Einstein with the caption “unfit to teach.” A hiring heuristic that gives massive preference to internal referrals means you’ll throw away some of the best candidates.

Reading all three-million unsolicited resumes is certainly not the solution either. Using technology like the Bright Score, TalentBin, Entelo, or Linkedin, smart companies can mine the pool to find the best talent. It is surprising, however, that the company that revolutionized the way we find information is still basing its hiring decisions largely on internal word of mouth.

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Prince Edward sheriff’s deputies are investigating a deadly home invasion that happened early Sunday morning in Prospect. Two of the three suspects are dead, shot by the homeowner in self defense, according to investigators on scene. Meanwhile, the search continues for the third suspect.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, waxes poetic.

Interesting and unusual quality books, fiction and nonfiction alike, used to make a huge splash, and that “used to” is not so long ago. In 2001 everyone seemed to be reading McCullough’s biography of John Adams; and before that, Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain. A few years earlier, it was Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories if you wanted to keep your end up at dinner parties—I read the first 17 of them seriatim. (And a biography to boot.) Even further back, in the 1970s, you could get a conversation going with lower-middle-class cube jockeys about James Clavell’s Shogun or Julian Jaynes’s Origin of Consciousness. It’s been a decade and a half since I worked in a business office, but I feel pretty sure they’re not talking about books around the water cooler nowadays.

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Their intentions are, and always have been, crystal clear–unlimited immigration and unconditional amnesty. Everything else is a lie.

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Thanks to decades of breeding, the modern agricultural tomato has a lot of properties that are great for farmers: the plants are incredibly productive, and the resulting tomatoes hold up well to shipping. Just one small problem: they are nearly tasteless. Heirloom tomato strains have become available precisely because people aren’t especially interested in the mass-produced, modern tomato.

In the words of a panel at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of science, we “broke” the tomato by allowing the plant breeders to respond to the needs of farmers, instead of the tomato’s end-users: consumers.

Gee, Congress does the same thing. Unfortunately, voters don’t have any panel of scientists to stick up for them.

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You know all the times that men complain about women talking too much? Apparently there’s a biological explanation for the reason why women are chattier than men. Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a “language protein” in their brains, which could explain why females are so talkative.

Previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men. In fact, an average woman notches up 20,000 words in a day, which is about 13,000 more than the average man. In addition, women generally speak more quickly and devote more brainpower to speaking. Yet before now, researchers haven’t been able to biologically explain why this is the case.

Arnold Kling understands the dialectic.

In the legacy education model, teachers combine coaching, feedback, and content delivery. By coaching I mean advice, guidance, and encouragement. Feedback includes formal grading as well as informal praise and criticism. Content delivery includes lectures and reading assignments.

Perhaps the key to radically changing education is to break up those functions.

Absolutely.

Most education reformers want to focus on low-end students. While this is a noble idea, I think it is not a good path for reform. When you fail, you do not know whether it is because the innovations were not good or because the student population is too difficult to reach.

As long as we have a government-run factory school model, where children classed by age are thrown into the same pot (regardless of ability) and are run through the system in batches, the system is going to be run on the basis of the politics of ‘Leave No Child Behind’, which means that the brighter a child is the shorter the end of the stick the child receives.

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Our cells remain chimeras, a hybrid fusion of unrelated creatures.

The genes date from an event 1.5 billion years ago, when two kinds of simple cells, neither having a nucleus or cellular membrane, shacked up and created an entirely new form of life: eukaryotes.

While the two distinct communities of genes work together to keep cell machinery ticking, they otherwise stay out of each other’s hair, report biologists from the National University of Ireland.

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Back in the 1990s, the wealthy couple of David Gelbaum and Monica Chavez Gelbaum bought the Sierra Club’s soul for $100,000,000 on the condition that they drop their immigration restrictionist stance and thus their stance against population growth in the U.S. and in the Sierra Club’s home state of California. This epochal switch has largely disappeared down the memory hole. Today, everybody assumes that plant nativists are, by the nature of their superior morality, human antinativists. But there are psychological tensions in this inherent contradiction.

Impossible. Everybody knows that rich people are all Republicans, and want illegal immigrants so they can have them pick fruit for less then minimum wage. This guy must not read any newspapers or watch the TV news.

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Everywhere you go in a certain segment of bourgeois America you see men and women dressed in childish togs trooping off to yoga class or heading to the gym for aerobics or jogging along—six, seven, eight miles, often at a toddler’s pace—in the heat, dust, and traffic of the late afternoon. Then a shower, a change of clothes, and off to the health-food store before it closes to get the right supplements and a quart of blueberries shipped up specially—it’s off season—from Colombia or Peru.

Why all the fuss? Why all the sweat and bother? To feel good, of course. To stay alive, naturally. What other reason could there be?

But the intensity of pursuit makes one pause and speculate a bit. What is this all about, this amazing attentiveness to health? There is a quasi-heroic dedication to all this conscientiousness about food, a saint’s rigorous commitment to the demands of exercise. And the devotees think about their health all the time. Is man the rational animal? More and more what he thinks about—if he is middle class; if he has been to college; if he has read the right books—is how to go on living. He concocts strategies ostensibly for the prolongation of a healthy life.

But on some level one senses—let speculation take full charge here—that what the man or woman oriented to health most wants to do is to live forever. In one of Tom Wolfe’s novels there is a young man perpetually deep in his computer. He wears titanium-framed glasses and a look of enduring intensity. His name is Wismer Stroock. “The Wiz,” says Wolfe, “was only thirty-two, but he had a bony neck and a bony jaw and sunken cheeks and cadaverous cheekbones from getting up every morning, every morning, before dawn and running six miles through the streets of a Dunwoody subdivision called Quail Ridge.” He drinks bottled water and eats purified foods of all descriptions. He is devoted to the purging of the body. He is very pale. He is a young man, Wolfe suggests, not unrepresentative of many in his generation. On some deep level he has decided that it is his goal to live forever. He is never going to die.

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In a spectacle that might have beguiled poets, lovers and songwriters if only they had been around to see it, Earth once had two moons, astronomers now think. But the smaller one smashed into the other in what is being called the “big splat.”

The result: Our planet was left with a single bulked-up and ever-so-slightly lopsided moon.

The astronomers came up with the scenario to explain why the moon’s far side is so much more hilly than the one that is always facing Earth.