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Using a technique known as two-photon lithography, Austrian researchers have developed a high-precision 3-D printer capable of producing nanometer-sized objects in the shape of race cars, cathedrals and bridges — all in a matter of minutes.

Gavin MacInnes vents.

Los Angeles is to life what New York City is to a woman’s ovaries. It’s an elephant’s graveyard where stupid losers go to die. Here are 10 reasons why.

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What do you want to bet that ‘ability’ will include racial and ethnic quotas if any politically fashionable minorities wind up ‘underrepresented’.

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I dunno, I’ve always thought it was pretty random.

Give evolution enough time and space, they say, and new species can just happen. Speciation might not only be an evolutionary consequence of fitness differences and natural selection, but a property intrinsic to evolution, just as all matter has gravity.

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“Well to have a printable gun – it’s my intention to have that done by the end of this month and we’re at the end of March now so it’s my intention to have it done by April,” he said.

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Arab men assaulted an Israeli film director in southern France following the screening of his film criticizing Israeli occupation.

Yariv Horowitz was rendered unconscious as a result of the beating Monday by several men after a screening of “Rock the Casbah” at a film festival in Aubin, Army Radio reported Thursday.

Arabs beat Jews for fun, and it doesn’t matter if the Jews are on their side.

Read it. And by all means watch the video.

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Americans are migrating from less-free liberal states to more-free conservative states, where they are doing better economically, according to a new study published Thursday by the George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

The “Freedom in the 50 States” study measured economic and personal freedom using a wide range of criteria, including tax rates, government spending and debt, regulatory burdens, and state laws covering land use, union organizing, gun control, education choice and more.

It found that the freest states tended to be conservative “red” states, while the least free were liberal “blue” states.

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

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In the public policy basket case that is my native state of California, one of the most underrated of the many mind-blowing statistical measures of decline is the fact that–for the first time in recorded history–a majority of the Golden State’s residents were born there. Which helps explain, among other things, why California in 2010, again for the first time, failed to pick up a seat in the House of Representatives. A state whose very identity and economic engine were founded on attracting dreamers from elsewhere has not really come to grips with the fact that it is no longer doing that anymore.

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In a referendum election on March 4, [Brooksville] residents voted 112-64 to approve the “Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance,” which states that producers or processors of local foods are “exempt from licensure and inspection,” so long as the food is sold directly by the producer to a consumer.

The ordinance also makes it “unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights organized by this ordinance.”

Looks like a grass-fed roots revolution.

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Hey, here’s another item for the “Crazy stuff rich Chinese people will do for their kids” file! Hot on the heels of the Hong Kong couple who spent $2.2 million on a college consultant (who failed to get their sons into Harvard), here’s the tale of the Chinese woman who bought a $6.5 million apartment at a super luxurious 57th Street condo for when her daughter goes to college in the city. That’ll be sometime in 2029, because her daughter is currently 2-years-old.

Hey, it never hurts to be prepared.

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Just trying to spread the knowledge around, here.

Steve Sailer spanks the Washington Post.

 I’ve spent most of my life living in Los Angeles and Chicago between really rich people on one side and poor people on the other. One thing I’ve noticed is that the rich don’t really take up all that much room.

When I go for a hike in the Hollywood Hills, for instance, I often walk by an imposing gated estate that other hikers assert is owned by some major movie star: Will Ferrell is the most popular claim. But it looks like about 4 to 8 acres, most of that steep hillside.

Last year I taking out the trash when I heard a whoop-whoop-whoop from overhead. I looked up and there was the Marine Corps One helicopter carrying the President to his fundraiser at George Clooney’s house, around the corner from the supposed Will Ferrell manor. To be precise, Obama’s helicopter was on its way to an airport to land, from which Obama’s motorcade would wind up into the canyon. Clooney’s house is 7,354 square feet and his estate is 3.16 acres, and apparently doesn’t have a big enough lawn to safely land a large helicopter upon.

I’m trying, but I’m having a hard time feeling really oppressed by the fact that George Clooney’s house is about as big as my yard. That doesn’t strike me as unreasonable.

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So it now turns out that Jeffrey Hillman, the barefoot beggar who famously received a free pair of boots from a big-hearted police officer, not only has an apartment but pockets as much as several hundred dollars a day while pretending to be homeless.

Hillman freely admitted as much to a team of Post reporters who followed him home on the subway Sunday — and then watched as he calmly counted a huge wad of bills. Not to mention that he seems to be the Imelda Marcos of the streets, with at least 30 pairs of shoes and boots.

Most New Yorkers will doubtless be disappointed to learn that the inspiring tale of a police officer’s kindness to a man in distress would have such a cynical denouement. Few, however, will be surprised. Even so, there is a moral to this story that is especially timely.

This is an old problem — Sherlock Holmes famously dealt with a similar case.

Read it. And watch the video.

Two Sarasota County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies seemed a bit miffed when Charles Ross jumped over a picnic table they were sitting on. But when they noticed he was recording them they got really angry. Threatening to ruin his day, they pulled him to the ground, handcuffed him and arrested Ross for breach of the peace and disorderly conduct.

Joel Kotkin takes Silicon Valley’s Sweetheart to the woodshed.

Marissa Mayer’s pronunciamento banning home-based work at Yahoo reflects a great dilemma facing companies and our country over the coming decade. Forget for a minute the amazing hubris of a rich, glamorous CEO, with a nursery specially built next to her office, ordering less well-compensated parents to trudge back to the office, leaving their less important offspring in daycare or in the hands of nannies.

The real issue is how we deal with three concerns: the promotion of families; humane methods to reduce greenhouse gases; and, finally, how to expand the geography of work and opportunity.

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Some exciting research from the University of Montreal has found that the drug metformin, commonly prescribed for diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), has the potential to slow aging and fight cancer. The study, published in Aging Cell, found that metformin reduces the body’s production of inflammatory cytokines, which accelerate aging.

Watch the FDA prohibit it being used for such an unapproved purpose.

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But he won’t. He is, after all, the Magic Negro, and probably thinks that the Pope would do well to learn from him.

Tuesday’s report that Pope Francis has chosen to live in a modest two-room apartment within the Vatican rather than the more spacious ten-room Papal Apartment on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace offers a stark contrast to the numerous reports of personal extravagance by President Obama, his family, and his administration throughout his tenure in office.

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Nothing like being on the receiving end of Communist ICBMs to concentrate the mind.

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Curiouser and curiouser. I’m waiting to see how long it will take for somebody to blame it on Israel or the United States.

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In each DOMA lawsuit—including Windsor—the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) has a responsibility to defend DOMA against a constitutional challenge. But President Obama declared that he believes DOMA is unconstitutional and ordered DOJ not to defend it.

The justices discussed whether this means no federal court has jurisdiction to decide the lawsuit. Article III of the Constitution only gives federal courts jurisdiction to decide a “case or controversy.” As the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, an essential element of this is that the lawsuit must be adversarial, meaning both parties try to win the case by making a good-faith argument to persuade the court to side with them.

So much for that bit about ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ in the Constitution. In a Real Country this would mean Obama’s impeachment. But we don’t live in a Real Country any more.

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The big machines that define modern life — cars, airplanes, furnaces, and so forth — have become exquisitely efficient, safe, and responsive over the last century through constant mechanical refinement. But mechanical refinement has its limits, and there are enormous improvements to be wrung out of the way that big machines are operated: an efficient furnace is still wasteful if it heats a building that no one is using; a safe car is still dangerous in the hands of a bad driver.

It is this challenge that the industrial internet promises to address by layering smart software on top of machines. The last few years have seen enormous advances in software and computing that can handle gushing streams of data and build nuanced models of complex systems. These have been used effectively in advertising and web commerce, where data is easy to gather and control is easy to exert, and marketers have rejoiced.

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Sell it Forward encourages users to sell their used clothes and donate half the proceeds to Goodwill. The pilot program is currently only available in San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin, though the company is going out of its way to make the process as painless as possible for those in eligible areas. Instead of creating listings for each item, wannabe auctioneers need only fill the pre-paid mailing bag (provided by eBay) with the clothes and accessories they wish to sell. Everything else will be taken care of for them. Employees will decide if your wares are in decent enough condition to sell, create a listing and, if the item is sold within 14 days, split the proceeds between the “seller” and Goodwill. If the item remains unsold for 14 days it becomes a straight donation to the charity.

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A recent assassination attempt in Turkey offers valuable lessons for the West concerning Islamist hate—and the amount of deceit and betrayal that hate engenders towards non-Muslim “infidels.”

The chief thing that most people refuse to remember about Muslims is that they look at non-Muslims the way Jim Crow southerners looked at black people — yeah, they live here, but they’re not really people in the same sense. It’s okay to lie to them, it’s okay to cheat them, it’s okey to steal from them, rob them, and even kill them, if there’s some advantage to a Muslim in doing so.

Megan McArdle lays it out.

This is an excellent precis of all the reasons (and there are a lot of them) to quit taxing corporations. It’ll never happen, of course, between ‘progressive’ simple-mindedness and government love of complexity (not to mention the interest groups that benefit from that complexity, and who have the lobbying clout to tickle special favors out of elected officials).

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Big government likes big providers. That’s why ObamaCare is gradually making the local doctor-owned medical practice a relic. In the not too distant future, most physicians will be hourly wage earners, likely employed by a hospital chain.

Why? Because when doctors practice in small offices, it is hard for Washington to regulate what they do. There are too many of them, and the government is too remote. It is far easier for federal agencies to regulate physicians if they work for big hospitals. So ObamaCare shifts money to favor the delivery of outpatient care through hospital-owned networks.

The irony is that in the name of lowering costs, ObamaCare will almost certainly make the practice of medicine more expensive. It turns out that when doctors become salaried hospital employees, their overall productivity falls.

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

ObamaCare’s main vehicle for ending the autonomous, private delivery of medicine is the hospital-owned “accountable care organization.” The idea is to turn doctors into hospital employees and pay them flat rates that uncouple their income from how much care they deliver. (Ending the fee-for-service payment model is supposed to eliminate doctors’ financial incentives to perform extraneous procedures.)The Obama administration also imposes new costs on physicians who remain independent—for example, mandating that all medical offices install expensive information-technology systems.

The chief obstacle to a person going into business for himself is government regulations, always and everywhere.

Broadsword Umbrella

Kitchen Gadgets That You Don’t Need

Great Helm Trash Bin

Umbrella Leash

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

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One oft-underestimated threat to epistemic rationality is getting offended. While getting offended by something sometimes feels good and can help you assert moral superiority, in most cases it doesn’t help you figure out what the world looks like. In fact, getting offended usually makes it harder to figure out what the world looks like, since it means you won’t be evaluating evidence very well. In Politics is the Mind-Killer, Eliezer writes that “people who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there’s a Blue or Green position on an issue.” Don’t let yourself become one of those zombies– all of your skills, training, and useful habits can be shut down when your brain kicks into offended mode!

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The tower is based on a novel energy technology invented in Israel in the 1970s. Intended for hot, dry climates, the tower is essentially a hollow cylinder, open at the top. Water is sprayed into the opening, making the uppermost air humid and heavy. That heavy air sinks and accelerates, reaching speeds of 50 miles an hour before escaping at the base via 52 tunnels, where the rushing air spins turbines and create electricity. (I learned about the idea while reporting a story about new wind-energy designs for Sierra magazine.)

Each tower would generate 610 megawatts of electricity, of which about 100 would power the plant. The remainder would go to the power grid.

No doubt there will be a prize for the first person to figure out how to use it to sneak illegal immigrants into the U.S.

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I’m not sure what it is about “Homeowners Associations” (HOAs), but I can’t recall ever coming across one which didn’t involve all sorts of acrimony. A few years back, I lived in a house that was a part of a (mandatory) HOA. I was renting, so I didn’t really care or pay much attention to any details. And then, one day I found a bright yellow document sitting on my front step, which had a long and rambling letter from a neighbor who apparently was challenging the HOA on something and the fight had escalated. He had placed the letter on the front steps of every single house in our neighborhood. While I don’t even recall what the argument itself was about, I do recall him explicitly asking that the police be present at the next HOA meeting, and the phrase: “I fear my life will be taken; I fear my wife will become a widow; if this situation is not brought under control.” The whole thing seemed so bizarre to me — who would ever take an HOA so seriously? — that I remember telling people about that phrase, and it’s stuck with me.

And the thing is, every time I ever hear anything about HOAs, it always seems to involve some similar crazy story. A few months back, we wrote about an HOA president in Indiana going ballistic with bogus legal threats towards pretty much anyone who criticized him. And now, here’s a story out of Naples, Florida, where an HOA for “Fiddler’s Creek” is using homeowners’ fees to sue one of their own homeowners, a resident named James Schutt, because he made some comments the HOA board members don’t like on a blog about the community.

Anybody who buys a home covered by a mandatory home owners’ association is obviously insane.

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And, of course, nothing in the news reports indicate that he’s a Person of Color, unless you are lucky enough to get a photograph, as here.

And,of course, if it were Republicans involved, charges of racism would be flying from the east even unto the west.

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Sometimes it is nice to belong to an oppressed minority.

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

Freeberg performs a public service.

Elizabeth Warren: ‘If we started in 1960 and we said that as productivity goes up, that is as workers are producing more, then the minimum wage is going to go up the same. And if that were the case then the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour,” she said, speaking to Dr. Arindrajit Dube, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor who has studied the economic impacts of minimum wage. “So my question is Mr. Dube, with a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, what happened to the other $14.75? It sure didn’t go to the worker.‘

Not so fast, Cherokee breath: ‘It did go to the worker – in the form of lower prices. Once upon a time, almost all banks charged fees; the increases in technology enabled them to give banking services away for free. Increases in production technology enables people to pay less for better cars. Everyone who is reading this is benefiting from the increases in computer technology that enable them to buy a WiFi enabled tablet for about a tenth of the price of a late 1980s Apple IIE. As Thomas Sowell repeatedly points out, more houses were connected to the internet at the end of the twentieth century than were connected to running water at the beginning. But if we were legally required to pay inflation-adjusted salaries to plumbers to install water pipes into our house, to account for the increased ease of doing so, it’s likely that fewer people would have running water, let alone internet.‘

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The basic drinking fountain—requiring you to bend over, press a button and slurp—was a steady seller for decades. Then, nearly 10 years ago, executives of Elkay Manufacturing Co. started noticing what they call “the airport dance.”

More people were toting plastic water bottles. Rather than drinking from the fountain, they wanted to refill those jugs. It wasn’t working.

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Google’s PageRank algorithm has forever changed the way we access information by putting the best stuff first, and now researchers are using the same mathematical models that Google uses to fight the spread of lung cancer within the human body. While there’s no “best” when it comes cancer cells, the aim is to identify tumors more likely to metastasize and then hit them with targeted treatment before the cells have a chance to spread.

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And that may be the future for all the people the robots throw out of work.

Of course, whenever the government showers money, there will be people with buckets waiting.

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I’m tidy but not particularly clean. An important distinction.

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A question that the ‘gay marriage’ pushers never quite seem able to answer.

JUSTICE SCALIA: I’m curious, when -­ when did — when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted? Sometimes — some time after Baker, where we said it didn’t even raise a substantial Federal question? When — when — when did the law become this?

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As John Derbyshire always says: Get a government job!

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

Check it out.

A picture from the Shorpy web site of a Detroit assembly line during WWII. This is the sort of blue-collar job, requiring only an elementary school education and moderate intelligence, that brought the parents of the Baby Boomers into the middle class.

All of this is now done by robots. And therein lies the problem.

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Unions are experts at remembering bad things that happened to workers but very conveniently ignore the violence for which union members have historically been responsible.

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Millions of Americans are officially jobless, but that doesn’t mean they’re not earning money. To help make ends meet, many unemployed and underemployed people are working in what economists call the ‘shadow economy.’

And who could blame them? Considering that the alternative is to walk around with Obama’s hand in your wallet.

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Distant family members of King Richard III, whose body was unearthed in a council car park, are set to challenge plans to bury the monarch – claiming they are a breach of human rights.

This is how far our culture has degenerated. Feel free to weep.

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Liberals use the argument of need to support regulations and bans ranging from soda to guns. Who needs a 32 ounce soda at dinner? Who needs a so-called assault weapon? But what do people really need? A hovel and some gruel. Everything else is part of life’s rich accoutrement, our desire (need) for more knowledge, more material goods, more experiences, more emotions. The pursuit of happiness includes guns, soda, sex,  transfats, tobacco, narcotics, all depending on the eye of the beholder.

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And if you fix those, we’ll fine other ones. So you might as well just give up now and go kill yourself. Be sure to apologize in your suicide note.

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The report suggests that the much-touted Welfare to Work policies of the 1990s that appeared to successfully move welfare recipients off the public dole may have been a mirage. States have figured out that shifting people from welfare to disability frees up substantial funds, as states have to pay the costs of welfare, but the federal government picks up the tab for disability.