The Most Expensive Kitchen Appliances

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Smartphone-Connected Laser Distance Meter

The Withings Pulse

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The Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing, also called the Sbarro massacre, was a Palestinian terrorist attack on a pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem, Israel, on 9 August 2001, in which 15 civilians were killed, including 7 children and a pregnant woman, and 130 wounded.

This is Islam, red in tooth and claw. These are who are trying to destroy us. This is what our ruling class ignores. This is the cancer that is invading our body politic.

Ahlam Tamimi, who was charged as an accomplice, scouted for a target before leading Izz al-Din Shuheil al-Masri, the suicide bomber, to the Sbarro restaurant. They arrived just before 2:00 pm, when the restaurant was filled with customers, “dozens of women, children and babies”, and pedestrian traffic outside was at its peak. Tamimi departed before Al-Masri, thought to be carrying a rigged guitar case or wearing an explosive belt weighing 5 to 10 kilograms, containing explosives, nails, nuts and bolts, detonated his bomb.

The dead included 13 Israelis, one pregnant American, and one Brazilian, all of them civilians. Additionally, 130 were injured. Chana Nachenberg remains in a persistent vegetative state a dozen years after the attack.

The Romans had a term for it: hostes humani generis, enemies of humanity.

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Vanderbilt University professors have developed a steerable robotic needle that can perform surgery on parts of the human brain that were previously considered too dangerous for physical intervention. Specifically aimed at relieving the effects of cranial blood clots, which have a 40 percent lethality rate, the new technology moves us forward from the present drug-based treatments. The only issue with it, perhaps, is that the process looks and sounds more like a disconcerting sci-fi scenario than a real-world medical breakthrough.

I feel so much better now….

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Next question: Are you likely to buy furniture that requires solving a puzzle to put it together? (Hint: Think IKEA….)

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In most fields of human endeavour the complete invalidation of a person’s formal training and skillset generally takes decades, if not generations.

Within IT the tools, applications, operating systems and cloud services learned at the beginning of a bachelor’s degree can already be defunct before that degree is completed.

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Geoffrey Miller, a psychology professor, has been censured by the University of New Mexico, two months after he sent out a fat-shaming Twitter post that caused an angry Internet uproar.

It may have taken Miller less than a minute to write out this message and hit the “Tweet” button: “Dear obese Ph.D. applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth.” But the consequences of that tweet will last much longer.

According to a university memo released on Tuesday, Miller — who has tenure at the University of New Mexico and was a visiting professor at New York University this summer — will be required to:

Not serve on any committee involving the admission of graduate students to the psychology department for the duration of his time as a faculty member at the university.
Work with the faculty co-advisers of the psychology department’s diversity organization to develop a plan for sensitivity training on obesity (for himself to undergo, said a university spokeswoman). The plan must be approved by a co-adviser or by the chair of the department.
Be assigned a faculty mentor for three years with whom he will meet on a regular basis to discuss potential problems.
Have his work monitored by the chair of the department.
Apologize to the department and his colleagues for his behavior.

Miller did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

I’ll just bet he didn’t. You depart from the Narrative, you get sent to a re-education camp, as we see.

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1. One person (or two people) did not have the ancestral state of all of our DNA.
The person whose cells housed the common mtDNA ancestor (or Y ancestor) also had all of the other chromosomes (1-22 and X), but did not house the common ancestor of each of these chromosomes. These non-sex chromosomes are a lot more complicated. This touches on why it is also misleading to refer to the common ancestor of genetic “males” versus “females.” Genetic females are not only their mtDNA – we also have 22 non-sex chromosomes, and two X chromosomes! Genetic males are not only their Y (and mtDNA), they also have 22 non-sex chromosomes and one X chromosome! Because the non-sex chromosomes (autosomes) can swap DNA, and are inherited through both the sperm and the egg, they much more complicated history than the Y and mtDNA.

2. A lower bound, not a point estimate.
Tracing back to the common ancestral mtDNA or the common ancestral Y chromosome does not tell us when anatomically modern humans arose. We can estimate the TMRCA, or the Time to the Most Recent Common Ancestor, but this mtDNA surely existed much further back in time.

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 I was interviewed by two different science writers to comment on this paper, and in both interviews I stressed how inappropriate the “Adam Y” and mitochondrial or “mtDNA Eve” analogies are. You can see how well they took that into consideration: here and here. I really enjoyed talking with the journalists, so hope they won’t think I’m picking on them either because, to be fair, nearly every popSci article used this analogy (see here, here, here, and here). I’ll take a sentence here to especially note the article by Francie Diep, here, that took a different approach.

While I have several reasons to disliking this analogy, I cannot fault the journalists completely for using it in this instance. Aside from my protests, there is no reason science journalists should think that it is a bad analogy, because it was used in the manuscript (without context or explanation).

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Of all fallacies, ad hominem endures the harshest abuse, yet we all know in our hearts that it really does matter that Michael Moore is fat

Which is where Bradley Manning comes in.

…

Isn’t the more pressing question really “What the hell kind of army lets a twink like this join in the first place?”

Steve Sailer waxes dyspeptic.

 As for my influence, I’ve been writing a long time, and I’m stoic about the fact that my influence works through labyrinthine laundering processes, where my ideas eventually show up in more sonorous forms on the op-ed page of the New York Times weeks or months or years after I publish them. Eventually, I expect to be recognized as The Guy Who Figured Out the Answers to the Hard Questions, but I don’t expect that to happen before I’m very old. Such is the way of the world …

On the other hand, the media conventional wisdom considers Bryan’s extremism to be admirable, if perhaps a little too forthright for the peasants at the moment. Unfortunately, it’s not a good idea to blithely assume that elites won’t get what they keep shouting for, no matter how stupid it is. To update for the 21st Century H.L. Mencken’s apothegm on democracy, “Mediacracy is the theory that the elites know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The problem is that there can be a lot of collateral damage when sanity is considered unmentionable in elite discourse.

That America is better than other places is obvious from the fact that a lot of people want to move from There to Here. It seems obvious to me that those who are Here ought to want to keep Here as good a place as possible, and I don’t see in what way that’s a bad thing; how does letting in a lot of people from There do that? They have equally obviously not been very successful at making There a better place, otherwise they would want to stay There.

So how do we keep Here the place we want it to be, and keep it from becoming Just Another There? The experience of the European countries is, I think, instructive — never have so many from There been allowed into Here, and the results have been invariably negative — for every 10 things good about such ‘diversity’, there are 100 things bad. Ought we not to learn from the mistakes of others? Do we have to keep reinventing the wheel (or, more accurately, the rack)? The whole ‘come one, come all’ attitude makes absolutely no sense to me.

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An experimental malaria vaccine called PfSPZ is showing promise after it was found to have blocked the disease in early clinical trials, according to a new study published by Science magazine on Thursday. Researchers are calling the vaccine a breakthrough while also cautioning that PfSPZ isn’t ready for prime time just yet. The vaccine, which is made using a weakened form of the disease, was administered in varying doses to a group of more than three dozen volunteers. Six people, each of whom were given a full five doses of the vaccine, were unable to contract malaria when exposed to the disease, the study says. This is the first time any vaccine has achieved 100% effectiveness in any trial, researchers report.

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According to CBS Denver, the institute will be a “100,000 square foot complex [with] a retail gun shop, five indoor shooting ranges, and a restaurant.”

In July, USA Liberty Firearms owner John Mason said, “This is going to be an upscale place to shoot your gun, to learn gun safety, and to be around people who know gun safety.” In a more recent statement, USA Liberty Firearms said it “will break ground in September and [hopes] to open doors next August.”

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

With Barack Obama having Wall Street’s back over the last five years (i.e., virtually no prosecutions for the events leading up to 2008), it’s only natural that Silicon Valley leaders have been thinking about getting their own tame black President, too: namely, Cory Booker, a former Stanford football player, whose job as mayor of Newark makes it easy for him to hit the national broadcasts out of New York City.

I haven’t paid too much attention to Booker, but he seems like a more energetic and prepossessing personality than Obama, so the notion seems plausible that in a country with a large demand for black Presidents but a small supply of plausible ones, Booker would be worth investing money in.

Don Boudreaux lays it out.

Competitive markets work so smoothly and silently that they fool us modern folk into thinking that the lives we lead are normal – fool us into thinking that poverty (rather than wealth) has causes; fool us into supposing that people my age (almost 55), because we still have all of our teeth and aren’t remotely yet decrepit, are “middle-aged” rather than old, ancient, nearly dead by historical standards; fool us into believing that possession by each person of several changes of clean, washable clothes is the norm; fool us into imagining that living under a solid roof atop solid walls joined to solid floors is natural; fool us into forgetting that starvation and malnutrition were in store for distressingly large numbers of our ancestors; fool us into worrying about the fact that someone has multiple more zeroes in his or her bank account than we have in ours rather than recognize that even the most ordinary of us today enjoy a material standard of living immeasurably higher than was dreamed of by any of our pre-industrial ancestors – and higher even, along many dimensions, than was enjoyed by the likes of Cleopatra, Louis XIV, and J.D. Rockefeller.

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As the federal government struggles to implement ObamaCare in less than two months, the US Agency for International Development has announced a $25 million grant to build a stronger primary healthcare system in Madagascar.

The gift that keeps on giving.

As Forces loyal to the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad continue to make advances against the “rebels”, dispirited jihad fighters from Western countries are expected to return “home” with a bad attitude and a working knowledge of explosives and firearms, looking for a fight. Authorities in Norway are apprehensive about “Norwegian” mujahideen who make their way back from Syria with the intention of applying in Oslo the skills learned in Homs or Aleppo.

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Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?

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Just in case you were wondering. I knew it all along.

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Conservatives and liberals alike may be surprised to find that in reality John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina antebellum statesman and political theorist, and his pro-slavery allies, stand firmly as the intellectual forebears of the political philosophy of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the modern left. Calhoun and the antebellum thinkers behind the positive defense of slavery in the nineteenth century represent the first major criticism of American founding principles – principles the American conservative movement seeks to preserve – as well as the intellectual seed for the later Progressive movement and what is considered modern-day liberalism.

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Not much good comes from taking expired medicine, but it’s not always obvious when the drugs in your cabinet are too far gone to safely ingest. To remedy the situation, Kanupriya Goel and Gautam Goel devised concept packaging that’s basically impossible to misinterpret. It’s called Self Expiring for exactly the reason you’d suspect: the packaging gradually “expires” over time, ultimately displaying a “not fit for consumption” message when there’s no going back and it’s time to trash your meds.

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…whoever fed the “Friends of Hollywood” Congressional Reps their questions last week forgot to make careful notes of who they gave which questions to… leading to a repeat. Congresswomen Judy Chu and Karen Bass both represent different parts of Los Angeles, so it’s no surprise that they’d be there to carry water for the legacy entertainment industry. But,having both of them ask identical questions, word-for-word, one right after the other? That kinda reveals that they were fed that question, doesn’t it? You can watch the full video here, or to make it easier, I’ve made a short YouTube video that shows the two questions back to back….

Best Congresscritters money can buy.

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The New York Times notes an annoying trend toward total police state in America, with “the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads — VIPR teams for short — assigned to perform random security sweeps.”

Yes, what sounds like a second-rate terror-crime cartel that a minor Marvel superhero might be punching out is roaming the land….

The significant differences between the TSA and the Gestapo are the the Gestapo were competent and had better uniforms.

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

No biggie, right? Rich, famous people put their kids in fancy private schools all the time. He probably looked at his options and made the best decision he could for his family.

Just one thing: Damon, whose mom is a public school teacher, frequently makes a big stink about the importance of public education. A really big stink.

Hey, when the Obamas put their kids in D.C. public schools, then Damon will put his in L.A. public schools. Fair’s fair.

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In the aftermath of the tornado that devastated Joplin in 2011, Remote Area Medical, a Tennessee-based charity that provides free health care, sent its mobile eyeglass laboratory to Missouri to help.

But it wasn’t allowed to assist because Missouri law makes it extremely difficult for doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals to offer free services.

Your tax dollars at work.

In May, state legislators passed the Volunteer Health Services Act, which would have allowed health professionals licensed in other states to offer free care in Missouri and also would have relaxed medical malpractice liability for volunteer health workers.

Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed the bill last month, writing that the VHSA “is unnecessary given that Missouri already has a system in place that encourages volunteerism.”

Governor Nixon is (of course) a Democrat.

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Hint: Yes.

What appears to be happening, in other words, is a threshold effect. People hovering around the borderline—just above 30 hours—are seeing their hours capped. And new positions that might have offered 32 or 34 hours of work in the past are being created as 25-29 hour a week jobs.

And Obamanomics is good with that: It creates more people dependent on government benefits, in one form or another, to survive — and that means more votes for the Party of Government Benefits, the Democrats.

The President is a lot smarter than you think.

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In all of these examples, building infrastructure was never the engine of growth, but rather a lagging indicator of growth that had already occurred in the private sector. And when the infrastructure was built, it was often best done privately, at least until the market grew so large as to demand a wider public role, as with the need for an interstate-highway system in the mid 1950s.

There is a lesson here for President Obama: Government “investment” in infrastructure is often wasteful and tends to support decaying or stagnant technologies. Let the entrepreneurs decide what infrastructure the country needs, and most of the time they will build it themselves.

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Colorado legislators are immune from speeding tickets and parking tickets thanks to the special plates issued to lawmakers — ones that aren’t included in the DMV database.

The Crust takes care of its own.

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“The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect,” writes David Kriesel, who uncovered the worrying bug last week while scanning construction documents. Numbers were randomly being altered, with 6 and 8 proving especially susceptible.

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 The researchers focused their efforts on Schlage Lock Comp.’s flagship secure-key solution, dubbed Primus.  Primus keys carry glaring “do not duplicate” message, which references Schlage’s patent on its two-tracked toothed key design, U.S. Patent No. 5,808,858.  The patent was filed in 1997 and granted in 1998.  The keys are typically used by law enforcement, mental health institutions, and military detention centers; they are even personally recommended by famous lockpick expert Marc Weber Tobias who wrote the much-referenced 1970 textbook on security Locks, Safes, and Security.

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I can feel New York Times editorials killing brain cells when I read them. Times editorials should come accompanied by a warning that they may be hazardous to your health. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Falstaff, they are not only stupid, they are the cause of stupidity in others.

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What I have decided is that the Buckley Rule is a stupid rule because it is not a rule, but a saying jackasses use to crap on candidates they don’t like. They did not think Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Pat Toomey and many others in the Senate and House were electable.

While they would point out, similarly, a list of conservatives who did not win, I’d say that’s the point. Views on electability differ and I don’t think you or I should take anyone else’s word for it. We should see for ourselves.

RedState’s rule is simple. We back the conservative in the primary and the Republican in the general. If fortune smiles, we wind up beating the squish in the primary and winning the general. It does not always work out that way, but often it does. There are a lot of Republican incumbents who suck. They are neither kings, nor princes, nor dukes. They do not get to dwell in the seat until they themselves decide to vacate the seat. The people are allowed to boot them out of the seat.

And I’m happy to help do that.

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Young children almost universally produce lactase and can digest the lactose in their mother’s milk. But as they mature, most switch off the lactase gene. Only 35% of the human population can digest lactose beyond the age of about seven or eight (ref. 2). “If you’re lactose intolerant and you drink half a pint of milk, you’re going to be really ill. Explosive diarrhoea — dysentery essentially,” says Oliver Craig, an archaeologist at the University of York, UK. “I’m not saying it’s lethal, but it’s quite unpleasant.”

Hmmm. I hear ‘enhanced interrogation technique’….

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Well, for one thing, it isn’t Michigan….

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Antiplanner pushes back against the latest Crustian jawboning.

“All the studies show” that the millenials “want to live where they can walk, whether that’s the city or an urban suburb,” she tells Washington Post reporter Paul Windle. Gallaher herself lives in New York City’s West Village, while Windle lives in inner Washington, DC, so their own personal anecdotal evidence easily confirms what “all the studies show.”

All the studies are done by academics who live in cities and know little about places where kids ride bicycles on the sidewalk.

Suburbs need to re-invent themselves, says Gallagher, by providing “A place people want to walk around. Organic, village-type environments that are how the suburbs started to begin with. Public transit also. People want out of their cars, especially millennials.” Again, the verdict is still out about whether millennials “want” out of their cars; somehow, I suspect US DOT researcher Don Pickrell is correct (as previously noted here) that high unemployment rates have more to do with the reduced amount of driving they do at the moment.

Let’s say Gallagher is right and young people will prefer to live in mixed-use developments and use transit over driving. Gallagher’s solution is to turn the suburbs into West Villages (or, going back to the real founder of the New Urbanist movement, Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Villages). That’s an invitation for urban planners to do all sorts of expensive and intrusive meddling into people’s lives.

And that’s what they’re really after — people living their lives according to Crustian prescriptions rather than their own preferences.

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Individual pieces of graphene have some pretty amazing properties, but finding a way to produce bulk materials that make good use of those properties has been rather challenging. Now, researchers have figured out a way to make graphene-based electrodes in bulk through a process so simple that it can be adapted to the manufacturing techniques that we currently use to make paper. And the resulting capacitors, at least in these test cases, had storage capacities that approached those of lead-acid batteries.

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Enter the world of food distribution, however, and you all but travel back in time to the last century. Much as it was done throughout the 1900s, food distributors use a largely paper-based system and onsite visits to take orders and payments. Phone orders and fax are widely used, sure, but ecommerce options –  even basic email – are scarcely found.

As a restaurant owner (and technophile) this frustrating situation is something I constantly agonize over. And notably it runs contrary to other parts of the restaurant industry, where automation and efficiency are driving innovation. Owning a restaurant is highly stressful and the margins are slim, so entrepreneurs like myself need every bit of efficiency we can get, and I believe tech is the answer.

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

Don’t know much about the Middle Ages…
Looked at the pictures and I turned the pages…

Don’t get me started.

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 Joshua Jacobs of Drexel University in Philadelphia and a team of scientists including, Michael J. Kahana at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Itzhak Fried at UCLA and Tel-Aviv University, reported in Nature Neuroscience on Sunday that signals from electrodes implanted in human patients with severe epilepsy proved the presence of grid cells that function in the same way as those in other mammals.

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A student at Logan College of Chiropractic/University Programs recently learned that her emergency Cesarean section didn’t qualify as a valid excuse for missing class.

But I’ll bet that pain in her lower back is much better.

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While Weinberg and Scott stress that they have studied data only for one university (and urge similar research at other institutions), they also suggest that the logic behind lifting mandatory retirement for higher education was flawed. Most other employers were barred by law in 1986 from using mandatory retirement, but colleges were given an exemption for a while, based on concerns that delays in retirement would make it difficult for colleges to hire people in emerging disciplines, and to diversify their faculties. But Weinberg and Scott note that these arguments became considerably weaker when the National Research Council issued a study in 1991 predicting that those things would not happen.

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Rich crook, poor crook….

Greg Mankiw uncovers a rock.

 With the implementation of the ACA (Affordable Care Act) these institutions are giving notification to their part-time faulty that their individual teaching schedules will now be limited to three sections. At the college this will likely result in the cancellation of 20-25% of the class sections in economics, and I would assume other areas will have a similar result. The students are not fully aware of the situation and many will be surprised that their desire to get a college education is now being impacted by the need to avoid the full implementation of the ACA.

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The Crust take care of their own.

Consider the HOV lane: Joe Sixpack on his way to a job site can’t use it. My chauffeur and I can. Your tax dollars at work.

Watch it.

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The Office of Civil Rights says Seattle serves all residents, whether they’re United States citizens or not. And while city leaders publicize “brown bag” lunch meetings as a way to designate a bring-your-own lunch time event, the term has a sordid history.

“It used to be a way people could judge skin color,” Bronstein said in a phone interview. Does the public find it offensive? Most people agree it’s not.

Unspoken is the fact that it’s used solely by black people to judge other black people. But, of course, if anybody anywhere is going to be offended, it’s off-limits.

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Alex spent time at two foster homes. Her parents noticed bruises on her body and mold in her bag when they saw her while she was at the first home. Her father says he told Child Protective Services they’d have to put him in jail because he didn’t want to return her to the foster home, and in January she was placed in a second home. Alex is now dead, and the foster mother was arrested after her description of what happened to Alex didn’t match the injuries Alex sustained. The mother admitted to slamming the two-year-old girl’s head and is charged with murder.

Consider it a very very late-term abortion.

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Two weeks ago, Ray Schulze was working in a barn at the Society of St. Francis no-kill animal shelter in Kenosha, Wis., when officials swarmed the shelter with a search warrant.

“[There were] nine [Department of Natural Resources] agents and four deputy sheriffs, and they were all armed to the teeth,” Mr. Schulze told WISN 12. “It was like a SWAT team.”

The agents were there to retrieve a baby deer named Giggles that was dropped off by a family worried she had been abandoned by her mother, the station reported. Wisconsin law forbids the possession of wildlife.

“I said the deer is scheduled to go to the wildlife reserve the next day,” Mr. Schulze told the station. “I was thinking in my mind they were going to take the deer and take it to a wildlife shelter, and here they come carrying the baby deer over their shoulder. She was in a body bag. I said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘That’s our policy,’ and I said, ‘That’s one hell of a policy.’”

There’s something about being a government employee that reduces the IQ by about 50 points.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if these guys quit pretending to be Republicans?