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Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation awarded University of Pennsylvania graphene startup Graphene Frontiers $744,600 to develop technology that makes it faster and cheaper to produce graphene on a large scale. I recently caught up with CEO Michael Patterson who described how roll-to-roll manufacturing will enable graphene to make its entrance into the big industries.

We have the technology.

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In a research paper published recently on Arxiv, a team from Rice University laid out the molecular schematics for Carbyne, aka linear acetylenic carbon. A supermaterial first theorized in 1967, its legitimacy has been disputed for the last 40 years. This time around the team figured out how to successfully synthesize and stabilize it at room temperature.

The paper goes on to describe the remarkable atomic chain of Carbyne – a microscopic lattice similar to that of its close cousin, diamond. Carbyne, however, has a Young’s modulus 40 times that of diamond, making it the world’s hardest material. With extensive applications in nanotechnology, it could completely change the way scientists view systems with nanomechanical bases. The polyyne family has a new heavyweight champ.

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Adjunct faculty members at Tufts University have voted to unionize with the Service Employees International Union, marking the national union’s first victory in a campaign to organize adjuncts across the Boston area and push institutions to improve their working conditions.

[Recap for the dimwitted: Unions arise when a particular occupation has a skillset that is easily subject to substitution on the part of management because supply vastly exceeds demand, hence collective coercion on the part of workers is the only way to raise (or sustain) their price over what the market-clearing amount would be. Historically, violence and activities that would be unlawful if any group other than a union did them are an integral part of this coercion.]

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A police officer from Somers Police Department in New York has been caught kicking and then taking a pro-Second Amendment sign from the yard of Jon Gibson of Lake Lincolndale, New York.

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

It had been stolen three times previously, so Gibson installed a camera on his rural property to catch the culprit. He said he was shocked that his camera captured photos of an officer in uniform kicking and then taking the sign.

‘When policemen break the law, there is no law — just a fight for survival.’ — Billy Jack

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 “I am a Christian, and if you want to kill me for this, I do not object to it” – such were the last words of one of three Christians, killed by extremists after their refusal to accept Islam in Ma’loula, which has already become famous among the faithful as “a land of Martyrs”.

Steve Sailer looks at striving within the Crust.

 I’m sure it bores most people, but I can never get enough of New York Times articles about the Wechsler I.Q. tests that the 3,000 most important four-year-olds in the world (or at least in Manhattan and the better parts of Brooklyn) take each year so their parents can pay $40,000 per year for them to attend kindergarten with some of the other 2,999 most important small children in the world. Pay no attention to that IQ test behind the curtain!

These are not just helicopter parents — these are Apache-gunship-escorted-Ospreys-loaded-with-Delta-Force parents.

Whatever magically non-competitive test replaces the Wechsler IQ test for NYC kindergarten admissions will instantly become the most gamed status symbol this side of Seoul.

We are rapidly turning into ancient China, where how you do on The Exams determines what you become, not the content of your character or your capacity to achieve or anything silly like that.

But there is hope! Specifically, Los Angeles:

 Los Angeles just isn’t as IQ obsessed as New York is. It’s a who-you-know culture, and if you don’t know anybody, why would they let your child in to their kindergarten for the children of cool parents? Maybe if you are extremely good looking, they’d make an exception. But if you are ugly and unpopular, who cares what your kid’s I.Q. is?

Hmm, well, then again, maybe not….

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To take Harkin seriously, though, if he thinks things are so dangerous, perhaps he should call on the White House to stop calling Republicans “terrorists.” Such language is not conducive to the “new tone” Democrats keep trying to shove down their opponents’ throats. Such language does nothing but create more rage.

He might also call on the Team Obama, which just sat down with the Holocaust-denying, terrorist-supporting Iranian regime, to negotiate with Republicans over domestic policy. Or are Republicans now worse than actual, nuclear-weapon-desiring apocalyptic mullahs jonesing for the end of days?

Harkin won’t do that. His comments are a scam, supporting a scam government pushing scam politics to a new level in American history.

Much like the ‘progressives’ from which they spring, Democrat politicians (like their base, the unions and environmentalists and feminists and wackos of all descriptions) are constantly railing about how people exercising their rights and participating in the political process are taking us to the brink of the Abyss; all of which is premised on their opponents unwillingness to surrender.

Obama is much the same way. He keeps fulminating about how Republicans are taking us to the brink of destruction when the cure for that is in his own hand–just sign the damned bill that the FUCKING HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA sent to him, presumably reflecting what the American people want done. (Notice that Democrats are always quick to hail the House of Representatives as the Voice of the People when Democrats are in control; when Republicans are a majority, not so much.)

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Ted Cruz is looking better and better.

Cornyn has been a tremendous disappointment to Texas conservatives (although not, perhaps, to Texas Republicans); not as bad as Kaye Hutchinson, and certainly not as bad as John McCain, but still a disappointment.

Still, Mirengoff’s criticism is well founded. Cruz ought to say what he thinks, and help the rest of us out in our evaluation of Cornyn … and Cruz.

Read it.

Hint: No.

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If you like Malcolm Gladwell, you won’t like this review.

Mr. Gladwell enjoys a reputation for translating social science into actionable insights. But the data behind the surprising dyslexia claim is awfully slim. He notes in passing that a 2009 survey found a much higher incidence of dyslexia in entrepreneurs than in corporate managers. But this study involved only 102 self-reported dyslexic entrepreneurs, most of whom probably had careers nothing like those of Mr. Boies or his fellow highfliers. Later Mr. Gladwell mentions that dyslexics are also overrepresented in prisons—a point that would appear to vitiate his argument. He addresses the contradiction by suggesting that while no person should want to be dyslexic, “we as a society need people” with serious disadvantages to exist, for we all benefit from the over-achievement that supposedly results. But even if dyslexia could be shown to cause entrepreneurship, the economic analysis that would justify a claim of its social worth is daunting, and Mr. Gladwell doesn’t attempt it.

I, for the record, do not like Malcolm Gladwell.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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It’s almost like this guy completely ignored all the “no guns on campus” signs. Can you believe it?

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

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Prior to the 20th century, these people would have been executed for treason in any country on earth. Nowadays they get positions in academia and while away their time rotting the brains of the young.

Check it out.

This would make a great wall poster but you’d need a big wall.

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And who could blame them?

A primer.

As the federal government’s fiscal year 2013 wheezes to a close without a budget in place for fiscal 2014, here is some basic information everyone should understand.

This is from tReason magazine, so it’s not the usual left-wing drivel.

The Other McCain points out some inconvenient truth.

Most people don’t realize that, according to some studies, about half of the “homeless” population have criminal records. Many others have substance-abuse issues or are mentally ill.

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Chuck’s email tagline reads: “Notice: It’s OK to print this email. Paper is a biodegradable, renewable, sustainable product made from trees. Growing and harvesting trees provides jobs for millions of Americans. Working forests are good for the environment and provide clean air and water, wildlife habitat and carbon storage. Thanks to improved forest management, we have more trees in America today than we had 100 years ago.”

And when you sign up for electricity, be sure to request wind-farm ‘green’ power — despite being an endangered species, eagles really just get in the way.

Read it. And for sure watch the video.

Durbin complained that Cruz wanted to deny health care to the uninsured; did he not, Durbin asked, enjoy the benefits of the generous congressional health-care package himself?

Cruz said he wouldn’t answer Durbin until Durbin first replied to three questions Cruz had posed. Durbin, with an “a-ha” gesture, responded by saying it was clear Cruz was simply refusing to answer his embarrassing question.

He’d walked into Cruz’s trap. For then Cruz said, no, Senator, I’m eligible for the congressional plan — but I’m not enrolled in it.

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On the Obamacare health insurance exchanges, being married can cost you a lot. Get divorced (or avoid getting married, if you live together), and you save $7,230 per year if you are a fairly typical 40-year-old couple with kids (example: the husband working full-time, and the wife working part time, with the husband making $70,000, and the wife making $23,000). If you are a 60-year-old couple with equal incomes and no kids, and you make $62,041 a year, you save $11,028 a year by getting divorced or remaining unmarried. These are the amounts of money you will lose if you get married, since you will lose this amount of taxpayer subsidies due to Obamacare’s discriminatory treatment of married versus unmarried couples. That’s the reality confirmed by an Obamacare “calculator” provided by the pro-Obamacare Kaiser Family Foundation showing how Obamacare’s “tax credits” work.

More radioactive fallout from the ‘progressive’ assumption that ‘different’ means ‘better’.

How that Hope & Change working out for you?

Battle Mug

Sprout Pencils

Smartphone microscope

Nature Sounds

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Take a portrait from history, add modern clothes — hilarity ensues.

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Because some ‘progressive’ causes are more equal than others, I suppose.

Let’s start with Don Henley.

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While at the Sheriff’s Department Music-Peed asked that the cops sent to investigate the vehicle not shoot her dogs when they arrived at her property. The 10-month-old puppy Ammo was described by Music-Peed as being jumpy but friendly.

However, according to Music-Peed’s roommate Kyle Sewall, when Sergeant D. Little (who shot another dog last year) arrived at the property he shot Ammo point blank in the head.

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The Bobcat tractor was working its way through a pile of mulch as big as an office building, dragging it from the alley to the playground of a private daycare facility. I asked the crew foreman about the sheer vastness of this mulch pile.

“It’s about the state regulations. There has to be 8 inches of this stuff underneath every play structure.”

“The State regulates even things like this?” I asked.

“The regulations on playgrounds are 15 miles long,” he said. “They mandate every fastener and bolt, the distance and height of every structure, and, especially, the drainage. Just getting the drainage right takes up most of the time and money.”

“But don’t these regulations inhibit others from opening daycare facilities?” I asked. “You would have to be super-well capitalized just to get one going.”

“I can tell you this. I would never do it.”

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How dare she work for herself! Doesn’t he know she’s supposed to depend on the government? The very idea….

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TSALike an abused spouse increasingly appalled by a long-time partner’s behavior, Americans are falling out of love with the federal workers who enforce an endless litany of mandates, taxes and intrusions into their lives. New data from George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration finds that, in addition to losing faith in the federal government itself, as other polls have revealed, a record number of Americans are losing faith in its loyal minions.

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

Read it..

The gist of the message is that, from the outset, the calculations used to sell Obamacare to the American public were slipshod and/or naive and/or mistaken and/or simplistic and/or outright lies (see more here).

And this is news to exactly whom?

The Other McCain points and laughs.

This is the difference between pragmatism and ideology: Do you want to solve your problem, or do you want to construe every problem to fit political categories and intellectual abstractions?

If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and if the only tool you have is feminism, every problem looks like heteronormative patriarchal oppression and “rape culture.”

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When David Schaffner III, 16, discovered he’d accidentally brought a pocketknife with him to a high school football game, he immediately sought out a security guard and turned it over. His principal didn’t appreciate Schaffner’s honesty. The principal not only kicked the boy out of the game, he suspended Schaffner for 10 days from Pennsylvania’s Fox Chapel High School.

Send your kid to a government school,
And he will turn out a fool —
That’s the way
Things work today;
Your tax bucks at work and play!

Read it.

According to the airport’s chief of operations, Melissa Osborn, out-of-town drivers have driven onto airport property twice in the past several weeks, crossing the runway and driving directly to the airport ramp side of the passenger terminal. “These folks drove past several signs. They even drove past a gate. None of that cued them that they did something inappropriate,” she said.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Guy Somerset rakes up the past.

On September 20, 2013, President Obama flew the black flag above his White House to honor prisoners of war and soldiers still missing in action.

If you were unaware of this, it is not surprising. The proclamation was quietly released to the media without a televised speech. On the day itself the Commander-in-Chief did make a public appearance…where he spoke about the debt ceiling instead.

It brings to mind December 7, or Pearl Harbor Day, which Americans and their president still widely commemorated until the late twentieth century. Contrast this against only the twelfth anniversary of September 11, which went by largely unnoticed, or at least with far less dignity than it deserved.

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Our smartphones share one thing in common with many animals: they have internal compasses that can orient themselves to the Earth’s magnetic field. And just as animals can detect local variations in that magnetic field to find their way around, our phones’ digital compasses can do the same. Structures and even furniture within buildings such as metal shelves naturally produce those geomagnetic anomalies, and by logging those anomalies on a map, they can be used to pinpoint a device — and its owner’s — exact location indoors.

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Apparently a lot of people didn’t really say what other people said they said. Or something.

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University of Adelaide researchers plan to publish a paper in Carbon that details how they vaporized plastic grocery bags to make the carbon nanotubes. Like just about everything, plastic contains carbon, which was freed when the bags were vaporized in a furnace. The researchers also placed a sheet of material in the furnace. The carbon grabs ahold of the material and builds itself into the long, one-atom-thick cylinders that make up carbon nanotubes.

Gotta love Australians.

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Beats me. But I’m sure George W Bush is to blame.

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The Mangiones’s insurance company, Humana, declined to comment. Humana did, however, include the following explanation in the rate spike announcement letter:

    If your policy premium increased, you should know this isn’t unique to Humana—premium increases generally will occur industry-wide. Increases aren’t based on your individual claims or changes in health status. Many other factors go in to your premium including: ACA [Affordable Care Act—also known as Obamacare] compliance, including the addition of new essential health benefits.

How’s that Hope & Change working out for you?

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Following the Navy Yard shooting, University of Kansas journalism professor David Guth tweeted he hoped that children of NRA members are targeted in a future attack. He has since been put on administrative leave but is still being paid by the university.

Of course. Want a steady paycheck even after you’re caught? Get a government job!

Love the picture — reminds us that there’s an obesity epidemic in America. Let that be a lesson to all of us.

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The Oracle CEO was slated to give a keynote speech Tuesday afternoon at Oracle OpenWorld, the business-software company’s annual gathering for people who love gabbing about databases and computer server racks. But just before Ellison was set to hit the stage, conference officials announced Ellison was out keeping tabs on the Oracle Team USA sailing team.

Sometimes it is good to be the king.

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After decades of losing out to foreign rivals, U.S. manufacturing of toilets is making a surprising, if modest, comeback—mostly under foreign ownership.

An under-appreciated indicator of economic health.

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Last year I wrote about some very interesting research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary, but they were nevertheless startling: There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.

Mickey Mouse has a lot to answer for.

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For years, we’ve been arguing against faith-based policy making when it comes to intellectual property. This is the belief that “if some intellectual property is good, more must be better,” when it’s never been established that the fundamental principle is true in the first place.

Which it isn’t, of course. The reason we have patents and copyrights is because they represented an improvement over the old arbitrary monopolies that monarchs would often grant their friends. Increasingly they act as a barrier to innovation and progress, as is the case with every government-granted privilege.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

Clintus J. Alford, 37, was sentenced to 40  to 60 years in prison Monday for raping two girls, ages 12 and 14. He had previously been convicted in 2004 of false imprisonment for a case involving an 11-year-old girl, and served two years in prison for that offense.

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. (Except white people, of course.)

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Consumer advocates and parents who accidentally backed over their children plan to sue the federal government, forcing it to issue a long-anticipated rule requiring automakers to help drivers see behind their vehicles.

“If it takes this kind of action, that is what we’re going to have to do,” said Greg Gulbransen, a New York pediatrician who accidentally backed over and killed his son, Cameron, in 2002, and is a plaintiff in the lawsuit expected to be filed Wednesday. “We’ve tried so hard for so long, and now we’re stuck.”

I’m curious as to why this guy isn’t in jail for negligent homicide.

Gulbransen marked what would have been Cameron’s 13th birthday this week. “Can’t we just get this thing passed, get this thing through?” he said. “There are so many children running around that are about to be backed over and killed by the parents because they can’t see them.”

There are times when the term ‘clueless’ is just totally inadequate.

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An email sent to students by a University of Maryland official that cites the Trayvon Martin shooting as evidence “it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida” is being blasted as the latest evidence of a left-wing bias on campus.

The email, from William Dorland, director of the school’s Honors College, starts by welcoming students back to campus, but then quickly veers into politics.

“This year, we learned that it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida,” it reads, in a reference to the trial of George Zimmerman, who was cleared of all charges in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The email went out to all students in the Honors College.

Send your kid to a government school,
And he will turn out a fool —
That’s the way
Things work today;
Your tax bucks at work and play!

Read it.

The system works by pairing an internal reading of a person’s heartbeat with an external reading touched to their body by the medical care provider. If the two match, the provider is then able to access the implanted device. Even if someone nearby intercepted the heartbeat, heartbeats change so frequently that a minute later the intercepted beat would no longer work.

The researchers said the system would work with existing implanted devices and still allow emergency workers quick access in a dire situation.

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Congress defined “affordable” as 9.5% or less of an employee’s wages, mostly to make sure people did not leave their workplace plans for subsidized coverage through the exchanges. But the “error” was that it only applies to the employee — and not his or her family. So, if an employer offers a woman affordable insurance, but doesn’t provide it for her family, they cannot get subsidized help through the state health exchanges.

How’s that Hope & Change working out for ya?

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McDonalds has an amazing technology when you look hard at it: They have figured out how to run restaurants in a way that dramatically conserves on the world’s scarcest resource, human capital. To run a McDonalds, you don’t have to know how to cook, how to order food, how to buy kitchen equipment, or all the other hundreds of bits of tough knowledge and skill that it takes to run a restaurant. Hamburger U trains the rest.

The whole operation is about taking low-skill teenagers living typically unstructured lives, and training them to what it takes to work.  Peering around the side of the cash register at an earlier trip, I noticed there were pictures on the buttons! You can work at McDonalds and operate its cash registers even if you’re functionally illiterate! To say nothing of not knowing what to do when offered $10.12 to pay a $7.62 bill. And McDonalds has a big investment in that technology.

In the face of technical change, it is seldom the successful incumbents who adapt, even when they innovate. Kodak did not bring us digital cameras, trying to protect their film advantage. Print media did not bring us the internet, and are floundering at it. Walmart tries to go online, but Amazon.com is displacing it. The major airlines flop in every attempt to imitate Southwest.

So, as I gaze around the familiar golden arches, it strikes me that the automated fast food restaurant — and the rapid decline in low-skill employment that it implies —  will likely not come from McDonalds itself. Rather, new competitors will arise that perfect the automated, people-less technology. In the same way that McDonalds displaced the previous era of fast-food restaurants, by perfecting a technology that brilliantly used lots of low-skill people and conserves on scarce human capital. For McDonalds to go automatic would be for it to throw away the key innovation that defines it and has made it such a success.

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You may never have heard of it—or of Lod airport, for that matter, which is the main airport in Tel Aviv and was later renamed Ben Gurion Airport after Israel’s founder and first prime minister. But the Lod massacre remains one of the most terrifying in the long list of terrorist attacks that have followed, and at the time it was perpetrated (1972) it was especially horrific. Masterminded by the PLO (specifically, its hard left wing the PLFP), it was also a prelude to the much-more-famous Munich Olympics massacre that gripped the world just a few short months later.

Muslims randomly killing large numbers of people is by no means a new thing.

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Child psychologists are being given a new directive which is that the age range they work with is increasing from 0-18 to 0-25.

Actually, it’s always been 25 in the Real World — just look at where auto insurance rates break. Actuaries aren’t bound by tradition or politics; it’s all about the numbers.