Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Google Glass is still a technology very much in its infancy, looking for the specific utilities and features that’ll make it useful to a broader market than the developers and enthusiasts who are currently experimenting with the device. One of those developers is Patrick Jackson of Rocky Mount, North Carolina — the Glassware apps he’s building aren’t going to be the ones to make Glass a widely-accepted consumer device, but despite that, he’s building out a specific, potentially life-saving use case for Google’s wearable.

Read it.

A potato near bedtime will surely increase blood glucose during sleep, supporting the idea that a better supply of blood glucose is what improves sleep.  Presumably it’s important to do this without (a) triggering too much insulin production or (b) increasing brain activity so much you wake up. Whether glycogen, in the liver or elsewhere, has anything to do with this I have no idea. Glycogen is one source of new glucose as the brain burns thru blood glucose but another is not yet digested carbohydrate in what you’ve recently eaten (e.g., potato).

Read it.

It’s no secret that when it comes to education, America gets a D-minus. In the most recent global tests – scored on a 1,000-point scale – the U.S. scored a 481 in math, 497 in science, and 498 in reading comprehension. In comparison, international averages were 494, 501, and 496, and the U.S. lags well behind the world’s leaders, a list which includes some of the usual suspects like China, Japan and the Netherlands, but also has Latvia, Slovenia and Vietnam.

Why is the world’s largest economy so bad at teaching its children? One growing school of thought is that the U.S. education system, in its laudable quest to make sure the worst students reach minimal standards, is cheating its best pupils.

“Gifted children are a precious human-capital resource,” said David Lubinski, a professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, in a recent news release. They are the “future creators of modern culture and leaders in business, health care, law, the professoriate, and STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics].” With fellow researcher Camilla Benbow, Lubinski’s team at Vanderbilt is tracking some of our country’s best and brightest. His project, known as the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), although something of a misnomer, since it tests verbal abilities as well, began in 1971 at Julian Stanley’s lab at Johns Hopkins. From there it moved to Iowa State in 1986, and then again to Vanderbilt in 1998, where it has been ever since.

Read it.

New York City’s new First Lady, Chirlane McCray, will not receive a salary for her work at City Hall, the mayor’s office said this evening.

However, her new chief of staff, former Al Sharpton aide Rachel Noerdlinger, will make $170,000 a year. She will be based in the Office of the Mayor, and will be paid as a City Hall employee, the office said.

Other details on Ms. McCray’s staff, office, and issue portfolio have not yet been determined, but she is not expected to have a large staff footprint, the office said.

No-show jobs typically don’t.

Nice work,if you can get it;
And you can get it, if you’re a fashionable minority.

Read it.

Fox News and conservative radio figure Sean Hannity has announced he is going to follow Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and leave the high-tax state of New York for either Florida or Texas, which is something to remember the next time the left claims, as it regularly does, that the idea that the rich move away because of high taxes is phony.

Read it.

“If my books appear oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them.” Malcolm Gladwell’s invitation to avoid reading his books, made recently in an interview in The Guardian, has a certain charm. He conveys the impression of a writer who, aware of critics who accuse him of cherry-picking the results of complex academic research to support simple-minded stories, defiantly insists on his right to do something different—to write in what he has described, in a riposte to one of his critics, as “the genre of what might be called ‘intellectual adventure stories.’?” If his books do not display the intellectual rigor that is supposed to attach to academic writings, Gladwell seems to be suggesting, it is because they serve a different purpose. Interweaving academic research with real-life stories, Gladwell aims—as he puts it—“to get people to look at the world a little differently.” Using the power of a storyteller, he is bringing “the amazing worlds of psychology and sociology to a broader audience,” an exercise that is capable of producing nothing less than a shift in the worldview of his readers.

No one can doubt Gladwell’s ability to reach large audiences. The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers were all tremendous best-sellers, leading some to conclude that Gladwell has invented a new genre of popular writing. In David and Goliath, Gladwell again applies the formula that has been so successful in the past. Deploying a mixture of affecting narratives of struggle against the odds with carefully chosen academic papers, he contends that the powerless are more powerful than those who appear to wield much of the power in the world. To many, this may appear counterintuitive, he suggests; but by marshaling a variety of historical examples ranging from the American struggle for civil rights to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, leavened with homely tales of the trials and triumphs of basketball teams and fortified with forays into sociology and psychology, Gladwell thinks that he can persuade the reader to accept the difficult truth that the weak are not as weak as the reader imagines. If they play their cards right, they can prevail against the strong.

Read it.

Let’s list some of them. There are the “Greats”: Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling, David Stockman’s The Great Deformation, Niall Ferguson’s The Great Degeneration, Timothy Noah’s The Great Divergence, Robert Scheer’s The Great American Stickup, and Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, which should probably be included despite the author’s ultimate optimism.

There are the “Ages,” such as Jeff Madrick’s Age of Greed, Thomas Edsall’s The Age of Austerity, Sean Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan, and The Age of Turbulence, which gets honorable mention because of the great success enjoyed by its author, Alan Greenspan, in screwing the world. There are the “American” tragedies: The Betrayal of the American Dream, The Looting of America, Third World America, and Why America Failed. There are nightmares of falling, like Freefall and Falling Behind. There are weird echoes from one title to another, for example from James K. Galbraith’s The Predator State to Charles Ferguson’s Predator Nation; from Donald Barlett and James Steele’s America: Who Stole the Dream? to Hedrick Smith’s Who Stole the American Dream?; and (please note that I am not complaining here) from my own What’s the Matter With Kansas? to Joan Walsh’s What’s the Matter With White People?

There is the scream-therapy approach—Beyond Outrage, Greedy Bastards. There is the voice of cool reason: The Shock Doctrine, Winner-Take-All Politics. There are the clever titles—Down the Up Escalator—and the genius titles, like Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia. And there are, finally, the classics of the genre, like Tom Geoghegan’s Which Side Are You On? (from 1991) or Christopher Lasch’s Revolt of the Elites (from 1995) or the granddaddy of all inequality reporting, the New York Times’ Downsizing of America (a high-profile series that ran in the paper of record in 1996).

Two things need to be said about this tsunami of sad. First, that the vast size of it, when compared to the effect that it has had—close to nothing—should perhaps call into question the utility of journalism and argument and maybe even prose itself. The gradual Appalachification of much of the United States has been a well-known phenomenon for 20 years now; it is not difficult to understand why and how it happened; and yet the ship of state sails serenely on in the same political direction as though nothing had changed. We like to remember the muckraking era because of the amazing real-world transformations journalism was able to bring; our grandchildren will remember our era because of the big futile naught accomplished by our prose.

Read it.

Unmentioned: And pay more in taxes.

Unmentioned: And do more good than OxFam.

Read it.

The OED, which this month experiences a rare change in leadership, is different from other English dictionaries. Most obviously, it is much, much bigger. The first edition, published in 10 instalments between 1884 and 1928, defined more than 400,000 words and phrases; by 1989, when two further supplements of 20th-century neologisms were combined with the original to create the second, this had risen to some 600,000, with a full word count of 59m. Once the monumental task of revising and updating that last (and possibly final) printed incarnation is complete, the third edition is expected to have doubled in overall length.

Read it.

Of course. She’s a Democrat, the party of Bill Clinton. That’s what they do.

Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator whose filibuster for abortion rights made her a Democratic superstar and launched her campaign for governor, has admitted to the Dallas Morning News that she lied about key events in her life, including her first divorce. Davis may even have lied under oath, testifying in a federal lawsuit over redistricting that “I got divorced by the time I was 19 years old,” when in fact she was divorced at age 21.

Other missing details have included: her second husband paid her way through law school and she divorced him the day after the last payment was made; her ex-husband accused her in initial court filings of adultery, and was awarded custody of their two daughters; and she first ran for city council in Fort Worth as a Republican.

“My language should be tighter,” she said, admitting her campaign biography has been less than truthful.

Read it.

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem with DWYL, however, is that it leads not to salvation but to the devaluation of actual work—and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.

Superficially, DWYL is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? And who is the audience for this dictum?

DWYL is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

If you persist in doing what you love, you’ll either starve or get arrested. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Gee, rich people leaving a Communist dictatorship. Whyever would they do that?

Read it.

About 3 years ago, I posted a blog post arguing that the poor don’t work due to economic rationality. This was just me playing around with the data and trying to see what I could come up with.

My conclusion back then: by graphing consumption vs income, it turns out that whether you earn $0 or $20k, your consumption is more or less the same. If utility is a monotonic function of consumption, then this means that people who’s labor income will lie between $0 and $20k will have no incentive to work. The data I had is hardly perfect – it’s just broad aggregates. I don’t know where to get a data set which excludes students, the disabled, etc.

Anyway, I forgot about that blog post. It went semi-viral today, so I decided to revisit the topic. Turns out that about a year after I posted it, the CBO issued a report more or less agreeing with it. They compare disposable income to income (rather than consumption to income), but the idea is similar.

Read it.

I suspect that it’s because watches have gone from something everybody uses to being a fashion statement.

Nobody demonstrates status with Timex.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

As the New York Times reported on Saturday, the Obamacare law, “adopted nearly four years ago, says employer-sponsored health plans must not discriminate ‘in favor of highly compensated individuals’ with respect to either eligibility or benefits.”

However, the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) now say they do not know how to define what “highly compensated means.”

Even though they’ve been dealing with rules on IRAs that cover what ‘highly compensated’ individuals can do for decades.

The ban on health plan discrimination was supposed to go into effect six months after Obamacare was signed into law on March 23, 2010, reports the New York Times.

I’m curious as to what provision in the law authorizes him to do this? Or is it just a power inherent in being The Magic Negro?

Read it.

Kwelia heat maps have been a great way to visualize rental prices with a detailed, city-wide view of median prices per square foot, and today the maps are getting additional features. Now, in addition to the median price per square foot overlay, you can explore every rental market by median income as well as by median rent as a percentage of median income. Simply toggle the “switch layers” button on the bottom left portion of the map and select your desired data layer to look around.

Read it.

1. He’s not making any money off of it.

2. It’s not vegetarian, so it displeases the Chattering Class from whom he makes his living. (The target demographic of Mother Jones, his venue, the connection with aging former hippies being left as an exercise for the reader.)

Read it.

This harvest season in the Central Valley, thieves cut through a fence and hauled off $400,000 in walnuts. Another $100,000 in almonds was stolen by a driver with a fake license. And $100,000 in pistachios was taken by a big rig driver who left a farm without filling out any paperwork.

Investigators suspect low-level organized crime may have a hand in cases, while some pilfered nuts are ending up in Los Angeles for resale at farmers markets or disappear into the black market.

“Disappeared into the black market” is code for “well, we don’t know, so we’ll make up something that sounds ominous”.

Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with the presence in California of vast quantities of sometimes-legal migrants from a country Down There that is legendary for its lawlessness and crime cartels. Perish the thought!

Read it.

The mediocre triumph because, having little or nothing else to do, they can devote themselves to intrigue, backstabbing, and jockeying for power. In my own little career, I have often seen the genuinely gifted and morally upright pushed aside or thwarted by schemers and apparatchiks who viewed their betters with a mixture of fear and hatred. An apparatchik may be defined as a person who doesn’t mind how long a meeting goes on unless he has another meeting to attend. He is interested in power for its own sake, divorced from purpose though he claims to want it for the good of humanity, but has very sensitive antennae for the power of others. When that power is strong, he retreats; when it shows a weakness, he pounces. Apparatchiks, like the Clintons, never forget; their minds are like filing cabinets.

…

The explanation lies in the expansion of tertiary education. Earlier in my life I used to think that this was unequivocally a good thing: The more educated a population, the better. But length of education, or attendance at supposedly educational establishments, is not the same thing as education itself. But in the modern world, where governments have to demonstrate tangible progress to their electorates, length of education and education are confounded.

Read it.

I always knew that the treatment of the critically ill in our best teaching hospitals was excellent. That was certainly confirmed by the life-saving treatment I received in the Massachusetts General emergency room. Physicians there simply refused to let me die (try as hard as I might). But what I hadn’t appreciated was the extent to which, when there is no emergency, new technologies and electronic record-keeping affect how doctors do their work. Attention to the masses of data generated by laboratory and imaging studies has shifted their focus away from the patient. Doctors now spend more time with their computers than at the bedside. That seemed true at both the ICU and Spaulding. Reading the physicians’ notes in the MGH and Spaulding records, I found only a few brief descriptions of how I felt or looked, but there were copious reports of the data from tests and monitoring devices. Conversations with my physicians were infrequent, brief, and hardly ever reported.

The Other McCain has some fun.

See, this is the niche that “small liberal arts schools” fill: The offspring of permissive parents who will give their Special Snowflakes whatever their selfish hearts crave. The kid isn’t smart enough or hard-working enough to get into a genuinely elite school, but they’re just too doggone special to attend a state school (let alone community college), and so there’s always that trendy little campus that will charge them $35,000 a year to pretend that they’re better than those disgusting low-brow slobs at State U.

This is not about education, it’s about aspiration.

The “small liberal arts school” is a luxury that the rich can afford, but borrowing money to attend one? That’s just crazy.

Maybe Randye Hoder‘s daughter can apply her knowledge of “the politics and culture of food” at Burger King.

Read it.

Heavy, man….

Read it.

But these neologisms seem innocuous when we look at how the word ‘freedom’ has been vandalised. Freedom used to be about taking responsibility for one’s own actions; but not now, we have, for example, freedom of religion — except where Islam is concerned; it is more important not to ‘offend’ Muslims by having a Christmas tree than it is to preserve freedom. We have freedom of speech — except when it is homophobic. We have freedom of information — except where the President’s social security number is concerned.

The word ‘fascist’ has always been difficult to define because it describes the particular aspirations of an Italian neo-communist party to identify with its ancient Roman roots. The fasci, the bundle of sticks wrapped around an axe, were a common link with the past. It is a symbol of absolute power and appears throughout the modern western world. What, however, does ‘fascist’ mean, in modern parlance? It is an epithet used against anybody who does not agree with left liberal/communist doctrines.

Read it.

Sure, the Irish are a little slow, but it took them longer than you’d think to leap onto the “genocide” bandwagon (or should that be “cattle car”?).

Recently released in paperback, historian Tim Pat Coogan’s tellingly titled The Famine Plot is the latest volley in the campaign to win prestigious (and lucrative) “ethnic cleansing” status for the storied Irish Potato Famine.

…

This matters (if not to Coogan, then to others) because as professional victimhood lobbyists know so well, thar’s gold in them thar wedding rings and dental fillings. “Genocide” earns you abject official apologies, socially leverageable favored victim status, and, best of all, financial reparations. Just ask Japanese Americans.

George Will blows turns over a rock.

Soon the crucial distinction will be between those with meaningful college degrees and those with worthless ones. Many colleges are becoming less demanding as they become more expensive: They rake in money — much of it from government-subsidized tuition grants — by taking in many marginally qualified students who are motivated only to acquire a credential and who learn little.

Lindsey reported that in 1961, full-time college students reported studying 25 hours a week on average; by 2003, average studying time had fallen to 13 hours. Half of today’s students take no courses requiring more than 20 pages of writing in a semester. Given the role of practice in developing expertise, “the conclusion that college students are learning less than they used to seems unavoidable.” Small wonder those with college degrees occupying jobs that do not require a high school diploma include 1.4 million retail salespeople and cashiers, half a million waiters, bartenders and janitors, and many more.

Read it.

Quick show of hands: who’s surprised to learn the global warming fanatics think communism is super-awesome?

Oh, I know what you’re thinking, People Who Have Your Hands Down.  You’ve seen what communist countries look like.  They’re absolute environmental disasters, horrifying wastelands of garbage and toxic pollution.  You’re wondering how anyone could possibly review the history of communism and come to the conclusion that it’s a political philosophy that leads to wise stewardship of the planet.

You need to switch off your critical thinking skills, People Who Have Your Hands Down, and master the crucial global warming skill of ignoring evidence that contradicts your ideology.  That’s what this scam has been all about since the beginning.  Ignore 70 percent of the data, declare what remains “science,” and treat anyone who disagrees as the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier.  If you don’t actually look at communist China, whose capital is currently enveloped in a choking cloud of pollution that’s literally driving people off the streets, you can come to the ideologically motivated conclusion that they’re the best little global warming fighters on the whole planet.

Read it.

The CEOs of hotel chain Marriott International and telecom giant AT&T are calling on Congress to grant them immigration reform so they can hire more cheap labor from outside the United States – at a time when an unprecedentedly high number of Americans are out of work.

In a lengthy post on his LinkedIn page, Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson said he wants amnesty and a massive increase in legal immigration in order to staff up Marriott’s various resorts around the country.

“As unemployment inches downward, we also need a functioning immigration system that helps us staff positions that might otherwise go unfilled, especially in our seasonal resorts,” Sorenson wrote.

Meanwhile, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, according to The Hill, wants more guest workers brought into the United States from foreign countries. Stephenson wants both more high-tech workers brought into the country and a streamlined and increased temporary worker program. “I get a sense that there’s momentum for doing something like this in Congress, and I hope [Obama] just does encourage it and it’s a high priority for his administration,” Stephenson said.

Stephenson is speaking in his capacity as both AT&T CEO and chairman of the business lobbyist organization Business Roundtable. In a Jan. 15 letter to President Barack Obama, Stephenson and the Business Roundtable’s 208 CEOs asked that Obama pressure Congress “to create a larger pool of visas for higher-skilled workers” and “enact a new visa system for lower-skilled workers,” while also granting amnesty to illegal aliens already inside the United States.

The Other McCain is on the case, when he can stop laughing.

Transgender feminist @papierhache reacted to yesterday’s notice exactly as predicted, by claiming victimhood, denouncing me as a bully “with sycophant minions” (that would be you, dear readers), and generally lecturing that I am the pluperfect example of how “people … use social media to orchestrate abusive behavior.”

Remember: @papierhache jumped into my timeline in response to incitement by a troll trying to stir up trouble because I’d used the common slang “shemale” in promoting a post about conflicts between transgender activists and radical lesbian feminists. And after sending me multiple messages condemning me as a terrible hater — because slang is the New Fascism – @papierhache evidently thought she would evade further criticism for her moralistic posturing.

Think again, sweetheart.

Read it.

Do tell.

Want to be a U.S. lawmaker considered friendly to big business? You should probably support raising the minimum wage and helping the unemployed, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said Thursday.

Turning conventional Washington wisdom on its head, Mr. Reich told a congressional panel that policies usually trumpeted by Democrats to help the poor could actually be a huge boon for big business.

“What is a business friendly strategy to create jobs? It’s to create customers,” he told the Joint Economic Committee. “Business executives and Wall Street traders are not job creators. The job creators are customers and if the vast middle class and the poor don’t have enough money in their pockets they can’t be customers.”

Read it.

The reason for ER overuse is simple: Medicaid patients (like all insured patients) feel that their insurance card entitles them to health care anytime they want it. When office doctors aren’t available to provide it, they go to the hospital to get it.

But there’s a huge problem with expanding this mentality to ever more Americans, at least given the payment mechanisms in place for Medicaid.

Doctors aren’t available for Medicaid because it pays us poorly while highly restricting tests and treatments, including prescription drugs. Preventive services such as eye care, hearing and dental care are now being limited by most states. A 2013 study in Health Affairs revealed that only 67% of primary care doctors like me, and less than half of all specialists, accept Medicaid.

 Even those doctors who do accept Medicaid are reluctant to do so, and many limit the number of Medicaid patients they will see. A 2008 Health Tracking Physician Survey showed that only 40% of physicians accept all Medicaid patients who seek appointments.

Many Medicaid patients who lack a primary-care doctor see the hospital as the place to get all their care. It is not unusual for a Medicaid patient to come to the hospital for a urinary infection, and then ask if they can have their eyes or teeth checked while they are there.

But hospitals, too, are paid less for seeing Medicaid patients, approximately 85 cents on the dollar, and the last thing a hospital needs is a flood of new Medicaid patients rather than patients with private insurance.

Read it.

CZECH investigators have discovered explosives at the Palestinian embassy complex in Prague where a possibly booby-trapped safe killed the ambassador on January 1, police say.

Police discovered 12 illegal weapons following the explosion at the embassy that killed Ambassador Jamal al-Jamal, but this is the first time that authorities said explosives were also found in the new complex that includes the embassy and the ambassador’s residence.

Read it. And watch the video.

Somehow, when Democrates whine about the rich and their ‘fair share’, I don’t think they mean a reduction.

Read it.

The Other McCain is on the case.

To summarize briefly, radical lesbian feminists reject the claims of “trans women” to inclusion, and this rejection is denounced by “trans women” as hate. This bizarre controversy is occurring on the extreme fringe of the culture wars, which doesn’t mean that the conflict isn’t taken seriously by the participants. At a radical progressive conference last May in Portland, Oregon, transgender activists attacked two women “in a coordinated assault as they sat at a table which sold feminist books and literature.”

Read it.

A funny thing happened on the way to President Obama’s “Promise Zones.” He stepped off track and delivered quite a smack to the teachers unions. In rolling out his newest anti-poverty program, Obama pledged federal support for five targeted communities, which share high unemployment and poverty and cited as a model the Harlem Children’s Zone.

That neighborhood initiative, led by founder Geoffrey Canada, is best known for bringing charter schools to Harlem. The Promise Academies have become the cornerstone of the community’s renaissance. Why? As Obama pointed out, “Last year, a study found that students who win a spot in one of the charter schools score higher on standardized tests than those who didn’t.” It’s that simple. But don’t expect the teachers’ unions to agree.

And they voted for him. Surprise!

Read it.

Read it.

The dirty secret of almost anything made out of plastic — from your soda bottle to a trash bag  — is that there’s a good chance it was made with ingredients that come from crude oil. A startup named Siluria is looking to swap out that crude oil with natural gas, which could make plastics and chemicals just a little less terrible for the planet.

If you’ve heard of startup Siluria before it’s probably because of the people involved with the company. Former Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy is on the board, the core tech came out of the labs of well-known MIT scientist Angela Belcher, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s fund also backed the firm. But the six-year-old company could be on the cusp of finally breaking out, thanks to a new partnership with the U.S. arm of massive Brazilian petrochemical company Braskem.

Read it.

Every newly developed pharmaceutical drug takes a long, winding path before it is ever administered to a human in a clinical trial. It’s first tested in a petri dish and on animals, which, it turns out, are fairly poor ways to predict how successful a drug will be for a human.

Soon, it will be possible to cut out dishes and animals and instead test drugs directly on living human tissue. San Diego-based Organovo, which develops methods to 3D print living tissue, announced today that it will partner with two National Institutes of Health groups to print tissue for medical purposes.

“Researchers who develop new therapies for patients are too often hampered by animal models and traditional cell culture models that are poor predictors of drug efficacy and toxicity in human beings,” Organovo CEO Keith Murphy said in a release. “Our 3D printer creates living human tissues that more closely reproduce in vivo human tissues.”

Read it.

And these people are educating our children. No wonder the kids are functionally illiterate.

And we might perhaps bear in mind that when criminals go on these shooting sprees in schools, the homeschooled kids are safe and sound.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

Perhaps it’s because most of them look, talk, and act like jerks. That’s just a guess, mind you.

When you picture a feminist or an environmental campaigner, what kind of a person do you think of? If you’re like the US and Canadian participants in this new paper, then you’ll have in mind an eccentric, militant, unhygienic person. Nadia Bashir and her colleagues say this commonly held stereotype of an activist is partly responsible for the sluggishness of social change. Large sections of the public agree with activists’ messages, but are put off by not wanting to affiliate themselves with the kind of person they think makes an activist.

Gee, I wonder why that is….

Read it.

Read it.

“Almost all prior studies administered caffeine before the study session, so if there is an enhancement, it’s not clear if it’s due to caffeine’s effects on attention, vigilance, focus, or other factors,” Yassa said. “By administering caffeine after the experiment, we rule out all of these effects and make sure that if there is an enhancement, it’s due to memory and nothing else.”

Read it.

Plans have been unveiled for the Hypermach SonicStar, a business jet which will be capable of a top speed of 2,664mph – twice as fast as Concorde. It will fly at 62,000ft, allowing passengers to see the curvature of the earth.

Read it.

Cats think you’re just a a slightly big, dumb non-hostile cat. Quite specifically, he says that they treat humans as if they were their Mama Cat.

All that rubbing up against you with their tails up is apparently no more than a hopeful check that you really are just another big, fat, slovenly cat who doesn’t intend to eat them with their Welsh Rarebit.

And I’m good with that.

Read it.

One should point out the hypocrisy of the liberal media which doesn’t care that Bill Clinton most likely raped Juanita Broaddrick (a serious felony that could get a regular person a very long prison sentence in a very unpleasant prison), but closing a few lanes on a bridge is a Huge Scandal of the Greatest Magnitude that it gets a “gate” suffix.

Read it.

Lynn University will phase out its learning management system for the next stage of its tablet-centric evolution. Beginning this fall, the university’s daytime undergraduate courses will be managed through Apple’s course management software, iTunes U.

The move makes Lynn one of only a handful of institutions that offer more than a select few courses through iTunes U, and is noteworthy because Lynn will trade a more comprehensive system, Blackboard Learn, for a product lacking key features such as analytics, attendance tracking and gradebooks.

Read it.

Bob Dible is an electrical engineer that works on his family farm in Kansas. He describes the productivity strides made in agriculture. “We generate GPS (global positioning system) yield maps using data from the combine as it harvests. That helps us determine what nutrients are needed the next season at various parts of our four-square-mile farm.”

Dible then programs those different nutrient mixes and locations onto the crop sprayer aircraft. As the crop sprayer flies over the field, it dynamically changes the mix of fertilizer based on its location.

The $900,000 Air Tractor model 802 has 1300hp and a payload of 9,249 lbs. In 2013 the plane can change its fertilizer mix every dozen meters. Dible, as an engineer, knows what is coming. “One day we will monitor and grow the corn on a stalk-by-stalk basis. When we plant crops, GPS with RTK (Real Time Kinematics) gives us 1-inch accuracy.” It’s not hard to see Dible’s vision even now. With today’s technology, a small autonomous robot could drive down the rows of corn.