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A team of material scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas have just discovered a new way to create powerful artificial muscles—synthetic sinew that forcefully expands and contracts on command—from low-cost, everyday fibers such as fishing line and high-tension sewing thread. In a study published today in the journal Science¸ the researchers described how they’re doing it: by twisting the materials into springy and energy-dense coils.

Well, ‘fishing line’ and ‘sewing thread’ aren’t materials, they’re products made of materials. The actual materials involved are, in the case of fishing line, probably nylon or dacron, and in the case of sewing thread, cotton or polyester. I should think that a sharply focused mag like Popular Mechanics would have more respect for the intelligence of their readers.

Toilet Auger.

Nightstand Dog House.

Sword Fly Swatter. Gives ‘flèche’ an entirely new meaning.

Tiny electric hatchback for wheelchair users.

Painless treatment to repair teeth.

How Not to Die: 20 Survival Tips You Must Know.

HotLogic Mini Personal Oven.

Gerber Money Clip. (Who uses money clips any more?)

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    In order to hire an H-1B worker in place of a U.S. citizen or green card holder, the hiring company must show that there is no “minimally qualified” citizen or green card holder to take the job.

Recruiting such minimally qualified candidates is generally done through advertising: if nobody responds to the ad then there must not be any minimally qualified candidates.

It helps, of course, if nobody actually sees the ads — in this case reportedly hundreds of them.

When Mr. Cvjeticanin was confronted with his alleged fraudulent behavior,  his defense (according to the indictment) was, “So let them litigate, I’ll show everyone how bogus their immigration applications really are.”   Nice.

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In 2012, there were more black babies killed by abortion (31,328) in New York City than were born there (24,758), and the black children killed comprised 42.4% of the total number of abortions in the Big Apple, according to a report by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Well, then, we’ll just wait until Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson come by with the protest march.

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‘Green’ technology turns out to have some teeth. Funny how the people who are right there on the spot to retard any hint of progress, like rice genetically modified to give people more vitamin A, but never think things through when it comes to their pet enthusiasms.

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The business of America is business.

Note the picture: This chick is of the Asian persuasion.

Read it. And watch the video.

Amy Julia Harris goes into detail about all the contracting problems, the resident complaints, the frustrations of the federal government over the mismanagement and the defenses by the city’s mayor, who would no doubt be calling for the owners head on a plate if these were private apartments and not publicly subsidized housing. Instead it’s Barack Obama’s fault for spending money on wars and bailing out banks. No, really; if you don’t want to read all of Harris’ reporting, watch the KQED segment below….

Sandy Ikeda connects the dots.

Far too many people look at the regulatory train-wreck of a modern economy and think, ‘Hey, the free market doesn’t work.’ Well, that’s like saying that a fish wrapped up in chains, that sinks to the bottom, can’t swim.

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That’s Affordable Care for you.

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They ought to have made his birthday, not that of Martin Luther King, a national holiday.

Hath Not a Jew Eyes?

New York Man Admits Plotting Terror Attack

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The New York Times recommends that we all move to Wichita, Kansas. Just kidding. Although Wichita has more income quality than New York, no one from the NY Times would want to live in a state where Sam Brownback is the governor.

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Why take a chance? That’s all I’m sayin’.

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Questions to ask:

What differentiates ‘neoracism’ from good old-fashioned ‘racism’? Or is it another weasel-term like ‘social justice’?

What are these ‘experts’ expert in?

Are they just worried that science is undermining the blithe Crustian assumption that ‘race’ has no real meaning? If so, why is that a bad thing?

New forms of discrimination, known as “neoracism”, are taking hold in scientific research, spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture, according to anthropologists who spoke at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago.

How are these ‘new forms of discrimination’ different from previous forms of discrimination?

If science has actual evidence that ‘races exist’ and ‘are different in terms of biology, behaviour, and culture’, why are they trying to oppose it? Science is science.

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Artist Alfred Twu, the Bay Area graphic designer behind this popular imagining of a cross-country high-speed rail map, has created a series of renderings showing what Silicon Valley tech campuses might look like if their parking lots could house the thousands of their controversial employees. Not only has he envisioned new campuses for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Electronic Arts, but he’s also created with a “generic café/startup/coworking space” to serve as a model for smaller startups, too.

It would certainly eliminate the prospect of on-the-street confrontations with the UnderCrust of San Francisco.

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I rarely revise my text messages, sending out typos and odd autocorrections left and right, and the semicolon is often the first punctuation mark I thumb for when I’m moving onto another thought (for instance: “yea, dinner at 8 sounds good; did you walk the dog?”).

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Consider income inequality. Not only is there inequality — which should be unsurprising, given inequality of ability, ambition, etc. — but there is supposedly a growing gap between America’s “haves” and “have-nots.” A do-gooder would leave it at that. Not being one of them, I’ll ask the questions that they’re unwilling/afraid/too-jejune to ask:

1. What is a have? Is it someone/a household whose income exceeds the median for all persons/households? Is in the top 20 percent of all such incomes? The top 5 percent? The top 1 percent? The top 0.1 percent? (Pick your favorite point along the continuous curves in the graphs here.)
2. Or is a have defined by his/her/its wealth? And, if so, how? (See preceding bullet.)
3. Do haves “rig the game” so that they are, in effect, stealing from have-nots?
4. If haves are clever and determined enough to do that, isn’t it likely that they’d still be haves without “rigging the game”?
5. Is one’s economic status a permanent thing, or do people in fact move up and down the economic ladder during their lifetimes?
6. Are the have-nots of today — who, mostly, aren’t the have-nots of yesteryear — really worse off than their predecessors, or are they really better off?
7. Are they worse off relatively?
8. Will tomorrow’s have-nots be better off if the haves are deprived of income/wealth through redistributive actions taken by government?
9. Or will redistributive actions simply make haves worse off and less likely to do the things that make have-nots better off (e.g., give huge sums to charity, invest in growth-producing investments)?

Questions 1 and 2 are unanswerable; the distinction between a have and a have-not is purely arbitrary. (It has been said, with some accuracy, that a rich person is someone who has more more money than you.) The answers to the other questions are: (3) only to the extent that some of them are aided by government through perverse regulations favored by do-gooders; (4) yes; (5) not permanent, plenty of movement; (6) better-off absolutely than earlier have-nots; (7) probably about the same, relatively, but they’re mostly different people; (8) worse off; (9) yes, redistributive actions make have-nots worse off by hindering economic growth. (For more, see the list of readings, below.)

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At the moment, Organovo is synonymous with bioprinting in the 3D printing world. The San Diego–based company will begin selling its printed, living liver tissue later this year to the pharmaceutical industry, which can use it to test new drugs.

But other institutions are hot on Organovo’s trail. Scientists at the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering announced Wednesday that they have successfully printed multiple types of cells and blood vessels, a combination that is necessary to create more complex tissue. They published their work in Advanced Materials (subscription required). A visual walkthrough of their method is available here.

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Sounds like a plan.

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Clearly nobody remembers the last time they pulled that trick….

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The question is raised yet again with news that hedge fund billionaire turned environmental activist Tom Steyer wants to make “climate change” a key issue in the 2014 midterm elections by funding a $100 million ad push.

Half the money will come from his own pocket, funneled through his San-Francisco-based NextGen Climate Action group; half from fellow liberal billionaires.

As the HuffPo salivatingly reports, this is part of Steyer’s ongoing masterplan to turn the US greener than a green-themed St Patrick’s Day party thrown by Shrek, Kermit the Frog, and the Jolly Green Giant.

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 You love math and want to learn more. But you’re in ninth grade and you’ve already taken nearly all the math classes your school offers. They were all pretty easy for you and you’re ready for a greater challenge. What now? You’ll probably go to the local community college or university and take the next class in the core college curriculum. Chances are, you’ve just stepped in the calculus trap.

The best argument for learning calculus I ever heard was from a Dungeon Master. ‘You’re in a 10-foot-wide passageway that does an L into a five-foot-wide passageway. How long a spear can you get around that corner?’ That focused the minds of the players like nobody’s business.

Fred Reed lays down some inconvenient truth.

Anyone having experience with dogs knows that these admirable creatures differ in intelligence. Border Collies are simply smarter than pit bulls. Since there is no political penalty for noticing this, it is widely noticed and not disputed. Yet if subspecies of Bowser differ markedly in intelligence, it would seem to follow that subspecies of humans, who differ in color, hair, biochemistry, facial features, brain size, and so on, might also differ in intelligence. That is, there is no prima facie biological reason for believing that they cannot. There are many political incentives.

In the case of Fido, the differences clearly are not cultural, but genetic. If genetic differences in intelligence can exist between subspecies of dogs, why may they not between subspecies of humans?

People who do not want to believe that such differences exist offer several curious arguments. One is to point out that humans and chimpanzees share 98.2% of their DNA. It then follows that different subspecies of humans share an even higher percentage of their DNA. This is intended to show that humans are therefore essentially identical and that no differences in intellect can exist.

The obvious reason for the similarity of DNA is that the two share their underlying design: digestive tracts, lungs, muscles, cells, and so on. On similar grounds one could note that a Lamborghini and a dump truck share underlying design and therefore are essentially identical. Wanna race?

Sarah Hoyt connects the dots.

I’ve been listening to If This Goes On in audiobook while I clean the house.  I still think that Heinlein was right about the coming theocracy – that is he was right about the theocratic impulse that he saw in the American people.  I see it too.  It’s what I’ve referred to in the past as Americans being, in the community of nations, the Aspergers kid who takes things seriously, things that no one else accepts as written/said.  This has a good side, such as a lot of us taking things like the Constitution very seriously, and a bad side, such as people taking the whole multiculti thing seriously.  (The rest of the world might parrot it, but no, they don’t take it seriously.)

…

I grew up in an area where every invader and every ruler left behind a piece of folk religion and a bit of superstition.  People believed in them all and in the official religion, regardless of the contradictions.

This is more what Progressivism resembles.  It’s made of the myths of many groups, all of which are sure they’re THE group and willing to tolerate fellow travelers.  Thus progressive women have their myths, starting with the Earthly paradise of the matriarchy and ending, eventually with the restoration of the same matriarchy.  Black supremacists… we won’t go into their myths.  We’ll just say they deny other races full humanity.  If you poke around, you’ll find it.  And the myths of the class warriors start in a distant paradise of Rosseau-like nonsense, where men neither spun nor labored and yet had everything they needed, through the current vale of tears of Capitalism, which is weirdly responsible for every human vice (that is for vices that existed before it existed) and which will end in the wonderful classless society of the future, where, to quote Star Trek, “we don’t have money, we just work because we want to.”  (Thus throwing all the credits system away.  Never mind.)

…

One of the mistakes Heinlein’s generation made was thinking the religious impulse went away when organized religion did.  It doesn’t of course.  As religion loses force, the state-as-religion moves in.  Of the two the second is probably the most harmful, as it wants to bring about a reality that simply doesn’t fit into the physical world.  No matter how much we squash capitalism, we’re not going to have an Earthly paradise.  (On the contrary.)  The paradise hereafter is each person’s concern and ultimately neither testable nor enforceable (not to say that some places and times haven’t tried it.)

Kathy Shaidle tells us a story.

It’s Black History Month, but gays are the new blacks, so let’s dip into some timely homosexual lore….

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In a chilling interview with The Criterion, former Planned Parenthood worker Marianne Anderson revealed the horror and greed that pervaded the institution where she served for two years.

A nurse whose job was to serve at Indiana’s largest abortion facility by partially sedating women who gave more money for the privilege while they aborted their children, Anderson said many women were urged to have abortions they didn’t want. Some of them were minors.

Anderson confessed, “One young girl came in with her mom. She was about 16. Her mom had made the appointment. That’s not supposed to be how it works. It’s supposed to only be the patient who makes the appointment. I checked her in, and she thought she was there for a prenatal checkup. The mom was pushing it. She blindsided her own daughter.” She told another story that was terrible: “This guy brought in a Korean girl. I had no doubt in my mind this girl was a sex slave. This guy would not leave her side. They could barely communicate. He wanted to make all the arrangements. During the ultrasound, she told one of the nurses that there were lots of girls in the house, and that the man hits them. She never came back for the abortion. I always wondered what happened to her. One of my co-workers said, ‘You’re better off to just let it go.’”

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The work of the Greek polymath Plato has kept millions of people busy for millennia. A few among them have been mathematicians who have obsessed about Platonic solids, a class of geometric forms that are highly regular and are commonly found in nature.

Since Plato’s work, two other classes of equilateral convex polyhedra, as the collective of these shapes are called, have been found: Archimedean solids (including truncated icosahedron) and Kepler solids (including rhombic polyhedra). Nearly 400 years after the last class was described, researchers claim that they may have now invented a new, fourth class, which they call Goldberg polyhedra. Also, they believe that their rules show that an infinite number of such classes could exist.

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Hey, it’s in The New York Times, so it HAS to be true, right?

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St John Damascene, writing in the 7th century, considered Islam to a Christian heresy. From a functionary of the Caliph in Damascus, this would seem to be an authoritative assertion. Norbert Pressburg thinks he was right.

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We have the technology.

Mark Steyn has a new book out.

This is the book I wrote after wiggling free of the death grip of Canada’s “human rights” commissions, and it reprints all the “hate crimes” of mine the Canadian Islamic Congress did their best to get banned in perpetuity. But it roams far wider than that, from America to Europe, Britain to Australia, examining multiculturalism, Islamic imperialism, civilizational self-loathing, plus, of course, giant space-lizard conspiracy theorists and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s “precepts of ejaculation”.

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You thought water was good for you? Not necessarily, if you believe researchers at the University of Arkansas. According to a new study, if there’s ice in the water, it could pose a health risk.

That’s right. Now we have yet another “danger food” to be wary of. Let me be the first to warn you: Ice cubes are dangerous!

Oh noes!

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

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Makes sense — after all, who would want to condemn an innocent child to life as a Belgian?

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It’s about how when Peretz Partensky called 911 when he stumbled across an injured biker on a San Francisco street, it led to him being shoved, tackled, kneed in the temple, having an existing elbow injury exacerbated, cuffed face down on the street, his hands stomped on, arrested, told he “was going to be a problem,” denied medical attention, stripped and shoved into solitary confinement, then let out the next day. When he went to court he had his charges summarily dismissed.

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How ’bout that Global Warming, eh?

Back in the ’70s the Usual Suspects were worried about a coming new Ice Age. Maybe they were on to something.

Read it.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that 5% of households on food stamps are headed by college graduates.

Meanwhile, a recent news report out of the University of North Carolina, bemoans the plight of the school’s grad students–many of whom now rely on government welfare assistance in order to live. Increasingly, students are applying for food stamps even while they are still enrolled in degree programs.

One UNC PhD student, Releta Summers, said she wound up homeless last semester–sleeping in her car and living off food stamps: “From the outside looking in, most people wouldn’t believe me if I told them I receive benefits,” Summers said. “I still get up every day, and I comb my hair and put on real clothes and go into my office.”

Yet nowhere does the UNC report call into question the ethics of students who are able-bodied adults, and who could work to support themselves, but choose not to. Nowhere does it question whether they ought to be allowed on food stamps while choosing not to work a job the offers a living wage.

Of course not. College is a right! So that they can get a good-paying job! Oh, wait….

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Well, yeah….

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I am not making this up.

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Watch the government screw it up as they did with fission power.

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Everything bad is good for you.

This is on NPR so it HAS to be true, right?

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Yet another thing that requires better identification than voting in America.

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The robot, which is less than a millimeter long, is just a simple rectangle that contains metal particles. Magnets surrounding the building area pull it in any directions with enough power that the robot can push different blocks of material into place.

The researchers were able to use the robot to assemble 1mm square pieces of gel cut into different shapes, including squares, circles and triangles. But it is also capable of moving more complex shapes like spheres and rods. By sliding up a tiny ramp, the robot can stack objects to build taller structures.

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I hope they didn’t use the guys that made the Obamacare web sites.

The Washington Post obsesses about race so that you don’t have to.

‘Unfortunate’? It’s just bad luck he’s the only black guy there? Did the others miss a plane or something?

Don’t listen to your friends back home saying the Winter Olympics are just for white people who like the cold and vacation in Aspen. This is the most inclusive Winter Games ever. Why, there are Caucasians here from almost 88 different nations.

Bada-bing! I’ll be here all week.

Don’t quit your day job.

Actually, I will be here the next 10 days. And in that time, I will encounter no more than a dozen people of African American descent. They are the same ones I see over and over.

They’re probably getting tired of you.

Maybe it’s because I lived in the District for eight years. Maybe it’s because I spent my formative years in a real melting pot: rural Oahu, Hawaii, where diversity in ethnicity and culture are part of island life. Maybe I’m just used to seeing and feeling comfortable being around a variety of people, many of whom don’t look like me.

Maybe it’s because you’re a left-wing asshole who wears his White Guilt as if it were a Purple Heart.

Whatever, this place is whiter than an episode of “Downton Abbey.”

Hey, don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. (Maybe it’s whiter than an episode of ‘Downton Abbey’ because, like Downton Abbey, the people who are here belong here and weren’t picked for their Diversity Points.)

Now, you are reading this and thinking one of two things: What’s with the white guilt, son? Or, What does race have to do with the greatest athletes in the world competing in their chosen disciplines, most of which just happen to be contested against other Caucasians?

Look, I don’t care about the color of the competitors.

Coulda fooled me. Guess somebody else wrote the rest of your column.

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Thanks to recent breakthroughs, the insides of our refrigerators could work very differently in the coming years. Scientists at GE are perfecting a method of transferring heat that uses magnets to achieve temperatures cold enough to freeze water.

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‘Here. Have a Coke and a smile, on me.’

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When offered the choice of playing with either a doll or a toy truck, girls will typically pick the doll and boys will opt for the truck. This isn’t just because society encourages girls to be nurturing and boys to be active, as people once thought. In experiments, male adolescent monkeys also prefer to play with wheeled vehicles while the females prefer dolls — and their societies say nothing on the matter.

The monkey research, conducted with two different species in 2002 and 2008, strongly suggested a biological explanation for children’s toy preferences. In recent years, the question has become: How and why does biology make males (be they monkey or human) prefer trucks, and females, dolls?

Who’ll be the first ‘progressive’ tool to get his/her panties in a wad about this?

John C. Wright lets loose.

Before swan-diving into the sewer of total stupidity that is the DESOLATION movie, my intractable Southern courtesy requires that I say something good about this movie. Well, as it happens, there was not just one thing good about this movie, there were three: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, and Richard Armitage. They played their parts so well, that I feel I have met the real Gandalf, Bilbo and Thorin.

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Of course, since this is NPR, they assume the existence of a ‘food desert’ in this location (Michelle said so! It must be true!), so no wonder they are puzzled.

A Rational Human Being, however, would consider that perhaps the whole notion of ‘food desert’ (i.e. proles who don’t eat SWPL food that yuppies would prefer that they eat) is merely projection on the part of the Upper Crust.