Read it. Ponder the graphs.

Indeed, the “peak car” is antithetical to the reigning urbanist paradigm of highways known as “induced demand.”  Induced demand is Say’s Law for roads: supply of lanes creates its own demand by drivers to fill them. Hence building more roads to reduce congestion is pointless. But if we’ve really reached peak car, maybe we really can build our way out of congestion after all.

Read it. And watch the video.

Bassem Masri, a pro-Palestinian activist who is live-streaming the violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, had his smartphone stolen as he was live-streaming the action (at 2:34 in the video below). The thief’s escape was broadcast to some 90,000 viewers around the world as he retreated, breathless, to a park. The video was captured and reposted to YouTube.

Now that’s comedy.

Masri himself has blamed police for the theft, suggesting they are trying to suppress his coverage.

I believe it was a police agitator that stole my phone #ferguson

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Read it.

The poll finding probably says more about other federal agencies than it does about the nation’s mail delivery. Fortunately for the Post Office, it is mostly immune from the machinations of the Obama administration.

Freeberg nails it again.

Had this one germinating in my cranium for awhile. SNews (n.): News that is produced for the benefit of the producer of the news, or some third-party who has entered into some transaction with the producer of the news, rather than for the benefit of the consumer of the news.

If you like, you can think of it as a portmanteau for “sponsored news.” It is meant to be a homonym of snooze. The litmus test is: Thinking of the “news” as an answer to a question, does the question it answers bear any resemblance to a question the audience would have been asking? If it doesn’t — and lately, I notice, it very rarely does — then it isn’t really “news,” is it?

Read it.

Looks like the kids are smarter than their parents.

Read it.

To paraphrase John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, there is very little wrong with any large American city that a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix.

Read it.

Then there is the computer you use for sous vide, a cooking technique beloved by restaurant chefs — and a truly groundbreaking way of making better meals. In this method, you begin by packing food, usually meat, into a plastic bag. Then you place the bag in a water bath whose temperature is precisely controlled by a computerized thermostat. Then you wait.

After an hour, two hours, or in some cases 72 hours, you will have an exquisitely textured cut of meat — a steak with a uniform pinkness from edge to edge, or chicken so tender it tastes like no chicken you have ever experienced. If you have ever wondered how high-end restaurants get every steak right, every time, it is most likely because they cook sous vide.

Read it.

As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

Lewis Page, in British tech pub The Register, expands on that:

Whenever somebody with a decent grasp of maths and physics looks into the idea of a fully renewables-powered civilised future for the human race with a reasonably open mind, they normally come to the conclusion that it simply isn’t feasible. Merely generating the relatively small proportion of our energy that we consume today in the form of electricity is already an insuperably difficult task for renewables: generating huge amounts more on top to carry out the tasks we do today using fossil-fuelled heat isn’t even vaguely plausible.

Read it.

Well, mostly it’s controlled by the government, for starters.

Who becomes a teacher in America? The answer keeps changing, and not in ways that should make any of us proud. In the first half of the twentieth century, as Goldstein notes, bookish urban immigrants used the profession to catapult themselves into the middle class. During the Great Depression, especially, teaching attracted people of outstanding academic achievement—including some with Ph.D.s—who couldn’t get work elsewhere. Since the 1960s, however, the proportion of top college students who have entered the field has steadily declined. Part of the reason lay in the feminist movement, which created new occupational opportunities for women outside of teaching. Rather than enhancing the profession’s status, as Susan B. Anthony had predicted a century earlier, this harmed it considerably, as many high-achieving women went into other professions.

The profession was also harmed by the campaign for racial integration, which closed all-black schools and threw thousands of experienced African-American teachers out of work. Those teachers had often achieved much within black school systems and then found themselves without jobs. By 1980, Texas Monthly published an award-winning article showing that public school teachers in Houston and Dallas scored lower on reading and math tests than the average sixteen-year-old in nearby suburbs did. It also reported that students of teacher education at Southwest Texas State University—where future president Lyndon Johnson received his teaching degree—were functionally illiterate. Teacher preparation, the article concluded, was “a hoax and an educational disgrace.”

Read it.

One leading researcher in this field, Henry L. Roediger III of Washington University in St. Louis, argues that tests of varying scale and intensity can deepen learning. “We now know that testing, including self-testing, is an especially powerful form of study,” said Dr. Roediger, co-author of the book “Make It Stick.”

Tests find out what you know. That’s all they do. Yet to read a lot of what passes for discussion these days, especially among ‘educators’, you’d think that making a student take a test is somehow a violation of his or her civil rights.

“Oh, I don’t test well.” Better learn, then; that’s like saying that you can’t walk well. Real Life is constantly putting one in situations where one either has to come up with a fact or successfully exercise a skill — in other words, IT’S A TEST — and the technical term for those who ‘don’t test well’ is FAILURE. Now, I realize that to be a FAILURE in this degenerate modern age isn’t the Bad Thing that it used to be, but it’s not a Good Thing, either.

Charlie Stross takes a break from being a communist in a Clever Plastic Disguise to talk about something interesting.

Big-ass L5 space colonies as envisaged by Professor Gerard K. O’Neill in his book The High Frontier turn out to be both economically and biologically questionable. To be fair, it’s not entirely his fault: he took NASA’s early-1970s estimates of Space Shuttle flight rates as gospel—one flight per week, costs around $1M/ton delivered into orbit—back when they were selling it as a “space truck”. At which point, hauling 50,000 tons of hardware and 10,000 workers into orbit to build a gigantic factory town churning out gigawatt range solar power stations using materials mined from the lunar regolith and positioned where they could transmit microwave power beams down to Earth 24×7 sounded like it should cost about as much as the 350-odd tons and 6 astronaut crew of the ISS. And as a solution to the 1974 oil shock, it seemed like a good idea. If we ever do get space trucks like that, it might be time to dust off those concept drawings and go for it. But in the meantime …

Read it.

Like many agrarian cultures, pre-contact Hawaiians used a lunar calendar to manage farming and fishing. Beginning with Hilo, the crescent moon, and peaking with M?healani, the full moon, the Hawaiian calendar was made up of 30 distinct moon phases. Based on observations passed down through generations, certain phases were thought to correspond to better fishing or planting, depending on the season and where one lived.

Today, that shared knowledge has largely faded, but one group of contemporary Hawaiian conservationists is looking to rebuild the oral tradition of how lunar cycles affect the environment by using a decidedly modern form of the diary: an Instagram account. The Moon Phase Project, as conceived by founders Kanani Frazier and Brenda Asuncion, encourages a team of island-based photographers to post observations of the natural world tagged with the corresponding Hawaiian moon phase to a shared account.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Sarah Hoyt points out the intellectual inversions characteristic of Crustian propaganda.

One of the most fascinating conceits of our ruling powerful elites — be they in entertainment, politics, governance, jurisprudence or news reporting — is the often repeated assertion of being some kind of underdog “speaking truth to power.” This comes with the concomitant illusion that anyone opposing them is paid by powerful interests.

Never mind that the ones making the accusation are usually in positions of power and receive recognition all out of proportion to their achievements, (no, really, Mr. Obama failed to deliver his first book, so they contracted for a second with an exponentially bigger advance. When he delivered an auto-biography instead of a book on race relations, it was taken and lionized. I challenge any writer/personage not of the establishment to replicate this feat.) Never mind that the dissenting voices often have to come out in less respected and far less rewarding channels, it is against those of us who speak the actual truth against those who yield actual power that the finger of mercenary interest is pointed.

Read it.

On November 22 the Tallahassee Democrat called for the repeal of the Second Amendment and a total ban on handguns and “assault rifles.”
For those who respond by saying that taking guns from law-abiding citizens will only leave them in the hands of criminals the Democrat says, “That’s a chance worth taking.”

…

What Ensley does not take into account is that the carry of handguns was banned on the FSU campus–thanks in large part of FSU president John Thrasher’s opposition to students being able to use them for self-defense–and what did that handgun ban accomplish? It simply guaranteed that the bad guy, 31-year-old Myron May, was the only person who had a gun when he decided to attack.

Read it.

More and more evidence is surfacing, however, that milk consumption may not only be unhelpful, it might also be detrimental. This is in spite of the fact that the United States Department of Agriculture and other organizations advocate that even adults should drink at least three cups a day.

Read it.

Legions of research teams around the world are now working on proof-of-concept studies that take this tiny step further, engineering microscopic robots that may some day be able to cruise through both the large arteries and small veins of living bodies to perform a wide range of medical feats that would otherwise require invasive surgery.

Read it.

Though the trend is new, the idea is an old one. From Frederic Law Olmsted’s faux-pastoral Riverside to the nostalgic, Disney-built town of Celebration, suburbs have always represented cultural aspiration more than reality. And like others before them, life in these agrihoods is more about the idea of living on a farm than the reality of it. Though residents reap the benefits of the agricultural life in the form of bucolic views and fresh meat and produce, their heirloom tomato patches, citrus groves and chicken coops are mostly tended by salaried farm managers.

Personally, I can’t think of anything I’d like less than to live near a farm. But there it is.

Read it.

Not far off the coast of Ireland’s County Dublin, there’s a private island with some unlikely inhabitants. Along with the native bird colonies and a herd of cattle, the island, called Lambay, is home to Ireland’s only wild mob of wallabies.

Read it.

All of the subjects’ blood samples revealed changes in gene expression following meditation. The changes were the exact opposite of what occurs during flight or fight: genes associated with energy metabolism, mitochondrial function, insulin secretion, and telomere maintenance were turned on, while those involved in inflammation were turned off. These effects were more pronounced and consistent for long-term practitioners.

Read it.

A new controlled diet study has found that increasing the levels of saturated fat in the diet does not lead to increased levels of saturated fat in the blood. However, increasing the amount of carbohydrates in the diet was found to raise the levels of a fatty acid associated with diabetes and heart disease.

Everything bad is good for you.

Read it.

Read it.

Four weeks ago today Michael Zehaf-Bibeau went on a shooting spree on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, killing Corporal Nathan Cirillo at the Cenotaph before being shot to death himself inside the parliament building.

Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau, who called himself Joseph Paul Michael Abdallah Bulgasem Zehaf-Bibeau after he returned to his father’s religion, was more than a psychotic homeless crackhead. In his lunacy he had found a spiritual home, and his murderous actions were motivated by religion — specifically the Islamic religion.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Two men suspected of buying explosives they planned to detonate during protests in Ferguson, Missouri, once a grand jury decides the Michael Brown case, were arrested on Friday and charged with federal firearms offenses, a law enforcement official told Reuters.

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

Read it.

Looks like Michelle Obama will need a new hobbyhorse.

Read it.

As news reports announced 31-year-old Florida State University alumnus Myron May drew a handgun and opened fire “in or near” the FSU library on November 20, one aspect of the story was conspicuously missing—namely, that FSU President John Thrasher played a key role in defeating a bill to allow students with concealed carry permits to carry guns on campus for self-defense.

It’s more important to be In With The In Crowd (to be fair, the guys who pay his salary) than protect your students against killers.

Read it.

Women are finally realizing that being armed is the great equalizer.

Read it.

When the government provides goods, it provides goods of Government Quality. Think about that.

Read it.

Duncan, 33, who raps under the name Tiny Doo, is not accused of providing the guns or being present at the nine shootings that terrorized a neighborhood where the Lincoln Park gang has long used violence to protect its turf.

Instead, prosecutors are going after Duncan over something else: His latest album.

Entitled “No Safety,” the album features a picture of a gun and bullets on the cover.

Prosecutors say that shows that Duncan fits the legal definition of a gang member who “willfully promotes, furthers, or assists in any felonious criminal conduct by members of that gang.”

This is absurd and an obvious attempt to get around the First Amendment.

Flash drive cufflinks.

Remote-controlled heated insoles.

Spring-based nutcracker.

Chocolate Cake in a Can.

The Survival Bike.

Guitar Pick Punch. You never know when you’ll need an emergency guitar pick.

Anna Simons, Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, lays it on the line.

Gavin McInnes tells it like it is.

Killing sexism also leaves women unsafe. When you tell girls they’re as tough as men, they go out and get wasted with no escort to make sure they get home safe. They strut down the street in the middle of the night through the bad part of town, almost daring criminals to attack them. When a black thug pulled a gun on Nicole duFresne in NYC in 2005, she said, “What are you going to do now, shoot us?” So he shot her. And her beta male boyfriend had an African funeral ceremony for her to promote peace and tranquility. How wildly unnatural.

…

Girls don’t rule the world. Evil does.

Read it.

Over the past 100 years, coyotes have, quite literally, been taking over America. They are native to the continent, and for most of their existence these rangy, yellow-eyed canids were largely restricted to the Great Plains and western deserts where they evolved. But after wolves and cougars were exterminated from most of the United States by the 1800s, coyotes took their place. Colonizing some areas at a rate of 720 square miles per year, coyotes now occupy—or “saturate,” as one scientist I spoke with described it—nearly the entire continent. (Long Island is a notable exception.) The animals are now the apex predators of the east. And they’re proving so resourceful that even the last stronghold—the urban core—represents an opportunity to flourish.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

For as many as a quarter of normal-weight Americans, the opposite is true. While they may have a “healthy” BMI and look skinny on the outside, on the inside, they’re a mess. Dr. Neil Ruderman first recognized these individuals 33 years ago, labeling them “metabolically-obese, normal-weight.” Today, they’re more casually described as “skinny-fat.” Skinny-fat people generally have all the hallmark health problems associated with obesity — high blood pressure, increased levels of LDL cholesterol, insulin resistance — without overtly looking the part.

I think that this is like the ‘unconsciously racist’ theme: you’re actually bad even though everything about you looks good.

Read it.

By now it’s sadly clear that the nation’s satirical news programs do a significantly better job at reporting the news than most of the nation’s actual news outlets, despite a fraction of the budget and experience. John Oliver’s recent analysis of Miss America scholarship claims, for example, contained more original reporting in a fifteen minute segment than most Apple regurgitation blogs manage to stumble through in an entire year’s worth of gadget lust. Not only are satirists now doing a better job unearthing the truth, they’re doing a better job explaining complex issues.

Not really much of a surprise.

Read it.

Sorry, ‘first-year’ is already claimed by law school. Try ‘FNG’ instead.

George Will blows the whistle.

It is as remarkable as it is repulsive, the ingenuity with which the Obama administration uses the regulatory state’s intricacies to advance progressivism’s project of breaking nongovernmental institutions to government’s saddle. Eager to sacrifice low-income children to please teachers unions, the Justice Department wants to destroy Wisconsin’s school choice program. Feigning concern about access for disabled children, the department aims to handicap all disadvantaged children by denying their parents access to school choices of the sort affluent government lawyers enjoy.

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

Read it.

School administrators in Tampa, Florida, are insisting that parents pick up their kids from the bus stop after school lets out. And if they fail to comply, they could receive a visit from child services.

Why is all this statist crap happening in Florida?

According to the Tampa Bay Times, district policy forbids kindergartners to walk home and requires bus drivers to bring them back to school if their parents don’t appear on time.

I was the only one in my family who went to kindergarten, and I walked about a half hour each way, by myself. The worst thing that ever happened was I was late getting home when it rained because I had too much fun jumping in puddles without spoil-sport grownups along to interfere.

Time to homeschool….

Read it.

Before he became chair of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke agreed with the free market economist Milton Friedman that central bank policy played a key role in making the Great Depression the most severe in U.S. history. But the two parted ways on the reason why. And that disagreement goes a long way toward explaining why the financial crisis of 2007-2009 has brought not just a dramatic increase in the powers and activities of the Federal Reserve but a fundamental transformation of its role within the economy.

Friedman viewed banking panics as monetary shocks, in which the checking accounts and other deposits at failing banks wink out of existence, causing a sudden fall in the total money supply. In contrast, Bernanke treats panics as shocks to the flow of savings, causing the failure of firms whose continued existence is crucial for the allocation of credit. Such disparate diagnoses dictate significantly different cures.

If the danger from bank panics is primarily a collapse of the money supply, then the proper response is a general injection of money by the central bank. The survival of particular financial institutions is of secondary significance. On the other hand, if the danger comes from key financial institutions failing and choking off credit, then the proper response is bailing them out.

Read it.

Hackers seized a database from the City of Detroit earlier this year before unsuccessfully demanding $800,000 in Bitcoin.

The failed extortion attempt back in April was disclosed by Detroit mayor Mike Duggan at the North American International Cyber Summit conference on Monday.

The stolen database wasn’t needed by the cash-strapped city so the ransom was never paid, according to local reports.

Read it.

Slow news day.

Read it.

But that was yesterday … and yesterday’s gone….

Read it.

MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, the Obamacare architect who bragged about deceiving the “stupid” American people to secure passage of the bill, has been paid an estimated $5.2 million by the federal government and 12 state governments for consulting services to assist in the design and implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Doing well by doing good.

Read it.

By whom? Democrats, of course. This is like Republicans criticizing Democrats for putting people who want to raise taxes in leadership positions.

The only news here is that the Wall Street Journal dignified it with coverage.

Read it.

The ransom payment was first disclosed by Rep. Duncan Hunter in a Nov. 5 letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Mr. Hunter stated in the letter that Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) made the payment covertly as part of a release deal. But the money was stolen by the Afghan intermediary claiming to represent the Haqqani terrorist network.

These guys can’t do anything right.

Read it.

Such a broad definition of those subject to the IRS’s tender ministrations reaches far and wide. It reaches so far that American tax authorities say Boris Johnson (pictured), the mayor of London, owes capital gains taxes to the land of his birth, even though he hasn’t lived here since he was five years old.

The thing about Boris Johnson, who says he won’t pay, is that he’s not your average pushover for the thugs who keep the U.S. government fat and happy. He’s not just the mayor of an important city, but he’s a player in Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, and discussed as a potential future prime minister of the country.

Read it.

Most jobs suck. Yours probably doesn’t–after all, you’re a member of the highly educated, cutting-edge TechCrunch demographic–but most jobs, almost by definition, are done by people coerced by the fear of not having enough money into doing work they mostly don’t want to do. We should be ecstatic about the prospect of robots doing that work for us. Shouldn’t we?

Nobody cares whether tech ‘eats jobs’ — what they care about is tech ‘eating incomes’, which said jobs provide.

Suppose self-driving trucks let us do all that work with 3 million fewer people, while creating 2 million better jobs with twice the salary elsewhere. How have we painted ourselves into a corner where that is somehow viewed as a bad thing? Why are we so scared of a future that boasts both greater economic production, and more people with the freedom to spend their time and effort however they desire? Shouldn’t a world with more output from fewer jobs (defined as “paying people to do things they don’t really want to do”) actually be extremely desirable?

Easy to see the three million eliminated jobs, easy to wave the hands about two million better jobs with twice the salary elsewhere; we people on the reality side of the aisle want some specifics behind that handwaving. Saying ‘here a miracle occurs’ is not sufficient.

Put another way: why would it still be important to maintain full employment in a world overflowing with machine-generated wealth available to everyone?

But it’s not ‘available to everyone’, outside of the Aggregation fallacy. Wealth doesn’t accrue to ‘everyone’ (except in socialist dreamworlds, and we’ve seen how well those work out), but to people who have a claim on that wealth through some market mechanism. This focus on distribution (for which I blame the fact that everybody reads Rawls in college) only deals with half of the question; what about production, and the claims on wealth that participating in production produces in all free societies?

The writer, of course, being a good Voice of the Crust, sees it as a Problem For Government; I blame the current media for allowing people like this to write about economic problems without bothering to learn something about economics first.

Sarah Hoyt understands the dialectic.

I know that schools purport to teach you the skills to survive in the modern world. They actually teach you the schools to survive in the nineteenth century. But here what they don’t teach you that gets passed on and that I’ve run into trouble with (as have other people) in self directed professions:

• You have more in common with people your age than with anyone else. People born within nine months of you have everything in common with you. This has got us to think in generations, which is stupid. To the extent boomers are as portrayed and to the extent that some of them discriminate against past and future generations, it’s the idea that there’s some magical bond between people within x years or each other. (This is mostly seen among leftists who view people as widgets, anyway.) Do I need to tell you there isn’t? The internet should prove that. And yet it was a shock to me to find that most of my friends are either ten years older or ten to twenty years younger than I. I find myself thinking “What is wrong with me?” Of course, nothing is. I’m just not complying with the educational-industrial complex version of it.

• Performing to set task. I’m actually very bad at it. I think it’s a version of standing up to recite for the teacher. When I’m under contract my mind freezes. Back when there was no indie I could force myself to sort of perform, but it wasn’t my best work. Now… let’s say when these two books are delivered, I hope Toni will let me go on a loose rein. I will still deliver books to Baen, probably twice a year. But if she doesn’t want them, I can bring them out myself, and that allows me to work “loose”

Read it.

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

“Every time he opens his mouth about immigration and what he’s gonna do, there’s a huge negative impact on us that live out here along the border, especially in the rural areas where all the smuggling trails are,” Vickers said. “There’s no question if he takes an executive action for some kind of an immigration issue that allows amnesty, allows them to stay here. We’re gonna be covered up again. There’s gonna be another wave, a flood of people coming from all over the world to get in here.”