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This apple had been carefully grown somewhere in Washington state, the result of millions of dollars and two decades of labor. Break apart its unremarkable surface to reveal its flesh, wait long enough, and you’ll see what’s different: It remains pure white. It doesn’t start to brown right after you take a bite and leave it on the kitchen counter. In fact, it doesn’t start to brown until it molds or rots. It doesn’t bruise, either. Through a feat of genetic engineering, Carter’s apples hold on indefinitely to the pearly-white insides that inspired their name — the Arctic.

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So with all this attention to Trump on David Duke, surely you read the news about John Bachtell, right? He endorsed Hillary and the headlines were everywhere. Oh, wait, sorry. Mr. Bachtell’s Hillary endorsement was apparently not newsy enough to make the mainstream media headlines.  Curious, yes? If the endorsement of Trump by the ex-head of the Ku Klux Klan is big news, one would expect a Hillary endorsement by the head of the Communist Party USA would be a big deal as well.

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Even so, not enough to bring her to court. Unbelievable.

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For more than a century, Chinese typewriters have been objects of curiosity, confusion and even a fair bit of ridicule — after all, how do you type a language that has no alphabet?

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On a cool Sunday evening in March, a geochemist named Sun Weidong gave a public lecture to an audience of laymen, students, and professors at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, the capital city of the landlocked province of Anhui in eastern China. But the professor didn’t just talk about geochemistry. He also cited several ancient Chinese classics, at one point quoting historian Sima Qian’s description of the topography of the Xia empire — traditionally regarded as China’s founding dynasty, dating from 2070 to 1600 B.C. “Northwards the stream is divided and becomes the nine rivers,” wrote Sima Qian in his first century historiography, the Records of the Grand Historian. “Reunited, it forms the opposing river and flows into the sea.”

In other words, “the stream” in question wasn’t China’s famed Yellow River, which flows from west to east. “There is only one major river in the world which flows northwards. Which one is it?” the professor asked. “The Nile,” someone replied. Sun then showed a map of the famed Egyptian river and its delta — with nine of its distributaries flowing into the Mediterranean. This author, a researcher at the same institute, watched as audience members broke into smiles and murmurs, intrigued that these ancient Chinese texts seemed to better agree with the geography of Egypt than that of China.

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We got yer ‘green’ energy — right here.

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Labor Day is an appropriate moment to reflect on a quiet catastrophe: the collapse, over two generations, of work for American men. During the past half-century, work rates for U.S. males spiraled relentlessly downward. America is now home to a vast army of jobless men who are no longer even looking for work—roughly seven million of them age 25 to 54, the traditional prime of working life.

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One day in Venice, sometime near the end of the 14th century, a busy merchant found himself with a few spare moments. Maybe it was a slow day at the docks, or he arrived home too early for dinner. Whatever the reason, he did what people of his era tended to do when they had some time—he took out his notebook and his set of pens, and he put together a page-sized patchwork of his afternoon.

Over 600 years later, you can still open that notebook and see that day. Written in spidery loops are daydreamy calculations regarding how large a particular tree is, and how long it might take to get to Rome. There’s a sketch of a pair of colorful ships, and another of two tradesmen in green hats, examining a meal of bread and fish. Keep flipping through, and a whole life emerges. Scribbles and sketches fill each page. Personal anecdotes and hard-won lessons nestle alongside gathered material, including prayers, copied quotations and lists of spices.

I have a ‘commonplace book’ on this very blog.

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Typing helps you learn the syntax. It helps you learn the keywords. It makes you think, and as you’re writing out the 10th import foo from ‘foo’, the little details become apparent.

“Oh, those separators in the for loop are semicolons, not commas.”

“Oh, import {foo} from ‘foo’ isn’t the same as import foo from ‘foo’.”

Typing makes you curious about the words you are forced to write out. “What do all those things in public static void main(String[] args) mean, anyway?”

It also helps you learn the various error messages. Inevitably, you’ll type something wrong or leave out something you thought wasn’t important or that your eye didn’t notice (damn semicolons).

When you’re typing in a program by hand, you can try to run it at various points along the way, to see what works. Maybe more importantly, you can see where it breaks. “Poking the box.”

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Tractors revolutionized farming. We’ve written about tractors in Popular Science for a century, and like the use of domesticated animals before them, tractors greatly increased the amount of land a farmer could use, and because tractors ran on fuels and not grains, using tractors instead of horses and mules freed up former animal feed land for other crops. The revolution first took off in the 1920s, and it continues to this day. Only this time, instead of a human driving the tractor across the land, autonomous tractors drive themselves.

BBQ Toolbox.

One-Man Mosquito Tent.

Anti-Mosquito Socks.

Hands-Free Level.

Stirling Engine Viking Longships. If they’d had them, they’d have used them.

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I have spent my life as a Democrat which probably isn’t that surprising considering that I am African-American. One of the things that always attracted me to the party were the ideals of equality, fighting for the little guy and our openness to differing opinions, but lately I have seen my party take a turn that makes me uncomfortable. Somewhere along the way we stopped fighting for the little guy and became the party of the smug, educated elites who look down on those with less education and deem them unable or unworthy of being able to make personal decisions for their own lives.

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What if the United Nations didn’t exist? It’s a question easily answered, because for nearly all of human history, it didn’t. History “teaches us that order in international relations is the exception, rather than the rule,” Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, writes in a new report on the uncertain future of the UN. “Since the rise of the modern nation-state, both prior to and following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, disorder has been the dominant characteristic of inter-state relations.” We tend to think of the United Nations as just another part of the global furniture. But it’s actually a recent addition.

…

There is “growing evidence of nation-states walking around the UN to solve major problems and then perhaps coming back to the UN when it’s all done as some sort of diplomatic afterthought,” Rudd told me. The United Nations continues to establish rules for how people and states should conduct themselves in the world. “The problem is, if you simply set norms and don’t do anything about the execution of those norms, as the international agency given that function back under the charter of 1945, then you start to lose complete relevance over time.”

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Ship designers, their operators and regulators are gearing up for a future in which cargo vessels sail the oceans with minimal or even no crew. Advances in automation and ample bandwidth even far offshore could herald the biggest change in shipping since diesel engines replaced steam.

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France’s Calais migrant camp, home to around 7,000 refugees and a hotbed of unrest and violence, will completely shut down “as quickly as possible,” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced Friday.

About time they did something about this behavioral sink.

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I am not making this up.

If they’ve got a cow fart problem, then it’s no wonder people are moving to Texas.

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Welcome to Londonistan. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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According to Time, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz are considering making a joint endorsement of Hillary Rodham Clinton for president. This is not surprising – in an era of dopey anti-“Establishment” rhetoric, Kissinger and Schultz may be the last two men in politics happy to call themselves pillars of the establishment. Which, of course, they are, as is Mrs. Clinton.

‘Hillary: The New Nixon’ Yeah, I can see that. Birds of a feather flock together; the Crust takes care of its own.

The next part, which will be amusing, will be watching progressive leftovers from the 1960s, who have for decades denounced Kissinger as a war-monger, an enabler of genocide (as Senator Bernie Sanders charges), and a war criminal – who have called for his prosecution — rejoicing in his endorsement of Mrs. Clinton. “Even Henry Kissinger!” they’ll say. Schultz doesn’t stand very much higher in the Left’s estimate, to be sure, though he doesn’t inspire quite the passion that Kissinger does.

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

Check it out.

‘Hold my beer and watch this.’

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

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A huge story broke by Politico early Thursday morning exposes how Bill Clinton exploited a federal program for former president to grease the wheels of the Clinton Foundation. “Bill Clinton’s staff used a decades-old federal government program … to subsidize his family’s foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife’s private email server,” Politico reported. As shocking as the new revelation is, the “Big Three” networks gave the incendiary story a wide berth during their evening broadcasts.

Of course. It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

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Of course not. That would be Noticing.

But if Rush Limbaugh or Roger Ailes did something like that, hoo boy….

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

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Waaa waaa waaaa….

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People started to speculate that the shooting was a terrorist attack when the identity of the suspect started to spread online. The man is linked to militant Islamist group Millatu Ibrahim and has openly expressed support for Islamic State.

Seems like a no-brainer.

Danish police released a statement saying they currently have “no evidence” to support that the suspect’s terrorist sympathies had anything to do with shooting. They are instead charging him with attempted murder and drug trafficking for dealing large amounts of cannabis.

“It may look a little strange that police in the same press release explains some ideas and sympathies of the alleged offender, while also updating that it has nothing to do with the shooting,” legal analyst Mette Mayli Albaek told public broadcaster DR.

Seems like a no-brain.

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And the feminists say: [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp]….

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Black Lives Matter – except when buying weed.

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A second message came in shortly thereafter. “Indeed, we have no qualms because they were the ones who came to our area. I will cut your head off too,” read the message. They were allegedly sent by Abu Sayyaf militants.

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Add this to the immensely long list of things that annoy Obama when he’s making a speech.

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The math myth is the myth that the future of the American economy is dependent upon the masses having higher mathematics skills. This myth goes back to at least Sputnik, when the Russians were going to surpass us because they were better in math and science. It returned in the late 80’s when the Germans and Japanese were going to surpass us because they were better in math and science. It’s occurring again now because the Indians and Chinese are better than us in math and science.

I find it difficult to find anyone who uses more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics (=arithmetic, and a little bit of algebra, statistics and programming). In the summer of 2007 I taught an advanced geometry course and had two students in the class who had been engineers and one who had been an actuary. They claimed never to have used anything beyond Excel and eighth grade level mathematics; never a trig function or even a log or exponential function! There is in fact a deskilling going on in our economy, where even the ability to make change is about to disappear as an important skill.

I’ve actually used calculus once, in a D&D game where I needed to find out the maximum length of a spear that would fit around the corner of the intersection of a 10-foot-wide corridor and a 5-foot-wide corridor. I’ve used algebra and trig in Navy electronics — again, in school, never out in the Fleet.

Steve Sailer points and laughs.

He doesn’t even need to make any comment. Just posting the drivel from the Times is enough.

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As good a summary of the current situation as I’ve seen.