October 19, 2013 – 8:42 pm
It’s Oysterfest weekend in Wellfleet once again, and your humble correspondent has reclaimed his crown at the annual Spelling Bee. I realize that by now most of you have likely already heard — I’m sure it’s all over the national media — but I thought the rest of you would like to know.
October 19, 2013 – 8:23 pm
It’s the flesh-eating beetle, genus Dermestes. See these hungry little guys in action, here.
October 19, 2013 – 11:41 am
OK, everybody, I think we all need a little cooling-off period. Time to set aside our partisan differences and watch a bear play tetherball.
October 18, 2013 – 12:09 pm
OK, the battle’s over, if not the war, and as we carry the dead from the blood-soaked field, Obamacare is still the “law of the land”. (“Flaw of the land”, according to some, but never mind.) So: how’s it going? Megan McArdle’s been wondering. If you are too, here’s a nifty website to help you […]
October 17, 2013 – 10:07 pm
I’ve been preoccupied, so just a pair of related links for tonight. The topic is ‘biobots’ — i.e., remote-controlled cockroaches — and new ways to use them.
October 15, 2013 – 10:23 pm
I have a question for all of you who say insist that the Democrats have played no causal role in this government shutdown and impending default (there’s no reason why the US must cease paying its debt service if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, by the way). (Just to be clear: although I agree with […]
October 15, 2013 – 8:15 pm
From an item at SFGate: People whose 2014 income will be a little too high to get subsidized health insurance from Covered California next year should start thinking now about ways to lower it to increase their odds of getting the valuable tax subsidy. Slip-slidin’ away…
October 14, 2013 – 10:55 pm
— Steve Sailer comments on the tendency of women who are interested in science to go into the “life sciences” (medicine, biology) rather than fields like physics and chemistry. — Mark Steyn on King John and Barack Obama. — A “must-know” endgame from Susan Polgar. — Iron Man. — Walter Williams on guns, and the […]
October 13, 2013 – 1:30 pm
Forward-looking, tech-savvy investors knew a while back that 3-D printing was going to be a Big Deal. (Those farsighted speculators have already made handsome returns with companies like 3-D Systems and Stratasys.) The technology is still in its infancy, though — about where personal computing was in 1980 or so — and its truly transformative […]
October 11, 2013 – 11:41 pm
With a hat tip to our friend Mangan: sitting will kill you.
October 11, 2013 – 7:00 pm
Here’s the academic Left descending ever deeper into self-parody. Racism collides with sexism in a self-pitying pissing-contest of the microscopically oppressed. One would have to have a heart of stone to read this without laughing.
October 10, 2013 – 9:55 pm
On the dance floor itself, a great seething mass of people move like maggots in a tin. — Theodore Dalrymple, visiting a club. From Life at the Bottom, Kindle location 1408.
October 8, 2013 – 6:07 pm
I don’t know what’s worse here: the brownshirt tactics of NPS rangers assigned to strong-arm old folks so as to make House Republicans look mean, or the awful fact that someone educated in America could accuse a person of “recreating”. God help us.
October 8, 2013 – 3:54 pm
Over at The New Republic, in an article called Quit Blaming Gerrymandering for the Shutdown, Nate Cohn addresses some fashionable ideas about the effects of Congressional districting.
October 8, 2013 – 3:29 pm
In a new worldwide evaluation of various cognitive skills, Americans have made a poor showing. Americans performed below the international average on math, reading and problem-solving on the exam, known as the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. U.S. math skills lagged far behind top performers, including Japan and Finland. The Organisation for […]
October 6, 2013 – 10:21 pm
Here’s another, from DARPA: WildCat. See also: RoboSimian.
October 4, 2013 – 2:20 pm
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own […]
October 3, 2013 – 11:14 pm
Limpid clarity on the 17th shutdown, from Thomas Sowell. Here.
October 3, 2013 – 1:07 pm
From Heartiste: the Beauty Ratio.
October 3, 2013 – 11:17 am
A tart item from Bill Vallicella. Here.
October 2, 2013 – 10:32 pm
While the nation keens and writhes over the theatrical Obamacare showdown/shutdown, Kevin D. Williamson, in an essay published earlier today, offers a sobering look at the larger problem: reaching a point where debt service plus “mandatory” entitlement spending exceeds total revenue — which rising interest rates could bring about sooner than you might think. When […]
October 2, 2013 – 10:02 am
Speaking of Washington Monument Syndrome, some memorable political theater is underway at the WWII Veterans Memorial: the completely open-air plaza has now been blocked off by our Executive Branch, in a gesture of sheer petulance, just as a planeload of elderly veterans are arriving for a ceremonial visit. (“Non-essential” workers were actually exempted from their […]
September 30, 2013 – 12:10 pm
This excellent metaphor comes to us (by way of Jim Geraghty) from blogger Bruce Webster, who coined it to describe a phenomenon that he observed, originally, while analyzing the ways in which large-scale software projects can fail. In this post, he notes that it applies also to the slow-motion catastrophe we call “Obamacare”. The post […]
September 29, 2013 – 11:17 pm
The lovely Nina and I met a very interesting gentleman today: Paul Sheehan, a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald. (He has also served as that newspaper’s Washington correspondent, and its day editor.) Mr. Sheehan is an old friend of our friend Allen Kurzweil, and is in Wellfleet for a visit. This afternoon Allen, who […]
September 28, 2013 – 2:59 pm
Here is the opening of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, pp 25-26, 1986. (My emphasis.) For “openness”, you may substitute “non-discrimination”. There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put […]
September 25, 2013 – 11:00 pm
One of my oldest and closest friends is a fellow by the name of Carl Sturken. We’ve been pals since the fifth grade. Carl is a fantastically (and eclectically) talented musician. We were bandmates in high school, and he went on (to no-one’s surprise) to a very successful career as a songwriter and record producer. […]
September 24, 2013 – 11:26 pm
Interesting item here: the human population may have undergone significant expansion far longer ago than we’ve thought up till now — not ten millennia ago, but sixty to eighty. How, I wonder, does this fit in with the “Toba bottleneck” theory, in which the entire breeding population of humans is thought to have crashed to […]
September 23, 2013 – 10:33 pm
Here’s a Cold War scheme I’d never heard about, until our own JK sent me this link: a Saturn-like ring around the Earth, made of little copper wires.
September 22, 2013 – 12:08 am
For you chessplayers: a pretty puzzle, from Susan Polgar. Here.
September 21, 2013 – 9:48 am
Here’s the comedian Louis C.K., with some remarkably insightful remarks on the popularity of smart-phones and the human condition. Blaise Pascal said: “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room’. We would rather see, or do, almost anything rather than be forced to look […]
September 20, 2013 – 10:06 pm
— Not of this Earth? — Steve Sailer on amnesty and fertility. — New book on the way about the Matthew Shepard story. — A great Burgess Shale website. Drill down for the animations. — Speaking of exotic fauna, longtime readers may remember our mentioning the tardigrade, here and here. Now, an amazing photo, here. […]
September 19, 2013 – 1:40 pm
Cleverly displayed, using animated maps. Here.
September 18, 2013 – 1:42 pm
In his daily newsletter, Morning Jolt, political commentator Jim Geraghty posts a response to a question from NPR on “what kind of debates the country should have after a mass-shooting tragedy”. * I’m reproducing Mr. Geraghty’s answer in full, below, because I think it is forthright and sensible.
September 17, 2013 – 12:13 pm
Sam Harris has issued a $20,000 challenge to anyone who can refute his claim to have placed morality on a thoroughly scientific, Utilitarianist footing. (Not a merely descriptive footing, that is: a normative one: a beneficent blend of biology and Bentham.) I might have to take a go at this myself. See also Harris’s initial […]
September 16, 2013 – 4:20 pm
Jonah Goldberg has posted a tart essay on the Left’s conceit that it is they, not conservatives, who stand on the side of personal liberty. We read: Alleged proof for this amusing myth (or pernicious lie; take your pick) comes in the form of liberal support for gay marriage and abortion rights, and opposition to […]
September 14, 2013 – 9:37 pm
Encouraging news from Illinois. Here.
September 13, 2013 – 4:24 pm
A sine qua non for the modern liberal ideologue is a flair for living comfortably in a state of cognitive dissonance. This is made necessary by the internal contradictions of his worldview, and by its frequent, and calamitous, collisions with the social, political, economic, cultural, mathematical, and biological realities of the actual world. The California […]
September 12, 2013 – 10:30 pm
I note with real sorrow the passing of Ray Dolby, who gave my generation of recording engineers a priceless gift: quiet recordings on analog tape. That may not sound like much, but let me tell you, friends — it was.
September 11, 2013 – 9:20 pm
From Charles Cooke (@charlescwcooke): The Russian president just trolled an embarrassed United States in its paper of record on September 11th. Everything I love is dead. From Iowahawk: Putin now just basically doing donuts in Obama’s front yard. They’re talking, of course, about this.
September 10, 2013 – 10:23 pm
OK, enough about Syria. Here’s the video we’ve all been watching, a frame a day, in the mirror. Fantastic.
September 10, 2013 – 10:01 pm
Good point from Stanley Kurtz just now at the Corner: This speech was a close reflection of [U.N. ambassador Samantha] Power’s views. The overwhelming emphasis was on humanitarian goals, with a brief, secondary, and noticeably weak effort to buttress that case with talk about threats to our interests. Power’s core argument is that American foreign […]
September 10, 2013 – 9:07 pm
Some takeaways from the President’s speech just now: 1) Assad has achieved moral equivalence with Hitler, but we will leave him in power. 2) It is morally imperative that we use our incomparable military power to set an example here, so that despots the world over will never again dare to use gas to do […]
September 10, 2013 – 11:41 am
Hey, whaddya know. Looks like: a) Our “credibility”, and incontrovertible moral imperatives, don’t require us to bomb Syria after all; b) Our “incredibly small” strike — described as being equal, in its fearsomeness, to making Assad eat Cheerios with a fork instead of a spoon — might not be about to send its blunt and […]
September 8, 2013 – 9:45 pm
Sorry — no time for a post today. Some links: — Natural selection in action. — A Chinese guide to the West, c. 250 A.D. — Sheep and bull. — Japan is just… different. — Steve Sailer on American exceptionalism. — Postcard from Mars. — BHO vs. BHO, from VDH. — Murder in America. — […]
September 6, 2013 – 12:33 pm
Our friend Kevin Kim has just worked his way through all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures, and has a comprehensive review. Go read it here.
September 5, 2013 – 10:57 pm
Here’s retired general Robert H. Scales on a war the military doesn’t want: By no means do I profess to speak on behalf of all of our men and women in uniform. But I can justifiably share the sentiments of those inside the Pentagon and elsewhere who write the plans and develop strategies for fighting […]
September 5, 2013 – 12:14 pm
That’s what prions are: ice-nine for the brain.
September 5, 2013 – 10:12 am
I was all set to put up a link to today’s NightWatch analysis, but noticed that the indefatigable JK beat me to it in a comment on our previous post. Here it is again, nevertheless. I haven’t selected any excerpts to reproduce here — I urge all of you to follow the link and read […]