If you’re into “vintage” erotica, it’ll be hard to top this.
With a hat tip to VFR, here’s Charles Krauthammer on the “Arab Spring”: Many Westerners naÁ¯vely believed the future belonged to the hip, secular, tweeting kids of Tahrir Square. Well there were, after all (ahem!), some observers here in the West who saw things a bit more clearly. Alas, this sliver of Westernization was no […]
From Letters of Note: an exchange between Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry that began when Asimov wrote an item for TV Guide criticizing inaccuracies in televised science fiction. The first letter in the series, from Roddenberry to Asimov, contained the following: In the specific comment you made about Star Trek, the mysterious cloud being “one-half […]
I don’t go to my employer’s Manhattan office much anymore; mostly I work from home, to save the time and inconvenience of riding the subway from Brooklyn to Midtown. I did go in today, though, for a lunch meeting with some other members of our software-development team. It’s July, and so there is plenty of […]
You’ve no doubt heard about the runaway erotic bestseller 50 Shades of Grey. If you’ve been wondering what all the fuss is about, here’s a steamy excerpt, as read by a noted celebrity.
From Big Think, a glimpse at the ongoing Graduate Studies session at Singularity U.
Here are some further thoughts on the Corpus Christi police-standards issue that was the subject of our previous post. A reasonable response might be: Malcolm, you grumpy old fossil: can’t you see the obvious benefits of putting women on the police force? Women, who handle social interactions and conflict very differently from the “rough men” […]
Here’s a brief transcript from Radio Derb’s most recent podcast: If you thought the federal Department of Justice could not get any crazier, try this. The Police Department of the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, has fitness standards for people who want to be police officers. Applicants must complete a 300-meter run, a 1½ mile […]
Britain’s isolation by salt water throughout historical time had a lot to do with its stability and rise to global power (though of course there is more to a nation’s destiny than geography). It wasn’t always that way, though. Learn more here.
John Stossel gives President Obama’s ACA victory speech a brisk fisking, here.
From this morning’s parade here in Wellfleet: As you can see, not much changes around here.
Here’s something really wonderful, from our friend Horace Jeffery Hodges. Go and enjoy.
Here’s one sent our way by our reader “The Big Henry”: the history of rock music in 100 guitar riffs. One man, one Strat, one take.
For tonight, an interesting item from the frontier of advancing technology. One of the the most promising innovations we discussed and saw demonstrated at Singularity University back in April was 3-D printing, in which a movable printer head builds up solid objects by depositing one very thin layer at a time. The extraordinary thing about […]
There’s an ad on my local news-radio station that’s been playing for years. It’s for one of those personal-injury law-firms. Now I have nothing against such firms, and they surely serve a just and necessary purpose in bringing succor to those wrongfully harmed. But there’s one line in this commercial that jumps out at me […]
Here’s more on the ACA ruling, from Daniel Foster at NRO. From Kennedy’s dissent, joined by Scalia, Alito, and Thomas (but not Roberts!): “In our view, the entire Act before us is invalid in its entirety.’
The blogger Poor Richard makes an interesting point about the Obamacare ruling, here.
Well, SCOTUS made its big ruling today, and the key point of contention — the individual mandate — was upheld. I haven’t read the opinions yet, but it seems the IM was ruled not to be permissible under the Commerce Clause, which was what pretty much everyone thought the decision would hinge on, but was […]
We can’t seem to do anything at all any more. Here are two posts about that: one from Walter Russell Mead, the other from Dennis Mangan. Democracy works well enough for a while, I suppose, while a nation is young and virile enough to value opportunity over security, and while its people can muster up […]
Here’s an interesting item from the New England Journal of Medicine on the “changing task of medicine”. It looks back at NEJM’s pages from a century ago and more to see how both the technical and social aspects of medicine have changed. (The article cites hopeful remarks, for example, about how eugenics would someday supersede […]
That the mainstream media list hard to port is so obvious to anyone who doesn’t share their reference frame that it’s hardly worth mentioning — or at least it would be so if everyone on the left didn’t deny it so fatiguingly and disingenuously at every opportunity. With that in mind, here’s a refreshing post […]
The other day I was reading up on Phlebopus marginatus, the Salmon gum mushroom of Western Australia, and noticed that it is “generally recorded as of unknown edibility”. I was surprised to see that — I mean, is the thing edible, or not? — until I thought about it and realized just what’s involved in […]
Call me crazy, but I think this is one rakish alligator.
Living is walking backwards. All we can see is where we’ve already been.
Here’s Arthur Miller, remembering the sweltering New York of his youth. (I doubt I would have survived it.)
Scientist James Lovelock, best known for his development (with Lynn Margulis) of the “Gaia hypothesis” and for his ardent advocacy of radical measures to prevent global warming, surprised us all a little while back when he told MSNBC that in retrospect he thought he had been too “alarmist” about climate change. (It is no small […]
Working late tonight, with much to catch up on — so for now, just an odd little item about the physics of Slinkies.
We’re back, after a splendid trip. Visiting Venice and Florence reminds one just how tall the West’s candle once stood, and on returning home it’s hard not to dwell on how very low it has burned. But that’s just the way of the world, I suppose. Did I miss anything? I have a lot of […]
We’ll likely be off the air until sometime around June 21st: the lovely Nina and I are celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary with a little trip to Italy (Venice and Florence). We’ll have scant access to email and the Internet — and it will be nice to take a little break from all that is […]
I’ve lived in the Northeast all my life. I like it here. I like the landscape, the culture, and the dramatic cycle of the four seasons (my favorite being autumn). I have no inclination to live anywhere else, and will doubtless make my home here for the rest of my life (unless some combination of […]
From the website “prosthetic knowledge” comes this cross-section of a marram-grass leaf:
Here’s a nifty invention, at least four years in the making. Wonder how long the deregulating will take?
Today’s Times reported that it is now possible to read almost all of a fetus’s genome simply by taking blood from the mother and saliva from the father. Lurking behind the headlines is an idea, once heartily embraced by Progressive intellectuals: eugenics. Thanks to certain mid-20th-century events, eugenics nowadays is generally thought of as entirely […]
This looks promising: touchscreens that can create 3-D buttons as needed.
From NASA: a little historical item about a previous transit of Venus.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s Victory Deals Blow to Unions
OK, last item about Wisconsin: for those of you who hadn’t followed the recall campaign, here’s a video clip that should help to explain what happened there yesterday. The Dow shot up 286 points today.
Have a look at some impressive photos of yesterday’s astronomical event, here.
Sorry to harp on politics, but the Walker victory in Wisconsin yesterday was an important inflection point, and this recent piece by economist Walter Williams underscores its significance so clearly and straightforwardly that I’m going to reproduce it here in full. Why was Wisconsin so important? Because the tragedy-of-the-commons effect described here by Williams is […]
James Lileks weighs in, so to speak, on the soda-ban ruction.
In which it is demonstrated once again that “Second-In-Command of al-Qaeda” is the world’s most dangerous job.
Here’s Gary Taubes in Sunday’s New York Times, writing about the flimsy case for restricting dietary salt. (Mayor Bloomberg, take note.)
With the Walker recall election on the morrow — widely regarded as a key American battle in the bitter ideological conflict now convulsing all of the West — here’s a piquant item from Mark Steyn. Excerpt: [I]n 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec. […]
Warning: you won’t be able to unsee this.
My friend G. Orcalimbo Jones (be sure to listen to the live stream of his radio show on WOMR, Fridays at 9 P.M.) has sent us a nifty item: a continuously zoom-able display of our Universe at all scales. Seen this way, scale itself seems to become a linear dimension of its own. Have a […]
Shouldn’t be difficult, after you have a look at this.