Sunday Links

Virus-hewn batteries, in three flavors.

What lurks in the files?

Futurese.

The 5 best password managers.

A cure for deafness?

A cure for diabetes?

A cure for mortality??

How the brain is involved in music.

Why flies are hard to swat.

Why the Hillary supporters are heartsick.

Exploding bacteria for fun and profit.

Pelosi pontificating above her pay grade.

Zoom into concrete.

God bless the Democrats!

8 trillion viruses per square meter.

And now a word from Cassandra

At MyDD of all places.

While the national media and some democrats have had a field day with the Palin VP pick, most Alaskan dems have been wandering around dazed and disoriented, feeling like the rug was pulled out from under us.
My plea is "Don't underestimate her."
....

Sarah is a shark. She is smart, and she is shrewd. However, she comes across as extremely personable; you can't help but like her in person. She is a good public speaker, I've seen better from her in Alaska, and considering how little time she had to prepare for today's speech, I think we'll see much better from her in the near future.
The biggest mistake we can make is to write her off, ignore her, or think she won't bring anything to the campaign. Quit with the jokes and the remarks about how cute and quaint she is. Stop with the pats on the back and the hurr hurr stuff.
The experience debate disappears now, let it disappear. It seems many Dems feel a vindictive need to bring up the experience issue after it's been applied to Obama so many times. Don't. Experience is a non-issue, she won in Alaska by being the inexperienced, outside candidate, and the Rs will, and already have, argued that she has more "executive experience" than Obama anyways. This is an opportunity to take the experience issue off the table, lets take it.
Our job is to remember and remind everyone else that it is John McCain running for President and not Sarah Palin. This means dropping the "old and dying" stuff. The jokes and comments that McCain's VP might become president in the next 4 years. We don't want people thinking about Sarah as the President.
I say this because I believe Sarah could win if she were the one running for President. Sure she's from a small town in Alaska and has only been the Governor for 2 years, but it doesn't matter; she is as of today on the national stage. McCain's campaign will do its best to lead with the pretty, energetic woman and let you forget that he's the one that would sit in the big chair. People will like her, and she will be a name in the Republican party for quite a while now.

RTWT

Call me crazy, but...

...regarding the Palin experience issue; do the Democrats really want to be running their Presidential candidate against the Republican's Vice Presidential candidate?

I've been increasingly impressed by the tactics of McCain's campaign, and his choice of Palin, while it certainly carries risks because of the national stage is so much larger than the Alaskan stage she's operated on to date, seems like it has netted a lot of positives for him.

As I said in opening, the Democrats seem oblivious that, while jumping on Palin's inexperience as an excuse for Obama's inexperience, they have been maneuvered into comparing their candidate against McCain's running mate? I can't imagine the Republicans ever wasting their time contrasting McCain against Biden in an attempt to try to score points. Such a comparison always diminishes the head of the ticket.

Secondly, as I read the blog comments today, the Republican base seems positively giddy and delighted by her selection. McCain did what Obama did not do with Biden -- McCain energized his base. This was of course important to him, since his base was less than enthusiastic with him so far. It looks like he's got a lot more troops in the trenches now that Palin is on board.

Considering Hillary being shoved out the door by Obama, the choice of a woman was also a very good move. The Democrats seem to be conflating feminism with women in general to try to diminish her, and that too is a mistake in my opinion. The Republicans will never get the feminist wing of the PUMAs, but many women do not primarily identify with conventional feminism. Many women are bound to be impressed by what she's achieved, and diminishing those achievements to diminish Palin will not play well with them.

Finally, today's announcement scuppered any lingering buzz from Obasma's acceptance sppeech.

Of course the final tally of McCain's choice of Palin will depend on how well she performs in the arena of national politics, but so far she seems to have been a solid and clever choice.

Friday Links

How North Korea feels.

Repressed hate.

Cosmic dark matter gets a divorce from regular matter.

McCain's golden opportunity.

25 places to read free books online.

Cold War, the sequel?

Lost cities of the Amazon jungle.

The four horsemen of economic apocalypse.

Evolution smiles on war mongers.

Why the US is in deep denial about the deep doo-doo.

Crows never forget a face.

No more beauty contest of the nuns.

How hate campaigns are run.

Introducing Connections.

Putin: Da Bush made me do it!

Wednesday Links

Is the Taleban winning?

Your dog is smarter than a wolf.

45 beautiful motion-blur photos.

Totalitarian games.

The next President will disappoint you.

9 things you should not buy new.

The oldest dinosaurs.

Bob Marley in the Balkans.

"Requiring" renewable energy.

Algorithms and data structures.

Password-protected websites aren't.

Are elephants better at arithmetic?

Seneca barely misses a riot.

Big Brother in a box—already available in 60 countries.

120 generations in the Harz mountains.

WHO SENT YOU?

Jaime Irons asked for my thoughts regarding polling and the election the other day and this post is a response.

I cannot do better than Jay Cost did on the 22nd with regard to polling. There is no trend. Add Rasmussen to the Gallup results and the answer is the same.

So. What's going on? In my opinion, the malleable portion of the electorate, the inchoate Muddle, has steadfastly refused to be drawn into the political drama this year. The 24/7/365 campaign mode just isn't exciting enough to hold the electorate's attention. Factor in the drop in the main stream media's reputation, plus its drop in readership and viewership levels and "flat line" polling makes even more sense.

When I look at the coming election, my thoughts turn to Bill Clinton and his grabbing a candidacy which no one (in 1991) wanted to tackle, due to the conventional wisdom concerning George H. W. Bush's extraordinary popularity following the first Gulf War. That same lack of desire manifested itself on the Republican side this time with McCain taking his best shot because his age made it his last shot.

Accross the aisle, Hillary Clinton seriously underestimated both her unpopularity among Democrats and the resources available to her opponent. MoveOn made good on its boast to have purchased the Democrat party by mobilizing the ACORN/SEIU elements which Dean had successfully used in the 2006 election to pick up 12-16 seats which the Republican's failure to deal effectively with ethics issues had left vulnerable. The ACORN/SEIU thugs were very successful in the caucus states this year, beginning in Iowa and putting the race effectively out of Clinton's reach on Super Tuesday.

In my opinion, the outcome of the election will depend upon the inchoate Muddle learning the answer to the question posed in the title. If they come to realize that Obama was selected by Bill Ayers in 1995 as a front man for the theft and misuse of funds meant to improve the atrocious schools in Chicago, then John McCain will be sworn in in January. If the media and the Copperhead faction of the Democrat party succeed in concealing the fact that Obama owes his "career" to leftists and slumlords like convicted felon Tony Rezko, then there is a good possibility that Obama will win.

That's not the cheeriest of news but there are signs that the coverup of the Ayers/Obama relationship is beginning to unravel. As you read about Obama's role in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge please remember that he assumed the presidency and chairmanship of CAC in roughly the same period that Ayers hosted a cocktail party celebrating his "entrance into electoral politics". That isn't a coincidence. Nor is Obama's reluctance to highlight the only executive experience to be found in his entire brief but lackluster life an oversight.

UPDATE: of course, I could have just linked Barone. If I had read him first. Serendipty is always serendipitous.

Monday Links

Putin reads the West.

Iran's manned space program.

How people really decide.

Sex, violence, glamor, and Islam.

3D printing for the masses.

Russian loves Putin.

Why no medium-sized black holes?

Qinetiq's solar-powered plane flies at night, breaks the records.

US warships bringing baby food.

The face of aggression.

Jihad in China.

Robots riding the thermals.

Obama picks Joe Biden as VP candidate

CNN reports that it's Biden for Veep. The Video from a couple of days ago shows him saying he's "not the guy". It's interesting that he chose to tell an untruth. He could have said nothing. He could have been evasive. He could have joked about cameramen parked outside his house. He could have done all kinds of things. Instead he tells an untruth. Hmmmm. Biden and his mouth. This will be interesting.

Wednesday Links

Conway (the inventor of the Game of Life) has proven: even the slightest amount of free will implies inherent indeterminacy in the universe.

Beavering away to kill the queen.

Not your father's cartoon.

Not your father's Kosovo.

Magpies can recognize themselves.

Echoes of Berlin, 1936.

How to teach an old rat new tricks.

The future of elections.

Rebellion of the slave ants.

What to do in the Twin Cities when you're dead.

Charging the cartoonists.

Why gay genes exist.

Sunday Links

The fundraising survival kit.

The Hillary Clinton memos.

Moving the money jobs to India.

Lakes in the Sahara.

Our Georgian options for dummies.

The genetic map of Europe.

The neurology of magic.

How attitudes have changed in Hollywood.

The cure for cancer?

Is it time for Poland to get the bomb?

Self-growing nano-fabrics.

Overheated warming warnings.

Friday Links

The new authoritarian nationalists on the march.

Pyramids of the future.

Rat-brained robots.

Is college a waste of time and money?

Introducing Nodal.

Is military success hiding subtle failure?

The invisibility cloak.

Never say die.

Was Bigfoot found?

Big Brother Britain.

The 10 truths of Economics.

Wednesday Links

Buff up your T-cells.

Old media caught at their usual double-standard.

How to demo your startup.

Drill and conserve—why is this hard?

Bigger cheaper solar cells.

How to find the work you love.

Witches, goblins, and Nazis.

The brain unmasked.

The ultimate of bridges.

Confessions of a risk manager.

The brain's fairness detector.

Sunday Links

Get a plasma drive engine.

The triumph of the totalitarian will.

Ideas are just a multiplier.

Chain lightnin'.

86 wives.

Is schizophrenia a byproduct of brain evolution?

Big-time pandering.

What men have to do for love.

Paternalism is back.

Why you buy the rug.

The best man in Washington still going strong.

Friday Links

The virus that gets sick.

A tyranny of true believers.

14 million year old tropical plants—in Antarctica.

The Orwell olympics.

Red ink in the anti-business states.

When Google throws the switch.

What's the matter with Pakistan?

The ability to stand apart.

Here comes the eyeball camera.

Can colossal carbon tubes best nanotubes?

Vague but sinister.

So let me get this straight...

...Hamdan gets 5 1/2 years, probably including time served. Lucky for him he wasn't dealing drugs. Then he would have been in serious trouble.

Wednesday Links

Have you bought your Waboba yet?

Eloquence fatigue.

Finding color in fossils.

Home really alone.

Maybe Roger Simon is no longer alone?

The world's smallest snake.

Neuroeconomics.

Snoozing makes you smarter. Has anybody looked into drinking beer?

Stuff your brain.

The Springfield years and what they say.

Does quantity trump quality?

The Google of criminal searches.

SpaceX finds that space is still hard.

The dawn of artificial photosynthesis?

Extinct in 12 years?

Saving the crumbling Timbuktu manuscripts.

Are men neutered?

This is a Democrat Organization?

Look, I don't know what to make of this. Some bits ring true, though, from my experience as a Republican election judge in a machine Democrat town. I was also struck by the point, about halfway in, where oen guy says "they filed complaints against the Hilary people for all the things they were doing. It was projection."

I've said elsewhere that I don't think Obama is running for President as much as he's running for Caudillo. This isn't changing my opinion.

Climate Hysteria and its Heretics

IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans's article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can't be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.

Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.

The reason is that precisely that they are believers, not scientists. No amount of empirical evidence will overturn what has become not a scientific theory but a form of religion.

But what kind of religion? More than 200 years ago, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume put his finger on the process. His essay, Of Superstition and Enthusiasm, describes how even in civilised societies the mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions when real worries are missing.

As these enemies are entirely invisible and unknown, like today's greenhouse gases, people try to propitiate them by ceremonies, observations, mortifications, sacrifices such as Earth Day and banning plastic bags and petrol-driven lawnmowers.

Read the whole thing.