Here's a video of a homemade 12 gauge zip gun, better then anything from a 3d printer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1wV3lmbSv4

... playing the next Silent Hill.

to finally pass some legislation improving mental health care.

We have a a professor emeritus at Harvard, two time pulitzer prize winner saying one thing, a blogger saying another, and the headline looks like the blogger wrote it. Bad slashdot.

Is his book, The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson takes droves of biologists to task for espousing the theory of kin selection to explain altriusm, accusing them of both torturing their "relatedness" math and also essentially back-solving from a desired result. Wilson makes the case that the theory of group selection (one social group besting a neighboring social group) explains altruism more simply, and occam's razor applies.

if spree killers usually use guns, then we must do something about all gun owners, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Weather_conditions The special on TV said the storm was too tall to fly over, too big to fly around. Might have been too late to turn back, I forget. Anyway, the Pitot tube heaters were too weak to stay defrosted.

"A director of writing at MIT Les Perelman says that because these robo-graders work according to an algorithm, it is not hard to find out what it values and thus beat the system. He found that if you write long essays with big words, even if they are nonsensical, you will score high. The algorithm does not like short sentences or paragraphs or sentences that begin with ‘and’ or ‘or’ nor is it enamored of sentence fragments. In other words, all the little rules that good writers will break to create a particular effect will cause your essay to be marked down.

Perelman gives an example of how you can get a high score. The most interesting feature of the algorithm is that it doesn’t care about substance or even truth. It will ignore such trivialities as saying that the war of 1812 began in 1945, provided you say it grammatically. The substance of an argument doesn’t matter, he said, as long as it looks to the computer as if it’s nicely argued.

For a question asking students to discuss why college costs are so high, Mr. Perelman wrote that the No. 1 reason is excessive pay for greedy teaching assistants. “The average teaching assistant makes six times as much money as college presidents,” he wrote. “In addition, they often receive a plethora of extra benefits such as private jets, vacations in the south seas, starring roles in motion pictures.”

E-Rater gave him a [top score of] 6. He tossed in a line from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” just to see if he could get away with it. He could."

http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2012/05/03/how-to-fool-a-computer-grader/

More for longer flights. You estimate your weight when you book, then weigh in before the flight.

When XP was introduced, I switched to windows for the games. I have happily paid for newer versions of Windows since because they are very usable and I don't want to learn linux. Now, there's no good new version of windows to switch to, based on what I'm reading about windows 8. Apparently valve and steam are making gaming on linux easier than ever. I'm at risk of trying it and finding I like it. The real threat to Microsoft may be their own vision with Windows 8.

Some low-probability events that did cause big changes in public policy: dying in a terrorist attack, having a kid get shot at school, dying in a plane crash.

That the whole point of microsoft centralizing the skype servers after they bought it was to allow gov't taps.

Anyone hitting the dew hard should read up on brominated vegetable oil.

will get thrown out of court. http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/22/2269.asp

It got so hard farming bitcoins I had to find somehting else. I learned CFLs save $40 over the life of the bulb. Got a room with 300 in there now. Quit my job!