Hopefully Interesting

Here  is a really nice article about someone's project putting some smarts on a model plane.  The author explains things well and does the whole multi-media thing very well. This  is one scary chemical reaction. For a while Hong Kong had a block that was essentially a lawless zone backed full of people regardless of any sort of zoning.  Here's an awesome cross section someone put together of it. The roundworm c. elegans is remarkable for being the creature with the world's most studied nervous system.  Which was relatively easy since it only has a few hundred neurons.  Well, some scientists simulated those neurons and put them in a robot body .  Uploading here we come! Boston is apparently  in the running  for the 2024 Olympics.  I hope we don't end up hosting it. Many people have complained that Indian Jones isn't a very good archeologist but Max Gladstone weighs in to support him . Apparently humans and dolphins can hunt ...

As longtime readers will know (all three of them) one of the things I worry about regarding government is  complexity .  There are a lot of ways that government can be more complex than it has to be with various sorts of detriments to democracy's ability to control that government but one that annoys me out of proportion is taking some new tax or other revenue stream and saying that it has to be used for some particular purpose. There was actually a ballot measure in Massachusetts that did this by dedicating the unclaimed deposits on cans and bottles to conservation; as well as increasing the variety of containers subject to deposits. Why not just put any money that comes in into the same general fund and then take all expenses out of that fund?  Well, it seems that while voters generally think the money the government spends is wasted in general, they  also think  that for things the government spends money on it's doing a good job.  That means that t...

Fantasy style  map  of Boston. I've always sort of thought it was odd that the one place in the galaxy that Kryptonians were least adapted to was their home planet.  Julian Sanchez comes up with some interesting  explanations , which I hope some story uses. So we've all heard the phrase "To gird one's loins" right?  I once had no idea what that meant, but  now I do . If Nigeria can successfully  contain an Ebola outbreak  I'm pretty sure the US doesn't have much to worry about.  Better to panic about the flu becoming deadly instead. The Metamorphosis cast with  a robot. When bad things happen to good robots. Raccoons are  getting smarter . So recently the ESA launched a probe to investigate a comet.  And it's been taking some really cool pictures . There's been this Gamer Gate furor going on recently.  I was going to write a post about it, but Ken at Popehat wrote almost everything I wanted to say. ...