Last of the Enola Gay crew

The Associated Press has an article about a last flier:

The last surviving member of the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, hastening the end of World War Two and forcing the world into the atomic age, has died in Georgia. Theodore VanKirk (photo, top), also known as Dutch, died of natural causes at the retirement home where he lived in Stone Mountain, Georgia, his son, Tom VanKirk, said. He was 93.
VanKirk flew nearly sixty bombing missions, but it was a single mission in the Pacific that secured him a place in history. He was 24 years old when he served as navigator on the Enola Gay (photo, middle), the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb deployed in wartime over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 (photo, bottom).
He was teamed with pilot Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Ferebee in Tibbets’ fledgling 509th Composite Bomb Group for Special Mission Number Thirteen.
The mission went perfectly, VanKirk told The Associated Press in a 2005 interview. He guided the bomber through the night sky, just fifteen seconds behind schedule, he said. As the nine-thousand-pound bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, fell toward the sleeping city, he and his crew hoped to escape with their lives.
They didn’t know whether the bomb would actually work and, if it did, whether its shockwaves would rip their plane to shreds. They counted— one thousand one, one thousand two— reaching the 43 seconds they’d been told it would take for detonation and heard nothing. “I think everybody in the plane concluded it was a dud. It seemed a lot longer than 43 seconds,” VanKirk recalled. Then came a bright flash. Then a shockwave. Then another shockwave.
The blast and its aftereffects killed a hundred and forty thousand people in Hiroshima.
Three days after Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The blast and its aftermath claimed eighty thousand lives. Six days after the Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered.
Whether the United States should have used the atomic bomb has been debated endlessly. VanKirk told the AP he thought it was necessary because it shortened the war and eliminated the need for an Allied land invasion that could have cost more lives on both sides. “I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run. There were a lot of lives saved. Most of the lives saved were Japanese,” VanKirk said. But it also made him wary of war. “The whole World War Two experience shows that wars don’t settle anything. And atomic weapons don’t settle anything,” he said. “I personally think there shouldn’t be any atomic bombs in the world— I’d like to see them all abolished. But, if anyone has one,” he added, “I want to have one more than my enemy.”
VanKirk stayed on with the military for a year after the war ended. Then he went to school, earned degrees in chemical engineering and signed on with DuPont, where he stayed until he retired in 1985. He later moved from California to the Atlanta area to be near his daughter.
Like many World War Two veterans, VanKirk didn’t talk much about his service until much later in his life when he spoke to school groups, his son said. “I didn’t even find out that he was on that mission until I was ten years old and read some old news clippings in my grandmother’s attic,” Tom VanKirk told the AP in a phone interview. Instead, he and his three siblings treasured a wonderful father, who was a great mentor and remained active and “sharp as a tack” until the end of his life. “I know he was recognized as a war hero, but we just knew him as a great father,” Tom VanKirk said.
VanKirk’s military career was chronicled in a 2012 book, My True Course, by Suzanne Dietz. VanKirk was energetic, very bright and had a terrific sense of humor, Dietz recalled. Interviewing VanKirk for the book, she said, “was like sitting with your father at the kitchen table listening to him tell stories.”
A funeral service was scheduled for VanKirk on 5 August 2014 in his hometown of Northumberland, Pennsylvania. He will be buried in Northumberland next to his wife, who died in 1975. The burial will be private.

Rico says another good one gone...

Speeding up airport security

Bill Saporito has a Time article about the TSA:

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) needs your help. The organization that scans your bags and invariably yanks your spouse out of line for the hairy-eyeball treatment when you are late for a flight desires to do something about wait times. I’m presuming that the TSA wants to make the lines shorter, but maybe I should double check.
This doesn’t seem like a particularly difficult goal in some respects. Here’s the way the TSA worked at the Delta terminal at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport on a busy afternoon the last time I was flew: there were two positions open to check IDs and three screening lines for bags and people. The line was nearly out the door. I’m no math expert, but I’m thinking that increasing the number of screening lanes by one increases throughput by a third. Just a guess.
Increasing capacity— that is, adding ID checkpoints and scanning lanes— or at least manning all available lanes, seems like the most obvious way to shorten the lines. But that would involve spending more money, and Congress has proven again and again that it cares little for the flying public, which helps explain the current state of flying.
So, instead, TSA is trying to crowdsource a solution. It is looking for someone or some group that can create the Next Generation Checkpoint Queue Design Model. Your model will have to incorporate the TSA’s (very successful) PreCheck program, along with plans to accommodate coach, business/first, crew, and special needs passengers. Do that successfully and the TSA will reward you. The agency is handing out $15,000 in prize money for the best ideas, including a $5,000 top prize. 

I'll be glad to help:
Ban mobile phone calls in the queue. People who talk on the phone while simultaneously trying to get out their laptops and take off their shoes ought to be shot, but I’m willing to merely silence them to speed things up.
Start a Spirit Airlines line. Passengers on ultra-low cost carriers like Spirit and Allegiant are, let’s say, inexperienced at air travel; okay, hopeless. Even with their own line, they’ll still take forever.
Make every airline charge more for using the overhead bins than for checked baggage. Higher fees equals fewer bags equals shorter waits. Stop hating me. In an ideal world, all baggage would go underneath— for free— and show up teh minutes after landing.
Fine the TSA for delays. Airlines get fined, so why not the TSA? If it takes me more than twenty minutes to get through, the TSA is not doing its job right.
Have a giant, discount health and beauty store at every airport. No need to bring all that product in three ounce bottles. Just order in advance and buy’em at the airport, cheap. 

There is indeed a science to lines, whether it’s applied to supermarkets, tollbooths, amusement parks, fast food joints, or in the bakery chain Le Pain Quotidien in my office building, where the front end system was designed by people who think dentistry isn’t painful enough. The science is known as queuing theory, and it was invented in 1909 by Danish physicist and mathematician A.K. Erlang to try figure out the optimal size of a central telephone switch to accommodate the most customers most of the time. One of queuing theory’s later advances is something called Little’s Law, expressed as L = λW , where L is the expected number of users in a queuing system, W is expected time in queuing system per user, and λ is the arrival rate. Seems easy, right?
Nope. The TSA’s problem is far more complex because it’s not a steady state system— it ebbs and flows based on the time of day and number of flights, among other factors. “The math gets really hairy, really fast,” says Dick Larson, known as Dr. Q, who teaches queuing theory at MIT. “No human knows how to derive the actual equations.”
Companies like Disney use simulations even before they create rides to try to predict the lines, says Larson, but the math attached to security lines is surely beyond the TSA. “I wish them luck,” he says. Larson believes that half of the problem in queuing is psychological. People are stressed out about making their flights, about their cranky kids, about setting off an alarm and being groped by TSA agents. Larson’s suggestion for improving matters isn’t mathematical, it’s behavioral: “The key idea is stress reduction versus duration reduction,” he says. “If you can reduce the stress, the complaints would plummet.”
That could be done by guaranteeing that people who arrive at the security line within the airline’s minimum will make their flights, for instance. Diversion may help too. In New York City, post World War Two, office workers in skyscrapers often faced long waits for elevators. The solution wasn’t more elevators, which was not possible. Instead, landlords mirrored the walls at the elevator banks; complaints dropped as worker bees had something to take their minds off the wait.
You can’t do that in airports, but maybe there’s a similar approach. Comedians? A brass band? Magicians? Or how about security-line mimes? Then passengers would have something to hate more than the TSA and the airlines.

Rico says this is a good start (except for the mimes), but surely the gummint can come up with a good solution...

Car porn

Rico's friend Kelley forwards this:

Rico says, okay, it's wrong, but it's true at the same time...

NYPD chokehold news

Jeremy Stahl has a Slate article about the NYPD, at it again:

The NYPD is facing more cries of police abuse after an advocacy group released photos (above) of a police officer appearing to place a seven-month pregnant woman in an illicit chokehold.
The same procedure, which is banned under NYPD rules, was used on 43-year-old Staten Island resident Eric Garner by a police officer shortly before Garner’s death. The abuse allegations in the Garner case led to a national outrcry, and the officer in question being stripped of his gun and badge pending an investigation.
The advocacy group People Organizing and Working for Empowerment and Respect (POWER) released the photos of 27-year-old Rosan Miller being restrained by police while she was being arrested for disorderly conduct.
“She was grilling, BBQing, in front of her home,” said former city councilman and current assembly candidate Charles Barron. “Not committing any crimes.” Barron pointed out that the woman was arrested in front of her seven-year-old daughter. He also blamed New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton and the city’s “broken windows” policing policy of rigorously enforcing minor offenses for the latest incidents. Garner died after an arrest for illegally selling cigarettes.
Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio have defended those “broken windows” policing practices, while discussing other reforms they plan to implement in the wake of Garner’s death.  "I can understand why any New Yorker may say, that's not such a big offense," de Blasio said of policing of minor offenses. "But a violation of the law is a violation of the law."
The New York Times reported that arrests of subway performers had more than quadrupled this year as part of an NYPD campaign to clamp down on these smaller violations.
Councilwoman Inez Barron called for reforms to the chokehold regulations that would result in firings if those policies are violated. As the New York Observer reports, Barron says that, of a thousand such complaints against officers submitted to the NYPD’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, only nine had been confirmed. The harshest punishment, Barron says, was a loss of vacation time.

Rico says that asking the police to police the police doesn't work...

Tornadoes in New England? Not as rare as you would think

Eric Holthaus has a Slate article about New England tornadoes:

A mini outbreak of tornadoes swept through New England recently, the most severe of which— an EF-2 with estimated winds of 120 mph— hit Revere, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston (photo, sorry, is not of the actual tornado). Weaker EF-0 tornadoes were also confirmed by the National Weather Service in Wolcott, Connecticut (near Bristol), and in Limington, Maine, west of Portland.
According to the Boston Globe, Monday’s tornado damaged more than a hundred homes in Revere as it passed through the heart of the town’s central business district. A survey report from the National Weather Service showed the tornado was about 3/8 of a mile wide at its peak and traveled about two miles. According to the NWS, “thankfully and miraculously, there were no fatalities or injuries reported.” Though the National Weather Service mentioned the general risk for tornadoes in their technical discussion of severe thunderstorms, the local office didn’t explicitly issue a tornado warning in advance of the quickly forming Revere storm.
In a blog post deconstructing the storm, meteorologist Ryan Hanrahan said: “It would have been virtually impossible to provide any lead time with a tornado warning in this situation.” As with virtually all crazy weather events these days, the Revere tornado was captured on social media as it happened, including this impressive Instagram video.
Judging from that same database, the tornado is also the strongest ever recorded to hit the Boston area, eclipsing an EF-1 that hit Newton in 1972. However, that of course doesn’t mean tornadoes have never happened there before. Going back to colonial records compiled by Massachusetts-born meteorologist Thomas Grazulis, the first confirmed tornado in the New World was one that hit at 2 pm on 8 July 1680, in Cambridge, before there was even an America.
All told, there have been a hundred and sixty tornadoes in Massachusetts since 1951, most of them relatively weak EF-0’s. But forty-four were at least as strong as the recent one, about seven per decade. The last one took place in 2011, killing three people near Worcester, and caused more than two hundred million dollars in damage.

Rico says who knew?

Blossom reruns

Willa Paskin, Slate’s television critic, has an article about an almost-forgotten (but not by Rico) television series:

This month, for the first time in fifteen years, Blossom began airing on television again, nightly on the Hub network. The sitcom about funky, precocious Blossom Russo (Mayim Bialik. photo, second from left) and her family, which ran on NBC from 1990 to 1995, was in syndication for a few years immediately after its finale, but the third millennium has (give or take an Old Navy ad or SNL sketch) been a wasteland for Blossom and its signature whoas and zany hats. (Only the first two seasons have even been released on DVD.) But Blossom, despite its fairly time-specific 1990s stylings, is a show that, like its protagonist, was and remains mature beyond its years.
The series, created by Don Reo, who had worked on shows like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and Rhoda (and currently writes for Two and a Half Men), was initially supposed to be about an emotionally astute teenage boy and his hip musician father. NBC asked that the boy become a girl. (“It meant that I could steal every story that The Wonder Years had ever done and no one would know it,” Reo joked.) NBC also worried that having such a child and a single, hip dad in one show was too much: In the series’ pilot, fourteen-year-old Blossom lived in Los Angeles, California with her nuclear family. By the second episode, in which Blossom gets her period and tries to buy tampons from a very young Giovanni Ribisi, Reo had prevailed on NBC: her mother had moved to Paris, France to follow her own dreams (and Bobby Brown’s My Prerogative had been replaced by My Opinionation as the show’s theme song). Blossom and her older brothers, recovering addict (a bold choice at the time)  Anthony (played by Michael Stoyanov) and doltish Joey (played by Joey Lawrence, whom the show made a Tiger Beat pin up), lived with their relatively cool musician father Nick (played by Ted Wass). Blossom is an old-fashioned family values show, with some structural and emotional twists: a close-knit, slightly broken clan relying on Dad, who often, but definitely not always, knows best.
Blossom is good, sensible, grounded, lovable, and wise beyond her years. That is to say that she is the exact character that current conventional wisdom says it is both difficult and potentially boring to build a show around. Blossom rarely gets in any real trouble, and when she does— say, by running off with a boy in a leather jacket she loves but barely knows— she usually ends up being right: that boy, Vinnie (played by David Lascher), turns out to be a stand-up guy and her on-again-off-again boyfriend for the final three seasons of the show.
Yet despite her decency, Blossom is not boring. She is the human equivalent of her dancing style: lively, bright, energetic, unembarrassed. She is precocious without being twee. She’s curious, kind, level-headed, smart, social— but she also has absolutely no chance of peaking in high school. Blossom is comfortable being who she is— that’s what all the crazy clothes are about; she has a personal style, and she will express it. And the show carries itself just like its heroine. The stakes may not be those of Breaking Bad, but especially in the early seasons, Blossom’s relaxed, confident energy is much more in keeping with the rhythms of real life than are the hyped-up-goings on of a soap opera or even the manic hijinks of a standard family sitcom.
One of the sweetest early episodes, Such a Night, takes place during a single long night in the Russo house. Nick confronts Joey about a phone bill racked up on sex lines, Tony tries and fails to keep a friend on the wagon, and Six and Blossom have an epic sleepover conversation: a long talk covering boys, plastic surgery, dancing, kissing, pregnancy, and whether they’ll still be friends when “we’re really old, like thirty”. It’s My Dinner with Andre, Tweens, and a Laugh Track. Nothing exactly happens, but all that nothing feels exactly right.
Blossom, like any sitcom with teenagers, features lots of lessons learned, but most of those lessons skirt a cheesy Full House fate because they aren’t overly simplistic. (As the show went on, and Blossom got older, it started tackling Very Special Issues like alcoholism, assault, divorce, bulimia, and gun control, a little more heavy-handedly.) In the first season, Blossom and Six go to a make-out party instead of a movie and get busted. Blossom gets grounded, but has a very nuanced conversation with Nick about lying, which includes Blossom asking a parental brain-teaser: “Do you really think it’s possible for a kid to go through her teenage years without lying to her parents?” At the end of the episode Nick and Blossom have talked the incident through, but they haven’t reached an easy conclusion or declared that she’ll never lie again.
It’s still rare for sitcoms, even the good ones, to embrace ambiguity. But in episode after episode, Blossom ends where other shows would include one more clarifying beat. In the first episode of the second season, Blossom narrates a long story to her diary about the question of whether she went to second base with a boy named Jimmy. At the end of the episode, Blossom realizes that if she writes down what happened— whether she got to second base or not— it won’t be private. So she doesn’t. We never find out. In another episode, Blossom gets tricked into going to a dance with a geek. Worried about her social capital, she lies that she can’t go, and then feels so horrible about it she changes her mind. On a different show, her guilt would exonerate her, they’d go to the dance, and he might even turn out to be cute. On Blossom, the geek isn’t having it. “Are you suffering from the delusion that you’re super cool?” he asks. The episode ends with her confessing her guilt to her father, who reassures her that’s what makes her a good person: “It’s a good sign you feel bad, it means you’re a good person. Really good people are miserable all the time,” he says.
Yes, Blossom is very 1990s specific. It’s not just the clothes, the lack of the Internet and cellphones, the entire episode spoofing Madonna’s Truth or Dare. It’s not just the guest stars, who include Will Smith, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Alf, C+C Music Factory, Doogie-era Neil Patrick Harris, and Phylicia Rashad drawing fallopian tubes on a birthday cake. The show has a kind of Zen calm about its progressive cultural politics that feels both specific to its era and refreshing in our own. By 1994, near the end of Blossom’s run, partisanship was shutting down the government, but Blossom wasn’t that worried about being polarizing, and Blossom never hesitated to declare herself a feminist. (In Blue Blossom, a great episode that consists mostly of Blossom moping around, Joey gets a letter from first lady Hillary Clinton asking for input on her health care initiative. He has some thoughts about hair care.)
In Losing Your Religion, Blossom has to practice and learn about another religion as a school assignment. Blossom, who gets assigned Judaism (something of an in-joke about Bialik’s own religion) says she got one of the “biggies” because when the teacher asked the class what religion they were, she was the only one who said “none”, even though, as Nick points out, her family celebrates Christmas. Nick says: “Look honey, I was raised in the church, but I rejected it in the 1960s along with everything else my parents liked. So we decided that, until you could choose for yourself, we’d bring you up believing in the strength of the family.” “The divorce kind of hurt that a little,” Blossom replies. “Well, I think we’re still a pretty strong family,” Nick says. This scene, a kind of secular cri de coeur, is not even the episode’s Full House moment (that comes, later, when Six almost gets pressured into having sex with a boy). It’s almost a throwaway, a casual, short conversation at the very beginning of the episode, book-ended by jokes.
Because the actors were so young when the show started— Lawrence was fourteen; Von Oy was thirteen; Bialik was fifteen but looked younger, and had recently made a name for herself playing the young Bette Midler in Beaches, a movie Blossom and Six would have watched a million times— the show has the Harry Potter effect: everything else aside, it’s touching just to watch the actors grow old.
But there’s no need to put everything else aside. One of the running, bittersweet jokes of Blossom, about a really grown-up kid growing up, is that she doesn’t want to. “I don’t like getting older. I don’t want to get older. What could be better than being sixteen?” she says to Tony in Blue Blossom, dressed all in black and a beret, moping about her seventeenth birthday. Not even Blossom could stop herself from turning into a real adult, right before our very eyes.

Rico says that Mayim Bialik is now better known as Sheldon's still-virginal-sort-of-girlfriend, Amy, on The Big Bang Theory...

Exemption from anti-abortion laws

Jon Terbush has an article in The Week about some odd politics:

If Christian business owners cannot be compelled to violate their faith, why should the same protection not apply to Satanists? That's the argument the Satanic Temple is making to claim that, in the wake of the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling, women who share their beliefs should not be forced to follow some of the more restrictive state-level abortion laws to crop up in recent years.
Specifically, the Satanic Temple wants women to be exempt from having to view legally mandated "informational" materials— which it calls "biased" and "medically invalid"— prior to having an abortion. Dozens of states require women to attend counseling before receiving an abortion, while ten mandate that they receive written materials before undergoing the procedure, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
"While we feel we have a strong case for an exemption regardless of the Hobby Lobby ruling, the Supreme Court has decided that religious beliefs are so sacrosanct that they can even trump scientific fact," a spokesperson for the group said in a press release.
The Satanic Temple added that all women who share their belief that the "body is inviolable subject to one's own will alone"— and not merely temple members— should be free to claim the exemption.

Rico says ain't politics fun?

Irish slave owners were compensated

Rico's friend Kema forwards this Irish Central article by Patrick Counihan:

A Limerick based historian has revealed how prominent Irish families cashed in on the abolishment of slavery. Liam Hogan is currently working on his first book, a study of the historical relationship between Limerick, Ireland and slavery.
In an article for the website TheJournal.ie, he explains how over a hundred Irish families were financially rewarded when the British government finally abolished slavery in most of its colonies in 1834. Hogan writes that the British paid slave owners over thirty million dollars in compensation for the loss of their ‘property.’
Anti-slavery advocate Daniel O’Connell protested against this compensation payment and requested that the names of those receiving this money be made public, according to Hogan. He adds that the Parliamentary return (1837-8) lists the basic information about those who received compensation.
A new online database now reveals that nearly a hundred different individuals, either born or based in Ireland, benefited directly from this slave compensation.
Peter and William Diggs La Touche, private bankers in Dublin, received a payment of nearly £7,000 (approximately a million dollars at today's values) for their four hundred slaves on two plantations in Jamaica.
Howe Peter Browne, the 2nd Marquis of Sligo, of Westport House in County Mayo, inherited slave plantations in Jamaica in 1809 from his father. The report says he submitted a claim for 286 slaves and was awarded almost £5,525 ($745,000 today).
Hogan’s fascinating article includes a full list of all the Irish families who received compensation when slavery was finally abolished.

Rico says we could've done that in 1861 and saved a lot of money and blood...

North Korea threatens White House nuclear strike

Slate has an article by Elliot Hannon about the latest madness out of Pyongyang:

As if the world needed another theater of global conflict, North Korea, as if on cue, threatened a nuclear strike on the White House and the Pentagon recently. The threat came from Hwang Pyong-So, director of the military's General Political Bureau, who was presumably playing to the audience by dishing out some serious red meat to what Agence France Presse described as “a large military rally in Pyongyang”: If the US imperialists threaten our sovereignty and survival, our troops will fire our nuclear-armed rockets at the White House and the Pentagon, the sources of all evil," Hwang said in his speech broadcast Monday on state television, according to AFP.
The over-the-top rhetoric came after North Korea test fired a short-range ballistic missile into the sea over the weekend and analysts "say Kim Jong-Un won't order troops to stop testing weapons unless rival South Korea and the US make a major concession, such as downsizing their regular joint military drills or conducting them in a low-key manner,” according to The Associated Press. Simultaneously, according to The Associated Press, “North Korea is seen by foreign observers as pushing for better ties with South Korea and other countries as a way to lure international investment and aid to revive the country's stagnant economy.” North Korea’s people skills may need some work. This is not the first time North Korea has threatened to stage a nuclear attack on the US, but AFP reports, “most experts believe it is still a long way from developing a viable intercontinental ballistic missile with the required range.”

Rico says it's, yet again, a case of 'who will rid me of this troublesome priest', or, in this case, crazy leader of a nuclear power...

Robots in the ocean

The New York Times has an article by Katharine Courage about an underwater robot:

For years, roboticists have yearned to develop a flexible machine that can explore tight spaces, repair dangerous equipment, and potentially even conform to the human body.
Now one of the first members of this new breed of robots is almost here. It has sinewy arms, a powerful grip and the ability to work underwater without coming up for air.
Yes, it is an octopus.
Because octopuses can swim, crawl and manipulate objects, they make “the ideal underwater robot,” said Francesco Giorgio-Serchi, a scientist at the Research Center on Sea Technologies and Marine Robotics in Livorno, Italy, who is working on the project.
In a small seaside laboratory, he and others have been tinkering away on a prototype of a multi-armed robot they call PoseiDrone for the sea god Poseidon. Pieces of half-built arms are scattered about, and an inflatable kiddie pool sits between tables.
It was in that modest body of water that their robotic octopus got its sea legs, as it were.
It did so well in the pool that the researchers borrowed a small boat and deployed it in the Ligurian Sea, still attached to their controls via cables. It successfully swam in the waves and adeptly crawled along the rocky bottom.
Robotic technology is generally based on hard materials; a logical approach, because they can be controlled with precise movements and low computing power. Soft robotics is something else altogether, promising “the mechanical versatility you find in natural organisms,” said Carmel Majidi, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute who is working to develop sensitive artificial skin and strong artificial muscles.
Imagine a roving vacuum cleaner that could literally squeeze itself into nooks where dust bunnies hide. Or more grandly, Dr. Majidi said, exploration vehicles, construction drones, “wearable robots and maybe even implantable robots.”
Early efforts in the field date to the 1940s, when scientists developed pneumatic “artificial muscles” to be used in traditional robots. Progress has inched along since then, producing small-scale projects like scooting soft-bodied caterpillars and pneumatic quadrupeds.
But the advent of 3D printing has greatly accelerated the chase.
Dr. Majidi said the technology had been “a bit of a game-changer,” enabling just about any research team or garage tinkerer to make new molds to create stretchy prototypes, a process that just a few years ago was slow and costly.
A group at Harvard University used molds from a 3D printer to create a prototype of a soft, octopus-like four-legged robot that could be controlled via tubes of liquid or air. And, in Italy, Dr. Giorgio-Serchi and his colleagues recently acquired a 3D printer that allows them to design, experiment, and revise quickly. They aim to replicate the key features of an octopus: eight arms to provide an almost infinite range of motion; the ability to squeeze through any opening larger than its chitinous beak; and an unusual nervous system in which the arms are semiautonomous and the central brain is thought to do little more than issue general commands: “Arms, let’s go catch that crab!”
To make quicker headway, some of the PoseiDrone’s components, such as the electronics, remain hard for now. The exterior will be silicone, a material whose density, like that of an octopus, is similar to water’s.
The drone’s potential missions include inspecting and repairing underwater turbines, wave-energy generators, oil rigs, ship hulls, and perhaps fishing nets. In contrast to a hard-bodied underwater bot, which would need to hover at a safe distance from such equipment, the PoseiDrone should be able to attach itself directly without damaging the equipment or itself, Dr. Giorgio-Serchi said. Sending robots down to perform dangerous tasks could also help keep human divers safer.
The drone can already crawl, swim and even carry small tools. But it is not yet ready to repair a turbine. And, although the researchers are applying for patents, it is still a crude specimen, a robotic Frankenstein’s monster bridging the eras of hard and squishy; currently only eighty percent soft materials.
“It’s still very much a work in progress,” Dr. Majidi said. And Mark R. Cutkosky, a professor at Stanford School of Engineering, said: “How do we build stretchy conductors? That’s still a very open question. It sounds pretty prosaic,” he added, “yet one of the biggest challenges is just wiring. This was true twenty years ago, and it’s still true.” The PoseiDrone’s movements still rely on external control of conventional motors and actuators.
Nevertheless, the octopus robot is more sophisticated than a standard robot covered in rubber, Dr. Giorgio-Serchi said. Its abundance of soft, elastic materials enables it to do things most other robots cannot, much as stiff-jointed humans cannot do what an octopus can, despite our soft skin and muscles. “Without the soft part,” Dr. Giorgio-Serchi said, “it would just be a pile of motors and cables.”
Also like real cephalopods, the PoseiDrone, whose body is about the length of an adult human hand, could be just about any scale, from fractions of an inch to dozens of feet across. A larger version is in the works. And perhaps not reassuring  to those who fear a robot uprising, the bigger it is, “the easier it is to make it stronger, and fast,” Dr. Giorgio-Serchi said.
Virtually any conceivable form is now just a click away, so why do researchers focus on animal models? Dr. Cutkosky, who has built a climbing robot with gecko-inspired grippers, says we inevitably look to the natural world for inspiration. And caution. Comparing the octopus robot to its real-life counterpart, he said, “It’s probably a good thing they’re confined to water.”

Rico says there's a science-fiction thriller in here somewhere...

Microsoft for the day

The BBC has an article about Microsoft's troubles in China:

An anti-monopoly investigation into US technology giant Microsoft has been launched by Chinese authorities. China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce, the body responsible for enforcing business laws, said it was looking into "alleged monopoly actions" by the company.
The announcement came after officials from the regulator visited some of Microsoft's local offices. The company said it "will address any concerns the government may have". It has not yet been accused of any specific wrongdoing.
Any potential investigation in China would be a fresh setback for Microsoft in the country, a key growth market for global technology firms. Earlier this year, China said it would ban government use of Windows 8, Microsoft's latest operating system.
The visits to Microsoft offices come just days after the China's anti-trust regulator said that Qualcomm, one of the world's biggest mobile chipmakers, had used monopoly power in setting its licensing fees. The anti-trust case has already seen some local handset makers hold back on signing licenses for Qualcomm products, hitting its revenues.
Another technology firm, Interdigital, which specializes in wireless technology, has also faced a similar investigation. Chinese regulators suspended that investigation earlier this year after Interdigital agreed to change its pricing structure.
However, some have alleged that China is using anti-trust probes to protect domestic firms. "It has become increasingly clear that the Chinese government has seized on using the anti-monopoly law to promote Chinese producer welfare, and to advance industrial policies that nurture domestic enterprises," the US Chamber of Commerce said earlier this year.

Rico says he can only shake his head sadly. (Oh, yeah, and go 'tee hee'...) But accusing the Chinese of protecting their own against foreigners? Like that never happened... (Remember the Boxer Rebellion?)

Not them, surely

Nolan Feeney has a Time article about trouble at Southwest Airlines:

The Federal Aviation Administration proposed a twelve million dollar fine against Southwest Airlines for allegedly not complying with safety regulations during Boeing 737 jetliner repairs.
The proposed fine is the second-largest in FAA history, The Associated Press reports. In 2010, the FAA proposed a twenty-four million dollar fine against American Airlines.
The agency says that Southwest’s contractor, under Southwest supervision, did not properly fasten aircraft skins and replace fuselages, among other violations, while updating forty-four planes in 2006 to prevent cracking on the aluminum exteriors. The agency also claims the Dallas-based air carrier flew those planes in 2009, despite notice from the FAA about the lack of safety compliance.
A spokesperson for Southwest said the company would respond to the agency’s claims in accordance with FAA procedure guidelines. The airline also said it “fully resolved the repair issues some time ago” and that “none of the items raised in the FAA letter affect” planes currently in operation.

Rico says not fixing things on an airplane is a discomfiting thought; those responsible should be punished, and not just by a fine. (When will public beatings come back into fashion? Yeah, and fuck the Eighth Amendment...)

Military vehicles you can buy

The BBC has an article about toys for (rich) big boys:

In 1944, Willys set about creating a civilian version of the Army’s quarter-ton jeep. The first model available to the car-buying public, the CJ-2A (CJ-1 and CJ-2 were prototype designations), went on sale in July of 1945, and its success would usher in other military-to-civilian transitions, notably Land Rover’s Series 1 (1948), Volkswagen’s Type 181 Thing (1968) and General Motors’ Hummer H1 (1992). These vehicles’ heroic reputation and all-conquering capability have cemented their appeal among all manner of outdoors enthusiasts, hip-hop personalities, and playboy despots. In their spirit, we present a septet of military trucks a civilian can buy (sans weaponry, sorry) along with a look at a vehicle that is gunning to become the next US military truck (and to someday spawn a Schwarzenegger-caliber civilian version of its own). 

 

Renault Sherpa (France)
Renault’s mighty Sherpa owes its appeal not only to the olive drab versions piloted by French and NATO soldiers, but to the charismatic appearances of the civilian model in the grueling Dakar Rally. Available by special order in Russia, Africa, and the Middle East, the non-military Sherpa can be had as an unarmored station wagon or pickup, or, for war-zone duty, a fully-armored wagon. Power comes from a deafening 4.76-liter four-cylinder diesel engine. Its 215hp and 590lb-ft of torque reach all four wheels through a six-speed automatic transmission.
Price: Approximately a million dirham ($272,000) 

 

GAZ Tigr (Russia)
That the military Tigr bears a passing resemblance to the American Humvee is, to the Russian truck’s vociferous fans, nothing more than coincidence. Beneath its expansive hood rumbles a 5.9-liter diesel engine, which meets a six-speed manual transmission and permanent four-wheel-drive. Production of the civilian Tigr– which can soften its brutality with the addition of such creature comforts as leather, air conditioning, and a thumping audio system– is hardly a top priority for GAZ, and acquiring one is neither simple nor inexpensive, but a successful buyer is fairly guaranteed to be the only Tigr-tamer in his okrestnosti.
Price: approximately three and a half million rubles ($110,000) 

 

Mercedes-Benz G63 AMG 6x6 (Austria)
As production vehicles go, the Mercedes-Benz Geländewagen, otherwise known as the G Class, is ancient. Merely revised during more than thirty years of production, this brick-like military machine in a civilian paint job still manages to capture the imagination of those who dream of traffic parting with their approach: business tycoons, action-film stars, the Pope. Like the “standard” G63 AMG, the new G63 AMG 6x6 packs a twin-turbo 5.5-liter V8 engine producing 536hp and 560 lb-ft of torque. The engine meets the six-by-six drivetrain from Mercedes’ hulking Zetros truck, yielding sixteen inches of ground clearance, sufficient to ford water as deep as forty inches. Getting behind the wheel of this ultimate G Class, unless you happen to be, say, a James Bond villain, will be tricky. The vehicle is not (legally) destined for North America or right-hand-drive countries, and Mercedes has promised that production volume will be “very small”.
Price: 379,000 euros (approximately $523,000) 

 

Paramount Marauder (South Africa)
Ten tons of South African stoutness, the Marauder is possessed of a double-skin monocoque that helps it resist virtually all forms of light-arms fire, as well as the occasional anti-tank mine. It also, as Top Gear’s Richard Hammond learned, is rather good as a city runabout, provided the pilot steers clear of fast-food drive-throughs.
Price: $485,000 

 

Polaris MV850 Terrain Armor Edition (United States)
Designed to thwart “enemy ballistics, treacherous terrain and other mission-crippling obstacles”, the MV850, from US-based Polaris Industries, is the first military ATV to make use of non-pneumatic tires. The company promises that the single-seat trucklet’s TerrainArmor tires, invented by Wisconsin-based Resilient Technologies, can shake off shots from a .50-calibre gun or penetration by a railroad spike, even while carrying a full combat load. In both the MV850 and its equally tenacious civilian counterpart, the WV850, a 77-horsepower, 850cc two-cylinder engine is matched to a single-speed transmission and all-wheel drive. With TerrainArmor's proven survivability on the battlefield, it's a safe bet that the US military is looking closely at non-pneumatic tires for bigger machines, including the coming replacement for the Hummer.
Price: $15,000 

 

Supacat LRV 400 (Britain)The Qt Wildcat, formerly known as the Bowler Wildcat, is a Land Rover Defender-based cross-country rally runner. The new Supacat LRV 400 is the military version of the Wildcat, and it delivers the rally car’s high-speed all-terrain capability in a somewhat more weaponized package. Perfect for special forces teams, border patrol agencies, and the like, the LRV (which stows neatly aboard a CH-47 Chinook helicopter for easy transport) packs a 3.2-liter five-cylinder turbocharged diesel engine from Ford that’s good for 236 horsepower, although buyers may opt for gasoline V8 engines producing as much as 640hp. Top speed with the standard diesel is 106mph, but the addition of a armor plates, winches, and a roof-mounted .50-caliber machine gun may sap performance a bit.
Price: approximately $250,000 

 

Go-Ped Knightrider (US/Israel)
A scooter on the battlefield? Roger that. Meet the Knightrider, from US scooter-maker Go-Ped. It may bear a passing resemblance to the neighbour kid’s Razor, but don’t be fooled: this two-wheeler is no toy.
Based on Go-Ped’s Hoverboard civilian electric scooter and the police-spec ESR-750 Portable Patrol Vehicle, the matte-black Knightrider was designed for stealthy special-forces maneuvers over hostile terrain, with fat knobby tires and a long-travel cantilever-style suspension. The Knightrider’s lithium-ion polymer battery pack and Torkinator electric motor deliver a maximum cruising range of 25 miles and a top speed, thanks to a short-burst Turbo mode, of nineteen miles an hour.
So who is using the Knightrider? That’s strictly need-to-know, according to Go-Ped. Says Tactical Division chief executive Dr. Ran Lapid: “I can only confirm that the Knightrider was tested by the most prestigious special ops commando units in the world.”
Price: $4,700 

 

Oshkosh L-ATV (United States)
How to replace a fleet of aging Humvees that numbers in the tens of thousands? With a bit of technological derring-do. Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Defense has developed the L-ATV prototype to pick up where the Humvee has left off, carrying a diesel-electric hybrid powertrain that allows the purpose-built vehicle to run near-silent when missions require it. The US government has taken delivery of twenty L-ATV prototypes for testing, but civilian sales do not figure in Oshkosh’s immediate product plans.
Price: N/A

Rico says all too expensive and specialized for him, but cool...

Israel intensifies Gaza attacks

The BBC has an article about the latest in Gaza:

More than a hundred Palestinians are said to have been killed as Israel intensified its bombardment of Gaza and a ceasefire proposal was rebuffed by Hamas. Gaza's only power plant was hit, as Israel carried out air strikes targeting sites linked to Hamas, the Islamist group which controls Gaza. Israel intercepted rockets over central and southern parts of the country. Later, Hamas turned down a ceasefire proposal from a senior Palestinian in the West Bank. The proposal, by Yasser Abed Rabbo of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) came in the aftermath of a deadly series of air strikes. He said a ceasefire was imminent and claimed to speak for Hamas, but a spokesman for the group quickly denied that.
As night fell an audio recording emerged attributed to Hamas' reclusive military leader, Mohammad Deif, asserting Hamas' position.
The BBC's Chris Morris reports from the ruins of a Gaza mosque, where he says the mood is one of "defiance".
"We don't accept any condition of ceasefire," The Associated Press quoted the Hamas commander as saying. "There is no ceasefire without the stop of the aggression and the end of the siege."
Palestinian officials now say just over eleven hundred Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed in the fighting since 8 July 2014. Some sixty-seven hundred have been injured. Israel has lost 53 soldiers and three civilians, two Israelis and a Thai worker.
Gazans get power from just one local plant, as well as some supplies from Israel and Egypt. A huge plume of smoke rose over the Strip's only power plant, after one of its fuel tanks was reportedly set alight by Israeli tank shells, and the facility was forced to shut down.
For the last three weeks, most Gazans have been living with just a few hours of electrical supplies, but now the situation will almost certainly get worse.
After a brief lull in the fighting earlier this week, the violence has returned with a renewed intensity.
In Gaza City, you can hear the constant bombardment of areas close to the Israeli border. There have also been large explosions in the city throughout the morning. Any sign that a patchwork of truces would lead to more a sustainable ceasefire has been dashed for now.

Bethany Bell, BBC News, reports from Jerusalem:
Rockets have continued to target Israeli towns and cities from within Gaza. More than three weeks on, there is in general very widespread support among Israelis for the Gaza offensive. Recent polls say almost ninety percent of Israelis are in favor.
Some are beginning to ask whether the army and the government underestimated the tunnel threat from Gaza. Targeting the tunnels is one of Israel's main objectives in this campaign, but destroying them is complicated.
Israel says it has identified more than thirty tunnels, but the army was taken off guard last night when five soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants who came up through a tunnel into Israel. Military sources say these aren't just single shafts, but a labyrinth of underground passageways, some booby-trapped with explosives. The government says it will not stop the offensive until the tunnels are destroyed.

Fifty-five houses were destroyed in overnight bombing, with people buried under rubble in at least three of them (photo), Palestinian security sources told the BBC. The unoccupied house of former Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh was destroyed. A neighbor, Um Hani abu Ryalah, told The Associated Press the experience had terrified her family: "Our children... can't hear because of the loud explosions and they are shaking."
Israeli fire is also said to have damaged the Hamas television and radio stations, three mosques, four factories and government buildings. Gaza's port had also been destroyed, Palestinian security sources told the BBC, and two schools and a kindergarten were on fire after being hit.
Among the hundred people killed on Tuesday were seven families, the Palestinian health ministry said.
UN Relief and Works Agency spokesman Chris Gunness said in a tweet that a number of staff members had reportedly been killed. The UN is currently caring for 182,604 Palestinians in its 82 shelters in Gaza, he said.
Rockets fired from Gaza continued to hit Israel. The Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepted four over the southern city of Beersheva, Israeli media reported. Sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and several other towns.
Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, told The Associated Press that pressure was being increased on Hamas. "Israel is determined to strike this organization and relieve us of this threat," he said. The renewed violence comes after Israel said ten soldiers died on Monday: five were killed by an infiltrator near the border, four by a mortar strike, and another in fighting in southern Gaza.
In a recent address to Israelis, Netanyahu said Gaza had to be demilitarized in order to protect Israel. "We will not finish the operation without neutralizing the tunnels, which have the sole purpose of destroying our citizens, killing our children," he said.
Israel's Operation Protective Edge began on 8 July 2014 after a surge in militant rocket attacks. A rally in support of the operation is planned for Tuesday evening in Tel Aviv.

Rico says it's still 'clueless in Gaza'...

Local history for the day

Jessica Parks has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about some little-known local Civil War history:

Neighbors opposing the proposed demolition of the William Penn Inn in Lower Merion presented information suggesting that the building might have harbored runaway slaves. At a meeting of the township Historical Commission, a resident of the inn showed photographs of a trapdoor panel and a hiding place between the second and third floors.
Gerald A. Francis, president of the Lower Merion Historical Society, said it would be nearly impossible to prove that runaways passed through, but "it would make sense" given its location near other known safe houses.
Joseph Price, one of Lower Merion's most notable Quaker forefathers, built the inn in 1799. In his diaries, Price wrote of giving money to slaves and helping them on their way to freedom, Francis said.
William Dupertuis said that, when he moved into one of the inn's apartments fifteen years ago, "I was told about the understanding of it being a stop on the Underground Railroad and there were hidden panels." Dupertuis showed photographs and described how a rope-and-pulley system hidden in the wall opened up a four- by eight-foot space in the ceiling.
Robert Wise, a historic preservation planner hired by the developer, said he had no idea about a possible slavery connection when he prepared his report. "This is news to me," he said.
John Rayer, the developer buying the property at Lancaster Avenue and Clover Hill Road, estimated the inn would cost two million dollars to restore to historical standards. He wants to build five single-family houses on the two-acre lot.
The Historical Commission unanimously recommended a ninety-day delay in the demolition. The plan is scheduled to be considered by the Planning Commission on 8 September 2014.

Rico says that's right up the street from him; he'll have to check it out...

History for the day

On 29 July 1981, Britain's Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, England.

Rico says, yeah, and that turned out so well...

Quote for the day

From The New York Times:

"It's not a pleasant thought that you sit one day on the patio drinking coffee with your wife and a bunch of terrorists will rise from the ground."

Eyal Brandeis, a political scientist who lives on Kibbutz Sufa in Israel,

a mile from where thirteen militants emerged from a tunnel at dawn on 17 July 2014.

Rico says we wouldn't tolerate this on the Mexican (or even the Canadian) border, and neither should they...

The bankers of Paris

DelanceyPlace.com has a selection from How Paris Became Paris by Joan DeJean:

The first gigantic modern fortunes in Paris, France in the early 1600s originated not with the profits of commerce or industry, but from high finance. These financiers arose through the profligacy of the King, both in his wars (the army grew from forty thousand to four hundred thousand soldiers) and his lifestyle. The sheer magnitude of the King's needs meant that the bankers of Paris displaced the famed bankers of Florence, Italy as the most important in Europe:
In the word financier's inaugural appearance in English, in the 1652 The State of France, John Evelyn explained the workings of 'the King's revenue' and described 'the great financiers who suck the very blood of the French people.' 

For the first time, Europeans could use words invented with the objective of classifying individuals according to their financial status, and of singling out persons of new wealth. Such individuals had existed before, but evidently not in sufficient numbers for a society to bestow official linguistic recognition on the phenomenon. And whereas previously, in European cities such as Venice, Italy and Amsterdam in Holland, most recent wealth had been accumulated through trade and the overseas trade in particular, the parvenus of seventeenth-century Paris had amassed their fortunes by dealing, not in goods, but solely in money. The emergence of the financier began in about 1600, when the French monarchy first encountered fiscal problems that have ever since plagued the modern state.  Prior to the seventeenth century and early in that century, the French state lived mostly within its means: Henri IV even built up a small surplus (Adam Smith claimed he was one of the last rulers ever to do so). Then, during the first quarter of the century, spending began to outstrip revenue. As a result, the bankers, especially the Italians, who had ruled over the finances of all European nations in the sixteenth century gradually ceased to play a preeminent role in France. The individuals then known as bankers dealt in foreign currency exchange and transferred funds throughout Europe. When, for example, a monarch had to pay soldiers stationed on foreign soil, he would call on a banker. But once French monarchs began to spend on a previously unheard-of scale, the need for another type of financial agent became evident. Lyon, formerly the nucleus for French finance because of its association with Italian bankers, thus lost its centrality. And by the 1630s Paris, home to the financiers, the new financial agents on whom the crown increasingly depended, had become the country's uncontested finance hub. Whereas in the sixteenth century the French monarchy's revenue had remained stable, in the range of eight to twenty million livres annually, during the first half of the seventeenth century this situation changed dramatically. Between 1590 and 1622, for example, revenue rose from about eighteen million livres to an estimated fifty million a year; by 1653, the total had grown to roughly 109 million, and it stayed well over a hundred million throughout Louis XIV's reign. This meant that the French monarchy had access to resources that vastly outstripped those of its major European rivals. A noted eighteenth-century economist estimated that, during Louis XIV's reign, France's revenue was four times greater than England's, and nearly three times superior to that of the Dutch Republic. Relatively little of that was spent on keeping up appearances: between 1600 and 1656, court expenses rose only from three million livres to six million. However, whereas in 1600, court expenses accounted for thirty-one percent of the budget, in 1656 they represented only seven percent. During that half-century, the cost of war changed the face of French finance. France was at war with foreign enemies for sixty of the years between 1615 and 1715; it was torn by civil war for another five. In addition, Europeans had begun to wage war on a scale without precedent. The Thirty Years' War (1618- 48), the War of the Grand Alliance or of the League of Augsburg (1688-97), and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) made armed conflict more costly than ever before. As a result, the French military machine never ceased growing. Whereas, for example, in the 1590s, the French royal army was only forty thousand strong, less than a century later Louis XIV maintained a force of about four hundred thousand. Since France's main rivals, England and Holland, were maritime powers and the French had no navy to speak of, the country spent on a colossal scale to acquire one: in 1661 its entire 'fleet' consisted of eighteen near wrecks, but soon one hundred and twenty vessels sailed under French colors. Such transformations were possible because those in charge of the finances of France had begun to follow a logic later presented by Adam Smith as 'the necessity of contracting debt in times of war': 'An immediate and great expense will not wait for the gradual and slow returns of new taxes. In this exigency government can have no other resource but in borrowing.'"The French government's bookkeeping divided expenses into 'ordinary' (court expenses) and 'extraordinary'. Due to the rising cost of war, between 1600 and 1656, extraordinary expenses ballooned-from just seven million livres to over a hundred million. When budget deficits began to surge, the State began to borrow as never before and thus had recourse to a type of financial agent who surfaced in the late sixteenth century: the financier. "The original financiers signed traités, tax or loan contracts, with the Crown; they also bought, sometimes at auctions organized by the Crown, charges or offices that made them part of a private fiscal administration with close ties to the government, an administration that vastly expanded in size in the course of the seventeenth century. In return, they acquired the right to collect a new tax or import or export duty from which they guaranteed the government a fixed income, and from which they were allowed to retain a sizable share of the profits. Contract terms varied with supply and demand, but financiers always lent money at a cost far above the official rate of between five and eight percent. At moments when a war was going badly and the monarchy's need was therefore most pressing and money most scarce, a rate of twenty-five percent became standard, hence the steady rise in 'extraordinary' expenses, a category that included the interest on loans. Tax contracts were especially useful to the Crown because the deal was closed and money changed hands very quickly. Contracts for five hundred thousand livres were soon common; many involved far larger amounts. Naturally, few financial agents were able to deal for such stakes: it's likely that, at any moment in the century, fewer than a hundred individuals virtually controlled the financial fate of France. As the monarchy became ever more dependent on credit because its needs were growing, that number shrank. And thus it was that the first gigantic modern fortunes in Paris originated, not with the profits of commerce or industry, but from high finance.

Rico says that nothing's changed; our banks make a lot of money lending to the gummint...

Gubs for the day

David Weigel has a Slate article about DC and gubs:

At the end of last week, Senior District Court Judge Frederick Scullin Jr. handed a huge victory to DC's outnumbered supporters of unfettered Second Amendment rights. The district's handgun restrictions, wrote Scullin, flew in the face of precedent. "In light of Heller, McDonald, and their progeny," wrote Scullin, referring to other cases that rolled back the gun laws, "there is no longer any basis on which this Court can conclude that the District of Columbia's total ban on the public carrying of ready-to-use handguns outside the home is constitutional under any level of scrutiny." The District was violating the Constitution by refusing to let people from other states open-carry or conceal-carry their guns. Just days before, an unlucky South Carolina activist had been arrested for trying to take his loaded Ruger into the Capitol. The people's Capitol. (It was an accident.)
Yet, on my ride in to work today, I saw no fellow citizens carrying guns. The reasons are simple; it's still hard to get a gun license in the city, the city is readying an appeal and a request for a stay, and in the meantime police are being advised to "record any relevant information" about, and check the criminal background of, anyone they spot with a gun. For now, Palmer v. District of Columbia is mostly interesting as the second example in just a few days of libertarian lawyers dunking on the liberal state. Tom Palmer, listed first among the plaintiffs, is the director of the libertarian Cato University program, and a vice president of the Randian Atlas Society. He was a plaintiff in the Heller case, too; in attorney Alan Gura's words, he was "a gay man who had previously, in California, fended off a hate crime using a firearm that he happened to have on him". Just as the attorneys in Halbig found conservatives who were eager to sue, they could find ready, liberty-minded skeptics of DC's gun laws.
These people are relatively rare in DC, until you enter the halls of Congress. (Assuming you don't try to enter while carrying a gun.) Kentucky Representative Tom Massie, a libertarian-minded Ron Paul acolyte who wants to defund DC's gun laws in the current appropriations bill, has declared this case a clear victory. Certainly, as libertarian counterattacks go, it's more effective and less personally harmful than Adam Kokesh's:

Rico says this ain't over yet...

MILFs

Rico says that, if you don't already know what they are, this video will explain:

SuperBowl commercials

Oops is a Dutch word

Rico says his arch-perv friend Dave forwards this:

Glowing oceans

Lindsey Galloway has a BBC article about bioluminescence:

As night falls on certain beaches around the world, the waves glow (photo) with an eerie blue light: tiny, neon dots that make it look as though stars are washing up on shore.
The surreal scene arises, not from magic, but from plankton that have evolved to glow in order to startle or distract fish and other potential predators. Some scientists call it the “burglar alarm effect”: by lighting up, the plankton draw even larger predators that, in turn, eat the animal threatening them. The phosphorescence only occurs when the microorganisms, which exist worldwide, are agitated, such as when the water crashes onto the shore, someone steps on the wet sand, or a paddle hits the waves.
The phenomenon’s effects can vary depending on time of year and weather, so sightings cannot always be predicted. Even so, here are three spots where you’re most likely to see the sea shine with its own light:

Maldives
Visitors to the Indian Ocean archipelago say they have had the most luck seeing the blue glow from about July to February, especially during a new moon since the darkness of the sky helps intensify the light. The bioluminescence can occur throughout the country’s twenty-six atolls, but some of the most spectacular photographs have been captured on the grouping’s eastern islands, including Mudhdhoo, Vaadhoo, and Rangali. 

Puerto RicoMosquito Bay on the island of Vieques has the nickname of Bioluminescent Bay (often called Bio Bay) for the bright plankton that illuminates the water. Unexpectedly, the bay went dark in January of 2014. Some scientists theorize that a wind shift pushed many of the microorganisms out of the bay, but the various factors that contribute to the bioluminescence make it difficult to say for sure.
Thankfully, the bay brightened again in June of 2014, although at a lower intensity. Though no one knows if the bay will return to full strength, tour operators are still running kayak tours, as scientists work to study the bay the rest of the week in hopes of preserving the magical glow. 

San DiegoThere is bizarre bioluminescence in this Southern Californian city, too, caused when millions of phytoplankton form a group of algae so big they discolor the nearby water. Surfers see a “red tide” every few years, when these algal blooms give the sea a reddish tint by day and a bright blue phosphorescent glow by night (photo). When the right combination of water temperature, wind, darkness of the sky, and other factors come together, surfers and swimmers can glide through the water with a glow illuminating their way. Though some algal bloom can be harmful, the species common to San Diego, Lingulodinium polyedrum, is not considered to be toxic.

Rico says that's pretty...

Another cease fire? Why not? The last one worked so well...

David Stout has a Time article about Gaza:

The UN Security Council agreed on a demand for an immediate truce in Gaza, following the resumption of fighting between Hamas and Israel. The fifteen-member council’s call for all “parties to engage in efforts to achieve a durable and fully respected cease-fire” came as the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr commenced, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
The renewed push for an end to hostilities follows the collapse of a humanitarian agreement over the weekend after Hamas fired a salvo of rockets (photo) into Israel that was then followed by the renewed shelling of Gaza by Israeli forces.
There is little evidence to suggest that either side trusts the other enough to follow through with another deal, according to Lina Khatib, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center. “Israel and Hamas both did not abide by the truce even though they said they agreed to it. The fighting that’s restarted by both sides is a sign that each of them was expecting the other to break the truce first,” she told Time. “There’s a dynamic of mistrust that has overwhelmed any desire to engage in truces on both sides.”
During an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed that his administration was not obliged to agree to another armistice that would allow Hamas “to rearm, and continue firing on our citizens. We’ll determine what is important for our own security in the way that we can to protect our people, including working against these terror tunnels that they’re digging against us,” said Netanyahu. “That’s how we’ll act.”
At least a thousand Palestinians have been killed and more than six thousand injured during the first twenty days of Israeli military’s offensive into Gaza, according to the latest tally by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Forty-six Israelis have been killed, including two civilians and one foreign national.
Hamas has rejected several cease-fire initiatives, including the US-backed deal tabled by Cairo earlier this month, and said it will continue to do so until the Netanyahu Administration agrees to terminate its seven-year blockade of Gaza. In an exclusive interview with Charlie Rose, Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal reiterated the organization’s position. “Life is a right for our people in Palestine,” said Meshaal. “This is a collective punishment. We need to lift the siege.”
Analysts explain that Hamas’ obstinacy reflects the group’s desire to remain a political mainstay in the Israeli-Palestinian equation, after joining a unity government with the Palestinian Authority earlier this year. “Hamas wants to prove that it can make demands and it can deliver results,” says Khatib. “So it’s important, for its own credibility, to show that it can make demands and see the results.”

Rico says that Eyeless in Gaza was a good book, but it should now be called Clueless in Gaza...