SURVEILLANCE AND AI: The Future of Surveillance? When Automated Brains Keep Watch 24/7. Oh, goody.

UH OH: “A second, much larger volcano in Iceland is showing signs that it may be about to erupt, scientists have warned.”

COMING: More California municipal bankruptcies?

RAHM EMANUEL heckled in Israel. “Emanuel’s father is from Israel, but many Israelis blame the U.S. official for what they see as the Obama administration’s anti-Israel policies.”

NASDAQ AND MISTAKES: Of Cows And Bears And Mice And Men.

LABOR: Finding a Badly Needed New Generation of Nano Workers, In Unlikely Places.

MARKDOWNS AT the Amazon Outlet store.

HOW TO REBOOT YOUR SLEEP CYCLE.

THE SIX-FIGURE law review article?

TAMING TINNITUS with electrical stimulation.

NORTH VS. SOUTH KOREA: How bad could a war get?

TESTOSTERONE MAKES NAIVE WOMEN less trusting.

MIKE STOPA: A Tea Party candidate for Congress in Massachusetts. Via Chris Peterson who notes: “This is probably the first time that a nanotechnologist has run for Congress.”

PRESS CONFERENCE FOLLIES: Obama: Um, I’m not sure if the MMS director was fired or resigned. Plus this Obama defense from the right: “WaPo writers are touting the fact that he officially ‘owns’ the spill now and Chris Matthews continues to hammer him on MSNBC, all of which I’m happy to play along with politically, but I’m a little hazy on what precisely people want him to do that BP isn’t already doing. Jindal criticized him over the weekend for being too slow in approving materials needed to build oil barriers for the coast, so that’s one thing. But I think our favorite liberal has it right: Most of The One’s negligence here happened before the BP rig exploded, not after.”

A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BREED of Faux-Ferrari.

REASON TV: A Teachers’ Strike In Paradise.

A SIGN OF OVER-INFLATED PROSECUTORIAL BUDGETS: Prosecution for truancy-related forgery.

Shannon Anderson 27, along with her husband, William Anderson, were arrested March 8 and March 9, respectively, on felony warrants charging them with forging a doctor’s note to excuse their third-grade son from school.

Really, prosecutors have time for this kind of stuff? Apparently, yes:

A Corning woman is out on bail today, one day after she was arrested on a warrant charging eight felony counts of truancy-related forgery.

“This is a sad, sad case for the little kids who should have been in school,” Tehama County District Attorney Gregg Cohen said in a statement.

Kari Shannon Brandt, 38, was booked into the Tehama County Jail on Tuesday on six counts of preparing false documentary evidence and two counts of offering false evidence in the course of an investigation, Cohen said. . . . Prosecutors accuse Brandt of forging signatures and creating doctors’ notes on 12 occasions between December 2009 and April. The reported notes were written for three of Brandt’s children, ages 6, 7 and 8, in a reported effort to excuse them from West Street Elementary School in Corning, Cohen said.

I feel comfortable concluding that Cohen’s appropriation is much too large if he has time for cases like this. I encourage the relevant officials to direct the money to more significant priorities in this time of hard-pressed public budgets.

UPDATE: Reader Al Nugent writes:

This is the prosecutorial equivalent of the apocryphal Vietnam ‘we had to destroy the village in order to save it’ incident. In this case he’s burning down the family. Apparently this idiot thinks the best thing he can do for these kids is give their parents felony conviction. I’m sure that will improve their chances of supporting them through college immeasurably.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steven Den Beste writes: “Why do you need a note from a doctor to keep your kids out of school?” Because now they belong to the state. You just get them on loan, weekends.

MORE: Reader Ronnie Schrieber writes:

Don’t entirely blame the prosecutor. My bet is that he was acting at the behest of school administrators. Certainly the matter was brought to the prosecutor’s attention by public school administrators. In my experience, public school administrators get indignant when parents don’t meekly comply with whatever “rules” they’ve instituted. Recently, when my daughter was questioning why my granddaughter’s school follows Indiana dept. of health guidelines on lice instead of our own department of health’s guidelines here in Michigan (Indiana’s guidelines are more restrictive so they appeal to control-minded types like school administrators), the principal told her that it was “unprofessional” for her to debate the issue in front of my granddaughter. The same principal has told me that sick children must be “symptom free” for 24 hours before they can go back to school. When I told her that was my daughter’s call, not the school’s, she made a sour face. All of these policies come with the implicit threat that the school will contact child protective services if the parents don’t comply.

Good point, and a reason to get out of the public schools — but it’s still the prosecutor who’s responsible for decisions to prosecute.

DAVID HARSANYI: The Rand Paul Distraction.

SHOCKER: Study finds increased gov’t spending results in unemployment.

SWINE FLU NO HOAX: “Here’s the answer I hear from scientists: declaring a pandemic and making vaccine were overwhelmingly the right things to do given the science and technology at our disposal.”

WOMAN SUES CELLPHONE COMPANY after husband discovers her affair through phone bill.

IT’S A LITTLE CRAMPED: Test-driving the 2011 Infiniti QX56.

THOUGHTS ON AI and Driverless Cars.

NEW DRUGS for macular degeneration.

IN THE MAIL: From Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization.