HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN APPS for smartphones and tablets.

POLIWOOD: The Debt: A Movie Too Smart for Some of Our Critics?

DUDE, WHERE’S MY AK-47? “I’ll go out on a limb here and assume you’re aware that the economy’s not so hot. And that the likelihood of college grads snagging full-time employment that doesn’t require wearing a paper hat is pretty slim. One tried and true way for undergrads to improve their chances of getting hired after they’re handed a diploma is a summer internship. Sure, you probably won’t be paid, but at least you’re getting some real world experience, right? Chris Jeon, being the proactive type he is, decided to create his own internship fighting with Libyan rebels as his summer vacay wound down.”

SCIENCE: Biomarkers show difference between healthy, obese kids; Personalized medicine market to grow.

MORE ON THE SEMI-FAILURE OF Blue Origins’ rocket test.

NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY: Apple Investigators Allegedly Posed as Cops in iPhone Prototype Hunt. If someone shows up at your house or office claiming to be a cop, you might want to call the police (or FBI office, or wherever they claim to be from) and independently verify their identity.

UPDATE: Reader Brian Smiley writes:

According to an article from CNN (posted today) CNN is reporting that the SF Police said they helped Apple search someone’s home for a missing item… which kind of goes against what you posted from Wired. Ooops.

“In the statement sent to CNN and other news media late Friday, police did not describe what ‘lost item’ Apple was looking for. However, the file name of that news release is ‘iphone5.doc,’ as Reuters pointed out. Lt. Troy Dangerfield gave an interview to SF Weekly Friday afternoon confirming the police’s involvement with Apple in the investigation.”

So I guess this means that the Wired article is not correct?

Well, if CNN is right, I think that means Wired has to be wrong.

MARS: Probe Spots Remains of Martian Lake and River.

ORBITAL DEBRIS UPDATE: Space junk reaching “tipping point,” report warns. “The amount of debris orbiting the Earth has reached ‘a tipping point’ for collisions, which would in turn generate more of the debris that threatens astronauts and satellites, according to a U.S. study released on Thursday. NASA needs a new strategic plan for mitigating the hazards posed by spent rocket bodies, discarded satellites and thousands of other pieces of junk flying around the planet at speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, the National Research Council said in the study.”

Here’s a piece that Rob Merges and I wrote for the Environmental Law Reporter last year on the subject.

HAPPY International Bacon Day!

CHANGE: It’s getting much more difficult to join, or stay in, the U.S. Army. “The military is now a club that many want to join, but only few are good enough to get in.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

As a loan guy who does mostly VA loans for active duty military members, I have seen something twice in the last 90 days that I had never seen before. Enlisted people summarily returned to civilian life with time still left on their enlistment, and without warning. One of them the day we were supposed to close on her home loan. An honorable discharge, so no harm to them, but the one commonality I saw was that they had both been “in rank” a little too long. Aside from the tighter recruiting, there is clearly an “up or out” criteria being implemented as well.

Interesting.

SAD: Kelo v. New London: An Ignominous End for One of the Supreme Court’s Worst Decisions. “Connecticut taxpayers have thus been soaked tens of millions of dollars, not just for nothing, but for making things worse — for transforming a nice local neighborhood into a dump.”

IN THE MAIL: From Roy F. Baumeister & John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: A new Afterburner from Bill Whittle.

THE LESS-BORING SIDE OF THE PROFESSORIATE: Professor is accused of being a biker-gang leader and drug dealer. I wonder what his student evaluations look like.

Best bit: “To have an associate professor who is a member of the Devils Diciples and allegedly dealing methamphetamine is quite alarming. I mean, it’s unusual to say the least.” One hopes.

MICKEY KAUS: OBAMA AND CONGRESS:

If the Democrats who ran both houses of Congress and the White House before then didn’t focus on “what the American people need them to be focused on,” whose fault is that? Is Obama running against Nancy Pelosi too? … P.S.: In this situation, do voters want a candidate who is “frustrated”–or one who’s contrite? …

Obama doesn’t do contrite, so the Democrats had better hope for alternative one.

SPENGLER: Obama will get an economic recovery when demand curves slope upwards.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Zero Jobs 101 — the Psychology of Alienating Employers. “Zero jobs last month — a net change of zero job growth? It was just announced that last month’s unemployment is still above 9% — despite the nearly five trillion dollars in Keynesian pump-priming, the near zero interest rates, the expanded unemployment and food stamp support, and the government takeovers and subsidies of businesses. There is a scary sort of deer-in-the-headlights look about Obama and Biden that is quite disturbing. . . . In the last 30 months, the Obama administration has created a psychological landscape that finally just seemed, whether fairly or not, too hostile to most employers to risk new hiring and buying. Each act, in and of itself, was irrelevant. Together they are proving catastrophic and doing the near impossible of turning a brief recovery into another recession. . . . Highly publicized visits to bankrupt subsidized green plants, blaming George Bush, new racially-driven invective from some congresspeople against the Tea Party, sermons about the sensitivities of illegal aliens, politically-correct tutorials about Islam — all that might rally the base or in isolation be understandable, but again fairly or not, such liberal rhetoric simply adds to the problem from yet another dimension: confirming perceptions that employers are about the last people in the world that this administration is worried about.”

GOOD QUESTION: Inquiring minds want to know: Why did green-jobs bust Solyndra get a gigantic federal loan? “The White House insists it didn’t intervene with DOE on Solyndra’s behalf, but — go figure — the company’s key investor was a foundation headed by George Kaiser, a billionaire known for raising boatloads of money for Barack Obama.”

AT AMAZON, top deals in Patio & Garden.

MESSAGE TO DOUG MATACONIS: I haven’t called for the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment. In fact, the very post of mine that you link — which I had actually forgotten, but hey, it’s not bad! — says this:

It’s even enough to get some people calling for a repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment, which required direct popular election of Senators, whose selection was previously left in the hands of state legislatures.

I don’t know what I think of this idea — you want to think that anything would be an improvement over what we’ve got now, but heck, that’s probably what people thought when we ratified the Seventeenth Amendment — but I have heard it proposed more than once recently. (Some somewhat more serious criticism of the Seventeenth Amendment can be found here.) And this is surely a bad reflection on the Senate as it exists now.

My own proposal for reform would be a bit different: Make anyone who serves in the Senate ineligible to run for President. That wouldn’t be much of a loss, really — Senators do very badly in the Presidential election business anyway. But while legislatively selected Senators might have been smart guys, or at least politically wise men, Senators elected in statewide races are likely to be ambitious politicians who see the Senate as a stepping stone. My proposal would steer those people elsewhere, which might improve the Senate.

See, that’s not really the same thing as repealing the Seventeenth Amendment at all. But I’m happy to put it out there again. Mataconis’ point, however, is that favoring such a repeal is not really a radical position, and that’s certainly true.

UPDATE: A swift correction. Thanks!

JOHN HINDERAKER: “The Obama administration has turned out to be a bitter disappointment, and Democrats aren’t taking it well.” Plus, the secret heart of Face The Nation.

STUDENT LOANS AND DEBT-TO-SALARY RATIOS: Out Of School And Into The Red. “Instead of looking at tuition and salaries, I have examined the debt-to-salary ratio. Student debt captures more about the true costs of college than does tuition alone; due to generous scholarships and grants, many universities’ sticker price is vastly different from what students actually end up paying. . . . Schools with a ratio of .57 or higher (marked in red) are at the other end of the spectrum. According to Mapping Your Future, student debt that represents more than 57 percent of one year’s salary will yield loan payments that are unaffordable. Nineteen North Carolina Schools exceed that ratio. Two schools, Johnson C. Smith and Meredith College, have ratios greater than one-to-one.” Can you say higher education bubble? These are mostly fairly obscure private schools with high tuitions but no offsetting national reputation. Such schools will be the first casualties when students are no longer willing to bear punishing levels of post-graduation debt.

“I’VE NEVER MET PRESIDENT OBAMA.”

RANKING LAW SCHOOLS by graduates’ standard of living. Yale is #16. Harvard is #17.

HEH: “Also, Make Sure to Write Obsessively About Trig Palin’s Matrilineal Line. I don’t know why Andrew Sullivan forgot to mention that bit of advice.”