UTAH TEA PARTY FOUNDER DAVID KIRKHAM WILL ANNOUNCE HE’S RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR TOMORROW. Good.

SARAH PALIN: Hey, if I were in South Carolina, I’d vote for Newt.

SUSANNAH BRESLIN: How To Get Married. Under less than ideal circumstances.

2012: Now or Never for the Standard Model of Physics?

WELL, THAT’LL NEVER FLY: Climate Proposal Puts Practicality Ahead Of Sacrifice. Sacrifice is the point.

WIKIPEDIA AND GOOGLE will protest SOPA tomorrow.

Google will join Wednesday’s protest of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Unlike Wikipedia and reddit, Google will not shut down its homepage, which is the world’s most visited site.

Instead, the company will display a message opposing the legislation.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Hollywood) calls it a “stunt.”

UPDATE: A reader emails with a devilishly clever suggestion:

On the Wikipedia-Google strike/protest… what I’ve said all along is they need to go on strike in a more sensible, targeted way. The most onerous part of SOPA is the IP blocking and information control… the sites in opposition should give the would-be Ministry of Information a taste of their own medicine. Block all US government IP addresses from Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, and other opponents- from now until this bill is dead and buried- with a message redirecting to AFF’s “call your legislator” page.

Or if you REALLY want to get results… cut off IP addresses of the constituents of all members of the Judiciary committees, starting with those registered to their biggest donors (which is all publicly available information). This “do not serve” list could be made available for download by anyone who wishes to put it on their server. That might move the needle.

Heh.

YOU LOVE YOUR KID? Too bad.

DOUG GILES: 13 Politically Incorrect Gun Rules. I like this one: “Guns have only two enemies rust and politicians.”

AN INTERESTING GRAPHIC ON the efficacy of various supplements for various purposes. Not sure about the research behind it, though.

Archangel is a new novel from reader/blogger Aaron Worthing. The Kindle version is free to Amazon Prime members under the new Prime lending setup. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s getting a lot of buzz. (Bumped).

MORE GUNS, LESS . . . Homicide drops off US list of top causes of death.

THE TEN MOST USELESS car technologies.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

AT AMAZON, cellphones and wireless plans.

WELL, THEY CERTAINLY LOOK TOP-HEAVY: How stable are cruise ships like the Costa Concordia?

 

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) specifies the stability that ships must have – and if a vessel complies with those rules it should be fine, says Staunton-Lambert. All the heavy stuff – the engines, water ballast tanks and fuel oil – are kept low in the hull, and the tall accommodation blocks above are largely empty space peppered with much lighter contents: people and furniture. “These cruise ships may seem high,” says Staunton-Lambert. “But the trick is to ensure that the weight distribution is correct, focusing on where the centre of gravity is.”

Meanwhile, reader Louis Nettles writes: “Glenn, you have been preaching disaster prep and telling up we can’t count on the government in the immediate aftermath. Well now its clear that a Cruise ship is a third world country and we’d better be prepared. So what goes in a cruise bug out bag?” I don’t think a bugout bag on a cruise ship would be especially useful. You don’t have time to return to your cabin if you need to evacuate. I think that — unlike in the case of, say, zombies — your best preparation here is learning the paths to the lifeboat stations and other important locations even if the crew, as in this case, doesn’t get around to doing the drills.

OUT TODAY: From Law School Transparency, the Winter 2012 Transparency Index Report. “Taken together, these and other findings illustrate how law schools have been slow to react to calls for disclosure, with some schools conjuring ways to repackage employment data to maintain their images.”

I FIND THIS NOT ENTIRELY SURPRISING: Antibiotics in pig feed increased the number of antibiotic resistant genes in gastrointestinal microbes in pigs, according to a study conducted by Michigan State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. I don’t believe in this, but then if I set drug policy antibiotics would be more strictly controlled than cocaine, since misuse that breeds resistant strains is much more dangerous to third parties.

TROUBLE AHEAD? In China, Empty Malls.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I have lived in China for nine years now. I can tell you from personal experience and numerous exchanges with civil servants, entrepreneurs, and regular Chinese that China’s “economic miracle” is anything but miraculous; In fact, it is little more than a mirage. China is dealing with very high unemployment, extremely expensive housing, rapid inflation, corruption that is utterly out-of-control, high levels of public debt, near apocalyptic pollution, and numerous other very severe social and political problems. Moreover, these issues are nothing new. Things were this way nine years ago but the situation has now become so bad that the Chinese government is just no longer capable of covering them up.

Tom Friedman will be so disappointed.

REPORT: Ipad 3 Coming In March.

A COOL MAP TUNNELING TOOL: “Have you ever wondered which part of the other side of the earth is directly below you? Find out using this map tunnelling tool.”

UPDATE: Reader Scott McGlasson is thinking Tunguska: “I’ve always wondered if a miniature black hole is what hit Siberia in 1908, but have never put any effort into trying to figure out what the direct-opposite side of the planet would be, assuming the singularity passed all the way through. Odds are, given our planet’s geography, that it would be in an ocean somewhere, and it turns out to be off the southern coast of Chile. I wonder if anyone has ever surveyed the sea floor in that area?” Beats me. But unless I’m out of date on the physics — and I may well be — I think that Hawking quantum tunneling made miniature black holes seem much less likely, or at least much shorter-lived, which amounts to the same thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steven Den Beste, along with several other readers, notes that there’s no particular reason to think the object that struck Tunguska was traveling perpendicular to the surface on impact anyway, meaning that it could have emerged anywhere.

WORKOUTS HAVE THEIR LIMITS, recognized or not. “While public health officials bemoan the tendency of most people to do little exercise, if any, physiologists are fretting over the opposite trend: an increasing focus on extreme exercise among some recreational athletes. Weight lifting with no rest between sets and with no days off. Endurance training with no easy days or days off. Competitions that encourage excess.” That kind of weight lifting might work for you, for a while at least, if you’re using anabolic steroids. Otherwise, not.

As Mark Rippetoe notes, if you’re training hard enough to make progress, you’ll be sore, and if you’re training often enough to make progress you’ll wind up using muscles while they’re still sore sometime. I can generally tell when I’ve overdone it because I feel tired all day, instead of for just an hour or so after my workout. Then I lighten up for a few days. Every few months I take a clean week off to let stuff catch up. That’s the formula used by old-timey bodybuilders and lifters and since — like them — I’m not using steroids, I figure it’s pretty good. Then again, my fitness goals are comparatively modest: To be reasonably strong, reasonably fit, and uninjured. Those who want to be competitive lifters or bodybuilders will have to take more risks of injury.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Death By Wealth Tax.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Age of Austerity? Lawmakers Proposed $1 Trillion in New Spending Last Year.

PRIVACY: Facebook gives Politico access to Facebook’s private status messages and comments.

QUOTATION OF THE DAY:

The man of system . . . is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.

Adam Smith, quoted in Mark Levin’s Ameritopia: The Unmaking Of America.