Archive for 2013

STANDING ATHWART HIGHER EDUCATION COST-CUTTING EFFORTS, yelling “Stop!”

THE NEW 8.9″ KINDLE FIRE HDX gets a strong review from Gizmodo. “The Kindle Fire HDX 7’s 1920×1200 323 PPI screen was terrific, but the 8.9’s 2560×1600 339 PPI screen is better. Demonstrably better than anything other large tablet out there. . . . It helps that the sound from the speakers is, as on the 7-inch HDX, some of the best we’ve ever heard on a tablet.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 10 Things Not to Say to a Female Lifter. Though I expect most InstaPundit readers would grok this stuff naturally.

Plus: “If your first reaction is, ‘she’s too muscular for me,’ you need to lift more, bro.”

HMM: A Baby’s Gaze May Signal Autism, Study Finds. “In a study published Wednesday, researchers using eye-tracking technology found that 3-year-olds diagnosed with autism looked less at people’s eyes when they were babies than children who did not develop autism. But contrary to what the researchers expected, the difference was not apparent at birth. It emerged when babies were 2 to 6 months old, and autism experts said that may suggest a window during which the progression toward autism can be halted or slowed.”

I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: The Chelyabinsk Lesson: Beware Small Asteroids. “In reconstructing the asteroid from its fragments and recorded evidence of its descent to Earth, scientists estimated that Chelyabinsk was around 62 feet, or 19 meters, in width. Yet even at this (relatively) small size, the space rock caused an airburst equal to about 500 kilotons of TNT. (The largest such airbus of the modern era was about three times that—the 1908 Tunguska asteroid exploded over Russia with the equivalent of 5 to 15 megatons, about 10 times as much.) Scientists have recorded about 1000 objects the size of Chelyabinsk in the area around the Earth, the Wall Street Journal says. However, a meteor expert tells them, there might be a million of them. And according to Space.com, the a historical analysis of impacts suggests Chelyabinsk isn’t exactly a fluke: Asteroids of this size might hit the Earth more often than astronomers had previously thought.”

THE GREEN-CAR DOLDRUMS continue.