ANDREW MALCOLM: Mysterious missives to distant strangers.

In an age of instant communications, we get annoyed if we must wait 30 minutes for a reply. I’m still awaiting replies to messages I launched decades ago – in bottles.

One day around 1950 on a ferry far off the New England coast, my father suggested we write a note, slip it into a bottle and toss it into the North Atlantic to see what might happen.

That was the first of many times we did that. We called it “doing a bottle.” It became an avocation I continue to this day.

Back at home after a bedtime story, Dad would reach to turn off the light. Just before darkness captured my room, he’d say, “I wonder where our bottle is tonight?”

Do yourself a favor and read the whole, lovely thing.

WATCH AMAZON ORIGINAL VIDEOS FOR FREE THROUGH DECEMBER 31.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to open a Champagne bottle with a steak knife.

This is particularly useful for those belonging to the non-saber-owning community.

GOOD ADVICE FOR MOMS: Cut Yourself Some Slack. Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions.

Unless it’s a resolution to open a bottle of red and watch Bad Moms, which was by no means great, but cuter and more entertaining than my wife or I expected.

STORAGE BECOMES MORE VALUABLE: It’s certainly scarce in my garage. Of course this article references digital storage and stored digital data.

AI will make stored data – and therefore storage- more valuable. When you can take – as we can today – a grainy surveillance video or a blurred face and read a license plate number of determine someone’s identity using AI, the value of stored data rises, for good or ill.

AND IT’S THE GOVERNMENT’S FAULT: Your Shower Is Lame, Your Dishwasher Doesn’t Work, and Your Clothes are Dirty. “Anything in your home that involves water has been made pathetic, thanks to government controls. . . . But wait: what about the need to conserve water? Well, the Department of the Interior says that domestic water use, which includes even the water you use on your lawn and flower beds, constitutes a mere 2% of the total, so this unrelenting misery spread by government regulations makes hardly a dent in the whole.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “I served for 8 years on a university sexual misconduct board and at the end of that distressing tour of duty concluded the following…”

(1) the combination of alcohol abuse by both parties (which is the case in the vast majority of charges), absence of witnesses, and absence of any forensic investigation in the student led process makes the charges almost impossible to prove by any standard of evidence; (2) a very small number of sexual predators can create a lot of misery on a campus (3) peer pressure and buddy systems by both male and female students are probably the best form of prevention; and (4) cases of sexual assault should go straight to the police and courts. Universities aren’t equipped to handle these cases and need to stop trying to serve as a parallel justice system. This is not a place for amateur hour.

No, it’s not.

THE YEAR IN PREVIEW: All the Biggest Space News to Look Forward to in 2017.

SPACE: 8 reasons why space is worth getting excited about in 2017. Next year should be good, but the coming decade should be great.

AIR SAFETY: Pilot fired in Indonesia after alleged attempt to fly drunk.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Editorial: ‘Unconscionable’ Leaders Hid Charlotte Law School’s Problems To Keep Revenue Flowing; ‘Catastrophic Fiasco May Destroy Lives Of Hundreds Of Innocent Students.’

EXERCIZE: Mouse Study Hints at Why Obese People Struggle to Exercise.

“There’s a common belief that obese animals don’t move as much because carrying extra body weight is physically disabling. But our findings suggest that assumption doesn’t explain the whole story,” Kravitz said.

Kravitz has theorized that the brain chemical dopamine is key to inactivity in mice.

“Other studies have connected dopamine signaling defects to obesity, but most of them have looked at reward processing — how animals feel when they eat different foods,” Kravitz said.

“We looked at something simpler: Dopamine is critical for movement, and obesity is associated with a lack of movement,” he said. His team wondered if problems with dopamine signaling alone could explain the inactivity.

For the study, researchers fed normal and high-fat diets to mice. The mice on the high-fat plan put on weight and slowed down. But they slowed down before adding pounds, raising questions about why things happened in that order.

One possible answer: The researchers found that the obese and slow-moving mice had less of a “receptor” that processes dopamine.

Further research suggested that weight gain was compounded by their inactivity.

That’s a nasty catch-22 to overcome, a natural tendency towards inactivity triggering a weight gain which causes even less activity.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Make Friends Faster.

HEALTH: One Breath Into This Breathalyzer Can Diagnose 17 Diseases.

Researchers invited about 1,400 people from five different countries to breathe into the device, which is still in its testing phases. The breathalyzer could identify each person’s disease with 86 percent accuracy, the researchers said.

The technology works because “each disease has its own unique breathprint,” the researchers wrote in the study.

The breathalyzer analyzes microscopic compounds — called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) — to detect each condition. Testing for VOCs isn’t a new approach; in 400 B.C., physicians learned that smelling a patient’s bodily emissions could help with diagnoses. For instance, doctors used to smell the stools and urine of infant noblemen daily, the researchers said.

But while excrement and other bodily substances, such as blood, contain VOCs, examining exhaled breath is the cheapest, easiest and least invasive way to test for the compounds, the researchers said.

Get the regulators out of the way so that these things are both affordable and available over the counter, and bundle them with a free mobile app which can share data with your healthcare provider.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Love In A Time Of Cannabis.

MARK STEYN: License to Dye.

Let’s just run that again: In Illinois, if you don’t do your domestic-abuse training course every two years, you’ll lose your hairdressing license – and your livelihood.

As I write in After America, in the Fifties one in 20 members of the workforce needed government permission to do his job. Now it’s one in three. The original justification for requiring a government permit to cut another person’s hair is that a salon contains potentially dangerous chemicals such as coloring products. Making the license conditional upon acing sexual-assault training courses is not just the usual Big Government expansion but the transformation of the relationship between a private business and the state:

The rule was inspired by the spirit of camaraderie in hair salons, said State Senator Bill Cunningham, one of the chief sponsors of the amendment. For some women, those salons are a safe space, where they can sit among other women, drop their guard and confide about life as their hair is braided or colored, or their nails trimmed and painted….

As Ann Althouse comments:

So, it’s a great place for government to plant informants…

Just so. Just as the Stasi turned neighbors and relatives into spies, the State of Illinois is making your stylist one.

Read the whole thing.

BRITAIN’S PRIME MINISTER REBUKES JOHN KERRY: Teresa May demonstrating a Thatcher inclination? The Guardian thinks she’s playing up to Trump. Britain did vote for the UN resolution calling on Israel to stop construction of settlements in disputed territory. However:

The prime minister’s spokesman said May thought it was not appropriate to make such strongly worded attacks on the makeup of a government or to focus solely on the issue of Israeli settlements.

“We do not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the democratically elected government of an ally,” he said. “The government believes that negotiations will only succeed when they are conducted between the two parties, supported by the international community.”

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Obama to huddle with Hill Democrats on saving Obamacare.

President Barack Obama will head to Capitol Hill Wednesday to meet with congressional Democrats about how to shield Obamacare from Republican efforts to dismantle it, a Capitol Hill source told Politico.

But:

Still, if the pillars of Obamacare are successfully dismantled, moderate Democrats — particularly those senators up for reelection in 2018 — could come under considerable pressure to help Republicans replace the law and are already openly entertaining that option.

And here’s the big but:

Democrats reeling from a devastating election face a daunting task: the 2018 Senate map.

It favors Republicans in a big way. The GOP will be defending just eight seats, while Democrats must fight for 23 — plus another two held by independents who caucus with Democrats.

What’s worse is the fact that many of the seats they must defend are in states won by Republican Donald Trump.

If Democrat Senators Bill Nelson (FL), Joe Donnelly (IN), Claire McCaskill (MO), Jon Tester (MT), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Sherrod Brown (OH), Bob Casey (PA), Joe Manchin (WV), and Tammy Baldwin (WI) are smart, they’ll pay better attention to their constituents next year, than Senate Democrats did in 2009 before voting for ObamaCare.

ADVICE: In 2017, Pursue Meaning Instead of Happiness.

HEH:

FLAILING: Twitter Seeks a Little Help From Its Users.

Twitter Inc., in the midst of an identity crisis, has turned outward to its millions of users for ideas.

Over more than six hours Thursday, Chief Executive Jack Dorsey tweeted with users about what they hope to see from the social-media service, opening the discussion with, “What’s the most important thing you want to see Twitter improve or create in 2017?”

Users came back with thousands of replies. Mr. Dorsey responded to some of the concerns expressed, shedding light on the company’s plans and underscoring his promise last week to play a more active role in engineering and design decisions at Twitter.

Twitter’s most immediate problem is cultural, not technological. The company could start to clean up its corporate culture by firing Dorsey and disbanding the Orwellian “Trust & Safety Council.”

ROGER SIMON: Obama’s Sour Happy New Year To America And The World.

SO IT’S COME TO THIS: At Lawmaker’s Behest, Painting of Cops as Pigs Graces U.S. Capitol.

The congressman in question is Rep. Lacy Clay (D-MO).

ANN ALTHOUSE: My message to the women’s magazine columnist who says she is “terrifed of raising a boy in Trump’s America.” “I’m a mother of sons, and I raised them when the President of the United States was an admitted sexual predator — in the 1990s — so maybe I can help.”

IF YOU STRIKE ME DOWN . . . Announced yesterday, Milo Yiannopoulous’ book is #1 on Amazon today, despite Twitter ban.