HOW MUCH URINE IS IN A SWIMMING POOL? Rather A Lot, Really. Though it depends on whether you go by absolute quantity (sounds like a lot) or fraction of the whole volume (tiny!)

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Cory Hamblin, A New Constitution For A Free People.

HEY, MAYBE I’LL SIGN UP TO HAVE MY HEAD FROZEN AFTER ALL: Scientists Have Found a Way to Rapidly Thaw Cryopreserved Tissue Without Damage.

CHANGE: Colon and Rectal Cancers Rising in Young People. The article brushes it off, but I wonder if the combination of HPV and increased prevalence anal sex accounts for a lot of it.

STEVEN HAYWARD: The Liberal/Media Freakout Rolls On.

Related: McCaskill piles on Sessions with dishonest tweet.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Get Rid Of Flies.

Well, the Bug-A-Salt 2.0 Insect Eradication Gun seems like the way to go to me.

‘TIS A PITY THEY CAN’T BOTH LOSE: Syrian army re-enters town of Palmyra as IS defenses crumble.

The SANA news agency reported earlier that government troops had entered the town’s archaeological site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, around mid-day, then the town itself, as IS defenses crumbled and militants fled the area.

It said army units were engaged in “precise tactical operations” and chasing remnants of IS fighters holed up inside the ancient town.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition monitoring group, said IS militants pulled out completely from Palmyra, adding that troops were conducting mopping-up operations.

The Syrian government’s push has relied on ground support from Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group and Russian air cover, according to Hezbollah’s media outlets.

Once this is over these hardened Hezbollah vets are going to become Israel’s next big headache.

TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT: Ex-Muslim Woman to Toronto Imam ‘Can I Criticize Islam Without Fearing for My Life?’

According to a strict interpretation of Islam apostasy is punishable by death — which is something those Muslim-for-a-day protestors should perhaps have looked into before they took to the streets last week.

FASTER, PLEASE: NASA’s longshot bet on a revolutionary rocket may be about to pay off.

The rocket engine starts with a neutral gas as a feedstock for plasma, in this case argon. The first stage of the rocket ionizes the argon and turns it into a relatively “cold” plasma. The engine then injects the plasma into the second stage, the “booster,” where it is subjected to a physics phenomenon known as ion cyclotron resonance heating. Essentially, the booster uses a radio frequency that excites the ions, swinging them back and forth.

As the ions resonate and gain more energy, they are spun up into a stream of superheated plasma. This stream then passes through a corkscrew-shaped nozzle and is accelerated out of the back of the rocket, producing a thrust.

Such an engine design offers a couple of key benefits over most existing propulsion technology. Perhaps most notably, unlike chemical rockets, the plasma rocket operates on electricity. As it flies through space, therefore, it does not need massive fuel tanks or a huge reservoir of liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel. Instead, the rocket just needs some solar panels.

The Sun powers both the production of plasma and the booster exciting the plasma, and the extent to which it does either can be shifted. When a spacecraft needs more thrust, more power can be put into making plasma. This process uses more propellant, but it provides the thrust needed to move out of a gravity well, such as Earth orbit. Later, when the vehicle is moving quickly, more power can be shifted to the booster, providing a higher specific impulse and greater fuel economy.

“It’s like shifting gears in a car,” Chang-Díaz explained. “The engine doesn’t change. But if you want to climb a hill, you put more of your engine power into torque and less into rpm, so you climb the hill, slowly, but you’re able to climb. And when you’re going on a freeway, flat and straight, you upshift. You’re not going to go to Mars in first gear. That’s the problem. It’s why we run out of gas going to Mars with a chemical engine.”

Not needing a huge propellent tank means more cargo space for supplies, equipment, habitat, or people.

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

TAMMY BRUCE: Why the liberal establishment is collapsing.

Democrats and liberals have been driving drunk while texting for eight years. Swerving into the wrong lane, they crashed into oncoming traffic and sit, dazed and confused, wondering what happened. The few survivors crawl out of the clown car screaming at the innocent people they’ve harmed. After all, it’s never their fault, you see, it’s everyone else’s for daring to get in their way.

Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel led the way, as Entertainment Weekly noted, “The first salvo against Donald Trump was fired only a few minutes into the Oscars — and then they just kept on coming. In what might be an unprecedented number of jokes, allusions, and sincere articulations inspired by a single person during an awards telecast, Hollywood’s most luminous tackled Trump and his policies. …”

The target may have been President Trump, but the derision was meant for the people who elected him. Nothing says “oops” like ridiculing your audience.

I apparently was one of the millions who didn’t tune in, causing the ABC network program to be the least-watched in nine years. The Los Angeles Times spent thousands of words trying to explain why the awards show had its third year of ratings decline. It was late, they explained, small budget films and, they mused pensively, maybe, just maybe, “[t]he promise of strong criticism of President Trump from the Oscars participants may also have put off some viewers.”

Ya think? But it’s not about criticism of any particularly president, it’s Hollywood’s constant sanctimonious lecturing of the unwashed hoi polloi.

People generally don’t sit down in front of the TV or make a trip down to the multiplex in order to enjoy a sanctimonious lecture — a simple reality reflected in declining ratings and fewer ticket sales.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Presidential Payback for Media Hubris. “Donald Trump conducted a press conference recently as if he were a loud circus ringmaster whipping the media circus animals into shape. The establishment thought the performance was a window into an unhinged mind; half the country thought it was a long overdue media comeuppance. The media suffer the lowest approval numbers in nearly a half-century.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A ‘living Constitution’ on the right? What would it look like if right-leaning judges ruled like lefties?

Well, I’m neither a conservative (I’m a libertarian) or a living constitutionalist, but I can imagine a few places. . . .

Likewise for the Warren Court’s “one man, one vote” rule for state legislative apportionment, in which states — unlike the federal government under the U.S. Constitution — were no longer allowed to have a house of their legislature apportioned by geography rather than population. The result has been that states like California or Illinois, which is red almost everywhere but in the Chicago metropolitan area, are totally dominated by the large populations of urban centers. Those states are also governed badly and suffer from considerable degrees of corruption and enormous debt. Perhaps experience turns out to show that the “one man one vote” approach was wrong, and that there was wisdom after all in the Framers’ approach of not apportioning everything according to population. A “living Constitution” changes with the times!

Read the whole thing.

CLAIRE MCCASKILL MUST RESIGN IMMEDIATELY:

It’s easy to forget because ambassadors aren’t very important.

WHAT WAS BETSY DEVOS JUST SAYING ABOUT THIS? School Put on ‘Secure Mode’ After Bear Spotted Nearby.

We find one sniffing around in our garage every now and then.

APOLOGIZE FOR WHAT? Prof. Jacobson remembers Andrew Breitbart.

JAMES JOYNER: Mattis Is Mostly Right on NATO.

We should be clear that this new reality is not a threat to walk away from an alliance that has served us well for nearly seven decades. While Donald Trump made some inflammatory remarks about NATO on the campaign trail and even called it “obsolete” a few days before his inauguration, he has since moderated his tone, declaring, “We strongly support NATO.” His follow-up plea that “NATO members make their full and proper financial contributions” was, as we have seen, routine.

I share the concerns of my fellow Atlanticists that the Trump administration risks overplaying its hand. The desired end state must be to bolster NATO by turning more members into security contributors, not fracture it.

The Article 5 commitment at the heart of NATO that an armed attack against any member “shall be considered an attack against them all” must remain sacrosanct. And, it is worth reminding ourselves, the only time it has been carried out was when the other Allies came to American aid in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Still, that guarantee is much more valuable when backed by 28 countries pulling their weight rather than a handful.

Indeed.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Paul Krugman Hardest Hit:

Late in election season, as pundits tried to feign uncertainty about the inevitable Clinton coronation, a few folks considered what might happen to the financial markets if Donald Trump were elected. The answer a lot of them came up with was pretty dire: a big crash. Against all predictions, Trump was elected. And then, right on schedule … the stock market indices soared to new records?

Umm, what?

That’s the question that a lot of folks in the punditocracy are asking: Why do markets seem so happy about Trump?

Pundits who are asking that haven’t paid attention to the last 8 years.

UH-HUH: It was a heart attack, not poison, says North Korea.

“We have information that Kim Chol suffered from heart disease and was not fit to travel without his medication,” Ri Tong-il (pic) told a press conference at the North Korean embassy here on Thursday.

Ri, who was part of a delegation which arrived on Tuesday, identified the deceased as Kim Chol and not Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Ri also cited the postmortem examination conducted by Malaysian health authorities, claiming that the postmortem showed Jong-nam died of a heart attack.

“Medications for diabetes and high blood pressure were also found among his belongings,” Ri said.

However, on Feb 21, Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah had said there was no evidence of a heart attack.

The old “Never believe anything until Moscow denies it” could be updated to “Believe anything Pyongyang says isn’t true.”

UNEXPECTEDLY: Pepsi is laying off up to 100 workers in Philadelphia and blaming a 2-month-old soda tax.

The layoffs, which account for roughly 20% of Pepsi’s 423 Philadelphia employees, will begin Wednesday and be spread out over the next few months, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

“Unfortunately, after careful consideration of the economic realities created by the recently enacted beverage tax, we have been forced to give notice that we intend to eliminate 80-100 positions, including frontline and supervisory roles, in Philadelphia over the next few months, beginning today,” Pepsi said in a statement to Business Insider.

Why are Democrat-run cities such cesspits of anti-worker sentiment?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Student Suspended for Criticizing ‘Oops’ and ‘Ouch’ Rules for ‘Offensive’ Speech.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A ‘living Constitution’ on the right? The left should be glad that Gorsuch is an originalist and not a living constitutionalist in the leftist mode.

HANS A. VON SPAKOVSKY: Did a Big Law Attorney Act Unethically to Sabotage Trump’s Travel ‘Ban’?