HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Campus Leftists at UChicago say Free Speech Shouldn’t Apply Equally to Everyone.
Archive for 2017
February 17, 2017
CHARLIE MARTIN: All Dare Call It Treason.
FLASHBACK: Andrew Breitbart on MSNBC.
IT WAS MY UNDERSTANDING THERE WOULD BE NO MATH: McDonald’s Re-Engineers Straw Using Fibonacci Formula To Let You Enjoy Shamrock Shake More.
According to the company, the straw will have to deliver the chocolate and mint flavor in equal ratio whenever you take a sip. It appears that the traditional straw is incapable of such feat, so JACE and NK Labs were brought in.
“It was a puzzling assignment but one with an ambitious goal,” Seth Newburg, principal engineer and managing partner at NK Labs, stated. “From a physics perspective, it’s actually quite difficult to deliver a proportional amount of both chocolate and mint flavors with each sip.”
The engineers were able to develop the Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal (the STRAW), which is claimed to be capable of showcasing the marvel of fluid dynamics. It is a J-shaped affair that was built with the help of the Fibonacci sequence, an integer sequence attributed to the mathematical genius Leonardo Fibonacci.
Don’t get too excited — McDonalds ordered only 2,000 of the STRAWs.
UPDATE (From Glenn): “Mathematics is the language of nature.”
DRILL BABY DRILL: The rig count increased this week, a small increase but still an increase. Right now there are 597 drilling rigs operating in the U.S.
U.S. crude inventories rose to 518.1 million barrels last week, the highest in weekly data going back to 1982, according to the Energy Information Administration.
There’ve been a couple of prior Instapundit posts about oil prices and U.S. frackers. I thought I’d add a comment. About three years ago a petroleum engineer and an engineer who does reservoir analysis independently told me they believed Texas drillers would “soon” be able to breakeven in the $40 to $45 a barrel range. They meant energy companies could drill new wells and make money in that price range. Improved technology and new techniques for using existing technology were reducing drilling and production costs. FWIW, one of the men was disputing estimates by “other experts” that frackers needed $60 a barrel to breakeven. Yes, they offered opinions –informed opinions– but this article indicates both gentlemen made good guesstimates.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO FLASH: Cartwheeling Substitute Teacher Exposed Self To High School Choir Class, Police Charge.
OY: Jewish Groups Find Trump’s Answers to 3 Anti-Semitism Questions ‘Worrisome,’ ‘Mind-Boggling’
It was a sometimes meshuga press conference, but for the most part the crazy seems to be working.
IT’S FRANK J. FLEMING’S WORLD: WE JUST LIVE IN IT. Trump Nukes The Moon.
ANNE COULTER: Trump Press Conference Makes Him ‘Head of Church’
ZEALANDIA: Geologists spy an eighth continent.
Geophysical data suggest that a region spanning 5 million square kilometres, which includes New Zealand and New Caledonia, is a single, intact piece of continental crust and is geologically separate from Australia, a team of scientists from New Zealand, Australia and New Caledonia argue in the March/April issue of GSA Today1.
“If you could pull the plug on the world’s oceans, then Zealandia would probably long ago have been recognized as a continent,” says team leader Nick Mortimer, a geologist at GNS Science in Dunedin, New Zealand.
“Zealandia” has a nice ring to it, but “Middle Earth” might catch on faster.
LOCAL ASTRONOMY NEWS: Life’s Building Blocks Found on Dwarf Planet Ceres.
LIFE COMES AT YOU FAST:
NewsBusters today: Chris Matthews compares Trump to Alger Hiss.
As someone tweeted yesterday, Joe McCarthy called and said you might want to dial back the Communist innuendo a notch or ten, MSM.
SENATE CONFIRMS SCOTT PRUITT TO HEAD EPA:
Democrats also criticized Pruitt for being a climate change skeptic, specifically, manmade use of fossil fuels being its primary cause. East Coast senators stressed during floor debate that sea-level rise, resulting from increasing global temperatures, is threatening to submerge much of their states’ coastlines.
Anti-fossil fuel groups denounced Friday’s vote as a step backward for climate change action. “If you don’t believe in climate science, you don’t belong at the EPA,” said 350.org Executive Director May Boeve. “Scott Pruitt not only fails to meet the basic criteria for the job — he’s fought this agency at every turn, and Oklahomans paid the price with their health and safety.”
One of our undercover reporters has brought back hidden camera video from inside the EPA’s offices when Pruitt was confirmed. EXCLUSIVE — MUST CREDIT INSTAPUNDIT:
AND HERE YOU PROBABLY THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Earth Has a New Continent Called ‘Zealandia’, Study Reveals.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Alphabet won’t need all those internet balloons after all.
MY PRESIDENT IS ORANGE: Trump Tops Obama, Hands Over Full Torture Report To Court Previous Administration Refused To. “Credit where credit is due: Trump has done more to preserve the full CIA Torture Report than Obama ever did.”
NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT HERE. NOTHING AT ALL: Astonishing geomagnetic spike hit the ancient kingdom of Judah: If this were to happen again today, the electrical grid could be a smoking ruin.
By analyzing the orientations of the metals in a set of these jar handles with dates from 750 to 150 BCE, the scientists were able to see traces of the geomagnetic field’s behavior. What they found was startling. Sometime late in the 8th century BCE, there was a rapid fluctuation in the field’s intensity over a period of about 30 years—first the intensity increased to over 20 percent of baseline, then plunged to 27 percent under baseline. Though the overall trend at that time was a gradual decline in the fields’ intensity similar to what we see today, this spike was basically off the charts.
Writing in The New Yorker, Lawrence University geologist Marcia Bjornerud points out that this geomagnetic spike is far bigger than anything geoscientists had believed possible. “Both the height and the sharpness of the spike they recount push up against the limits of what some geophysicists think Earth’s outer core is capable of doing,” she explains. “If the eighth-century-BC geomagnetic jeté is real, models for the generation of the magnetic field need significant revision.”
The researchers note that this geomagnetic spike is similar to another that occurred in the 10th century BCE. Data from the 10th century spike and this 8th century one indicate that such events were probably localized, not global. That said, they write that “the exact geographic expanse of this phenomenon has yet to be investigated, and the fact that these are very short-lived features that can be easily missed suggests that there is much more to discover.” They compare the scope of these spikes to the South Atlantic Anomaly, a region where the planet’s Van Allen radiation belt dips down near the surface of the planet, trapping radioactive particles and causing problems for satellites cruising nearby.
Ancient peoples like those in Judah would not have been troubled by a localized geomagnetic field spike, but people in the same region today would call it a disaster.
Yes, this sort of thing could be a common occurrence, and unless it happened in the last 150 years or so no one would notice.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: A Robot Physical Therapist Helps Kids with Cerebral Palsy.
I THINK PEOPLE SHOULD OWN THE DEVICES THEY BUY: “Right to Repair” Is About a Whole Lot More Than iPhones: Apple is preparing to do battle with “Right to Repair” legislation in Nebraska, but there’s more than just phones at stake.
I wrote a related piece a while back.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teacher Melts Down in Front of Class, Walks Out—Then Tries to Get Job Back.
AND: Chicago High School Pushes Left-Wing Racist Seminar Despite Parents’ Concerns.
Parents need to remember their position in big city public education, which is to pay their taxes and shut up.
TWITTER CEO JACK DORSEY: Twitter Lacked ‘Focus And Discipline’ For Growth.
On Wednesday, Dorsey offered some insight into the source of Twitter’s user growth problem, which has haunted the company for years. Speaking in a panel at Goldman Sachs’ annual technology conference in San Francisco, Dorsey, who is also founder and CEO of payments company Square , said two things were previously missing in Twitter’s approach to user growth: “Focus and discipline.”
Just last week Dorsey introduced a new anti-abuse feature so poorly thought out that it actually created a new avenue for abuse, and was quickly removed.
So it would seem that Dorsey is part of the problem he accurately described.
