Another wingsuit flyer...

Another wingsuit flyer...  But this one took some beautiful video.  This is the first time I've watched one of these and not assumed the flyer was criminally insane...

Sunrise in Cache Valley...

Sunrise in Cache Valley...  Looking from our yard to the northwest...

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  This is from the middle of an excellent post by the always-wonderful Megan McArdle on the justification of Obamacare by economic externalities.  She demolishes that argument most convincingly, and in the process says this:

The answer is that we don't simply say "OMG, negative externality! Quick, government, kill it with fire!"

I sure hope Megan never stops being Megan...

Religions in general have some friction with science...

Religions in general have some friction with science...  That is, most religions have some beliefs that conflict with science, or at the very least are challenging to reconcile.  Evolution and cosmology are perhaps the most familiar such sources of friction.  However, most religions accept unhesitatingly an ancient scientific discovery that has been rather convincingly proven: that the Earth rotates around the sun, and revolves on its axis.  Most religions, I said – but not all of them.

Oh, my...

Unless you've been sleeping in a cave somewhere...

Unless you've been sleeping in a cave somewhere ... you know about the progressive press and punditry whipping up a storm of outrage over the candidacy of Scott Walker.  One of the outrage-whippers is the screamer Howard Dean.  The source of the outrage is Walker's lack of a college education.  Someone asked Mike Rowe what he thought about that, and his response is a must-read.  Here's one part that jumped out at me:

I don’t agree with Howard Dean - not at all.

Here’s what I didn’t understand 25 years ago. QVC had a serious recruiting problem. Qualified candidates were applying in droves, but failing miserably on the air. Polished salespeople with proven track records were awkward on TV. Professional actors with extensive credits couldn’t be themselves on camera. And seasoned hosts who understood live television had no experience hawking products. So eventually, QVC hit the reset button. They stopped looking for “qualified” people, and started looking for anyone who could talk about a pencil for eight minutes.

QVC had confused qualifications with competency.

Perhaps America has done something similar? 

Go read the whole thing...

Assessing scientific knowledge in the American public...

Assessing scientific knowledge in the American public...  That's the objective of this survey, which I just took.  Mid-way through the 13-question survey I started wondering where the tough questions were.  There weren't any – these were all trivially easy questions that I'd expect any adult American to know.  At the end of the survey, there's a graph showing the distribution of the number of correct answers (below) in the original survey.  There's also a chart showing cross-tabulations by question against age, education, and gender. 

I find these sorts of data to be very disheartening...

What's the strongest known biological material?

What's the strongest known biological material?  Limpet teeth (at right).

Who knew that limpets even had teeth?  I'd never thought about it before, though I've seen limpets at work on shoreline rocks many times.  I always assumed that they used digestive acids to perform their rock-cleaning magic – I had no idea they did it mechanically, with teeth and muscles.

I have a new-found respect for limpets :)

Just when you think ISIS can go no lower...

Just when you think ISIS can go no lower...  Beheadings, immolations, massacres – ISIS has been at the pinnacle of mass depravity for a while now.  But if this is true, they've raised it to another level: massacre for profit...

I wonder...

I wonder ... how the Obama administration will spin this?  An angry Muslim man walks up to two strangers, determines (by asking them) that they are not Muslim, and ... attacks them with a knife.  This doesn't fit the Obama administration's narrative, and it's right here in America (well, that's assuming you consider Detroit to be part of America).  What say ye, Obamanoids?  Is it time to acknowledge the obvious yet?