Steve Austin:

A bionic eye that can restore sight to the blind should be available commercially within two years, scientists behind the revolutionary technology announced yesterday.

The artificial retina has been cleared by US regulators to begin trials on between 50 and 75 people suffering from two of the most common causes of blindness, opening the way for millions more to benefit from similar implants in the future.

If the research progresses well, a device could be on the market early in 2009 at a likely cost of about £15,000, said Mark Humayun, Professor of Ophthalmology at the Doheny Eye Institute, part of the University of Southern California.

...

“They can differentiate between a cup, a plate and a knife. They can see motion. They can avoid stumbling around into large objects. That is just with 16 electrodes, and we’re now going up to 60. The models suggest 1,000 will be enough for face recognition, and we hope to get there in five to seven years.”

...

It generally takes patients a month or two to get used to the Argus device, before their brains learn to interpret the images. While the operation to install it took seven hours originally, it now takes 90 minutes.

Bruce Wayne:

23-year-old inventor has come up with a tool to give mere mortals the powers of a superhero: the ability to zoom up a rope as fast as 10 feet per second and scale the side of a building.

The battery-powered, handheld gadget is envisioned as a tool for firefighters and soldiers, and helped earn Nate Ball of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, to be announced Wednesday.

While he has practical applications in mind, Ball says it isn't a stretch to compare the tool to the gadgets fictional heroes use to quickly climb to dizzying heights.

"It's neat to be able to create a real-life engineering solution that has the actual functionality described in the fantastic situations you see on Batman, and with James Bond," said Ball, an MIT graduate student who spends his spare time rock-climbing and pole-vaulting.

The invention grew out of an MIT-sponsored, Army-funded student design competition in 2004 to develop technology to help soldiers ascend rapidly.

Umm, one problem: The ropes it uses to ascend need to be preinstalled on the top of the building to be scaled, meaning, well, you can't use it in emergency conditions, unless you've got a buddy up there already hooking up your rope, but then, how did he get there?

So the kid suggests that buildings start including pre-anchored ropes for firefighter Spidermen to use, when they need them.

Ummm... the kid needs to start working on his Bat-Grapple.

Posted by: Ace at 10:35 PM | Comments (53)
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This is the stuff people send me. Usually I provide you with some editorial screening, but I'm tired, so it just all goes out.

Content Warning: This video is 10% gayer than Beaches.

It starts off with a crucifix. Now, any video with a crucifix can only go one of two ways. This one wasn't directed by Mel Gibson, so there you go.

That's from Beta Male Prometheus.

Hot Prison Pals! from cutaway.

Hot Prison Pals, indeed.

And gayest of all, this from my communist/hippie friend Morgan. Tibetan personality test with bonus annoying music and chain letter!

Posted by: Ace at 09:59 PM | Comments (47)
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Men Men Men Men, Men Men Men Men.

Beer Cannon.

The montage of household items exploding in slo-mo is Virtual Therapy.
Though as a chickie I felt a little pang for the flowerpot of pansies.

Posted by: LauraW. at 06:48 PM | Comments (25)
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Very funny:

I'm not sure if this is that funny, so much as terrifying. For me, at least. My worst nightmare. It's called "Hobo With A Shotgun," and, if nothing else, it is graphically violent.

Thanks, respectively, to MikeK and RLW.

You're gonna want to get wrist control. Yeah, she can feel that.

I wonder how much Amanda Marcotte cries at the "misogyny" of that first video.

Oh, and I've been slack about linking this: Pwndagon.net, the website for gullible she-chumps.

I was actually given a password. I should post something there. Something important, like how I'm pretty, but runway models, exemplars of the fascistic patriarchal impossible standards of beauty, ain't all that, and are probably space-aliens.

And whether they're space aliens are not -- I'm pretty, damnit!

Posted by: Ace at 04:47 PM | Comments (37)
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On MSNBC, but from Britain's Financial Times.

The catch? They're calling Europe's economy "robust," because it's going to manage the stratospheric level of 2.7%. Two. Point. Seven. Whoo-hoo.

Oh -- it's expected to grow at that level this year. It hasn't done that yet.

Meanwhile, analysts predict a "soft landing" in the US of 2.5% growth. So -- 2.7% for Europe is "robust" growth, whereas growth of .2% less is a "soft landing" for the US?

Doesn't that mean the US's growth was much more robust these past few years?

Robust? Seems to crush the hell out of Europe's measly (projected) 2.5% growth.

Ah, the fair and balanced media.

As I've always said, the media is only willing the mention the Bush Boom posthumously. Only when the boom runs out of steam will the media tell us how much the country was growing just a couple of years ago, to contrast the current anemic growth of the past.

So the new business cycle, according to the MSM, is "recession -- recession -- (quiet whistling as eyes stare fixedly at feet) -- soft landing/contraction -- recession." At least when there's a Republican in the White House.

They just kinda never get quite around to reporting on that growth phase while it's actually happening. People could get the wrong idea.

Thanks to gengis.

Posted by: Ace at 01:57 PM | Comments (151)
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She brings all this heat on herself.

And who did Kurtz call for comment? Anyone on the right at all, apart from Bryan (her partner) and her husband?*

No, just a bunch of liberals. Oh, and for balance: the very conservative Andrew "Heart-Ache" Sullivan.

Sullivan suggests that the hate-mail Malkin receives is just the chickens coming home to roost-- hmmm, I wonder if he similarly believes his own hate-mail, filled with fag slurs and references to his "milky-load" personal ads, are really just his own chickens returning to roost?

Even more surprising is his charge that what she writes is often "disgraceful" or "so out there." Because, you know, the even-keeled Sullivan never writes anything "disgraceful" or "so out there" as to border on early-onset dementia. Or does he?

* Corrected: I originally he didn't contact anyone at Hot Air. He did, quoting Bryan. But then, the only pro-Malkin quotes come from people who are obliged to defend her -- her business partner, her husband, and she herself.

Apparently she's only got two fans in the world. Who knew?

The Nutroots Reacts: Links at LGF.

Michelle keeps being blamed for unhinged shut-ins writing unhinged hate-mail to the left.

Confession?

It's me. I'm writing them all. So stop blaming Michelle.

Suck the barbed cock of Satan,

Your buddy,

Ace

Posted by: Ace at 01:26 PM | Comments (38)
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Content warning: This post is very long, and it sucks. It's about the nonentity Marcotte, and, even given this target, the post just sucks. But I spent an hour on this awful post, so it's not going to waste. You may want to read Marcotte's self-pitying conspiracy theories and lies, though, and make sure you read the criticism of her from a fellow liberal, at the end of the post.

Marcotte's demented they-a culpa in Salon. Here are the better bits:

As one of the thousands, possibly millions, of bloggers out there holding forth on everything from cooking to politics, I'd always felt especially fortunate. I'd ascended from having a small, low-traffic blog to joining Jesse Taylor at the big-time liberal blog Pandagon to actually controlling Pandagon in the course of three years.

She acended from having a small, low-traffic blog?

I don't know if this SiteMeter is broken or what (thought it does seem to pick up LGF and Iowahawk referrals), but it would seem she's ascended to a small, low-traffic blog.

Not the hugest knock, but she's basically bragging about her meteoric rise here. Previous whines by her have focused on her killah writin' skillz and mad "abilities" to draw an audience.

It must be broken. Right? Anyway.

...

What I also failed to understand was how much McEwan and I would stick out. I was aware that I didn't exactly fit the image people have of bloggers who join campaigns -- the stereotype being 30-something nerdy young white men who wear khakis and obsess over crafting their Act Blue lists. I wasn't aware that not fitting the image would attract so much negative attention. In fact, I mostly saw this all as a baby step in the direction of diversity, since McEwan and I differed from the stereotype mostly by being female and by being outspoken feminists.

Misogyny and feminism. She's fixated on these points.

Here's her claims about the scrubbing of past posts:

I announced that I was taking the job on Jan. 30, and the same week, I noticed a small flare-up of oddly aggressive and misogynistic comments in my moderation queue over a short, irritated post I wrote about the coverage of the Duke lacrosse rape case on CNN. I assumed that some anti-feminist blogger had linked me and so, in frustration, I went and rewrote my by-then week-old post to mock the commenters by spelling out my views in childish, easy-to-understand language. This may have been the first indication that the right-wing noise machine had noticed me and was looking for something with which to hurt me and my new employers.

In frustration, she went and re-wrote her post "spelling out [her] vies in childish, easy-to-undrstand language," which just happened to be more amenable to her new employer John Edwards:

UPDATE: Since people are determined to make hay over this quick shot of a post, IÂ’m deleting it and hereÂ’s my official stance. The prosecution in the Duke case fumbled the ball. The prosecutor was too eager to get a speedy case and make a name for himself. That is my final word.

That's not particularly childish language. At least, not for Amanda Marcotte, who's pretty infantile. Here was the stuff that needed to be re-written, lest people "misinterpret her" or "take things out of context:"

In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out.

CanÂ’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?

So unfair.

Note that this post was quite recent -- after the DA dropped the rape charges, because even the "victim" says she's not quite sure she was raped at all. So this isn't her getting all huffy about this case when everyone assumed, as people often do, the kids were guilty. (I assumed that -- but then, I assumed that Nifong wouldn't indict some college kids with absolutely no evidence whatsoever just to get a higher pension benefit.)

Now, you tell me: Does her "re-writing" the post into "simpler, childish language" accurately restate the original post, just in clearer terms?

Does the original post merely say "the prosecutor fumbled the ball"?

She's a goddamned liar, she got caught, and now she wants to blame the "patriarchy" for not lettin' a gal just have some fun and use her scary "abilities" to draw a huge audience.

She's borderline delusional to continue insisting a rape occurred even after the corrupt DA withdrew the charges after the lying "victim" recanted. (Fortuitously enough, her sudden inablitilty to tell a penis from a foreign object like a broomstick conveniently explained away the utter lack of DNA evidence.) She edited the post because such delusions do not do much credit to the allegedly "Reality Based Community" she purports to belong to.

But for her, the great overarching "metanarrative" of oppression is the only thing that counts. Evidence, actual innocence, dated ATM records and photographs showing that at least one of the "rapists" was in a different part of the city when the "rape" occurred -- these mean nothing. The metanarrative says they're guilty, and the metanarrative cannot be questioned.

And the metanarrative also says because she's a woman, that must be the reason she was fired -- it couldn't be that she's dishonest, delusional, needlessly offensive, hateful, or at least extremely disrespectful, to people of faith, or just plain liberal, which, in case she hadn't noticed, is something conservatives tend to dislike as an attribute.

No, none of those reasons fit into the metanarrative. The reason conservatives picked on her is because he has a -- wait for it -- vagina, which we fear.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:14 PM | Comments (180)
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Valu-Rite Vodka: It's not just for inducing a hobo-murdering fugue anymore.

Phillip Kerkhof caught a 1.3-meter (4-ft.) bronze whaler shark with his bare hands off an Australian beach on Friday while it was swimming in shallow waters.

"He was just thrashing around in the water ... starting to turn around and try to bite me and I thought 'well, it's amazing what vodka does'," Kerkhof told AP.

And Adam ate of the forbidden fruit, and his eyes were opened.

Posted by: LauraW. at 10:26 AM | Comments (44)
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Jules Crittendon runs down all the news from the War on Terror.

The best news, I guess, is that part about non-binding deaths. Thanks, Nancy!

Also, Ken Allard has quit NBC over the Arkin fiasco, as well as its general decline.

Hot Air's on that too.

Posted by: Ace at 10:10 AM | Comments (17)
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Sweeeeet.

BBC reports the incident began shortly after the Boeing 737-400 took off from the capital city of Nouakchott, bound for the northern city of Nouadhibou. A lone man, believed to be North African, brandished two pistols and demanded the plane be flown to France.

Instead, the plane's flight crew initially attempted to land in Dakhla, in Western Sahara... but they were denied permission to do so by Moroccan authorities. So the crew headed to Gando, a Spanish military base in the Canary Islands.

A source close to the Mauritanian presidency told Reuters when the aircraft touched down, the pilot slammed on the brakes.

"When the pilot landed, he deliberately braked very hard," the unnamed source said. "The man fell to the ground and was jumped on by passengers. He fired two bullets but there are no serious injuries."

Read the article for more clues on the hijacker's motives and religion.

UPDATE: NOT A JIHADI PLOT.
Here's a better link, thanks to Kempermanx.
The hijacker was seeking political asylum in France. Originally was going to change the update to say he wasn't a terrorist, but he did hijack a plane full of civilians, after all. But there doesn't seem to be any anti-Western motivation here. Let's call it an immigration attempt gone wrong.

Posted by: LauraW. at 09:59 AM | Comments (30)
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