Wotka World Wide

Friday, December 28, 2012

Real Genius in real life: The Boy Who Played With Fusion.  And he's only a teenager.  Amazing.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Insightful look at the connections between mass shootings and mental illness, from David Kopel in the WSJ.

Monday, December 17, 2012

While President Obama has swiftly embraced Mitt Romney's idea to limit deductions by the wealthy (after campaigning against it), it turns out that many non-profit groups around the country aren't so enthusiastic about the idea, at least when it comes to limiting charitable deductions for the wealthy.  Apparently there might be some kind of link between deductions and donations...

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The new Sandy aid package being pushed by the White House is worth $60 billion, and includes millions in funding for things that have little or nothing to do with Hurricane Sandy relief, like a new roof for the Smithsonian and building sand dunes at Cape Canaveral.  Big surprise.  This spending would also just about negate the gains from Obama's intended tax increases on the rich.  So they've already spent the money they don't have.  Unreal.
Stay classy, ESPN.

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Saturday, December 01, 2012

Check out Learning from the Election, from Victor Davis Hanson.  He has his usual insightful observations, with his media commentary in particular of note:
Without Limbaugh, Hannity, Fox News, the Drudge Report, the conservative blogs, and the conservative dailies and magazine, the conservative cause would be lost. But with that said, do not quite believe the mainstream media is dead because the New York Times or Washington Post is nearly insolvent or the print version of Newsweek will shortly be defunct. The fact is that the liberal press is insidious. The worst network news anchors still have larger ratings on most nights than does The O’Reilly Factor. NPR, with 900 stations, draws more listeners than most right-wing talk hosts. It does not matter much that no one watches MSNBC if they watch NBC. It matters nothing that Air America went broke without an audience. When you tally together the cultural influence of the NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, CBS, ABC, and NBC, and then consider the slant of a USA Today or People magazine, it all adds up. Worse perhaps are the biases of AP, Reuters,Bloomberg News, Google, Yahoo, and the other wire services that feed supposedly neutrally reported news to local affiliates that ensure their prejudices are aired as disinterested information. Don’t forget the influence of the hard-left British and European presses. Conservatives are gradually catching up, but for the foreseeable future they have a real problem: slanted liberal news is still passed off as Walter-Cronkite mainstream apolitical news, and conservative alternatives are dismissed as shrill partisanship — and lots of clueless Americans believe that. When an author appears on Fox, he is dismissed as rank book plugger; when he goes on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, he is a literary figure. That the mainstream media was shamelessly partisan meant a 3-4% edge for Obama that was hard to erase.
Wired has a fascinating look at the state of cryptography today, with an in-depth account of breaking a 250 year old code with the help of statistical algorithms.  This type of technique may lead to scores of old coded texts being broken, which will allow much greater looks into secret societies or even just great thinkers writing in dangerous times. This was also recently done by a group at Brown University, who figured out the keys to Roger Williams' coded notes.  Cool.