Analysts: Tweaks May Not Save Congress’ Failed Foreclosure Fix - ProPublica

The Hope for Homeowners program was created by Congress last summer to help an estimated 400,000 homeowners avoid foreclosure. But it could more aptly be called the Hope for A Homeowner program, given that just one has used it successfully since its October launch.

Yup, only one person in America has been helped.


Magnets in ant antennae work as internal GPS - Discovery.com- msnbc.com
They pick up bits of magnetic material from the ground.

Grand juries cite Obama for ineligibility, treason
The WorldNetDaily seems like a somewhat unreliable publication. Still, Obama needs to prove beyond doubt that he is qualified to be President. It's a simple matter that he needs to take care of, or he's going to have this problem with him for a long time. And if he's not qualified to be President, we need to know sooner rather than later.


Are Too Many People Going to College? — The American, A Magazine of Ideas
"America’s university system is creating a class-riven nation. There has to be a better way."
I agree. It used to be everyone recognized that being a college graduate didn't make you smart - lots of smart people did their jobs well without ever going to college. Now, though, if you don't gradaute, you're seen as a second-class citizen - someone who's just not as smart, hardworking, or responsible as those who do make it through. I have news for you if you do believe that: I was not at all hardworking - in fact, I rarely read any of the books I was assigned, and frequently did my work poorly or not at all, yet managed to graduate college without much trouble. Being a college graduate should not equal employability and respect. Not having a college degree excludes too many people from jobs that they are eminently qualified to perform.


Foreign Policy: The Revenge of Geography
Robert Kaplan has written an article about why geography matters. I like it, and think it is probably helpful.


Ray Kurzweil Wants to Be a Robot | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com
His ideas are interesting, and he has a lot of followers, but the part that got my attention was at the end, where he voices his hope that he will be able to

bring his father back to life by getting DNA from his father's grave site and using a swarm of nanobots to create a new body that is "indistinguishable from the original person." He'll dig up all of his father's old letters and other materials, and download them along with his own memories into an artificial-intelligence program to create a "virtual person."

That's really sad.


Robot warriors will get ethics guide - Discovery.com- msnbc.com
These guys are trying to teach robots when to shoot, in an ethical way. Good idea, scary implications.

Cloud nine (Tensegrity sphere) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's a giant floating city, as envisioned by Buckminster Fuller. Is it doable? I have no idea. I'm no physicist. I'd be a little worried about living in a bubble that depended on differing air temperatures to float, though - poke a hole in it, and it will fall. Or you could screw with them by heating the place with a laser, and watch it ascend uncontrollably. Heheh.


Amazon.com: Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, Available in Various Sizes: Apparel
The comments on this thread are priceless.

This next video is weird, but interesting. Thanks, Brandon!

The Sahara Forest Project: A proposal for ameliorating the effects and causes of climate change
This sounds crazy, but it's a very workable, practical, and cheap way to do terraforming, by building greenhouses cooled and humidified by seawater. The greenhouses will not only grow crops, but the evaporated seawater will come down somewhere as precipitation, and the higher humidity in the area of any of these greenhouses will enable a lot more plants to survive near them. With enough of these, you could even restore vegetation to parts of the Sahara, or any other dry place in the world. They also plan to put some of these in below-sea-level depressions, so that pumping the water will cost nothing in terms of energy - and they also want to build solar collectors alongside these projects, to power the farms, the villages that will spring up around them, and anyone nearby (or even far away) who wants power. That part will be much more expensive, of course, and I'm not sure putting it right next to all that humidity would be the most efficient thing to do, but hey, it's not my project. Very cool. I'd love to build one of these.