A few months ago, I wrote a post about a drone that can fire a paintball gun with great accuracy. I concluded, "If this is what's doable by hobbyists today, think about what will be possible five, ten, or 20 years from now."
After decades of worsening diets and sharp increases in obesity, Americans’ eating habits have begun changing for the better.
Calories consumed daily by the typical American adult, which peaked around 2003, are in the midst of their first sustained decline since federal statistics began to track the subject, more than 40 years ago. The number of calories that the average American child takes in daily has fallen even more — by at least 9 percent.
The declines cut across most major demographic groups — including higher- and lower-income families, and blacks and whites — though they vary somewhat by group.
In the most striking shift, the amount of full-calorie soda drunk by the average American has dropped 25 percent since the late 1990s.
Alanna Whitney was a weird kid. She had a strange knack for pronouncing long words. Anchovies on pizza could send her cowering under a table. Her ability to geek out on subjects such as Greek mythology and world religions could be unsettling. She drank liquids obsessively, and in her teens, her extreme water intake landed her in the hospital.
Years later, she found a word that explained it all: Autistic. Instead of grieving, she felt a rush of relief. “It was the answer to every question I’d ever had,” she recalled. “It was kind of like a go-ahead to shed all of those things I could or couldn’t do and embrace myself for who I am.”
So it came to be that Whitney, 24, was arranging strawberries and store-bought cookies on platters at the Queensborough Community Center for a celebration of “Autistic Pride Day,” her shoulder-length hair dyed mermaid green to match her purse and sandals. A bowl of orange earplugs sat nearby in case any of the guests found the ambient sounds overwhelming.
Whitney is part of a growing movement of autistic adults who are finding a sense of community, identity and purpose in a diagnosis that most people greet with dread. These “neurodiversity” activists contend that autism — and other brain afflictions such as dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — ought to be treated not as a scourge to be eradicated but rather as a difference to be understood and accepted.
There’s no denying that Clinton is among the most polarizing figures in American politics, with staunch opposition from almost every Republican in the country. Add modest Democratic discontent—evidenced by the surprising popularity of Sanders—a series of highly publicized scandals, and Clinton’s legitimate problems with secrecy, and you have a recipe for her low ratings.
But that, I think, is as far as we can go. Beyond a few generalities about Clinton’s present media narrative and the overall landscape of the race, these polls just don’t tell us much. If anything, the breathless media coverage of the results is a good reminder of how not to interpret polls and what everyone should have learned from coverage of the 2012 presidential election.
The big thing is that this early in an election cycle, polls don’t tell us anything. They aren’t predictive or especially useful. For example, at roughly this point in 2011, Barack Obama was a goner. With a net negative job approval rating, he was behind in key swing states and losing to a generic Republican in a nationwide matchup. But the election came, and the picture changed: Discontented Democrats returned to his corner, and the race tightened to a virtual tossup. With economic growth on his side, Barack Obama won, with a victory that matched those fundamentals.
The first exoplanet orbiting another star like our sun was discovered in 1995. Exoplanets, especially small Earth-size worlds, belonged within the realm of science fiction just 21 years ago. Today, and thousands of discoveries later, astronomers are on the cusp of finding something people have dreamed about for thousands of years -- another Earth.
It is true: we will be able to do more stuff if we focus on managing our time, but in today’s business environment, we don’t need more repetitive, synchronized activity like we did in the Industrial Revolution. We need more thinking, more creativity, and more problem solving. A focus on time will undermine all of these. It will make you feel more overwhelmed and miserable too! Time management was a brilliant invention, and helped to transform society 250 years ago. It is just not helpful anymore; in fact it’s harmful in a world of too much. It’s time to develop a different strategy—one that starts from the recognition that, in our overloaded world, the greatest shortage is not time, but attention. Put another way; time is no longer money.
Either way, the police bear moral responsibility for Bland’s death. Trooper Encinia chose to pull her over for a minor infraction. He chose to escalate the situation, and he chose to go from writing a ticket to making an arrest.
Yes, Bland could have been less irritated, and she could have obeyed the command to put out her cigarette. But it’s not illegal to be frustrated with the police, and it’s not a crime to smoke. Moreover, it’s an officer’s job to remain calm and resolve situations without additional conflict. It’s not an imposition to expect as much from men and women entrusted with the right to detain and to use lethal force.
Think of it this way: If you are inclined to blame Bland for her arrest (and by extension her death), then you’re sanctioning an America where police command total deference, where you have to obey regardless of what you’ve done or what’s the law. You might want to live in that America. I don’t.
IT SEEMS THAT every couple of months, we have to talk about the Highway Trust Fund. Specifically, the lack of money in the Highway Trust Fund. And here we are again, with the fund expected to be insolvent by September—and a fix needed by July 31, since that’s when Congress takes vacation.
The Highway Trust Fund is the source of most federal spending on road infrastructure. Its primary source is the 18.4 cent per gallon excise tax on gasoline and a 24.4 cent per gallon tax on diesel. Problem is, the gas tax hasn’t been increased since 1993 (so it isn’t keeping up with inflation), cars are more fuel efficient than ever, and an increasing number of electric cars aren’t paying into the fund at all.
