Coffee and Provocation

Colorado Bans Hunting and Scouting With Drones

The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission is the first state to ban the use of drones for the purposes of scouting, hunting, and killing wildlife.

Alligator Ranching in South Carolina?

I guess economic development comes any way you can get it.

Who Needs Continental Drift?

Some plants and animals have crossed vast distances with simple ocean drift, and that may include old world monkeys coming to Latin America from Africa. "A few hapless monkeys and other species trapped aboard could have been carried along on favorable currents—and 40 million years ago, the Atlantic Ocean may have been just 900 miles across at its narrowest point.  With the most favorable winds, the voyage for the first pioneering monkeys in the New World could have taken as little as a week."

Finally, a Use for the School Library!

A Falls Church, Virginia High School has put stationary bikes in their library. "With lean budgets and a decreased emphasis in some schools on time spent at play, schools across the country are on the lookout for new and innovative opportunities to 'kill two birds with one stone,' says Falls Church High librarian Laura Potocki,."

A Solid Texas Political Platform

Texasn Tink Nathan is running for office on a simple platform: if elected he'll see that Texans can eat the deer they hit with their pickup trucks. "Why should buzzards be the only ones to benefit from the frequent animal-car collisions that occur by the thousands on Texas roads?"

Habla Gibberish?

Two scientific publishers are being forced to recall and remove more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.  

My Latest Scientific Paper

MIT has published a paper I coauthored on The Impact of Secure Modalities on Robotics (PDF) which builds on my earlier co-authored work:  Softner: Structured Unification and Gigabit Switches published in the Journal of Interactive, Random Information 94 (Aug. 2002).  Please note the section on "Dogfooding Our Heuristic".  I am particularly proud of that section!