Outside the Beltway

An oldie but goodie from PhD comics is making the rounds.

Getting nuclear weapons out of Ukraine in 1994 was a good idea, not a mistake.

Stanford astrophysicist Andrei Linde gets a nice surprise.

From Massachusetts, a ruling that might make little sense to the lay person but which seems to be right on the law.

A rich guy wants to break up California.

A rather impressive recovery from a career that was mostly dead in 2007.

What if the jobless recovery is but the beginning of a trend?

Lack of understanding or basic dishonesty?

“It’s complicated” has long been an option to describe one’s romantic status on Facebook. Now, it applies to one’s sex as well.

Snow days are no longer automatic vacation days for federal workers.

Can you still buy batteries there, though?

The House GOP leadership’s principles are a good start, but it’s unclear if they can make it past the anti “amnesty” crowd that seems to dominate the GOP.

Ezra Klein has put out a teaser of the project that he left WaPo to pursue.

Apple is pledging to fix a bug in iOs 7 that I have never experienced and never heard of.

Most peer-reviewed research is crap.

Seven years ago, Steve Jobs showed us that we could literally hold the world in the palm of our hand.

The IDF has finally put a woman in command of a battalion. They’re decades behind American forces.

One of the dumbest rules in sports may mean that people in three cities can’t see their teams play this weekend.

Once again, a poll shows that large numbers of Americans, and most Americans, reject Evolution via Natural Selection as the explanation for humanity’s origin. How do we explain that?

Another Federal District Court ruling on the Constitutionality of the NSA’s data mining program, this time more favorable to the NSA.

The era of the electric car isn’t likely to arrive for a long time, if ever.

In a new interview, Edward Snowden explains his motives for absconding from the country with NSA secrets.

Newly disclosed details about the US role in Colombia.

Scientists have discovered that heterosexual men alter their behavior around women.

A bunch of people talking on cellphones during a plane flight would annoy the heck out of me, but the government shouldn’t be involved in deciding if it should be allowed.

A potentially big legal setback for a big National Security Agency program.

No previously published works have entered the US Public Domain since 1978. And none are scheduled to enter until 1923. So what are we missing?

In an ordinary post-recession world, we wouldn’t need to talk about extended unemployment benefits, but times are far from ordinary.

Not surprisingly, Time’s editors chose Pope Francis as Person Of The Year. However, Edward Snowden arguably would have been the better choice.

Nobel physicist Peter Higgs says he could not make it in academia today.

Technology is about the way you order in your local restaurant.

Jeff Bezos’s latest idea may never get off the ground, but it sure is interesting.

Some signs from Silicon Valley seem to indicate that the heady days of the 90s Tech Bubble are returning.