What do you get when you combine eight films, 10 years and $6 billion?  Apparently a suicide watch.   The Harry Potter films are done, finis, kaput - and I have yet to see one.   But I am not the target market.    I do own every episode of "Firefly".Older, wiser fans - they of "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" - have wisdom to impart to today's youngsters about how to cope with withdrawal; namely spend money going to conventions and act out stuff.

Today, President Obama said 80 percent of the public supports Democrats' demand for tax increases.   "The American people are sold.  The problem is members of Congress are dug in ideologically."Demanding to have less money sounds odd, because it is.   A new Rasmussen Reports national survey found only 34% thought tax hikes were a valid part of the solution.   

Archaeologists at Khirbet Qeiyafa in Elah Valley near Jerusalem say they may have found remains of the biblical City of King David,  Israel's second king who held an area from Egypt to the Euphrates in the 10th century B.C.
If so, it is the first evidence that the ancient Jewish empire actually existed - while the Kingdom of David was described in the bible as the first Jewish state and features in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, it is commonly dismissed as just a story.
Professor Israel Finkelstein, of Tel Aviv University, pointed out that the remains are not evidence of a powerful biblical state.

On vacation  short while ago, NBA player Tony Parker rented a water-powered jetpack and it got a lot of attention.   They're cool because you aren't using rocket fuel, you're using water - less cool is that you are actually renting an entire boat and an engine and you are tethered to it while it pumps the water into the system, making it a toy for the idle rich.   On a Fox morning show, TechCrunch notes, an overenthusiastic Jetlev R200 user surprises the on-camera reporter with some premature ignition.  Hilarity ensues.

Is there a 'Singularity', an ascension of man being able to become machines or machines becoming sentient, coming in 2045?Given the current state of artificial intelligence and robotics, that would only happen if we were able to put a man on the Moon in a relative time scale of 3 minutes.  In reality, selling books and tickets to conferences showing "Man + (Black Box Full Of Magic) = SINGULARITY" not much progress has been made in decades much less anything leading us to believe the drastic inflection point needed will be happening any time this century.The robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks often begins speeches by reaching into his pocket, fiddling with some loose change, finding a quarter, pulling it out and twirling it in his fingers.

An activist website called Negotiation Is Over is urging its followers to attack scientists.  Left-wing kooks are no different than the right wing kind, just their issues are different.   Instead of global warming, they are anti-vaccine, instead of human embryonic stem cells, they are anti-agriculture.  One way fringe kooks on the left outdo their counterparts on the right is calls to violence.   They're even willing to pay students if they will target biomedical students who use animals in research.  Check this out:

In 2007, with the economy chugging along, environmentalists believed light bulbs were killing the world.   Companies like General Electric (GE) and Royal Philips Electronics (PHG), two of the biggest light bulb producers, were happy to oblige and helped Congress develop a de facto incandescent ban.  The law didn't outright ban bulbs, it simply set a new standard only newfangled, more efficient bulbs could meet.A lot has changed since 2007 - the replacement bulbs are either dangerous (CFL) or not very good (everything else) - and people have seen through the clever Energy Independence and Security Act name and realized they are going to be paying a lot more and accomplish little in the way of energy independence.

In the criticisms of American education, it is often noted that Asian children perform better on standardized tests that seek to measure knowledge across cultures so American schools last decade ago were required to begin teaching the same way, with funding contingent on success rates in education for the first time.Atlanta Public Schools shone during that period - scores rose so dramatically they brought national acclaim to superintendent Beverly Hall  and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.    

For over 20 years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been tasked with pooling and making publicly accessible the knowledge gleaned from climate-change research. Its efforts were rewarded in 2007 with the Nobel Peace Prize — not bad for what is basically a voluntary organization staffed by thousands of working scientists. But in the past two years, the IPCC has displayed a talent for maneuvering itself into embarrassing situations, making itself an easy target for critics and climate skeptics, writes an editorial in Nature.

Check out this ice cream manufacturer in Aberdeenshire which is entirely carbon neutral - it produces 10 million quarts of ice cream per year andthe factory is completely powered by the wind.Mackie's of Scotland makes more than ice cream and says its ice cream isn't selling you short by going carbon neutral, it's still 'extra posh', though it's hard to say what makes it expensive, the poshness or the wind power.    Of course, this state-of-the-art equipment was not manufactured using wind, nor is the transportation that takes it to stores, but if you need to feel good about your ice cream, this is the way to go.