• "The first major snowstorm of the season began its slow eastward march across the Midwest early Thursday, leaving at least three people dead, creating treacherous driving conditions and threatening to disrupt some of the nation's busiest airports ahead of the holiday weekend."
• "Tornado warnings remained in effect in parts of Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama early Thursday."
• "Schools across the country, already on edge following last week's massacre of 20 students and six adults at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school have been further unnerved following a series of copycat threats, sometimes yielding arrests and caches of deadly weapons."
• "The number of Americans filing first-time claims for [...]

I listen to a lot of AM radio, which is “Amplitude Modulation,” and I don’t know what that means, but not so much in the morning, if you know what I mean, as far as listening. One of the best things about AM radio, besides how it blinks out when you go under a bridge if you are in your car and the static and how other radio stuff bleeds in and out of whatever channel you are on and how it sounds like it’s coming from The Past, is guys like Harold Camping, who has a show on a network called “Family Radio,” which is pretty much [...]

"With all due respect to truckers, cargo pilots and other professional haulers, transporting goods across vast distances is looking more and more like a waste of our species' time, opposable thumbs and easily bored brains." Popular Mechanics says unmanned aerial vehicles like the Snowgoose Bravo, made by the Canadian company Mmist, should be deployed right away to carry our stuff for us. (You know the guys in Mmist's AV department were pissed when they couldn't get the rights to "Lunatic Fringe" for that video, right?) But, really, wouldn't we just use our opposable thumbs and easily bored brains to tie the robot helicopters to our penises? Also [...]

Florida is going to stop killing itself person-by-person and will begin to eventually kill us all. While Rick Scott's government kept a horrifying TB outbreak secret (while ordering the closure of the hospital that treated such!), let us not forget dengue fever outbreaks in the Keys and all that scary other stuff. Basically we need to wall off the subtropical portion of the United States before it's too late, before crocodiles with hoof-and-mouth Legionnaires bird flu storm our gates.

"Robots to get their own internet." —Enough said, right? Yes, I know, you're saying out loud: "How could this go wrong? The best part is that the RoboEarth website has a section called "collaborators," which, they certainly are. RoboVichy!

Once, there was Mechanical Turk, where people in the third world would do data entry for you. And also Google Answers, wherein people would do your homework. But you know what's going well these days? The Internet will allow you to hire anyone in the world to do simple tasks for $5, thanks to Fiverr, one of the only web startups that has a chance of becoming profitable. And boy is it ever useful! "I will tell you what name or animal you look like for $5." And! "I will send you a postcard + 10 grams of our purest sand from Mauritius Island for $5." More [...]

I was born in Houston, Texas. By the time I was three years old, I was living in New Jersey for the long haul. My family has no true roots in Texas, so leaving it was not a major upheaval. My father always said that Texas was the best place he ever lived. Maybe it was the best place I never really lived. This weekend, the story of the best place that none of us have ever lived—Dillon, Texas—comes to a close. After five seasons, "Friday Night Lights" finishes up, sending those ochre-tinged Texan spaces that have come to feel like home into cold blue digital storage.

"Friday Night Lights" [...]

Poor Alan Turing proposed a test by which you'd know whether The Machines are thinking: converse with someone you can't see and who might be a human or might be a machine, and you'll always know which. Test after test, we always know; machines are inferior conversationalists. But recently from the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-an extremely large, ruthlessly intelligent, highly organized professional association-comes troubling news. Change the test from conversing to killing, and all hell breaks loose: machines are indistinguishable from humans.

There is a creature alive today who has survived millions of years of evolution, without change, without passion and without logic. It lives to kill. A mindless eating machine. It will attack and devour anything. It is as if god created the devil and gave him… carp. I mean, I don't know if this is more like Jaws or Piranha or Deep Blue Sea. But it is pretty damn scary. CBS news reports that giant Asian carp-much like Benson, who was from England, but less heartwarming and dearly departed, and more giant and voracious and terrifying and, apparently, unstoppable-are on the verge of invading Lake [...]