Just grooving on this download.

Check it it out.

More: Adam Warrock: The Browncoats Mixtape

From The Economist

ALUMINIUM was once more costly than gold. Napoleon III, emperor of France, reserved cutlery made from it for his most favoured guests, and the Washington monument, in America’s capital, was capped with it not because the builders were cheapskates but because they wanted to show off. How times change. And in aluminium’s case they changed because, in the late 1880s, Charles Hall and Paul Héroult worked out how to separate the stuff from its oxide using electricity rather than chemical reducing agents. Now, the founders of Metalysis, a small British firm, hope to do much the same with tantalum, titanium and a host of other recherché and expensive metallic elements including neodymium, tungsten and vanadium.

The difference between its process and that of Hall and Héroult (and why electrolysis has not previously been used to make metals such as tantalum and titanium) is that the Hall-Héroult method requires both input oxide and output metal to be in liquid form. That demands heat. But aluminium has a fairly low melting point and its oxide can be dissolved in a substance called cryolite that also has a low melting point, so the amount of heat needed is manageable. Titanium and tantalum are not so obliging. The Metalysis trick is to do the electrolysis on powdered oxides directly, without melting them.

Elements will still be expensive if the ores are expensive, but the process described here seems to be orders of magnitude cheaper than the current method. Aluminum went from being Napoleon’s “silverware” to littering our roadways with discarded soft drink cans, so can we expect a similar transformation for titanium? Its ore is extremely common, as is that of tantalum, neodymium, tungsten and vanadium, though the latter two are more regionally localized (ie, China). I am not seeing too much hype in this article. This is likely to be the single largest change in metallurgy until we start mining asteroids.

Dorner Died of Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound to the Head, Authorities Say
By Mike Brunker, Investigations Editor, NBC News

Police had been seeking Dorner since last week, when they say he launched a deadly revenge campaign against the Los Angeles Police Department over his 2009 firing.

Video

Christopher Dorner, the former LAPD police officer who carried out a vengeful rampage against his fellow ex-cops and others, died of a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at the end of an intense firefight with police in rural Big Bear, Calif., authorities said Friday.

Chris Dorner’s victims.

At a late-afternoon news conference, San Bernardino County authorities said that the cause of death was determined by an autopsy conducted Thursday by the county Coroner’s Office.

Authorities had been unsure whether Dorner killed himself, had been struck by a deputy’s bullet or had died in a fire that engulfed the cabin during the shootout. The coroner’s finding still must be finalized.

Continue reading at NBC News.

Music video by Gossip performing Heavy Cross. (C) 2009 Sony Music Entertainment

If you want to know people’s politics, tradition said to study their parents. In fact, the party affiliation of someone’s parents can predict the child’s political leanings about around 70 percent of the time.

But new research, published yesterday in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests what mom and dad think isn’t the endgame when it comes to shaping a person’s political identity. Ideological differences between partisans may reflect distinct neural processes, and they can predict who’s right and who’s left of center with 82.9 percent accuracy, outperforming the “your parents pick your party” model. It also out-predicts another neural model based on differences in brain structure, which distinguishes liberals from conservatives with 71.6 percent accuracy.

The study matched publicly available party registration records with the names of 82 American participants whose risk-taking behavior during a gambling experiment was monitored by brain scans. The researchers found that liberals and conservatives don’t differ in the risks they do or don’t take, but their brain activity does vary while they’re making decisions.

The idea that the brains of Democrats and Republicans may be hard-wired to their beliefs is not new. Previous research has shown that during MRI scans, areas linked to broad social connectedness, which involves friends and the world at large, light up in Democrats’ brains. Republicans, on the other hand, show more neural activity in parts of the brain associated with tight social connectedness, which focuses on family and country.

Other scans have shown that brain regions associated with risk and uncertainty, such as the fear-processing amygdala, differ in structure in liberals and conservatives. And different architecture means different behavior. Liberals tend to seek out novelty and uncertainty, while conservatives exhibit strong changes in attitude to threatening situations. The former are more willing to accept risk, while the latter tends to have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli.

More: Study Predicts Political Beliefs With 83 Percent Accuracy

FEBRUARY 15—After demanding that the mother of a crying toddler “shut that nigger baby up,” a male passenger allegedly slapped the 19-month-old across the face as a flight prepared to land in Atlanta last Friday evening, The Smoking Gun has learned.

The shocking February 8 incident aboard Delta Airlines Flight 721 resulted in Joe Rickey Hundley, 60, being charged with simple assault, according to a U.S. District Court affidavit. Hundley, seen at right, is president of an aircraft parts manufacturer headquartered in Hayden, Idaho.

In an interview, Hundley denied striking the toddler or using a racial slur, though he did acknowledge that he “asked the mother to quiet the child.” Hundley, who said he was traveling to Atlanta to visit a hospitalized relative, described himself as “distraught” on the flight, during which he said he consumed a single alcoholic drink.

As detailed by FBI Agent Daron Cheney, Hundley was traveling to Atlanta from Minneapolis in seat 28A on the MD-90 twin-engine jet. He was seated next to Jessica Bennett, who shared seat 28B with her son Jonah.

Bennett, 33, told investigators that the “aircraft was in final descent” to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport when her child “started to cry due to the altitude change.” Bennett added that she “was trying to get [her son] to stop crying, but he continued.”

At this point, Bennett recalled, Hundley used the racial epithet as he told her to shut the child up. He then allegedly “turned around and slapped” the toddler in the face “with an open hand, which caused the juvenile victim to scream even louder.” The slap, Bennett said, “caused a scratch below [the child’s] right eye.”

More: thesmokinggun.com

Hancock said having an insurance department and a separate agency to represent consumers is “a waste of taxpayer money.” He added this his bill “will continue to protect consumers and reduce wasteful spending.” But consumer groups sharply disagreed. “Why would lawmakers even consider eliminating the one thing that gives Texas policyholders a fighting chance against Big Insurance?” asked Alex Winslow of Texas Watch, a consumer group that follows insurance issues. He said that by objecting to State Farm’s rates, OPIC is performing its statutory duty to represent the interests of consumers. “This state office with a handful of employees and a tiny budget shouldn’t be threatened with abolishment simply for doing its job,” Winslow said. The agency was created by the Legislature in the early 1990′s under an insurance reform bill.

More: Dallas-Area Senator Files Bill to Abolish Consumer Advocate for Insurance

It’s hard for me to fathom how much money is being funneled to candidates such as this one. It’s almost as if they revel in screwing regular citizens into the ground. What else could provide such incentive?

Music video by Gossip performing Move In The Right Direction. (c) 2012 Columbia Records, a Division of Sony Music Entertainment
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