One is addicted to attention, delusions of grandeur and a belief that money exists in a magical pot that never ends - and the other is Lindsay Lohan.

Allysia Finley argues that California is suffering from spending addiction like starlet Lindsay Lohan - and also a fair amount of denial.   'Smoke free restaurants' do not actually make California the envy of the world any more than the remake of "The Parent Trap" makes Lohan enviable (though she was pretty good).  If you look at the decline in the California economy, it happened when the legislature started funding social activism and penalizing businesses that pay taxes - result; a whopping 12% unemployment rate though, since Lohan is 100% unemployed, California has her beat there.

City Hall station, which opened in 1904, has been out of use since 1945, but riders can still make the journey to this long-forgotten subway stop - if they know how.  

John-Paul Palescandolo was kind enough to take some pictures and tell curious folks how to visit.

May beer have helped lead to the rise of civilization? It's a possibility, some archaeologists say.

Their argument is that Stone Age farmers were domesticating cereals not so much to fill their stomachs but to lighten their heads, by turning the grains into beer. That has been their take for more than 50 years, and now one archaeologist says the evidence is getting stronger.

If you paid attention to video that appears to show a missile launch off the coast of California, you can imagine what conspiratorial types are making of the military's silence.   
 
The silence is because from plenty of angles it looks like an airplane contrail.  

Sometimes I read sentences like "It occurs to me that I ought to thank Mark Hyman, "pioneer of functional medicine," and creator of "Ultrawellness," particularly since he started blogging for that wretched hive of scum and quackery (WHSQ), The Huffington Post" on Scienceblogs.com and think, 'gosh, it must be fun to never about science on a science site and get away with it' but then I realize we would lose most of our audience; no one can outdo Scienceblogs for progressive politics, atheism and culture wars and people who like that stuff are already reading them so I guess we'll

When times are good, green technologies can make projections stating that they will develop a prototype and the miracle of capitalism will make it popular and cheap and people will basically turn a blind eye to the suspect math but when things are tough, there needs to be an actual business plan.

Sure, Google is a multi-billion company that got there selling ads - and its contextual engine is smart but at heart it's still based on keywords and content.  So when it goofs, it goofs to funny effect:

Here's one and then the link below is to the full 10.



All 10

Wish that, like fantasy baseball players or civilization builders, you could have your own planet to kill with greenhouse gases?  Good news!  "Fate of the World" lets you run a UN environmental group tasked with saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or - and you know most people will do this - seeing what soaring temperatures do.

The people really excited about this "issue-led gaming" concept are the same people who think a game about cleaning up pollution would lead to less pollution and comic books about religion make kids want to go to church.   Basically they think people are pretty dumb and will only understand climate change if it's a game.    But let's face it, BP executives are not buying this game and getting rehabilitated, the already convinced are.

Burt Rutan, who designed the first private manned rocket to reach space, has announced he will retire next year.    Though everyone in aviation knew him well (including this blogger's aerospace engineering wife) he became famous worldwide in 2004 when his SpaceShipOne prototype won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for being the first privately financed manned vehicle to reach space.

In 1986, his Voyager aircraft made the first nonstop flight around the world without refueling.   I shall grow mutton chops and dig out my leather jacket in his honor.