Previously identified Doom rhyming.

Meet Scout, a device that can monitor and track your vital signs, temperature, ECG, heart rate, oximetry and stress by just holding the it up to your forehead for 10 seconds.

As simple as it sounds, to use the device you simply hold it against your forehead and wait. Results are synched from Scout to your smartphone, where you can track your health over time. On a basic level, you can see that your temperature or heart rate is elevated from the norm at any given time. On a larger level, you can also see potential problems headed your way by noticing abnormalities before they become physical issues.

But would it have warned me months ahead of time that i was in danger of having a back spasm? Cause that's the sort of shit i need a diagnostic report for so that i know my muscles are shriveling up and can do something about it before the injury occurs.

I don't need it to tell me my temperature. I need it to tell me what the hell is with those random sharp pains in my chest.

But they're going to have to program them to make the container as well as the food else it'll be really difficult to request your "tea, Earl Grey, hot".

Smiling broadly, the Pope initially shook the man's hand, but the South American pontiff's expression changed dramatically after a priest from the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative order, leaned in close and spoke a few words to him.

With a more serious expression on his face, Francis placed both hands on the man's head for 15 seconds.

...

The [television] station gathered a panel of clergy specialising in exorcisms who scrutinised the footage and concluded that the pope had performed an exorcism.

...

The Rev. Giulio Maspero, a Rome-based systematic theologian who has witnessed or participated in more than a dozen exorcisms, said he was certain that Francis' prayer on Sunday was either a full-fledged exorcism or a prayer to "liberate" the young man from a demonic possession. He noted that the placement of the pope's hands on the man's head was the "typical position" for an exorcist to use.

Clearly Pope Francis is a badass cause all it took was 15 seconds to exorcise four demons. It took Damien Karras days just to exorcise one demon, and he ends up dead.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The black vote helped Obama win the election. "Perhaps they cannot practically receive targeted policy. But surely they have earned something more than targeted scorn."

Paul Krugman: Latest CBO reports show that the deficit has been reduced. Where are the celebrations?

The Taibbi article is from December, but Atrios re-linked to it today in the context of this story.

From 1982 to 2005, the pole drifted southeast toward northern Labrador, Canada, at a rate of about 2 milliarcseconds --or roughly 6 centimetres -- per year. But in 2005, the pole changed course and began galloping east toward Greenland at a rate of more than 7 milliarcseconds per year.

...

They found that recent accelerated ice loss and associated sea-level rise accounted for more than 90% of the post-2005 polar shift.

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When mass is lost in one part of a spinning sphere, its spin axis will tilt directly toward the position of the loss, he says -- exactly as Chen's team observed for Greenland. "It's a unique indicator of the point where the mass is lost," says Ivins.

Guess Santa better start packing.

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ - that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for "soliciting" the disclosure of classified information - is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

That same "solicitation" theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can "charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them." When that theory was first disclosed, I wrote that it would enable the criminalization of investigative journalism generally.

...

If even the most protected journalists - those who work for the largest media outlets - are being targeted in this way, and are saying over and over that the Obama DOJ is preventing basic news gathering from taking place without fear, imagine the effect this all has on independent journalists who are much more vulnerable.

Obviously, i don't like what the DOJ did in terms of getting the AP's phone records, but it's good that the media has finally woken up to the danger they are in. I wonder if it's too damn late, though. It's certainly too late for this poor guy:

New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ's attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News' chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests - something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist - something done every day in Washington - and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for "espionage".

I found out yesterday that min had never seen Disney's The Black Hole, so we watched it, and it was pretty fun seeing her reaction as the movie just goes completely off the rails during the last 5 minutes into some crazy psychedelic madness. That got me noodling around online to see what the reaction to the ending was at the time and then how adaptations of the film in book and comic form handled the ending and that's what lead me to dinosaurs.

-n
Also called: dissymmetry; the configuration or handedness (left or right) of an asymmetric, optically active chemical compound

Although the structures created in this study are just for show, the technique has potential for future applications. The folds of these 3-D microstructures pack a large amount of surface area into a tiny space--an important consideration for the production of chemicals that depend on catalysts, substances that speed up chemical reactions. The more surface area available, the more catalysts you can add--and the more efficient the reaction.

Well... competitive with who? I'm absolutely pro-immigration reform, but i've always had a problem with this "they do the work we won't" argument, and you can see the sleight of hand between Drum's post title and his conclusion, which slips in the "for a bit above minimum wage". The real argument is "they allow our food prices to be cheaper than they should be" which is potentially still a good argument but now you're getting into a NAFTA style "Walmart's low prices vs. overseas sweatshops and American jobs" argument.

I have to admit that I was predisposed to dislike Klein's book when it came out, probably out of professional turf-defending and whatever -- but her thesis really helps explain a lot about what's going on in Europe in particular.

I wish he'd expand on that! This probably falls into The Radicalization of Paul Krugman category...

In his columns, Krugman is belligerently, obsessively political, but this aspect of his personality is actually a recent development. His parents were New Deal liberals, but they weren't especially interested in politics. In his academic work, Krugman focussed mostly on subjects with little political salience. During the eighties, he thought that supply-side economics was stupid, but he didn't think that much about it. Unlike Wells, who was so upset when Reagan was elected that she moved to England, Krugman found Reagan comical rather than evil. "I had very little sense of what was at stake in the tax issues," he says. "I was into career-building at that point and not that concerned." He worked for Reagan on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers for a year, but even that didn't get him thinking about politics. "I feel now like I was sleepwalking through the twenty years before 2000," he says. "I knew that there was a right-left division, I had a pretty good sense that people like Dick Armey were not good to have rational discussion with, but I didn't really have a sense of how deep the divide went."

...but i'd like to hear in a little more detail why he was dismissive of Klein. He seems to have come around, in any event.