Huh. Look at that. And the faculty got how much of a pay raise last year? Oh. Right. 2%.

Zero this year.

I sense a new hit to morale in the wake of the story. Good thing I shan't be in until tomorrow.

This is brilliant. Got it from Bits&Pieces. Click on the photo for a more readable version.

...what more could one ask for in a judicial opinion? The particular opinion here is U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter's ruling on a MOTD a "birther" suit which asked the court to: (1) recognize standing by uninjured parties who claimed hypothetical injury, (2) prevent Obama from acting as Commander in Chief (but apparently only when it meant someone might get deployed somewhere they didn't want to go), and (3) would have required that the judge essentially order a new election.

I found Judge Carter's final paragraph particularly charming:

Plaintiffs have attacked the judiciary, including every prior court that has dismissed their claim, as unpatriotic and even treasonous for refusing to grant their requests and for adhering to the terms of the Constitution which set forth its jurisdiction. Respecting the constitutional role and jurisdiction of this Court is not unpatriotic. Quite the contrary, this Court considers commitment to that constitutional role to be the ultimate reflection of patriotism.

Via Gizmodo:

In Utah, the National Security Agency is building a $2 billion storage facility that will house and analyze all forms of electronic communication...a potential yottabyte of everyone's (formerly) personal data. So how big is a yottabyte? CrunchGear puts it well:

There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB.

But, apparently, some people find impossible to love their spouse until they have performed 8 different surgeries on them...

Am I the only one who finds this enormously distasteful?

Good luck telling if they're Republicans or Democrats. Nate Silver notes the peculiarity of this election's crop of GOP *and* Democratic candidates: a lot of them don't really seem to want to admit their party affiliation.

Fascinating.

Go Volkswagen! First, it was the piano staircase in the subway station. Now...it is the bottle bank arcade that is making recycling fun:

A gallery of repurposed train cars...especially for kevin_standlee.

Via Neat-O-Rama.

...safe in the knowledge that none of them will show up in a pop-up window and shriek at you. And if they do, you can eat them. Just $29.99 to J.C. Penny brings home the waffle iron.



Via Nerd Approved.