Happy new year?

[conuly]

Crises beyond ‘Duck Dynasty’

http://wapo.st/JHUeyJ

2013 is the year that proved your ‘paranoid’ friend right

http://wapo.st/19sszZn

What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014?

Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1957

http://bit.ly/1lwVKQr

The Madness of the Planets
Our home in the universe continues to rock out of control.

http://bit.ly/18XcSMH

Atoms Reach Record Temperature, Colder than Absolute Zero

http://bit.ly/1lAnlAe

Mass-transit commuters getting screwed by the taxman in 2014

This is especially galling when you consider that people without cars tend to have less money than people with cars. So why should they get a smaller deduction for their transportation costs when those costs haven't decreased?

http://bit.ly/18WpbuW

Root for the Postal Service to survive

You know, if the USPS didn't have to prepay employee pensions, something no other government agency has to do, they'd be in much better straits right now. And if other delivery companies like FedEx didn't get to ditch packages on USPS if they were too inconvenient to carry, or too expensive, then they wouldn't be doing as well as they are either.

I ought to write to my congress folk again.

http://cnn.it/Ke7JXf

US acceptance of evolution holds steady overall, drops among Republicans

http://bit.ly/19EBLdl

Comments

[steorra]

It irritates me a bit that the headline for the negative temperatures article contradicts the article itself:
Headline: 'Atoms Reach Record Temperature, Colder than Absolute Zero'

Article: '"The inverted Boltzmann distribution is the hallmark of negative absolute temperature, and this is what we have achieved," said researcher Ulrich Schneider, a physicist at the University of Munich in Germany. "Yet the gas is not colder than zero kelvin, but hotter. It is even hotter than at any positive temperature — the temperature scale simply does not end at infinity, but jumps to negative values instead."'

[conuly]

Yeah, the first article I read on the subject said that really, really cold things act funny, more like super hot things.