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What’s in a name? Apparently, when it comes to hurricanes, a lot. A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that, for Atlantic Coast hurricanes in the U.S., storms with feminine names lead to more deaths than those with masculine names. The best explanation for this, according to the Economist, is that people do not take hurricanes with women’s names as seriously as storms with men’s names. The researchers actually tested this theory — and produced supporting results. They picked five male and five female names from the list to be used for this...

Imagine the press letting a Republican or conservative try to get away with trying to avoid uncondtionally calling something as infuriating and outrageous as the Veterans Administration waiting list scandal a real scandal. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did that on Monday (HT Patterico and Real Clear Politics) in an interview with Vox's Ezra Klein, who naturally let it slide right on by:

Proving that communism has worked no better for students at a University of California-San Diego cooperative living space than it did for the billions of citizens of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the aptly-named “Che Cafe” is quickly running out of cash. In the cleverly titled article, “In the Red,” The UCSD Guardian noted that the Che Cafe–a student-run co-op named after mass-murdering dictator Che Guevara and governed by the communist philosophy–has become a “money pit consistently plagued with safety issues.”

Nasa has released pictures of a prototype space suit, parts of which American astronauts could one day wear on the first manned mission to Mars. The public voted on three different designs for the Z-2 and the "Technology" design won by a landslide with 63 per cent of the vote. The design uses luminescent wire to form a light on the front of the suit that can be personalised to help astronauts identify other individuals on their team. The Z-2 is a prototype so will not be making any future trip to Mars itself as it does not have the...

Video released today by SpaceX confirms the landing legs deployed successfully on the Falcon 9′s first stage booster, paving the way for future vertical soft touchdowns on land. SpaceX’s next-generation Falcon 9 rocket was tested following the launch of the CRS-3 mission for the Dragon spacecraft, which launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on April 18. This was the first test of the landing legs deployment with a re-entry burn and soft landing in the Atlantic Ocean. The SpaceX CEO had mentioned the success during a post launch briefing and later tweeted further updates that the Falcon 9 first...

Murray County Deputy Greg Morrison put his arm around the FULL TITLE: Officer has face mauled by police K9 when he tried to take selfie with it AA Georgia deputy sheriff was rushed to the hospital Monday after a police bit his face, ripping open his chin and lip. Murray County Deputy Greg Morrison put his arm around the Malinois after a job well done in an attempt to take a selfie with his cell phone. But the professional pup was in no mood for camaraderie and proved it with a vicious snap at Morrison's chin. 'It’s an act of...

The Obama daughters aren’t the only ones with travel privileges. Vice President Joe Biden told a gathering on Monday that he likes to bring his grandchildren with him when he travels. “I literally—at Christmastime, Mr. Ambassador, I always sit with the kids the last five or—and say, well, where do you want to go this year? Because one of the great advantages of being vice president, I’m able to take, if I’m not going into a war zone, one of my grandchildren with me. And I do take them all. They’re good kids. They don’t get in the way. And...

Healthcare.gov, the troubled website set up to help Americans choose and enroll in a health care policy, crashed early Monday morning, on the final day to begin the process to apply for health insurance. According to a CNBC story, the website crashed around 3:20 a.m. (ET) Monday. It was  still down as of 7:40 a.m.Monday is the deadline to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act -- commonly called Obamacare -- before facing a fine.According to the White House, more than 6 million people have signed up since the enrollment period began on Oct. 1. According to...

PONTIAC, MI -- It was fun while it lasted for hundreds of gay Michigan couples who got married Saturday. With a voter-approved ban against same-sex nuptials out of the way for about 24 hours, couples rushed to tie the knot in four Michigan counties where clerks held special weekend hours to issue marriage licenses. But an appeals court put a stop to the immediate wedding planning, issuing a temporary stay of U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman's Friday ruling that called the Michigan Marriage Act unconstitutional. Friedman issued a decision that rejected all of the state's arguments that voters made a...

First Lady Michelle Obama will be accompanied by her children and her mother on her trip to China, which begins today. But she won't be accompanied by the press. "Michelle Obama’s trip to China starting on Wednesday will be nonpolitical, the White House says, a 'people-to-people exchange' emphasizing the importance that both nations place on education. As if to underscore the point, no reporters are traveling with the first lady, and she does not plan to give interviews while there," reports the New York Times. The White House is defending the first lady bringing her family along for the ride...

The National Football League sent six of its lieutenants to Minneapolis the other day to advertise what essentially is a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Either you people give us the tax breaks we want so that we might not be fettered by the reasonable expectations of doing business or you don't get a Super Bowl. Capiche? "It's an incredibly competitive environment,'' said Frank Supovitz, NFL senior vice president of events. If Supovitz wasn't wearing a tie, he would have said, "Look, we've got other cities that will do what we want, so you either play by our rules or you can stuff...

A 24-year-old geography major is the first Wikipedian-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley. His announcement can be found - where else? - but on his own Wiki page. Cal hired Gorman, according to a February announcement, to advise students and professors on the complex task of editing articles for Wikipedia, the user-generated online encyclopedia that gets 500 million monthly visitors. Until now, Wikipedians-in-residence have been assigned to cultural institutions, such as the British Museum, the Gerald Ford Presidential Library and the U.S. National Archives. In a statement, Cal calls Gorman a "hardcore Wikipedian" since his undergraduate days at Berkeley,...

Democrats control the Senate, but instead of bringing up a Democrat-sponsored climate-change bill, a few dozen of them pulled an all-nigher on the Senate floor to draw attention to the issue. It's a clear indication that Democrats don't have the votes -- or the public support -- to pass their own climate-change legislation. And they blame the lack of bipartisanship on billionaire Republican donors and "all that dark money," as one Democrat described it.

Councilman John Duran and his gay colleagues on the West Hollywood City Council never expected a backlash when they voted recently to remove the rainbow flag from above City Hall. For Duran, who is gay, taking down the flag wasn't about slighting gays but sending a message about the city's diversity. "It's not just a city of gay men. It belongs to heterosexual people as well," he said. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-weho-gay-identity-20140307,0,7458432.story#ixzz2vNq2Uy21

This week's episode:  Spending enormous resources on a program to reduce X, and then not tracking (or even putting in place a mechanism to track) whether X was reduced as promised.   James Taranto quoting the National Journal quoting Administration officials: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the health care law will reduce the number of uninsured people by about 24 million over the next few years, and that about 6 million previously uninsured people will gain coverage through the law's exchanges this year. So, is enrollment on track to meet that goal? Overall enrollment is looking pretty decent, but...

We previously made reference to the anti-Israel conference organized for February 28- March 1, 2014 by Lisa Duggan, a professor in NYU’s American Studies Department and incoming President of the American Studies Association. (Full conference poster at bottom of post.) When Elder of Ziyon blog and others caught wind of Duggan trying to keep the Conference from coming to the attention of those who oppose ASA’s academic boycott of Israel, the Facebook post for the event was taken down. The Conference is an NYU function, but it’s hardly academic. The panels are stacked with anti-Israel academic boycott movement supporters arguing...

Evidence is accumulating that quality control is a serious issue in academic publishing, which is the key to career advancement for scientists and other scholars. In an age when appeals to "peer reviewed" "settled science" have become standard operating procedure in efforts to impose radical increases in government control over our lives, corruption in the mechanisms for reviewing  scientific publications has very real consequences for all of us. Nature magazine tells us: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Richard Van Noorden writes: The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after...

Fire, brimstone, eternal suffering — hell is not a pleasant concept. But research has pointed to the societal benefits of a belief in supernatural punishment, including higher economic growth in developing countries and less crime. But there are also drawbacks, even in this life. A new study links believing in hell, and perhaps even thinking about it, with lower levels of happiness and satisfaction in life. "It seems there is this trade-off," said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. In research published in January in PLOS ONE, Shariff and a colleague looked at international...

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas likes to present himself as a deficit hawk—a red-state conservative who “believes that Congress must be a good steward of the taxpayers’ money,” as his official website declares, and that “fiscal responsibility is the cornerstone for good governance.” So the revelation in the National Journal that the 61-year-old Cornyn is collecting three different state-government pensions while receiving his federal salary as a senator (a total of $239,383 in taxpayer-funded largesse) is slightly off-message, and just a tad inconvenient, as he gets ready to run for a third term next year. “There’s a lot of...

Dear President Obama: I'm planning to move my family and extended family into Mexico for my health, and I would like to ask you to assist me. We're planning to simply walk across the border from the U.S. into Mexico, and we'll need your help to make a few arrangements. We plan to skip all the legal stuff like visas, passports, immigration quotas and laws. I'm sure they handle those things the same way you do here. So, would you mind telling your buddy, The President of Mexico, that I'm on my way over? Please let him know that I...