On an adjacent wall are numbers indicating four time spans from roughly 935 to 6,700 years. It's not clear what they represent, but maybe the scribes were doing calculations that combined observations from important astronomical events like the movements of Mars, Venus and the moon, the researchers said.

Why bother to do that? Maybe the scribes were "geeks ... who just got carried away with doing these kinds of computations and calculations, and probably did them far beyond the needs of ordinary society," Aveni suggested.

Experts unconnected with the discovery said it was a significant advance.

"It's really a wonderful surprise," said Simon Martin, co-curator of an exhibit about the Mayan calendar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

While the results of the scribes' work were known from carvings on monuments, "we've never really been able to identify a working space, or how they actually went about things," Martin said.

I bet these Mayan astronomy geeks would have fit right in with my modern engineer friends.

So why do I still buy lottery tickets? Definitely not for the expected monetary return on investment. I think of it as a discretionary entertainment spend. I get literally hours of enjoyment from fantasizing what I'd do if I won. I happily spend $25 for two hours of entertainment at the movies, and I don't judge the value of that experience based on its expected return. For me, a lottery ticket for the occasional big draw has just as much entertainment value, or more, than the many other things that I spend money on to entertain myself.

The decision of whether to buy a lottery ticket shouldn't be based on the probability of winning, or the expected return of a ticket, but on the entertainment value that comes from imagining a different life. If that entertainment value compares favourably with other activities with a similar price, then go for it. Plus, it has the added bonus that you might actually win; one-in-a-million events happen every day. Someone eventually wins the big prize, and you have to be in to win.

So in addition to the money he could win, there's a psychic reward to playing: you get to imagine what you'd do if you won. Interesting, but I can imagine what I'd do with a ton of money even if I don't buy a lottery ticket. Still, people pour money into all sorts of hobbies that have zero expected return on investment without batting an eye... whether you buy a new sports car or play Party Bingo online, it's your hobby money, spend it on what you enjoy.

Experts expect the measure to pass, despite the state's long history of moderate politics.

The "moderate" position is to be opposed to gay marriage, not to endorse it. That's why President Obama officially opposes gay marriage, despite everyone in the world knowing that he personally supports it.

Whatever Obama's public position, there was little doubt in the briefing room Monday that the president supports gay marriage and that he would go public with this position after Election Day, when he no longer need fear losing independent voters. Carney, who had the unenviable position of trying to convince the press corps otherwise, arrived 35 minutes late for the job and found a feisty audience.

"I have no update on the president's personal views," he told the first questioner, Anne Gearan of the Associated Press. "He, as you know, said that his views on this were evolving."

Tapper asked whether Obama was "still evolving" or whether he's "just waiting for the proper time to drop it, likely after November."

"It is as it was," Carney said.

CBS's Nora O'Donnell tried another approach. "Why does the president oppose same-sex marriage?"

"I really don't have any update for you," Carney answered.

"The vice president appears to have evolved on the issue, but the president is still evolving?" O'Donnell inquired.

"I will leave it to individuals to describe their own personal views."

Reporters fired dozens of barbed questions and taunts. "Contorted position! . . . Why did you guys send out statements to clarify? . . . What does the word 'evolving' mean? . . . Is he not evolved?. . . I want you to dissect the evolution." A fly buzzed around the lectern. Carney let out a sigh.

NPR's Mara Liasson asked whether Obama was "too clever by half," essentially telling voters: "I'm getting ready to change my mind."

"His views," Carney maintained, "are crystal clear."

Words matter, otherwise we wouldn't argue over them.

We have had 38 months of 8% plus unemployment. We are setting records in the numbers of Americans not working and the percentage of the adult population not employed. GDP growth was a pathetic 1.7%. The borrowing hit $5 trillion under Obama, who between golf outings and campaign hit-ups of wealthy people, adds $1 trillion plus each year in more debt. To question how to pay it back is to pollute the air or abandon the children. In 2005, Paul Krugman was writing why Bush's spending was going to crash the economy; in 2012, Paul Krugman is writing why Obama's far greater deficit spending, on top of Bush's debts, is not going to crash the economy, given that we need to borrow far more than our paltry $3 or $4 billion a day.

In 2004, the media's "jobless recovery" was the description of George W. Bush's 5.4% unemployment rate. "It's the economy, stupid" referred to George H.W. Bush's 1992 annual 3.3-4% GDP growth rate. "Unpatriotic" was W's $4 trillion in borrowing in eight years, not $5 trillion in three. If Obama right now had 5.4% unemployment, 3.4% economic growth, and a budget deficit of about $400 billion, what would the media call it--a job-full recovery, "it's not the economy, smarty," or patriotic borrowing?

Hopefully the electorate notices. Couldn't Romney use these stats and history in a speech?

(HT: Kotaku.)

FALSANI: Do you believe in sin?

OBAMA:
Yes.

FALSANI:
What is sin?

OBAMA:
Being out of alignment with my values.

FALSANI:
What happens if you have sin in your life?

OBAMA:
I think it's the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I'm true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward, when I'm not true to it, it's its own punishment.

Presumably Obama doesn't mean that it's a sin for any of us to be out of alignment with his values, but even still, it's telling that he thinks that the only standard of morality that applies to him is one that he creates.

(HT: James Taranto/)

When I worked on ships, seamen were a superstitious lot. When there was a bad storm, while the ship pitched and rolled, the crew, unable to eat or sleep, would gather in the messroom and grumble. Anyone who remembers Coleridge's ancient mariner knows that seamen don't blame the wind and tides for bad weather and rough seas. Rather, they blame a fellow member of the crew -- someone who has, say, killed an albatross. During storms, they'd mumble darkly that a crew member had "Jonah'd" the ship -- done something wicked, while ashore, that caused the seas to rise up and take revenge.

Inevitably, someone would point out that the likely cause of the foul weather was that one of our crew had committed the worst sin of all: not paying a whore. All would nod gravely. In my day, seamen were convinced that this was such a serious infraction it could threaten a ship's survival. More than once I saw fellow crew members, who'd come back to the ship so drunk they couldn't remember where they'd been, make superhuman efforts to send money to a woman ashore in a desperate attempt to avoid the curse of the unpaid prostitute.

I thought about this while reading about the scandal in Cartagena. It appears that getting drunk and going back to the hotel with the women wasn't, in itself, what got the Secret Service personnel into trouble. What got them busted was that someone in their group refused to pay an escort the pre-arranged price. One of the escorts wanted $800. She said that a Secret Service agent offered her $30. (To put that figure in perspective, it's more or less what seamen used to pay in Cartagena 45 years ago for all-night companionship.)

Seems pretty obvious: if you don't pay for services rendered it's going to eventually catch up to you.

While a formidable power in many respects, and one potentially with a great future, China is simply not a peer competitor of Washington in Asia at this point, and its illusions and pretensions left China uncomfortably exposed when the real world power decided to raise its game in the Pacific Basin.

Fine tuning diplomacy is a difficult thing, especially when adjusting the relations of great powers. Since the administration began to roll out its maritime initiatives last fall, a number of things have happened -- some by coincidence, some as unforeseen consequences of steps the US took -- that have actually made our China policy much stronger and more effective than planned.

This is good to read. I've long been a China-skeptic, thinking that China's recent economic and power growth are an unsustainable bubble.

The official report by French accident investigators is due in a month and seems likely to echo provisional verdicts suggesting human error. There is no doubt that at least one of AF447's pilots made a fatal and sustained mistake, and the airline must bear responsibility for the actions of its crew. It will be a grievous blow for Air France, perhaps more damaging than the Concorde disaster of July 2000.

But there is another, worrying implication that the Telegraph can disclose for the first time: that the errors committed by the pilot doing the flying were not corrected by his more experienced colleagues because they did not know he was behaving in a manner bound to induce a stall. And the reason for that fatal lack of awareness lies partly in the design of the control stick - the "side stick" - used in all Airbus cockpits.

Scary stuff. The voice transcripts are haunting.

There are over 1,500 asteroids that are as easy to get to as the surface of the Moon. They are also in Earth-like orbits with small gravity fields, making them easier to approach and depart.

Asteroid resources have some unique characteristics that make them especially attractive. Unlike Earth, where heavier metals are close to the core, metals in asteroids are distributed throughout their body, making them easier to extract.

Asteroids contain valuable and useful materials like iron, nickel, water, and rare platinum group metals, often in significantly higher concentration than found in mines on Earth.

I'm not a geologist, but don't vulcanism and water play an important role in concentrating metals on earth into veins that can be mined? If these valuable materials are in an asteroid wouldn't they be distributed rather uniformly? How would they be separated from the rest of the rock?

For comparison, there's a lot of gold in seawater right here on earth. Water and gold are pretty easy to separate, but no one has yet found a way to make a profit doing this. Wouldn't it be exponentially more expensive to separate platinum from rock on an asteroid?

Many conservatives have denounced Mr. Obama's new approach. But William G. Howell, a University of Chicago political science professor and author of "Power Without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action," said Mr. Obama's use of executive power to advance domestic policies that could not pass Congress was not new historically. Still, he said, because of Mr. Obama's past as a critic of executive unilateralism, his transformation is remarkable.

"What is surprising is that he is coming around to responding to the incentives that are built into the institution of the presidency," Mr. Howell said. "Even someone who has studied the Constitution and holds it in high regard -- he, too, is going to exercise these unilateral powers because his long-term legacy and his standing in the polls crucially depend upon action." ...

The Obama administration started down this path soon after Republicans took over the House of Representatives last year. In February 2011, Mr. Obama directed the Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages, against constitutional challenges. Previously, the administration had urged lawmakers to repeal it, but had defended their right to enact it.

So... President Obama decided to change his tune on executive power immediately after his party lost control of Congress. What a "remarkable" "transformation"!

(HT: Gizmodo.)