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?

Bridging the gap between the online and offline worlds is a challenge for any brand, but Brazilian fashion retailer C&A has come up with an innovative solution. Much the way both Renault and Bacardi have found ways to translate between real-world approval and Facebook "likes", so C&A has found a way to bring customers' Facebook approval into full view in its real-world stores.

Through its new "Fashion Like" initiative, C&A has posted photos of a number of the clothing items it sells on a dedicated Facebook page, where it invites customers to "like" the ones that appeal to them. Special hooks on the racks in its bricks-and-mortar store, meanwhile, can then display those votes in real time, giving in-store shoppers a clear indication of each item's online popularity.

This is brilliant! Sure, the application of the technology is frivolous, but still, I'm impressed. Very clever. We need to see this instant-social technology extended. What really needs to happen, though, is for Like information to be combined with an augmented reality display that isn't under the control of the owner of the item being Liked.

For example, imagine going to a new restaurant, passing your iPhone camera over the menu, and seeing each menu item annotated with the number of people who had liked it.

(HT: Gizmodo, which thinks the tech is dumb.)

(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.)

Jon Corzine is getting away with stealing $1.6 billion because of his political connections. Meanwhile a man goes to federal prison for whistling at a whale.

President Obama has now admitted that the "Buffett Rule," formerly the centerpiece of his re-election campaign, is a silly gimmick that will raise hardly any money for the treasury. (Actually, it might cost the federal government money, as increases in the capital gains rate have been known to do.) So how about if, instead, we start talking about the Geithner Rule, which is: everyone pays what he owes under existing laws? ...

Most tax evaders don't wind up in prison. In fact, some wind up working for the government. Take Tim Geithner. Geithner, Obama's Secretary of the Treasury, is a tax cheat. When he worked for the International Monetary Fund, the fund did not pay withholding taxes on his income, but rather paid Geithner a specifically-designated additional amount which Geithner was supposed to use to pay self-employment taxes. Geithner kept that money, but didn't pay the taxes. Byron York explains: ...

Short version: The International Monetary Fund paid Geithner money to reimburse him for taxes he was supposed to pay. Geithner took the reimbursement but never paid the tax.

When the IRS audited Geithner, he paid what he owed for 2003 and 2004. But he didn't pay what he owed for 2001 and 2002. Why? Because the statute of limitations had run on those years, so the IRS couldn't sue him to collect the money or charge him criminally for failing to pay it. Only when he was nominated as Secretary of the Treasury did Geithner go back and pay what he owed for 2001 and 2002.

If it bothers you that our Treasury Secretary is a tax cheat then buy a TAX CHEAT! stamp and stamp it over his name on your currency.

The crux of the problem, as I learned in my years at the helm, is our wrongheaded approach to risk. In attempting to eliminate all risk from flying, we have made air travel an unending nightmare for U.S. passengers and visitors from overseas, while at the same time creating a security system that is brittle where it needs to be supple.

Any effort to rebuild TSA and get airport security right in the U.S. has to start with two basic principles:

First, the TSA's mission is to prevent a catastrophic attack on the transportation system, not to ensure that every single passenger can avoid harm while traveling. Much of the friction in the system today results from rules that are direct responses to how we were attacked on 9/11. But it's simply no longer the case that killing a few people on board a plane could lead to a hijacking. Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene.

This is spot-on. The only things that should be banned from aircraft are items that could bring down the plane or inflict mass casualties.

Clearly, things needed to change. By the time of my arrival, the agency was focused almost entirely on finding prohibited items. Constant positive reinforcement on finding items like lighters had turned our checkpoint operations into an Easter-egg hunt. When we ran a test, putting dummy bomb components near lighters in bags at checkpoints, officers caught the lighters, not the bomb parts. ...

1. No more banned items: Aside from obvious weapons capable of fast, multiple killings--such as guns, toxins and explosive devices--it is time to end the TSA's use of well-trained security officers as kindergarten teachers to millions of passengers a day. The list of banned items has created an "Easter-egg hunt" mentality at the TSA. Worse, banning certain items gives terrorists a complete list of what not to use in their next attack. Lighters are banned? The next attack will use an electric trigger.

All of Hawley's recommendations are good, and I'm actually quite surprised to read so many sensible suggestions from a high-level bureaucrat.

One important consideration that isn't mentioned: the long security lines are themselves tempting targets for terrorists, and an attack at an airport line would disrupt our country as much as a downed plane.

With respect to incidents outside the home, the Stand Your Ground statutes clarify the law for innocent persons by dispensing with any legal obligation to retreat, hence the name, "Stand Your Ground." What has been overlooked is the fact that the statute only applies to a person under "attack." Again, the rationale is that it is bad enough for an innocent person to find himself under attack by a criminal, but to then have to worry about whether the law requires a retreat is simply too much to ask. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, "detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife." The Florida law says that if you are under attack, retreat if you like, but be assured that you may also stand your ground and fight back if that seems to be the best option. ...

When Zimmerman made the fateful decision to disregard the police dispatcher's statement to await the arrival of the police and not to follow his "suspect," he was acting outside and beyond the Stand Your Ground law. Other legal principles enter the picture and those principles run against Zimmerman. By following Martin, Zimmerman's actions set up the perilous confrontation. Consequently, he will likely be seen as an aggressor in the eyes of the law. Even if Martin threw the first punch, that punch will likely be considered the result of Zimmerman's provocation. Since Martin was unarmed, a gunshot in response to non-deadly force (fisticuffs) will probably be deemed beyond the bounds of normal self-defense. (The Florida legal system will have to consider all of the available evidence and ultimately determine Zimmerman's legal responsibility.)

I don't know what facts will be presented to a jury, but I bet this will be a complicated case for them to work out. If Zimmerman provoked the fight and then shot Martin when when Zimmerman started losing, then the shooting was not self-defense. But Martin might also have been in the wrong if his actions escalated from self-defense to delivering a beating to a prone/pinned Zimmerman. There's no reason why both men can't be guilty.

I have to say that I agree: being a software engineer is fantastic fun. Please, don't anyone else get into the field.

After two years of immense prosperity, the last year has been a disaster for the Somali pirates. For example, in the last eight months, only six ships have been captured, compared to 36 ships in the same eight month period a year ago. Pirate income is down 80 percent and expenses are up. Pirates have to spend more time at sea looking for a potential target, and when they find one, they either fail in their boarding efforts (because of armed guards, or better defense and more alert crews) or find anti-piracy patrol warships and armed helicopters showing up. Unlike in the past, the patrol now takes away the pirates weapons and equipment, sinks their mother ships and dumps the pirates back on a beach. The pirates claim that some members of the anti-piracy patrol simply kill pirates they encounter on the high seas (some nations have admitted doing this, at least once, in the past). But no one does this as official policy, and the rules are still basically "catch and release." The big change is that the patrol has become much better at detecting pirates, on captured fishing ships, and shutting these pirates down. Often the pirates bring along the crew of the fishing ships, to help with the deception. But the patrol knows which fishing ships have "disappeared" and quickly identify those missing ships they encounter, and usually find pirates in charge. The anti-piracy patrol also has maritime reconnaissance aircraft that seek to spot mother ships as they leave pirate bases on the north Somali coast, and direct a warship to intercept and shut down those pirates. The pirates have been losing a lot of equipment, and time, and money needed to pay for it.

I don't like the idea that there's a "tolerable" level of piracy, but that seems to be the most pragmatic course available.

The bottom line is that the pirate attacks, even if they took two or three times as many ships in their peak year, would not have a meaningful economic impact on world shipping. Total cost to shipping companies (ransoms, extra fuel, security equipment and services) is over $10 billion a year. For example, the international anti-piracy patrol in the Gulf of Aden costs $500 million a year, a fraction of a percent of the defense budgets of the nations involved. Politicians and bureaucrats can stand that kind of pain, and will likely do so and refrain from doing anything bold in Somalia.

Decisively dealing with pirates would necessarily harm civilians as well, and no one wants to get branded as a war criminal. So, the piracy continues.

I think that correct predictions were easier to make when we were on a shallower part of the exponential growth curve... and even back then the vast majority of predictions were very wrong.

(HT: Kotaku.)

It's all over Drudge, but just in case you missed it here is hidden camera footage of a white guy with no identification being offered Attorney General Eric Holder's primary ballot.

The only explanation for objecting to voter ID laws is that some people are perpetrating voting fraud and don't want to stop.

Ok, so she's not in a bikini, but the rest is true!

(HT: Gizmodo.)

To celebrate, here's a list of the religious affiliation of various superheroes.

(HT: Tyler Cowen.)