eLEGS unveiled by Berkeley Bionics. // Chocolate covered bacon and bacon pancakes too. // A visual timeline of the boombox. // The Pope-Waverley electric runabout, circa 1905. // The panhandlers of San Francisco: “The defining characteristic of all these ‘travelers’ seems to be an acute sense of entitlement.” // Printing with foam. // Florida from above. // Lego aircraft carrier. // The inconstant Batman logo. // Waiting for Superman. (h/t, TDK) // Mexico City’s public library. // Million-dollar London properties that may leave you disappointed. // How to degauss a cat. // The grass roofs of Norway. // Underwater scooters.

Photographed by Michael Salisbury.

Over at Samizdata, Natalie Solent provides a brief overview of the Katharine Birbalsingh saga, which may be of interest. Ms Birbalsingh is a deputy head teacher and former blogger whose first-hand account of state schooling and its dysfunction roused the Conservative conference and upset her employer, resulting in a brief suspension.

At a time when school discipline can be subject to racial quotas, Ms Birbalsingh is inclined to note, and say, things like this:

If you keep telling teachers that they’re racist for trying to discipline black boys and if you keep telling heads that they’re racist for trying to exclude black boys, in the end, the schools stop reprimanding these children. When the lawyers argue against a school and readmit a black boy, who do we think suffers the most? It’s all the other black boys who now look to this invincible child and copy his bad example. Black children underachieve because of what the well-meaning liberal does to him.

Here’s a taste of Ms Birbalsingh in action:

Readers may not be surprised to learn that Ms Birbalsingh’s disgruntled employer, Dr Irene Bishop, has political leanings more common to the teaching profession and has been more than willing to indulge them.

As Ross notes at Unenlightened Commentary,

So speaking at a party conference is too political but inviting one party to actually use school premises is perfectly fine.

Laban Tall has more.

On Ms Birbalsingh’s hasty suspension, Cranmer adds the following,

One can scarcely think of little else that the school could have done to establish the truth of every word Ms Birbalsingh spoke… And so Ms Birbalsingh sits ‘working from home’, while her governing body considers whether or not her Toryism is as perverse as theft, cheating in exams or allegations of paedophilia. Certainly, by sending her home, they equate speaking at a Conservative Party conference with gross professional misconduct.

Then asks,

How does a deputy head teacher who has blown the whistle on a sclerotic culture of excuses, criticised low standards, derided arbitrary targets and league tables, disparaged political correctness and poured scorn over the pervasive ‘leftist ideology’ in state education ever again command the respect of a staffroom populated with pathological Socialists?

It will, I think, be interesting to find out.

Update:

Ah. Ms Birbalsingh’s fellow educators really don’t want realism heresy in their midst. How righteous they must be.

Tom Paine asks,

Are teachers free to have and to express non-left political views or not?

Seems not.

As I get my news mainly from the Guardian and the BBC, it had entirely passed me by.

Ian Jack, Guardian columnist, reveals a little more than he intends.

Mr Jack is referring to this story about the Miliband brothers, their tax arrangements and property portfolios. 

The Guardian was probably right to ignore a story that charged Miliband with greed and hypocrisy.

Given the track record of the Guardian’s own editor and many of its contributors, hypocrisy is indeed a subject best avoided.

Instant underpants. // The chess set / sex toy combo. // The Kopp–Etchells effect. // Watches made of wood. // How ink is made. // Monkeys ride capybara. (h/t, Coudal) // It’s pasta, it’s a whistle. // Where lighthouses are. (h/t, MeFi) // Ah, at last. Now rock music makes sense. // The Twins Who Share a Body. // Telescopic eye implant. // Abseiling and lava, together at last. // A handsome motorcycle. // 50 years of Japanese concept cars. // Bunnies in cups. // Cement earrings. // Nutcrackers (circa 1950). // Attention male students. You will undergo a “cognitive and emotional intervention,” whether you want to or not.

A West German government bunker, a Dutch atomic bomb shelter and an abandoned Ukrainian submarine base. Click to enlarge.

From Relics of the Cold War by Martin Roemers.

By the mid-1970s, Britain was widely regarded – choose your favourite cliché – as the Sick Man of Europe, an economic basket case, ungovernable… In [1978] the year before Thatcher came to power, Britain, upon whose empire the sun never set, endured the Winter of Discontent. Labour unrest shut down public services, paralysing the nation for months on end… Rubbish was piled high on the streets of Britain that winter, and so, at one point, were human corpses. The Soviet trade minister told his British counterpart, “We don’t want to increase our trade with you. Your goods are unreliable, you’re always on strike, you never deliver.” This was what had become of the world’s greatest trading power.

From Claire Berlinski’s “There Is No Alternative”: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, which I’m halfway through reading and enjoying quite a lot. It’s a brisk and witty reminder of what was at stake and how socialism can lead to extraordinary selfishness. It also has plenty of revealing incidental nuggets, as when Berlinski notes the feelings of some of Thatcher’s loftier enemies:

When asked why intellectuals loathed her so, the theatre producer Jonathan Miller replied that it was “self-evident” – they were nauseated by her “odious suburban gentility.” The philosopher Mary Warnock deplored Thatcher’s “neat, well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just low,” embodying “the worst of the lower-middle class.” This filled Warnock with “a kind of rage.”

Claire Berlinksi is interviewed by National Review’s Peter Robinson, again in 5 parts:

1. Socialist winter.

2. How she did it.

3. Thatcher and Obama.

4. Turkey and Islam.

5. What’s a radical?

Glenn Reynolds also interviews Berlinksi here. (Registration required.)

Related: Tory! Tory! Tory! An excellent 2006 miniseries tracing the history and context of Thatcherism, the miseries it involved and the much greater miseries it avoided. Well worth viewing in full. The three episodes are embedded below in six parts: 

The emergency bra. A bra for emergencies. // How memory cards are tested. // Python digesting rat (interior view). // Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. // There’s a vortex on Venus. // Victorian submarines. // Bollywood + robots. // Puny human musicians, make way for GuitarBot. // Diamond-studded hoods, custom made for your falcon. // And girls should have costumes too. // The Foyn Johanson house. // Private jet interiors. // Chocolate artisans. // Maintaining high standards in Italian sculpture. // Logan’s Run in Lego. // “Yes, we call it the death ray.” (h/t, Stephen Keating) // And a little project for the family: Space Balloon.

“Sensitivity” is letting other people’s reactions to you decide your behaviour. So instead of choosing to do what you think is right and then defending it, you say something or try out something or listen to other people demand something… and try to adapt to that.

Peter Robinson talks with Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield about grade inflation, illiberal “liberals” and the state of academia. In five parts:

1. Leaning left.

2. A culture of self-criticism.

3. Everyone is excellent.

4. Diversity in all things (except of course in thought).

5. “Sensitivity,” indignation and the right to be agreed with.

At last, the bacon-scented tuxedo. (h/t, Mr Eugenides) // It’s probably best not to dunk your hand into liquid nitrogen. // Or into the beam of the Large Hadron Collider. // Beer crate architecture. // Sculpture by Alma Allen. // Rocks and fog. // For hardcore vinyl lovers. // Wine vending machines. // Things organised neatly. // Spray-on clothing. // The iPad Orchestra. // Projection mapping in Russia. // Persian portraits. // The price of weed. // Astroturfing malfunction. // A short history of asteroid discovery. // Hungover owls. // Happy owl. // H.G. Wells meets Orson Welles. (1940) // The grilled cheese underground.