From the New York Times…..

The first signs of declining interest among the young in science and engineering appeared almost two decades ago, after Japan reached first-world living standards, and in recent years there has been a steady decline in the number of science and engineering students. But only now are Japanese companies starting to feel the real pinch.

By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology industry here is already short almost half a million engineers.

Headhunters have begun poaching engineers midcareer with fat signing bonuses, a predatory practice once unheard-of in Japan’s less-cutthroat version of capitalism.

The problem is likely to worsen because Japan has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. “Japan is sitting on a demographic time bomb,” said Kazuhiro Asakawa, a professor of business at Keio University. “An explosion is going to take place. They see it coming, but no one is doing enough about it.”

This is happening all over the developed world. To much talent has been directed towards being a lawyer or a banker. Add that to a shortage of kids general and young engineers are going to be in high demand.

I know I should not feel this way, but I can’t but help feel that the upswing in coyote attacks in California represents some kind of cosmic justice. Especially when I read lines like this….

Authorities dissuade people from hunting renegade coyotes themselves and suggest that they instead make noise or throw objects to scare them from neighborhoods.

Wardens have spotted the coyote that tried to drag a 2-year-old girl from her front yard Tuesday in Lake Arrowhead, about 65 miles east of Los Angeles, but did not have a clear shot to fire. They have since set up traps for it.

Authorities were also investigating reports of two possible attacks earlier this year in the same resort town in which a coyote may have bitten two young children in the buttocks as their father barbecued on the deck.

In the latest case, police said her mother was photographing the toddler and her siblings in front of the house when she ran inside to put the camera down. That’s when a coyote tried to make off with the toddler.

The girl was treated for wounds to the head and neck, but was expected to survive.

Dotti Edwards, a neighbor, came home after the attack and spotted a scrawny coyote in the street. Her neighbors have complained of coyotes in recent weeks with reports of the wild animals sleeping in yards and pestering residents.

“They’re so brazen right now,” she said. “They just stand there and look at you.”

Coyotes are not stupid. If they know that the worst that will happen to them is that people will try to “scare” them they will have no fear. But a clear eyed understanding of nature is not politically correct in California.

William M. Briggs examines the Sean Bell shooting.

First Things has a well written essay on death and destruction and the “problem” that poses for the believing Christian.

Some heretics have dared to suggest that some of the blocks in the Egyptian pyramids were cast in place with a kind of crude concrete. They are currently being rounded up and shot. You can read all about it in this Boston Globe article.

I am in no position to add anything intelligent to this argument, but this passage from the article really struck me….

Archeologists, however, say there is simply no evidence that the pyramids are built of anything other than huge limestone blocks. Any synthetic material showing up in tests – as it has occasionally, even in work not trying to prove a concrete connection – is probably just slop from “modern” repairs done over the centuries, they say.

This is either really bad reporting or the Archeolgoists have a really weak argument. How can you say out of one side of your mouth that there is no evidence for the opposing camp and out of the other side of your mouth that the evidence “probably” was caused by something else?

Other gems from the article…..

Nearly every prominent Egyptologist is adamant that the pyramids are made solely of giant blocks cut with crude copper or stone tools. They note that proponents of the concrete theory are chemists or materials specialists with little experience at ancient digs – lab researchers, not shovel-wielding field archeologists.

I am all in favor of people who get their hands dirty, but are archeologists really arguing that chemists or materials specialists have no special skills that archeologists do not? Do they really ignore the insights of all the other branches of science?

And one last gem…

Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, minced no words in assailing the concrete idea. “It’s highly stupid,” he said via a spokesman. “The pyramids are made from solid blocks of quarried limestone. To suggest otherwise is idiotic and insulting.”

Now that is my style of arguing.

Our essay of the week comes from our very own Ape Man. He uses some recent remarks by Obama as a spring board to offer up some thoughts on rural culture.

From the New York Times….

The report, from researchers at Oxford and the University of Exeter in England, is said to be the first evidence that a child’s sex is associated with a mother’s diet. Although sex is genetically determined by whether sperm from the father supplies an X or Y chromosome, it appears that a mother’s body can favor the successful development of a male or female embryo.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, shows a link between higher energy intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons. The difference is not huge, but it may be enough to help explain the falling birthrate of boys in industrialized countries, including the United States and Britain.

The reason food intake may influence the development of one sex of infant rather than another isn’t fully understood. However, in vitro fertilization studies show that high levels of glucose encourage the growth of male embryos while inhibiting female embryos.

Someone in the comments wondered if this meant that diabetic mothers had more male children.

Did you know that every new car is going to have a wireless network of sensors on it then can be snooped upon remotely? After reading this rant you will be left wondering what other things this brave new world has in store for us.

This week’s essay of the week was selected under some protest from some of our staff. It was felt that 60 page essay “The Prehistoric Origins of European Economic Integration” was just too much to ask anyone to read.

But such complaints where brushed aside. The essay is 60 pages double spaced which means it is more like 30 pages single spaced. And besides, people should stretch themselves every now and again.

The essay is full of fascinating tidbits that will interest anyone who has much knowledge of the bible (thought the bible is scarcely mentioned in the essay and illuminating it was furthest thing from the authors mind). But if there is anyone overarching lesson to be taken from the essay, it is how slender our knowledge of antiquity is and how the self confidence assertions of scholars should be taken with a large grain of salt.

This is not the point the author was trying to make. Rather, the overarching theme of the essay is that the peoples of antiquity were far more numerous, wealthy, and literate then scholars have previously supposed. But when one reads about how few finds it took to upend previously held beliefs, ones glimpse the precarious foundation of modern knowledge of antiquity