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It used to be common practice to ask people for a jump start when your battery died, but nowadays people usually just call roadside assistance and let them handle the process.

But if you’re one of those DIY minded people who like to know what your options are when it comes to jump starting a car battery then you should check out this video by Mehdi Sadaghdar for ElectroBOOM.

(YouTube Link)

Mehdi demonstrates how you can link a bunch of AA batteries together to jump start that dead battery, which may not be the most convenient method but it sure is neat to see how it's done!

-Via Boing Boing

Just a week ago, we noted the hard-working US government was drawing up plans for "knife regulations." Well, in The UK it appears to have already begun...

As SHTFPlan.com's Mac Slavo warns, don't try to think this one through - the logica fail and sheer volume of absurdity might just make you sick if you do...

For the UK – whose laws and policies all-too-often influence those of the U.S. – gun control isn’t enough. Probably nothing will ever be enough.

Now a call to surrender knives, ongoing for years, is in full swing. Via Citizen Action:

The right to bear arms might be under attack here in America–but in the United Kingdom, police are trying to do something even more ridiculous: they’re attempting to ban knives.

 

The British police have recently joined forces with liberal grassroots activists in the UK, launching the “Save a Life–Surrender Your Knife” program. Knife crime has been climbing recently in major UK cities like London.

 

The program involved several weeks of “amnesty” for “pointed knives.” Civilians can turn in these apparently dangerous weapons at their local police station in exchange for “amnesty,” apparently, even though knives (rounded or pointed) aren’t illegal in the United Kingdom.

There is, however, a ban on people under 18 buying knives – going so far on the absurdity scale as to ban underage purchases of plastic knives! No joke. One woman in her 20s was even barred from buying spoons without proper ID:

Since knives are used for food preparation and many other basic and essential activities, and virtually any crude material can be transformed into a knife, even police admit the “amnesty” for turning in knives will do nothing to stop knife crimes (but it will do a great deal for instilling a mentality of helplessness while heaping on more and more rules).

Because the problem with knife crime, however, is that it’s pretty much impossible to stop just by banning knives itself. Virtually every person in the United Kingdom owns a knife–and, as long as food needs cutting, that’s not going to change.

[…] the problem is that “many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.”

Despite the attempt to paint knife crimes as an impulsive issue of short tempers and petty disputes, carjackings, robberies and premeditated murders are frequently committed with knives in the UK… and the system is trying to make sure victims remain defenseless.

Here is what the murder rate looks like since the UK’s gun ban – with knife murders spiking drastically:

Police departments in the UK, urging people to give up their blades, including those from the kitchen, are literally advising people to NOT to become a victim by NOT defending themselves:

Don’t be a victim

If you feel you are in immediate danger from knife crime there are a number of steps you can take to protect yourself:
• Move away from the situation towards a public place (shop, house, restaurant etc.) as quickly as possible.
• Make as much noise as you can.
• Instead of carrying a knife, carry a personal alarm.
• Don’t fight back.

The same “logic” has of course been used in American debates on guns, with Homeland Security training even advising would-be victims at schools and offices to hide or throw cans of soup at active shooters.

It is a good enough assertion at this point to suppose that all the sharpest knives in the drawer have already been turned in or confiscated… as clearly no one in a position of authority has common sense or wits about them at all.

"I noticed Herbie and Kevina are very curious about new things out at the barn. We had a shovel out and they inspected it for a long time. I decided to buy a ball to see what they would do. Here is the video of Herbie playing."

Since we last mentioned Tensile tents around this time last year, the company has unveiled several new models of their fantastic suspended tent systems. There’s a small hammock for three that can be layered into a multi-tiered treehouse, a 2-layer tree tent, and a massive communal tent system designed to hold 6 people high in the air. Tentsile was invented by designers Alex Shirley-Smith and Kirk Kirchev in 2012 and have since taken the camping world by storm, opening their own factory and picking up an ISPO design award. You can see plenty more here.

I think it’s one of these. (photo via runnitnlulem)

Seth MacFarlane’s “Ted 2” came out in theaters Friday. Early reviews are not great, but I doubt many people are surprised by that. The thing with the comedy of Seth MacFarlane — the guy behind “Family Guy,” “American Dad!” and “The Cleveland Show” — is that you know exactly what you signed up for: broad, slightly-above-average entertainment.

MacFarlane, for better or worse, has been an anchor of TV comedy in the U.S. since the waning days of the Clinton administration. You can make an argument that the writing on his comedies is lazy — in fact, I would make that argument: His stuff can be very funny, but it’s constantly getting mired in his weird obsession with punching down. But by sheer output alone, the man’s a machine. You may not like what that machine creates, but since 1999, “Family Guy,” “The Cleveland Show” and “American Dad!” have cranked out something like 200 hours of television. You don’t get there without working hard.

To make some sense of this output, I plotted out the IMDb episode score for all three MacFarlane-conceived animated series. The workload is pretty immense, when you lay it all out here, especially because MacFarlane is the voice actor for several characters on the shows. I also plotted the “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” series, which I only just realized MacFarlane produced.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind here, mainly that IMDb ratings — which go from 0 to 10 — tend to skew high. A quick inventory of titles released from 2000 to 2015 with more than 100 ratings shows a median episode rating of 7.1. Just about 70 percent of the MacFarlane shows are above that median score. But when we take a rolling average, we can see his stock drop slowly over time toward the median. He’s not getting better.

“American Dad!” is probably the most consistent MacFarlane product. The sheer longevity of “Family Guy” means that episode ratings are getting increasingly erratic. “The Cleveland Show” was consistent, but poorly received, with a lot of episodes below the 7.1 median.

Weirdly — and this is rather timely, with “Ted 2” in theaters now — MacFarlane’s movies tend to do worse than his shows. Both “Ted” and “A Million Ways To Die In The West” were below what we’d otherwise expect from a typical MacFarlane product at the time of their release.

But he’s capable of making good stuff. I really have no idea how MacFarlane managed to shepherd “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” — a reboot of a 1980s show hosted by Carl Sagan — through to completion, but the Neil deGrasse Tyson-hosted miniseries managed to crush it in terms of fan ratings.

Maybe MacFarlane is best when he pushes himself out of his comfort zone — you know, the comfort zone with the chicken fighting, the hippie punching and the masturbating teddy bear. You don’t make upwards of 500 episodes of TV over 15 years by being lazy, but the world probably doesn’t need a Ted Cinematic Universe, you know?