SHOCKER: Heated Butter Knife Cuts Butter Like A Hot Knife Through Butter.

HOW WILL OBAMA CELEBRATE INDEPENDENCE DAY? With a fundraiser in Paris. Naturellement.

UPDATE: Let me be clear: It’s the Obama Campaign. Obama himself won’t be in Paris.

STACY MCCAIN remains on the Kimberlin case. “Anything that Kimberlin says must be presumed false.”

RASA MALAYSIA: A website featuring easy Chinese recipes.

WELL, ISN’T THAT SPECIAL: Among Swedish Men, Chlamydia Is A Badge Of Honor.

AT AMAZON, BESTSELLERS IN SCIENCE FICTION. Interesting to see Lucifer’s Hammer on the list.

JOHN ROBERTS AND LONG-TERM STRATEGY. Here’s a thought: Perhaps he expects the Court to overturn Section Five of the Voting Rights Act next year, and thought it inexpedient to have that follow a striking-down of ObamaCare.

DAILY CALLER: ‘ATF Needs To F–k These Guys:’ Issa, Grassley release details about Fast and Furious whistleblower retaliation, cover-up.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, AFTER ALL: Cyborg Makes Art Using Seventh Sense.

AT AMAZON, loads of special MP3 deals.

GOOGLE GLASS TEAM: Wearable Computing Will Be The Norm.

We have a pretty powerful processor and a lot of memory in the device. There’s quite a bit of storage on board, so you can store images and video on board, or you can just live stream it out. We have a see-through display, so it shows images and video if you like, and it’s all self-contained. It has a camera that can collect photographs or video. It has a touchpad so it can interact with the system, and it has gyroscope, accelerometers, and compasses for making the system aware in terms of location and direction. It has microphones for collecting sound, it has a small speaker for getting sound back to the person who’s wearing it, and it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And GPS.

This is the configuration that most likely will ship to the developers, but it’s not 100 percent sure that this is the configuration that will we ship to the broader consumer market.

Anyone who’s read Rainbows End or Daemon will want them, for sure.

WHEN A UNIVERSITY OFFERS A DEGREE IN “POP CULTURE,” is it “perilously close to child abuse?” Personally, I don’t think that college students are children. But if schools were on the hook for student-loan defaults, how many do you think would offer majors like this?

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Solid state synthetic molecular machine points to advanced nanotechnology.

Canadian chemists have induced a metal-organic framework to self-assemble and function as a molecular wheel on an axle in a solid state material. From a University of Windsor news article “Chemists break new ground in molecular machine research: “A graduate student and his team of researchers have turned the chemistry world on its ear by becoming the first ever to prove that tiny interlocked molecules can function inside solid materials, laying the important groundwork for the future creation of molecular machines.”

Faster, please.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: True Love: It Begins In The Mirror.

BOY, WHO SAW THIS ONE COMING? Another subsidized solar company craters. “Abound Solar, a Loveland, Colorado-based maker of thin-film cadmium telluride solar modules has announced it will file for bankruptcy protection and suspend its operation. It’s the latest failure of an energy company that had received funding under the Department of Energy’s loan program.”

PROGRESS: “Spray-On” Photovoltaic Windows: And a manufacturing breakthrough.

TEST-DRIVING THE 2013 Honda Fit EV. “The Fit EV proves that there is room for a fun-to-drive electric vehicle that doesn’t cost as much as a Mercedes-Benz S-Class. And its range of 82 miles and 118 mpge fuel economy beats its competitors. The fact that this is a only a lease program for the 2013 and 2014 model years leads us to imagine that perhaps an even more powerful and efficient version will be right around the corner, especially as the gas Fit is due to be redesigned soon. Perhaps we’ll see an all-new Fit, Fit Hybrid, and Fit EV. That’s a lineup that looks awfully smart to us.”

A NEW MAC OSX VIRUS, which appears to originate in China.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: DO CANADIANS EVER THREATEN TO MOVE TO THE UNITED STATES? “Not really. They just move here.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Grants, Loans Fuel Higher Education Bubble. “Students are paying less and less of direct college costs, relying more on government grants and loans. That has encouraged universities to jack up tuition expenses, fueling a vicious circle reminiscent of the housing bubble. U.S. universities charged students $190 billion in 2001-02 for tuition, fees, room and board and more, according to data from Sallie Mae. By 2010-11 that had more than doubled to $410 billion. Even after adjusting for inflation, student charges shot up 72%.”

Say, did I mention I’ve got a book out on this subject?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Are You In Love or Lust? Depends on Which Part of the Brain Is Activated. “Two parts of the brain, the insula and the striatum, are responsible for tracking the way in which sexual desire develops into feelings of love, researchers said. Lust triggers parts of the brain that control pleasurable feelings, associated with sex and food, but love triggers parts of the brain associated with habits.”

HYBRID UPDATE: Ford C-Max Hybrid will get 47 mpg, better than Toyota Prius V.

JIM LINDGREN & ROSS STOLZENBERG: Retirement and Death in Office of U.S. Supreme Court Justices. “Computing robust standard errors with adjustments for clustering by justice, we find that the odds that a justice will retire (or resign or take senior status) in the first two years of the term of a president of the same political party as the president who first appointed him to the Court are about 2.6 times the odds of retiring under a president of the opposing party in the last two years of his presidential term.”

CLAYTON CRAMER: Violence Policy Center’s Concealed Carry Killers: Less than it Appears. Do not trust content from Violence Policy Center.

More here.