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Afternoon Links: Tax Reform and You, the Science Behind Tangled Cords, and Surgical Graffiti

By Jim Swift

How will tax reform impact you? It hasn’t passed just yet, but it just might! The New York Times has a basic calculator worth checking out. And Maxim Lott has one that’s a little more advanced. Neither are perfect, but worth examining to get a broad sense of how the tax reform bill might benefit or hurt you.

Chick-fil-A opens on Sunday? Yes, but only to do good in an emergency, as RedState’s Sarah Rumpf reports.

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As you may know, Atlanta’s airport experienced a major power outage and left thousands stranded on the tarmac for hours. I’m not sure I’d trade the horrific experience folks had Sunday in Atlanta just to say I’ve been able to eat fresh Chick-fil-A on a Sunday, but that’s pretty neat.

Why do my headphones always get tangled? Well, because you’re not a neat freak, obviously… But there is science behind it! Here’s a study on the spontaneous knotting of an agitated string explaining the why:

Among the issues now coming to light is that spontaneous knotting is apparently not a random process. Whereas an initial, naive hypothesis would be that the distribution of observed knots will be the same as if drawn by a random walk (this is a common modeling assumption), further reflection indicates why this might not be true.

It’s far too science-y for me, but interesting nonetheless.

What do you need to know to be a federal judge? Here’s Jonathan Adler, a TWS contributor, on the current state of play in the Senate on nominees. Trump has nominated some cringeworthy nominees (see: Matthew Petersen, who withdrew his nomination Monday), but Adler makes an interesting point about the Judiciary Democrats and their vetting procedures:

SUAREZ: The minority Democrats who were involved in the process say it’s happening too fast, that they’re not getting a chance to really examine these nominees – fair criticism? ADLER: It could be, but I don’t take that seriously. And just to explain why – one judge that was confirmed this past week was Justice Willett, who had been a Supreme Court Justice on the state of Texas. If Senate Democrats were concerned about the ability to vet and analyze the various nominees and their records, they would be doing things like asking substantive questions at the hearings. Instead, they spent a lot of their time asking him about attempts at humor on Twitter. So I don’t think that the Senate Democrats are really concerned about the time or the need to do more investigation. I think that they would like to slow the process down because a slower process means fewer confirmations.

Twitter ruins everything.

Obey the Chinese Wall! Conservative upstart cable network One America News suffered an embarrassment when it prematurely called the Alabama senate election for Roy Moore. Here’s Allahpundit:

All I can figure is that they wanted to make a splash in right-wing media by sounding the trumpets for Moore long before the pros at Fox News did. The announcer specifically mentions that OAN’s president, Robert Herring, extends his congratulations to Moore on a hard-fought victory. Maybe Herring got on the phone to the control room, seeing Fox exercising caution and sensing a momentary vacuum in right-wing TV’s “tell me only the news that’ll confirm my biases” niche, and gambled on the fact that Moore would indeed win — which was the likely outcome. Then, after he did, OAN would have crowed that they called the race long before Fox did and therefore they should be red-state America’s go-to network on election nights. It was a big bet. They lost.

This is why Amazon invented “Key” their in-door delivery service. A man in Washington state has had so many packages left on his doorstep stolen, he invented a device that triggers a shotgun blank to go off when the decoy is stolen. While it’s inventive and low-tech, the inventor has already paired it with cameras at his house, which begs the question: why not just use Amazon Key? Shotgun blanks going off in your front lawn is just a way to attract unnecessary police attention.

Liver me timbers! In Britain, a surgeon was busted for branding his patients’ livers with his initials.

Dr. Simon Bramhall, 53, admitted to Birmingham Crown Court that he etched “SB” onto the livers of two transplant patients in 2013 using an argon beam. Argon beam coagulators are commonly used during such operations to stop blood flow and resection organs.

He has since resigned, and awaits sentencing after pleading guilty to beating patients with an argon beam.

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