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Oh Michael Bay. You continue to ruin our movies, and now you are ruining the DC Metro Police fleet.

From DCIst:

A tipster sends in the above video, which appears to depict the yellow “Bumblebee” sports convertible, which will feature prominently in Transformers 3, t-boning a police cruiser which happened to be driving down 3rd Street SW during filming. The “Bumblebee” apparently was cruising down Maryland Avenue near the National Museum of the American Indian, when it stuck the police vehicle at the Avenue’s intersection with 3rd Street. The above video was shot from the Voice of America building at 330 Independence Avenue SW.

H/T Andrew B.

I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor.

Oh, I need to watch this episode.

Excellent piece from the NY Times on the initiatives of the Gates Foundation:

The education gap facing the nation’s work force is evident in the numbers. Most new jobs will require more than a high school education, yet fewer than half of Americans under 30 have a postsecondary degree of any kind. Recent state budget cuts, education experts agree, promise to make closing that gap even more difficult.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four nonprofit education organizations are beginning an ambitious initiative to address that challenge by accelerating the development and use of online learning tools.

Just how effective technology can be in improving education — by making students more effective, more engaged learners — is a subject of debate. To date, education research shows that good teachers matter a lot, class size may be less important than once thought and nothing improves student performance as much as one-on-one human tutoring.

If technology is well designed, experts say, it can help tailor the learning experience to individual students, facilitate student-teacher collaboration, and assist teachers in monitoring student performance each day and in quickly fine-tuning lessons.

At the Harlan Institute, we are at the cutting-edge of fusing technology and education. We are very pleased to see such recognition of the power of computers to enlighten tomorrow’s leaders.

I converted the FantasyCast podcast I recorded for Snyder v. Phelps into a YouTube video. I added still photographs to recreate (poorly) the experience of seeing the Justice in person.

You can download the podcast here.

What happens when you raise taxes in Maryland on the highest earners? They flee.

From the CSM:

Expatriation. It’s happening. Thousands of people are picking up stakes and leaving. They’re leaving their high-tax home states.

“I’m outa here. I’ve had enough,” said a friend at dinner last week. “[Maryland Governor] O’Malley thinks he can tax us all he wants. But I don’t have to put up with it. I can move. We bought a place in Florida.

“He probably thinks it doesn’t matter. What’s a single taxpayer, more or less? That’s not going to change the outcome of an election. But I’m taking my business with me. I’ll set up shop in Florida. I don’t have to be in Maryland. I can get crab cakes in Miami too.”

The WSJ reported:

Governor Martin O’Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were “willing and able to pay their fair share.” The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would “grin and bear it.”

However, there were two things that Maryland politicians didn’t count on (1) a world-wide economic crisis decreasing the number of million dollar earners and (2) millionaires simply leaving (or taking in less income). “By April 2009, one-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year – even at higher rates.

H/T Michael K.