car ins

Speeding tickets hard to get past

The Fayetteville Police Department and Highway Patrol hope the policy change will discourage speeding and make the roads safer. But neither agency said it had complaints about how speeding tickets were disposed of before the change.

Before the policy change, it was common for speeders to pay lawyers to visit privately with an assistant prosecutor to arrange for their speeding tickets to be dropped. The driver didn’t have to go to court and suffered no penalty other than a legal bill of several hundred dollars.

"What’s the lesson learned for that person?" asked Highway Patrol 1st Sgt. Bob Kidd.

Under the new policy, speeding tickets can be pleaded down to a reduced charge. They almost never will be dropped.

This will cost speeders more in fines and court costs, increase their odds of losing their licenses for repeat offenses and can drive up their insurance rates.

autobody repair

Promising careers? Teacher, salesman, mechanic

If you're about to graduate high school and have abso-friggin-lutely no idea how you'll make money after your parents cut you off, Manpower Inc. says the three career paths mostly likely to offer jobs are teaching, sales and mechanics. Though we highly respect those who choose to form young minds, we wouldn't want days filled with screaming kids and badly written book reports filled with horrid spelling, redundancy, incomplete thoughts, comma splices and redundancy.In sales you might get lucky enough to sell (and occasionally drive) high-end German sports cars, but more likely you'd either get stuck peddling vacuum cleaners door to door or, worse, pushing high-interest loans on unsuspecting economy car shoppers.That leaves car repair as Autoblog readers' only logical choice from Manpower's list.

student loans refinancing

Mississippi Leads Nation in People Behind on Mortgages

Mississippi, Louisiana and Michigan are the frontrunners in people behind on their mortgages and in danger of losing their homes.

Analysts say many homeowners staved off foreclosure a few years ago by refinancing to more risky adjustable-rate mortgages with lower monthly payments.

Now those homeowners and investors are struggling to hold on as their payments begin to increase.

The statistics come from the Mortgage Bankers Association's quarterly snapshot of the housing market. The figures are for October, November and December of 2006. .

equity home loan maryland

Evolutionary paleoneurology. The mind reels.

This week's cover story in Newsweek, "The Evolution Revolution," is about evolutionary paleoneurology. It is the study of the brains and minds of ancient hominids, dating back to 7 million years ago. Newsweek reporter Sharon Begley gives a credulous tour of the standard Darwinist speculations: we can tell when humans first started wearing clothing by genetic analysis of modern body lice, or perhaps human society was the result of the emergence of the gene for oxytocin, a hormone that causes mothers to secrete milk and that may influence social behavior in humans. Evolutionary paleoneurologists claim to know some of what ancient hominids actually thought by studying fragments of their fossilized skulls. Ms. Begley tells us that "paleoneurology is documenting when structures that power the human mind arose, shedding light on how our ancestors lived and thought." What can we really know about what ancient hominids thought?

I do research on living brains.