geekosystem

For today's lesson about cause and effect, we need only look to Bowie County in Texas, where the well-known conflict between woman and snake reared its ugly, flammable head yet again. This particular conflict involved a mowed lawn, gasoline, and a pile of brush. Oh yes, and fire. A Texan woman, you see, was startled by the presence of a snake and decided the best course of action would be to douse it and set it aflame. Whatever could go wrong?

29-year-old Texas man Andrew Mendoza was arrested for having sex with his neighbor's horse after being stood up by his girlfriend. To make the story even worse, Mendoza told police he was trying to "make the horse have a baby," because he thought it would have a "horse-man baby." That, Mr. Mendoza, is not how you get a centaur.

As a preface, let's just go ahead and say that if you buy anything from a random stranger at a gas station, you're pretty much asking for it. Strangers working the counter are okay, but if they pull up next to you and offer to sell you any kind of gadget, chances are they're not on the up and up. A Texas woman didn't necessarily think the same, and dropped $200 on what she thought was an iPad. Turns out, the "iPad" she bought was just a mirror with an Apple sticker on it.

They say everything is bigger in Texas. Well, as it turns out, pretty soon everything will be faster too. The Texas Transportation Commission has raised the speed limit on a single 41-mile stretch of highway from outside an Austin suburb to a highway near San Antonio to 85 miles per hour, the highest speed limit set in the country.

Every child wants to be a superhero at some point, but few actually get the opportunity to do it. Kye of Arlington, Texas, who suffers from leukemia, had the distinct good fortune of getting to be the caped crusader for a day and bringing two villains to justice. The stunt was organized by the nonprofit organization A Wish With Wings, which helped wrangle up some camera men, and the local police, who helped little Batman wrangle some baddies.

The intense storm system that ravaged Texas earlier in the week, dropping a reported 15 tornados before finally dissipating, shocked viewers across the country as incredible footage of the storms dominated news coverage. Scienistists at the National Oceanica and Atmospheric Administration were watching too, and have released a video of the storms as seen from space using data from their Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 13 (GOES 13).

While drones have been credited with much success overseas, even being used in an ongoing campaign in Pakistan, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles has remained limited here in the U.S.. Part of the reason for the hesitation to embrace the technology domestically was demonstrated recently in Texas when a prototype drone being used in a photo-op went hay-wire and crashed into a nearby police vehicle. Looks like we've got a while before Skynet takes out humanity.

Yesterday, the prison system in Texas abolished the well-known tradition that death row inmates get a last meal request, replacing it with standard prison food. Back in 1998, white supremacist Lawrence Brewer killed James Byrd Jr., and was put to death on Wednesday. He requested a gluttonous, opulent meal for his last meal, consisting of a triple meat bacon cheeseburger, two chicken-fried steaks, a cheese omelet, a bowl of okra with ketchup, three fajitas, a pound of barbecue with half a loaf of white bread, a pint of ice cream, peanut butter fudge, and a meat lover's pizza. When his meal arrived, he rejected it, claiming that he wasn't hungry. Seemingly, this prompted State Senator John Whitmire to write a letter to prison officials threatening that legislation would be enacted if the tradition of last meals wasn't put to an end. Executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Brad Livingston, agreed with Whitmire, and said the tradition would be put to an end, replacing the fancy last meals with regular prison food.

Kenneth Robinson, now of Flower Mound, Texas, spent a lot of time with his nose in the law books and boy did it ever pay off when he could finally afford the $300,000 house of his dreams -- with the $16 he had in his wallet. Now, the extent to which he "owns" it is a little hazy, but he's certainly on the path to owning it, and without having to spend one more dollar. How's that? Well, upon discovering an obscure and magical property law, Robinson discovered that if a squatter moves into an abandoned house, they have exclusive negotiation rights with the original owner. The original occupant? Walked away. The original owner? A mortgage company that folded. This perfect storm left Robinson in a position to eventually own the house by, no kidding, calling dibs by filing $16 worth of paperwork. $16 doesn't seem like a lot, mainly because it isn't. Here's a couple of other ways of putting it that make it seem like even less. (According to my shoddy calculations.)

• Robinson purchased this house at 99.99466666% off.
• Talk about pennies on the dollar. Robinson paid .005333333 pennies on the dollar. Or approximately 1 penny on every $187.
• If he were to take out a 7%, 30-year fixed-rate mortgage out on the house, assuming its value was the $16 paid for it, his monthly payments would be a whopping $0.11.

An archaeological dig site near Buttermilk Creek in Texas is challenging scientist's understanding of America's first residents. The site contains small stone tools which are believed to have come from about 15,000 years ago, which is more than 2,000 years earlier than previously thought. Fox News reports that the cache was found some five feet below the level where the earliest human deposits have been found and contained "15,528 artifacts, including chipping debris from working stones and 56 tools such as blades, scrapers and choppers."

If you've been to the hip tech, music, and art festival SXSW in previous years, you've probably seen Apple users clinging tighter than usual to their precious products. It is, after all, about five miles from downtown Austin to the nearest Apple store, meaning that one slip and fall with an iPhone could ruin your week. But all that's changing this year with a temporary, or "popup," Apple Store in the heart of Austin. Local news outlets are reporting that Apple has leased space near Sixth and Congress, and has already begun construction. Black vinyl has apparently been placed over the windows of the location, which is expected to open this Friday, the first day of SXSW. The location is surely less for the convenience of current Apple users, and more an effort to draw in customers amongst the thousands of tech-savy SXSW attendees. There's no word yet as to what kind of services will be available at the popup store, but you could almost certainly buy an iPad there. So, if you find yourself in Austin this weekend with some serious disposable income and a hankering for a new iPad 2, now you know where to go. (The Statesman, image via NetworkEffect)

A suburb of Houston, Texas has itself on odd little problem: some guy saw another guy out his front window, and the other guy had an ace bandage wrapped around his head like a mummy.  When the homeowner opened the door, the mummy-man fled. And now... apparently the whole neighborhood is in a state of terror?

If anyone's ever seen Armageddon, they know the state of Texas is big enough to accurately describe the level of terror one should feel in relation to asteroid size. It turns out that Texas is so big, in fact, that Stratford, Texas is closer to Alzada, Montana than it is closer to another town within its own state, Harlingen, Texas. As the graphic shows, Stratford is 708 miles away from Alzada, but is 843 miles away from Harlingen.

Kay Bailey Hutchison, Senator from Texas, has responded to the successful launch of the Falcon 9 rocket.

This first successful test flight of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is a belated sign that efforts to develop modest commercial space cargo capabilities are showing some promising signs. While this test flight was important, the program to demonstrate commercial cargo and crew transport capabilities, which I support, was intended to enhance not replace NASA's own proven abilities to deliver critical cargo and humans to low Earth orbit. Make no mistake, even this modest success is more than a year behind schedule, and the project deadlines of other private space companies continue to slip as well. This test does not change the fact that commercial space programs are not ready to close the gap in human spaceflight if the space shuttle is retired this year with no proven replacement capability and the Constellation program is simultaneously cancelled as the President proposes.

Right, because NASA has never missed a deadline.

No, this isn't a special border patrol spinoff of 24. This is real life. Republican Michael McCaul and Democrat Henry Cuellar, two Texas Congressman, want to put suitcase-contained EMP devices on our borders. EMPs, or electromagnetic pulse devices, send out an electric field that can disable any gadgetry it comes in contact with. As the only potential for human injury is that resulting from the electronic failures, this seems like a safe method for border patrol implementation. At first, this seemed an odd choice.