I like the author's self-identified attitude that "threats of 'cyberwarfare' waged through the public internet are the stuff of Hollywood schlock and patriotic pulp fiction". I think in general he's right about this particular threat. The conflict between security and usefulness is always vexing. The Stuxnet seems to have been propagated by a desire to make monitoring of data center equipment very easy. But somehow the application was corrupted. More attention to security could, perhaps, have avoided it, but how many hoops are busy Data Center managers going to jump through?

Grady Booch is a very well known guy in the world of commercial application development. He sort of gets it right. He states that there is no real architectural vision for most software projects. But what does he mean by architecture, anyway? I always thought architecture was a set of mental models for understanding the structure of something - a building, or a computer program, or a government project, or anything. The problem with this is that there is (1) no real continuity principle in software, and (2) not much in the way of a theoretical basis for understanding software. For (1), a single bit failure in the wrong place can cause unbounded havoc with a program. There's no idea of a "small" deviation from perfection. For ... More »

This is a pretty good article. The two important ideas, I think are on the last page. "George W. Bush passed his horse-race test and flunked the leadership test once in office. So did Bill Clinton, Halperin says. Both were good campaigners and strategists. Their weaknesses only became glaring to the pack when they were in office, he argues." and "Who's-gonna-win is portable, reusable from cycle to cycle, and easily learned by newcomers to the press pack. " Also, the reference to the Boston Globe and Charlie Savage was good. The point is, I think, that reporters have no special insight into what makes good governance, so they cover what they understand. That's why you get the talking mouths on NPR in the morning talking about ... More »

This is sort of a gossipy take on a Clinton attack on OBama. Someone said that someone else said that some third one did something bad. I must say that I generally have a hard time figuring out what the articles in The Economist are trying to say. They seem to want to be on the edge of being edgy, without actually venturing into irony. Skating the edge like this makes them seem to me like they are on the verge of having something interesting to say, but never quite getting there.

The two most intriguing articles I have ever read on genetics have been in the New Yorker. The first was several years ago, and explained to me how mitochondrial DNA can be used to trace how long ago two species diverged, in the context of canine behavior and genetics. The second is this one, which tells us why viruses, and retroviruses and lentiviruses in particular, have affected our evolution. There is a hint at the end about how retroviruses can explain, in large part, speciation. No other explanation has ever made sense to me about speciation, but this does. I recommend this to everyone, though people who do not believe in evolution will be even more apalled than they already are. Imagine - We are not descended just from ... More »

I have heard several radio articles about Judge Rahdi Hamza al-Radhi. He seems to be a very brave man, more brave than the public officials here in the US. The article clearly presents the core of his testimony. It also shows how the US State Department is stonewalling congress.

This is more of a book announcement than a book review or an article. It presents one of the conclusions of the book, perhaps the only one, with a small bit of evidence. Presumably the book has more evidence.

I like the way Dionne told the history of the Republican party's rise and eclipse. We often hear that the Republicans are in disarray, but we forget that there is a reason for it. The discussion at the end about Guiliani, Thompson, Romney and McCain, and the inevitable strains between the Republican base and the electorate at large needs constant telling.

I liked this story a lot. I was intrigued by the connection between Joseph Smith and the revolutionaries of 1848. I always knew that Smith and the Mormons were very despised when they were living in New York and Illinois, but I didn't know why. I had always assumed that it was because they were not orthodox christians, though I also know that in the 1820s there were a lot of different non-orthodox christian dogmas floating around.