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A bit of Inside Grammar for those of us who care — and you know who you are.

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That will be good news, if only because it will shut up the alternative-energy fruitcakes.

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They couldn’t do any worse than the dorks that do the uniforms for the American military.

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Just in case you were wondering. I wasn’t, being one of the few people in the country who know the correct answer to that question.

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The EFP is nasty because it can penetrate the armor on just about anything but an M-1 tank. An EFP is a precision weapon, not an ad-hoc assemblage of explosives (like most roadside bombs). Your typical EFP is a cylindrical device, the optimal one often described as similar to a coffee can. But the cylinder metal must be thicker. You fill about 60 percent of the “coffee can” with explosives (C4, also known as plastique will do). Then you insert a detonator on the closed end of the “coffee can” and a concave copper plug that is pushed into the plastic explosive. The tricky part here is that the depth of the concave copper part, and the thickness of the copper, have to be just right. It requires someone expert at math and the chemistry of explosives to make those calculations. You can make a mould for casting the copper plug, but you must make sure you get the thickness just right. The more precisely the copper plug is made, and the EFP assembled, the more armor the device will penetrate, and the more damage it will do inside the target vehicle.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Yes, Jay, especially for you.

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Another event from early 1992, still reverberating today: On January 10, a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, saw from the beginning how valuable the rubber duckies could be in tracing ocean currents, and correctly predicted their trip through the Northwest Passage.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Cool map.

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Still no explanation for rap, though.

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There, don’t say I never put in anything useful here.

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Who knew that a bicycle is a martial arts weapon?

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This is actually very clever.

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Load it with OS X, and you’re in business.

Ross Douthat makes a surprising connection.

He includes a map.

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*sigh* All of my illusions, shattered….

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Tell the truth — who, being an elephant, would not have done the same?

They’re lucky it didn’t try to climb on top of the car just to see how far it would squish.

I would have. But that’s me.

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Great. When New York and Los Angeles go under water, we can move to Australia. They’ll have enough food for us.

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Can you say “Mystamation”? If you can, and know what it means, then you’re an old fart just like me.

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Aw, isn’t that cute….

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Microsoft has been under huge pressure from its hardware OEMs to dump XP, thus forcing millions of customers who have been avoiding Vista and Vista’s inevitable hardware upgrade to finally buy new computers. Dumping XP will help Dell and HP AND Microsoft, big-time. It won’t do anything for you or me, though, since Vista still sucks, but we obviously don’t matter.

Time to buy a Mac.

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Funny things happen when you ask an economist.

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This could be useful.

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With the Conservative victory in London’s mayoral election, perhaps the days of Londonistan are numbered.

I’m not holding my breath.

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And there was much rejoicing.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I wasn’t.

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Let’s make it mandatory for public officials.

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Interesting times.

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Not sure what this means, but I’m sure it’s significant.

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The cubicle has its roots in the cybernetic school of thought that arose in the middle of the last century. The meaning of “cybernetics” has largely been swept up in the exuberant imagery of movies and commercials with their glowing rivers of ones and zeros flowing through the air. However, cybernetics has an older and deeper history, predating both the personal computer and the cubicle. Fred Turner’s recent book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, shows how the cybernetic idea of seeing the world in terms of information flows grew out of government-sponsored World War II military research and into the information technology industry of Silicon Valley. In the 1960s and 1970s, cybernetic ideas brought groups of military-funded computer researchers together with Deadheads, radical environmentalists, and art communards in the San Francisco Bay area. This collection of long-haired eccentrics began to think of everything from bee behavior to dance parties to computer programming as information processes. In doing so, they liberated the images of information and the computer from the clutches of the military-industrial complex, joining them instead to a new cybernetic-counterculture vision of egalitarianism, communal networks, and democratic “people power.”