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Cage match: 4th Century meets the 19th. Pass the popcorn.

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Well, there, see, it’s not my fault. Blame that qwertyitis on my parents.

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

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And what are the odds of that?

These new small reactors meet important criteria for nuclear power plants. With no control rods to jam, they are far safer than the old models — you might well call them nuclear batteries. By not using weapons-grade enriched fuels, they are nonproliferating. They minimize nuclear waste. And they’re economical.

In other words, not a chance.

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“At those nodes, the industry will start getting to the point where semiconductor manufacturing tools are too expensive to depreciate with volume production, i.e., their costs will be so high, that the value of their lifetime productivity can never justify it,” he adds.

At that point, says Jelinek, Moore’s Law becomes academic, and chip makers are going to extend the time they keep their process technologies in the field so they can recoup their substantial investments in process research and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

Megan McArdle is not afraid to ask the pointed question:

But here’s the thing:  Army hospitals have all the advantages that single-payer advocates love about the VA.  They’re unified.  There’s no profit incentive–indeed, the doctors are on quite low salaries.  They have great incentives for preventive care.  They certainly don’t have any profit motive to provide bad care.  So why did Walter Reed suck?  And what guarantees that the VA is the system we’ll follow, rather than the multiple other dysfunctional government systems everyone hates?

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None of the Coastal Elite care (or, if they do, they’d rather forget) that Ed McMahon was a Marine.

McMahon wanted to be a Marine fighter pilot during World War II. Because it required two years of college, he enrolled at Boston College — until the Navy dropped the school requirement and McMahon dropped school to enlist.

The Marines care — and remember.

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Can action figures be far behind? And perhaps some cute scratch-off game at McDonald’s….

The Vatican announced that 200 copies of the elaborately decorated parchment from 1530, which bore an appeal by English peers to Pope Clement VII asking for the annulment of Henry’s marriage, would go on sale for 50,000 euros (£43,000) each.

Boy, history don’t come cheap.

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On the bakesale issue, Bromfield stated: “disparate racial pricing for doughnut sales — was prohibited because we cannot and do not permit racially discriminatory practices.”

Other than affirmative action in everything from admissions to housing, of course. But it would be gauche to mention those.

The invincible humorlessness of the Politically Correct is infamous, of course, but nothing drives them so insane as underscoring it with a real situation.

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A cartoon from Diversity Lane.

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The truth is that tenure has served as an instrument of conformity since tenure votes are often glorified popularity contests. The fact that university professors donated to President Obama’s campaign over John McCain’s by a margin of eight to one is only the tip of the iceberg. Those professors who want tenure and disagree with the prevailing trends in their field — or the political fashions outside of it — know that they must keep their mouths shut for at least the first seven years of their careers.

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I’d be happy to join them if they’d just get away from AT&T. I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that.

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No rose without a thorn.

Jerry Pournelle has something to say about “consensus science”.

Apparently I’m not the only one to have noticed the herd mentality at New Scientist magazine.

Harry Stein has a new book out.

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Better late than never, I suppose.

Sure would like to read the pre-nup on that, though.

They have one son, Redmond, 24, who is currently in jail on drug charges.

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Uh-huh. Told you so.

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Ah, those collection societies just never learn, do they? We’ve discussed in the past how ASCAP once threatened the Girl Scouts for singing songs around the campfire, but in the past few years it’s been ASCAP’s counterpart in the UK that’s been in the news the most for things like threatening small business owners after calling them on the phone and saying they hear music in the background or threatening a stable owner for playing the radio to her horses. I guess ASCAP was feeling a bit left out. Its latest move is to claim that legally purchased ringtones on mobiles phones, playing in public places, represents a public performance for which it is owed royalties. Songwriters and music publishers already are paid royalties on ringtone purchases, but ASCAP is claiming that buying the file is entirely different than “the performance” (i.e., the phone ringing).

Gee, what does that sound like? Perhaps like the whining about the voice features in the new Kindle?

Bryan Caplan looks at insurance from an economist’s point of view.

The reason for my delight: As soon as she said that no insurance companies covered this treatment,  I knew it would be reasonably priced!

David Broder outs the Obama staffers who’d really rather keep running against the Bushitler if they could.

Bush’s silence has made it harder for Obama to keep the public focused on Bush as being responsible for our present difficulties — the weak economy, the unsettled wars, the scandals of Guantanamo and the detainee program.

It is not for lack of trying. Obama regularly reminds the public in his speeches and news conferences of all the problems he inherited from his predecessor. But to reporters covering the White House, those reminders have become familiar boilerplate. And since Bush won’t fight back, they rarely get much coverage.

Disappointing that a columnist of Broder’s stature can’t use the subjunctive properly, but that’s the way it is these days.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Very neighborly.

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I’ve always wondered what those silly shoulder-harnesses for non-sled-dogs were for. Now I know.

“Would you open up your Schnauzer please, sir?”

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After imposing jizya (an Islamic tax like a fine to the non-Muslims) to the Sikhs in some tribal areas of North West Frontier Province (NWFP) in Pakistan, where the Taliban have strongholds and rule their own fiefdom, Christians and Shia Muslims (a minority sect) across the country have received letters threatening them with death should they not conform to the Taliban’s Sunni Islam.

That’s some Religion o’ Peace™ ya got there, fella.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that was a problem.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The old embassy is supposed to be an official shrine to that bold act of national defiance, which defined for the world the glorious 1979 revolution, a kind of Iranian counterpart to America’s Boston Tea Party—but more central and significant. Yet in the four times I went to the embassy during trips to Iran in the past year, it was empty of visitors. A bookstore just outside the entrance, which was once known for selling anti-American literature and reprints of the thousands of secret embassy documents seized in the takeover (the infamous “spy den documents”), was vacant when I first saw it in December, its racks empty, but nine months later appeared ready to reopen as a bookstore for children. The slogans and spiteful artwork that had been spray-painted on the embassy’s brick outer walls by angry crowds during the tumultuous hostage crisis had faded—including an image of the Statue of Liberty with its face portrayed as a death mask and a sign in English that said “DEATH TO THE USA.“

For a visiting American, Iran is like Bizarro World, the mirror universe in Superman comics in which everything is inverted. Bad is good and good is bad. In Tehran patriotic symbols of the United States are everywhere, but always wrenched into images of violence, evil, and defeat. The American flag is shown in the shape of a gun; the bald eagle is shown going down in flames. In the West we are bombarded with advertising images of youth, beauty, sex, and life; in Tehran the preponderance of advertising images celebrate death. There are murals everywhere honoring martyrs—primarily those who died in the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, in the 1980s, but also more recent Islamic martyrs, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, who was assassinated by Israeli forces in Gaza earlier this year. Billboards in the West often feature scantily dressed, provocatively posed teens, but in Tehran the gigantic wall murals tend to depict robed grandpas and grumpy-looking white-bearded clerics—especially common are the bespectacled face of the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the more imposing, threatening visage of the late Imam, Ruhollah Khomeini, the major force behind the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, and the father of Iran’s theocratic state.

The hostage-taking was an outrageous violation of international law and of the age-old rules governing diplomatic relations between civilized nations; but as shocking as it was at the time, in today’s world of vicious Islamist terrorism the gerogan-giri seems almost quaint.

Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, a ringleader of the takeover who has become a reform politician and newspaperman, is emphatic in his assessment: “Hostage-taking is not an acceptable action under international norms and standards. The hostages underwent severe emotional difficulties. Prolonging it affected both countries in a negative way. The chaos caused such tension between Iran and the United States that even now, after two decades, no one knows how to resolve it.”

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Sir Michael, who plays Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore, had the child with the 43-year-old set designer Philippa Hart, with whom he already has a two year-old son, Michael.

The Irish actor’s wife of 45 years, Lady Gambon, knows about his second family and his divides his time between their two homes and a flat in London, according to The Sun newspaper.

I think there’s something in the water.

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And were promptly shot for trespassing? No such luck.

Ch Supt Matthew Nix added: “There are no reports of any injuries at this time. Public safety is of paramount importance to the operation and Kent police is using all available resources to bring a safe conclusion to the incident.”

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It uses less than 10 per cent of the water of conventional machines and 30 per cent less energy by replacing most of the water with thousands of tiny reusable plastic beads to attract and absorb dirt under humid conditions.

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Quick, get a picture of Ted Kennedy.

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She had already completed a 20,000-word dissertation and three pieces of coursework while heavily pregnant, as well as juggling three part-time jobs.

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If you’ve got money, of course.

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Yes, Mr. President, a lot of people inside and outside that room know exactly what you are talking about. A skewed reimbursement scheme set up by Medicare, a system that pays generously when you do something to a patient, but is stingy when you do something for a patient, is largely to blame. Cut, poke, sew, burn, insert, inject, dilate, stent, remove and you get very well paid; if you learn how to do this efficiently, maybe set up your own outpatient center so you can do it to more people in a shorter time (which is what happened when this payment system was put in place in 1989) and you are paid even more. If, however, you are a primary care physician, and if, just like the young doctor who saw my parents yesterday, you spend time getting to know your patients, and are willing to play quarterback when your patient enters the hospital, so that you can herd the consultants and guide the family through a bewildering experience that gets surreal if you are in the intensive care unit, then you may have great personal satisfaction but you will make five to tenfold less than your colleagues in the doing-to disciplines.

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I can see why the tender spirits of The Guardian find that disturbing.

On the other hand, perhaps they were eaten by aliens. I’ve seen movies on that very subject.

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Organisers of the demonstration accused embassy officials of attempting to spread fear among supporters of the thwarted challengers in the presidential election. One Iranian woman, Maryam, 26, said she felt threatened, as she was about to return to Tehran: “I’m worried they’ll take my passport or won’t let me get a flight back.”

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Actually, what is most astonishing is the number of dimwits who are surprised when a dictatorship acts like, well, a dictatorship.

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Turns Bram Stoker’s classic into a blog. There is nothing new under the sun.

Tyler Cowen is always worth reading.

Charlie Stross is a best-selling, award-winning author. If you haven’t read Accelerando, which won the Hugo Award, I don’t particularly blame you; I couldn’t get into it. If, on the other hand, you haven’t read any of the Merchant Princes books, your life is the poorer for it, I tell you truly.

However: Charlie started out as a geek, and writes about it on his blog — and it’s obvious why he was intended by God to be an award-winning writer.

During this process I discovered several things about myself. I do not respond well to micro-managing. I especially do not respond well to being micro-managed on a highly technical task by a journalism graduate.

Do I need to explain why putting an accountant in charge of a technology-driven company is not necessarily a wise, visionary, and forward-looking move?

As a Californian software corporation, SCO was prone to various types of American management disease; no alcohol on corporate premises, for example: and then the annual recurring Maoist self-criticism and re-education ritual known as the performance appraisal.

Here is an example of a Terminally Bad Sign for any organization in the computer business:

… When you discover that your line manager’s recreational reading is the 1980 edition of the IBM Staff Handbook.

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Since Britain is about five years further along on the road to cultural degeneration than we, I suppose this is a look at our future.

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But while on a sightseeing excursion to the city’s teeming slums, Tooley observed something peculiar: private schools were just as prevalent in these struggling areas as in the nicer neighborhoods. Everywhere he spotted hand-painted signs advertising locally run educational enterprises. “Why,” he wondered, “had no one I’d worked with in India told me about them?”

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A federal judge on Thursday struck down two Northern California city ordinances banning military recruitment of minors, finding the laws violated the U.S. Constitution.

Those who live by overcentralized government get poked by overcentralized government.

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Shiv Sena, the ultra-right Hindu nationalist party in India, has launched a global brand of snack food called the Shiv Vada — a sandwich containing deep-fried potato ball.

I curious on what basis Cory Doctorow characterizes the Shiv Sena party as “ultra-right”? Although, being ultra-left himself, I suppose I ought to accept his judgment.

In any case, any intersection of “ultra-right” and “potato” has my interest.

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The Peppered moth, which changed its colour from white to black in areas of Britain with heavy pollution, is now reverting back to its original appearance.

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And once they discover that it’s heavily correlated with ethnicity the information will be buried and never be seen again.

Remember, you heard it here first.

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Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.