Orville Schell has penned a harrowing guided tour of Iraq through a reporter’s eyes. What’s most absorbing from a futurismic perspective is the account’s detail of day-to-day life in an environment where modern weapons are ubiquitous and in constant use.

The organization National Popular Vote wants to make an end run around the U.S. Constitution to make the Electoral College irrelevant by convincing states to pass laws pledging all their votes to the winners of the popular election.

One of the reasons I choose not to watch television news is that I can’t stand the stultifying, cowardly, inhuman, stuffed shirt posturing that goes for responsible public behavior on the part of media personalities and the politicians they feed on. I’m not sure how we got into this world where operating in the public domain means buying into a code of conventional silence, but I think it’s changing. I think the popularity of John Stewart and the Daily Show are exhibit A. So too is George Clooney’s short opinon piece on Common Dreams. To Democrats in the Congress he says about the war in Iraq, “Fuck you, you weren’t misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic.” And I say Amen brother.

Update: Looks like Clooney is now saying he didn’t write and didn’t approve the blog entry, though he stands by the comments that make it up.

Turns out that almost every bit of what goes into a black hole is quantum entangled with the Hawking radiation that leaves a black hole. If you could collect it all, and if you understood how to read it, you could compute on a black hole.

It’s no news that technology and medicine are extending the average human life span. But it is astonishing to hear just how far some scientists think it could go; Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from Cambridge University, believes the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born. I really must get a pension plan nailed down.