Brian C. Bennet, stoner, believes the best way to bring about an end to the war on drugs is to publish statistical data about drug use and drug enforcement. I can’t say that the data he presents is accurate, but given that it comes for the most part from government publications, it’s hard to believe it’s biased against the government. And it’s a fact that what this particular discussion needs is less hysteria and more data.

Scientists in Israel have performed AND and OR calculations using enzymes. Why? “If such counters could be engineered inside living cells, then we can imagine them playing a role in applications such as intelligent drug delivery, where a therapeutic agent is generated at the site of a problem.”

The New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff has penned a rather puzzled and puzzling review of David Marusek’s Counting Heads. He begins with a lament that science fiction is inaccessible to average readers, and proceeds to use Counting Heads as a case in point. In the course of making his point, however, he makes obvious that all the things he loves about Marusek’s book are the very things that make it inaccessible. I could be an elitist and say that we who love science fiction should stop caring what those who can’t be troubled to understand it think, but I’ll take the opposite tack and say that science fiction’s problems with general acceptance are all about marketing and not about complexity. Look at The Time Traveler’s Wife, a science fiction novel with an asynchronous and complex plot: only it was marketed as literature, and sold well. [Thanks Ricardo!]

My day job lets me listen to tons of podcasts–I currently subscribe to about sixty–and one I recently stumbled upon seemed worth posting here. It’s called “The Silent Universe”, and with its high production values, exceptional voice acting and strong script, it’s shaping up to be a sci-fi drama to get excited over.

In a long, academic, but still intriguing piece for Foreign Affairs Stephen Biddle argues that policy discussion in the United States about the war in Iraq is mistaken in advocating that, “the United States must fight the Vietnam War again — but this time the right way.” Biddle points out that the war in Iraq is not a war of national liberation like Vietnam, and that training Iraqi troops to take on law enforcement responsibilities is probably the worst approach when such strong divisions still exist between groups within Iraqi society. Most interesting from my perspective, however, is how well Biddle illustrates that being able to predict the future is really about removing the blinders of the past to truly observe the present.