Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
A student who’s been in my class for 3 quarters now just sent me a rough draft of a lab report for critique, and he’s gone from classic ESL difficulties and standard freshman nonsense (”the error was the result of experimental error”) to clear English and insightful statements on the limitations of the apparatus.
This [...]

Some skeptical photo analysis of the recent “Syrian nuke facility” exhibit is happening at Moon of Alabama and Whirled View.

b at Moon of Alabama
Cheryl Rofer of Whirled View on the overhead photos, the “reactor photos” and the destruction sequence.

I’m not seeing the pixelation problems with the “Nuke-Guy Team-Up” photo that b sees, but the general [...]

By Thoreau
This morning, the LA Times ran a pretty good editorial on Ecuador, arguing that we should be respectful of other sovereign countries (a concept that America is still struggling with).  I’m reluctant to take them to task for some small point in the midst of it, but I did find this interesting:
Although losing the [...]

Tonight we bring you the story of lost swing queen Teddy Grace. I’ve been a follower of Grace ever since early this evening, when I started digging into the background of the new Elvis Costello song, "Stella Hurt." (Here’s a live recording of "Stella" from the other day at the Ryman in Nashville.) The Oxford [...]

A thousand words:

(Credit: SRI International.)
A thousand more by me at AOTP.

Doctor Joyner makes a colorable argument that we are not suffering a bout of Iran-War fever after all:
During the run-up to the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, the demands set forth to avoid war involved enough loss of face for the other side that they were unlikely to be met. I don’t recall any administration official [...]

By Thoreau
A while ago I observed that it would be less destructive and no more expensive if we just handed over suitcases of money to politically connected companies and skipped out on the whole war thing. If they have the clout to get the feds to hand money to them, can we at least [...]