Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Instead of bringing George Bush out of retirement to do the one thing he managed to not screw up, the government is going to use herbicide to clear brush along the Mexican border, in order to combat smugglers.
If you really want to defeat the cartels terrorizing northern Mexico, I have a blindingly obvious solution [...]

By Thoreau
Rabbis in the Israeli military were preaching to the troops that the Gaza conflict is a holy war being fought as part of God’s plan.
In one of several postwar testimonies given at a left-leaning military institute, a squad commander identified only as Ram complained that army rabbis tried to press what he called a [...]

By Thoreau
This is a nice question for a test.  Most people will probably say that if it’s fiziks then the non-intuitive answer must be right.  OK, but can you explain why?
Via Chad Orzel.

By Thoreau
A week or two ago a comment thread got into the way that college physics tests are constructed, and I said that I’d like to become a good enough test-writer that I can stop curving everything and just set an absolute standard. I think I’m starting to get there.
The ideal curve would have [...]

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Sully quotes a reader e-mail at length on the awful awfulness of the publishing industry. Some of the reader’s complaints, however, seem amiss.
And what a telling choice of words — "promote" — [...]

By Thoreau
US military officials are claiming that they will be able to shoot down missiles launched by North Korea.  Now, I have some thoughts on missile defense, mostly matters of cost, efficacy, and statistics, but instead of offering my technical analysis I will just quote the Onion, which summed it up nicely:
“Wait, the U.S. actually [...]

By Thoreau
Stephen Colbert has won the naming contest for a new module on the international space station.

By Thoreau
I admit it:  I’m in Joe the Plumber territory with some of my opposition to the bailout.  I don’t claim to understand all of it, but I’ve got a knee-jerk instinct that this just ain’t right and I’m not about to let somebody try to sell me some snake oil.
OK, so it’s a horrible [...]

By Mona
That I haven’t posted in, oh, eons does not mean I won’t begin to do so regularly again in a month or six weeks, assuming Jim’s sufferance. So much has been happening in my life I’ve just been utterly overwhelmed: non-terminal but debilitating health issues, I’m about to move and have to replace a [...]

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Alex Knapp on a big load of fertilizer.