NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace’s Death

A tribute as only The Onion could write one. See also their previous entry, Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20, a dead-wringer for his prose style. I had serious, serious trouble slogging through Infinite Jest and gave up circa page 150, but I’m increasingly feeling that I need to sample one or more of his less intense works. Just as soon as I put aside an uninterrupted week to pick my way carefully through Neal Stephenson’s latest tome, Anathem.

How to build an A-bomb

In 1964 the US Army enlisted two physicists with no nuclear background to see if they could design their own functional nuclear bomb using only publicly available information and experimentation. The project was an experiment to see how hard it would be for other countries to develop nuclear weapon programs. The results were not encouraging.

Pushing Russia Into the Cold

Pat Buchanan suggests parallels between NATO’s treatment of Russia and the predicate of Italy before World War II. His overarching point is sound — we can’t continue to bait the bear and escalate the situation without thinking through the endgame, and the potentially disastrous consequences.

Dreams & Nightmares of the Digital Age

In 1997, author Neal Stephenson in Time discussed how the use of emerging cryptography technologies by terrorists could scare citizens into tolerating a much stronger Big Brother. It is interesting to ponder why these technologies never took off like many techies imagined they would. Not surprising, though, is that terrorism (and Big Brother) has thrived regardless.