Borrego Springs...

Borrego Springs is a community in the desert just to the east of our coastal range.  Reader Larry E. was out there this past weekend, and sent along some photos.  Here's just a couple that caught my eye...

The Badlands area - striking, desolate, beautiful...

One of 50 or so sculptures Larry saw...

Piss Power...

This reminds me strongly of an episode in Neil Stephenson's trilogy...

Strange Pairing...

This is something I would never have predicted: the Zetas (the notoriously violent Mexican drug cartel) and the hacker's group Anonymous are edging toward outright war.  A real war, in which people are likely to die...

Still Working After 40 Years...

Now this is cool – forty years ago, Jerry Lowe built this ring-counter based clock.  This is before microcomputers and before LEDs (and before most of my colleagues were born!).  It's still working.

Nice, Jerry...

New Terrorist Threat...

The Wall Street Journal's commentary pages today prominently feature an article by Andrew Krepinevich, who describes a new and parlous terrorist threat: attacking offshore oil rigs.

Well, maybe.  His whole point, really, is that offshore oil rigs are “soft” targets, meaning easy to attack.  Sure they are.  So are many other targets (dams, water supplies, hydrocarbon storage facilities, mass transit, etc., etc. ad infinitum).  I'm not convinced there's anything special about the offshore oil rigs.  But I have a real problem with those, like Krepinevich, who think that we should try to defend all these things.  To steal someone else's phrasing: we do that, and the terrorists really have won...

Twenty Four Hours at Fukushima...

This is the best summary I've seen yet, from IEEE Spectrum...

Put Down Your Morning Beverage...

...then go read this!

Nuclear Event Detector...

This appears to be for real – here's the data sheet (PDF) right off Maxwell's site.

Awesome...