Six degrees of Captain America: some scientists at the University of the Baleares “studied the statistical properties of the network of 6,486 characters in the 12,942 Marvel comic books” since 1961. They found that the network of acquaintance among Marvel characters is “very weakly clustered – about 1.5 times more than a random network. Clustering in real networks is typically ten (or more) times greater than in random webs.” (Naturally, I found the link at a comic strip site.)

Aubrey Turner reports that Condi Rice, for good personal reasons, is firmly for RKBA. (Link from Bitter Bitch)

Yesterday I leapt over a shrubbery, twisted my right ankle (mildly), and landed hard on my left knee. Somehow this stiffened the muscle(s) behind the knee. I think of it as a learning experience: like, I never noticed before how strong my habit is of putting my pants on right leg first.

Today I bought a Danish-English dictionary published in 1953/4. To my amazement, it uses aa rather than å; I thought å came in at the same time as ø (former oe) and æ (former ae).

Failure and Fantasy, by Lee Harris.

. . . tragically, the Arab world seems to be united in wishing to choose the same balm that the Germans chose after the Great War, the indispensable fantasy of those who refuse to face up to reality, “It was all someone else’s fault.”

This is simply not our tradition in the United States. We blame ourselves, and at our best universities there are professors who are paid quite nicely to find as much fault with our society as it is humanly possible to do. An insane policy by any standard you might wish to chose, except that of pure pragmatic success — the most self-critical nation in human history is also the first nation to achieve absolute superiority over all the other nations of the world; and perhaps, by some dialectic irony, it is more through the efforts of men like Noam Chomsky than Rush Limbaugh that we possess supreme military might. Can you really fear a society in which men like Chomsky and Gore Vidal are lionized, as opposed to being shot in the middle of the night in a remote forest? . . .

(Link from Quare again.)

Interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell on the creation of The Pill. (Link from Quare)

2020: That article is lost, but here is a newer one on the same subject.