The thermodynamics of terrorism:

A strategic planning manual for a terrorist might say, “Attack a point in your enemy’s system with high potential energy and low entropy. Those are the areas where a small perturbation can cause the most havoc.” The counter strategy for our society is “Don’t build such systems. Avoid single points of failure. Decentralize and disperse control.”

If you’re looking for broad coverage of the current situation, you should check out World Press Review’s daily review of press coverage of terrorism and our attack on Afghanistan. Each of the WPR links is labelled with the general political stance of the media outlet so you don’t have to wonder what sort of paper the links come from. Yahoo! Singapore also has the AFP world news feed online. AFP is the French wire service, and has broken a bunch of stories out of Afghanistan.

Despite the fact that the US vehemently denies dropping a bomb on a hospital in Afghanistan, the Frontier Post (a Peshawar, Pakistan newspaper) is reporting the claim as straight news. The article doesn’t even include the fact that the US denied bombing the hospital, it just reports the Taliban claims that we did so. I imagine that coverage is similar throughout the Muslim world. The Pakistani newspaper is also reporting claims that two American helicopters were shot down within Afghanistan, and that Al Jazeera showed footage of what was allegedly wreckage of the helicopters. On the other hand, I can’t find any coverage in that paper of the Taliban’s rocket attack on civilians in the Northern Alliance held town of Charikar, which is reported as an aside in this BBC story. The fact is that even as the Taliban condemns the United States for killing Afghan civilians and accuses us of purposefully doing so, they are, in fact, intentionally attacking Afghan civilians themselves.

Robert Fisk’s latest dispatch from Pakistan discusses obsession with Osama bin Laden.

Take a look at this bizarre item from NewsForge: Disney worked an anti-music swapping plot into one of its cartoons. Perhaps next week we’ll have an episode explaining why CD prices have never gone down, despite the fact that the prices for CD media have dropped to near nothing since CDs were first introduced.

Certified Macintosh god John Siracusa has written an in-depth review of Mac OS X 10.1 (is that really the name?) for Ars Technica. I haven’t read it yet, but when I do, I’ll probably end up wishing that I’d bought an iBook instead of the Toshiba laptop that I purchased earlier this month.

I successfully nabbed the Emacs 21.1 sources from the FTP site and built it on my Windows 2000 box using Cygwin. The build process was surprisingly painless. It’s now up and running, and looks pretty darn cool.

RMS has written a great overview of the dangers of the USA Act (link via Dangerousmeta) over at Newsforge.

More from MEMRI: an editorial from an Egyptian (government-sponsored newspaper) on the perks of dying for Islam. I find it odd that this piece would appear in a government-backed media outlet in Egypt because Egypt has big problems with Islamic extremists who very much want to remove the current government from power.

I’m linking to David Talbot’s rant at Andrew Sullivan simply because it’s such a thing of beauty. One great thing about having your own widely read publication is that you can be sure that when you flame someone, plenty of people will read it.