In an odd coincidence, Brad DeLong had a post yesterday about World War I, specifically discussing Norman Angell’s 1911 book that explained why war between great powers was a no win proposition for all sides. Needless to say, despite the utterly true, compelling, and popular argument made by Angell, the great powers eagerly plunged into total war when the opportunity presented itself.

The Washington Post has an article today about Sean Gorman, a student who, as his project for a geography dissertation, mapped out all of the fiber optic lines in America, and the businesses that they connect to. Needless to say, plenty of corporate and security types are up in arms because he’s created a “roadmap for terrorism.” Why is it that in the world of security people are always so eager to shoot the messenger? Gorman compiled his dissertation using information that was available in the public domain — if he could do it, so can terrorists. Granted, if they could get ahold of his maps it would save them some work, but shouldn’t the focus be on studying the maps to figure out where more redundancy is needed and which chokepoints need better security rather than on obsessing over the convenient packaging of publicly available information?

Andrew Leonard has a review of Wired: A Romance up at Salon.

Mitch Kapor is looking for someone to teach him Python so that he can make a personal contribution to the Chandler code base. Nothing to say about that other than that I think it’s kind of cool.

Right now I’m reading Barbara Tuchman’s seminal book on World War I, The Guns of August. I ordered it after I talked here about the difference between European and American attitudes toward war and the effect of the Great War upon them. While I’m just getting started, I do think that there’s much we can learn from World War I when thinking about the current state of the world. What has struck me most so far is the similarity between people who are eager for war today and those who were eager for war a century ago.

In American schools, we learn almost nothing about World War I, or at least I didn’t, in college or in high school. Everybody knows that World War I was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the crown prince of the Austrian empire, by Serbian nationalists. What I did not know was that Europe was poised for war for over a decade prior to that and that the fallout from the assassination was used by the German empire to pick a fight with Russia and France.

I’ll leave any comparisons to you.

Microsoft Monitor has an interesting post on Microsoft’s rights management strategy.

One of the main reasons I hardly post at all about the Middle East any more is that the situation is far too complex for me to even hope to understand. Any sort of solutions I might propose come, to be frank, from a place of almost complete ignorance. Take, for example, the case of Marwan Barghouti. He is currently in an Israeli prison and is being tried as a terrorist leader, yet at the same time it is he who negotiated the cease fire with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and it is widely believed that both the Palestinians and Israelis see him as the successor to Yasser Arafat. Furthermore, it’s understood that Israelis see him succeeding Arafat as a good thing. At this point, I’m just taking all of this stuff in and hoping for the best.

I love a good, iconoclastic idea as much as the next guy, so I was quite taken with Michael Kinsley’s idea of ending marriage as a state sanctioned institution. This will never happen for a million good reasons, but refactoring our culture in this way would surely remove a lot of wierd hacks.

Everybody could use a friend like Brad Choate, who’s helping his friend Ron find a desperately needed job. I’ve also been touched by the outpouring of links (I guess) to help find a replacement kidney for Dave Jacobs. It never ceases to amaze me how loose groups of people on the Internet band together to help people out who are in need, just like people in small towns do when there’s a disaster or a house fire.

The Army Times published a sure-to-be controversial editorial lambasting the current administration for its hypocrisy in lauding the military for its achievements and at the same time paying soldiers like crap. It was pulled shortly thereafter, but thanks to the Web, it is neither gone nor forgotten. The editorial mentioned that the administration decided on October 1 to roll back some previous increases in imminent-danger pay. I guess they already knew that the amount of imminent danger that soldiers were going to face was about to go way up.