Of things I have learned online that appear to be true this one, if it is true, has got to be among the strangest: Kodak Had a Secret Nuclear Reactor Loaded With Enriched Uranium Hidden In a Basement.

It really gives a whole new possible meaning to ‘too big to fail’. Do we need to inquire of major corporations if they have signed the Comprehensive Nucclear Test-Ban Treaty? What if CitiBank or JP Morgan have nukes?

Kodak, now in bankruptcy, says it had the reactor in order to do radiological tests of the purity of materials. And it dismantled the whole thing under government supervision in 2006. Just a few years later Kodak went into Chapter 11.

Could this explain why Kodak isn’t getting a government bailout? I kid, I kid. I hope.

Given that the field/senior grades of the US officer corps is, in my admittedly limited experience, usually pretty smart (or better), it’s especially mysterious to me how they (or at least a number of them) can be so dumb about some of these things.

(But first, pass the bar.)

Obama Evolves:

I know what the polls show, and I know he was pushed into it, but I still credit the president with doing the right thing. So much of this process reminds me of Lincoln weighing emancipation, even as he knew, in his heart, that slavery was a sin.

Moreover, regardless of the push, I think this is really heartening timing after North Carolina, where a ban on gay marriage and civil unions triumphed by some 20 points.

So what if there is an element of calculation here. It’s still the right thing to do; it is nice even just once in a while to get that from the White House.

I wish to address the most important policy question of the millenium: should we build a Death Star?  This debate picked up this year after some Lehigh University students estimated that just the steel for a Death Star would cost $852 quadrillion, or 13,000 times the current GDP of the Earth. Kevin Drum suggests this cost estimate is too low but, in the context of a galactic economy, a Death Star is perfectly affordable and “totally worth it.” Seth Masket and Jamelle Bouie highlight the military downside of the Death Star, suggesting that more people might rebel against the wholesale genocide of the Empire, and that the Death Star would be the prime target of any rebellion. I have two thoughts to add. First, the Death Star is a bit misunderstood. It is primarily a tool of domestic politics rather than warfare, and should be compared to alternative means of suppressing the population of a galaxy. Second, as a weapon of war, it should be compared to alternative uses of scarce defense resources. Understood properly, the Death Star is not worth it.

And there’s lots more where that came from.

I look forward to subsequent articles about the costs, benefits, and ethical ramifications of building a time machine, a Stargate, and a transporter.

This video is great for people who want an intro to one of the central ideas in modern cryptography:

OK, there was a little math in there, but not so much.

One interesting aspect of these TOS is that they have a very American flavor. There seems to have been no attempt to cherry pick law; the Wikimedia Foundation is in the US and it relies on US law, both helpful (CDA § 230) and perhaps less helpful (DMCA).

I did enjoy reading part of it in French. But that didn’t seem to change the substance, which undoubtedly is the idea.