Was reading this from Crooked Timber yesterday: Maria asks, how does OPEC exist in a world where of legal and institutional free trade? She says "I'm not looking for the realpolitik answer. That's pretty obvious. But what is the legal and institutional answer to this question?"

Dear Mr. President: we are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.

So begins a letter from Project for a New American Century to Bill Clinton, dated January 1998. It's worth going back to this now we're into year six of the Iraq war. The one lesson I learned from the whole saga was this: there's no need for conspiracies. You can publish your intentions on a website, say the opposite in public, and no-one will care. Truth won't out.

In the run-up to the war, Blair and Bush repeatedly claimed that regime change was not the aim, and that - even right up until the last moment - Hussein had it within his power to stop the war. That's what I found most terrifying - listening to Blair parrot Bush, when I could go to a public website and read, plain as day, the neocons' policy for regime change and the reasons for it. Written by the neocons themselves. They haven't even got the shame to take it down.

Macro:

• Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth - so there's hope yet for polluting our atmosphere even more. Gosh, that'd be quite a mission.
• Laws of gravity wrong...? Probably not - but as I've written about elsewhere, scientists are a conservative bunch and spend years checking and re-checking their findings. So time will tell...
• Earthrise - a crap version of a hi-def film from a satellite circumnavigating the moon. Look! It's us, that little blue dot!
• Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? Reincarnation through probability. Hmm. Though they fail to mention that, if true, every other possible permutation of you and your friends and your mother's breasts attached to the side of your head is also possible. Gosh, paging Doctor Freud...
• Planets and stars in scale - really, really macro.

• to get a passport
• to get pregnant
• to boil an egg
• to get to the moon
• to digest food
• to walk a mile
• to get to Mars
• for hair to grow
• to build muscle
• to get a US passport

"How long does it take..." in Firefox quicksearch, using Google. Implying that each must be done before the next is possible. The US really have raised their citizenship bar. A whole phalanx of new and slightly meaningless sayings there too: 'weeell... you gotta boil an egg to get to the moon, you know...' etc.

Just come out of a lecture by Peter Marshall, author of Demanding the Impossible: a History of Anarchism. (Note the link to Amazon. Tsk.)

Two things: first, an old friend from Sheffield had a copy of this book. Many years back, one of her friends misread the title as 'Demading the Impossible'. Demading the Impossible henceforth became a formidable superhero of inscrutable powers. There's even a drawing of him somewhere.

Second. A comment from the after-lecture question session: a young man related a recent tale from his hometown. One evening, early but already dark, there was a powercut. Showing no signs of ending, people lit candles, put them in jars and - after a while - started wandering out of their front doors. Chatting ensued. Chatting led to a large fire 'in an entirely inappropriate place'. A large musical band formed. Sometime after the music got going, some people in balaclavas clutching weapons turned up and asked if anyone fancied a fight. There was a thoughtful pause, broken eventually by a guitarist who starting singing, 'don't worry, be happy'. Everyone joined in. The storyteller didn't relate if that included the balaclava people. He ended with the question:

So, when the lights go out, what kind of anarchism will we have?

I got sent a link this week to Zotero - iTunes for researchers, in the form of a Firefox extension. I'm now evangelising to people about it on a daily basis. It worries me how excited I am by it. Zotero just won a 'citefest' competition - can't say it had ever occurred to me such competitions occur, but they do. Zotero won a number of challenges and came out on top overall. Having used Endnote a little, I can see why. I have even written to them in order to become a campus rep. I'm going to get a t-shirt.

Zotero is spectacular. It's open source and funded at least in part by the US state, as well as some private foundations. A pretty large team have put it together; extensions and third party stuff should be on the way. Ctrl - alt + z brings it up. Any ISI / library / amazon page I'm on (and many, many others) will offer me a little button in the address bar to stick all the citation info in. If there are a lot of references on the page, it'll offer me a folder-full and I choose which ones to add. They can be dynamically searched and foldered, as in itunes, as well as tagged. The search index includes all text and, with a PDF plug-in, that text can be indexed too. Notes can added (also searchable), and any kind of file attachment. The tags act as dynamic toggle switches. Related things can be connected. Genius.

The Guardian reported yesterday on Joe Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes upcoming book, The Three Trillion Dollar War. In it, they attempt to audit the whole Iraq war effort. The article is terrifying; I thought I'd pull out some bullet points. The first one is obviously in the title - their estimate of the true cost - and this is just for the US (compared to an official estimate of £500 billion.) Other bullet points lifted from the article:

• The rest of the world, including Britain, will probably account for about the same amount again.
• America is spending $16bn a month on running costs alone (ie on top of the regular expenses of the Department of Defence) in Iraq and Afghanistan; that is the entire annual budget of the UN.
• 1 trillion dollars = any one of the following: 8 million housing units, 15 million public school teachers, healthcare for 530 million children for a year, scholarships to university for 43 million students (note: most of these would count as investment as well - you'd get a return on it. The opposite is true for war-spending.)
• America is currently spending $5bn a year in Africa, equivalent to 10 days fighting
• Wage for contractor working as a security guard: $400,000; US soldier: $40,000
• A soldier injured in the first month has to pay back their sign-up bonus
• Soldiers have to pay for a lot of their own equipment: if they lose their helmet (even through being blown up) they'll be billed
• It wasn't until 2006 that that the DOD agreed to replace Humvees with mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armoured vehicles
• Halliburton received at least $19.3bn in single-source contracts (i.e. bidding was limited... to Halliburton. Free market, huh?)
• Often, when contracts went to US firms rather than local ones, those firms would then bring in labour from e.g. Nepal because it was cheaper - even though one in two iraqi men were out of work
• The war has been paid for through borrowing (and taxes have been cut): the interest alone is 'a couple of hundred billion a year' - another trillion by 2017 and a little present for the next president
• Stiglitz also argues that the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low and 'looked the other way as lending standards were lowered' as a result of US government loan-seeking and pressure to keep their interest lower; he connects this to the subsequent sub-prime crisis
• Much of the war fund now comes from China; Stiglitz notes it was China that bailed out Merrill Lynch and Citibank recently because America simply doesn't have the money
• From studying futures markets, Stiglitz concludes that 'a significant proportion' of the rise in oil prices is due to instability post-Iraq; oil has gone up from $25 to $100 a barrell in five years
• Projecting to 2015, this will be an extra £1.6 trillion on oil in the US
• Direct quote: to developing countries it has been devastating - they note a study by the International Energy Agency that looked at a sample of 13 African countries and found that rising oil prices have "had the effect of lowering the average income by 3% - more than offsetting all of the increase in foreign aid that they had received in recent years, and setting the stage for another crisis in these countries"

In summary, they fucked things up right and proper. Stiglitz again: 'that's part of being in a global economy. You make a mistake of this order, and it affects people all over the world.' You'd really, really want to think a car-crash of this magnitude would require the incompetents and ideologues who led us there to be held accountable.

Tory David Willetts (apparently 'Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills') is to make a speech tonight at the LSE - the Oakeshott lecture indeed - espousing the virtues of reciprocity, community and altruism. He is proposing that institutions be designed to support this sort of thing. The dry stone wall metaphor comes in because, as the Times quotes:

A dry-stone wall, like the one David Willetts pointed out to David Cameron, does not have any glue or cement holding it together. It holds together because of the way it has been designed. Similarly, the aim of Tories is not to pour social glue on civil society through public policy, and armies of new laws, nor is to enunciate some new abstract principle of justice that might be at variance with human nature. It is to help society find different kinds of equilibrium.

Willetts was on radio 4 this morning enthusiastically recounting how game theory, evolutionary economics and neuro-biology are giving scientific weight to his argument: as the lecture website says, he uses 'latest research from these disciplines [or at least popularisers of...] to explain what Government can and cannot do to influence our behaviour.'

I'm gonna start aiming for better quality drawings of a cartoon-strip type. The first of these - and subsequent ones - can be found via this link (RSS in usual place. They won't appear in the normal CiB RSS - or shouldn't if it's working properly.)

Scribbly doodle things of 'vampire potato' quality are via the doodle link.

Watch the quantity of cartoon strips correlate precisely and positively to the proximity of PhD deadlines.

Just been re-reading my wibble about romanesques and noted that a strand of human DNA is about a metre long.

The rough number of cells in a human body is 50 to 75 trillion cells. So - presuming only 30 trillion of those actually have DNA (I have a notion that some don't), how far would all the DNA in your body stretch?

Just over 100 round trips from Earth to the Sun. In your body, right now.

Cooool. Who can we test it on?