STRANGE, INDEED:

The first was on the morning of October 22. Seismometers in Turkey and Bolivia recorded a violent event in Antarctica that packed the punch of several thousand tons of TNT. The disturbance then ripped through Earth on a route that ended with it exiting through the floor of the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka just 26 seconds later – implying a speed of 900,000 mph.

The second event took place on November 24, when sensors in Australia and Bolivia picked up an explosion starting in the Pacific south of the Pitcairn Islands and travelling through Earth to appear in Antarctica 19 seconds later.

According to the scientists, both events are consistent with an impact with strangelets at cosmic speeds. In a report about to be submitted to the Seismological Society of America, the team of geologists and physicists concludes: “The only explanation for such events of which we are aware is passage through the earth of ton-sized strange-quark nuggets.”

Professor Eugene Herrin, a member of the team, said that two strangelets just one-tenth the breadth of a hair would account for the observations. “These things are extremely dense and travel at 40 times the speed of sound straight through the Earth – they’d hardly slow down as they went through.”

(Via The Corner).

AMONG THE THINGS I MISSED last week was BlogCritics’ third anniversary.

CATHY SEIPP:

Whenever liberals remind us that not all Muslims are terrorists or anti-American rioters, I always think that not everyone in the pre-civil-rights south was a church bomber or member of the Ku Klux Klan. Even then, there was lots to like about the south. Southerners always have been known for charm and hospitality — rather like Palestinians today, whom the foreign press finds much more appealing than brusque and bossy Israeli soldiers.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh:

In the past, I’ve criticized Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and anti-abortion terrorists. Are there vast numbers of such people, or even of their sympathizers? I should hope not. Do American political leaders endorse these people? I don’t think so. Should they still be condemned? You bet. Likewise with those who support and defend the Iraqi insurgents.

Indeed.

HUGH HEWITT: “I am not sure if Glenn would notice he was in jail.”

There are advantages to being oblivious.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE: “Blogs can bite.” Daniel Drezner is quoted.

A PODCAST FROM OUTER SPACE.

TERRORISTS AND IEDS: Michael Yon reports from Iraq.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting item from StrategyPage on how the IED gangs operate. And here’s a report on how the Iraqi police are responding, though Michael Yon’s report looks a bit different from this one.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

To the cast of characters caught up in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal, investigators have reportedly added another name, that of the secretary-general’s brother, Kobina Annan.

That means at least three members of the Annan clan are now under scrutiny, including Secretary-General Annan himself, his globetrotting son, Kojo Annan, and his brother, who is Ghana’s ambassador to Morocco.

This latest news comes from London, where the Sunday Times’s Robert Winnett reported yesterday that the U.N.-authorized investigation into oil for food, led by a former chairman of the Federal Reserve board, Paul Volcker, is looking into suspected business connections between Kobina Annan and a family friend, Ghanaian businessman Michael Wilson.

Stay tuned. (Via Newsbeat 1).

BLOGS ATTRACT YOUNG, WEALTHY READERS:

Blog visitors are also more likely to shop online and to connect to the Internet using a broadband connection, according to the study “Behaviors of the Blogosphere” conducted by comScore Networks. Unsurprisingly, blog visitors are also more active online, visiting almost twice as many Web pages as the average Internet user.

(Via Hugh Hewitt).

BILL ROGGIO looks at Al Qaeda’s strategy, and how it may, or may not, unfold.

STEM-CELL UPDATE: Here’s some good news:

Imagine being able to reprogram the cells of your own body to produce fresh heart cells, regenerated nerve cells to heal spinal cord injuries, pancreatic cells to stop diabetes — or any other type of tissue to cure what ails you.

This may sound like a widely exaggerated vision of the future, based on the politically controversial use of stem cells extracted from made-to-order human embryos. But that assessment would be wrong on two counts: First, somatic cell reprogramming avoids the political controversy. And second, it’s sounding less and less like a wild exaggeration with each passing month.

In fact, experts on both sides of the stem cell debate say the scientific hopes for somatic cell reprogramming, also known as dedifferentiation, are rising sharply — although they caution that much more work remains to be done.

FuturePundit observes:

Lanza is a very credible source for such an optimistic assertion as Lanza and ACT colleagues were the first to clone a human embryo in 2001. In other words, he’s an accomplished stem cell researcher and has a major human embryonic stem cell research achievement to his credit.

Even if you resent or disagree with the religious folks who morally oppose the harvesting of embryonic stem cells from human embryos you should see Lanza’s latest claim as good news. If fully pluripotent stem cells (i.e. capable of becoming all cell types) can be created without destroying embryos then a larger fraction of the populations of Western countries will support research into uses of pluripotent stem cells. Increases in public support for stem cell research of any type are beneficial to the cause of developing rejuvenating therapies and disease cures.

He notes that even Leon Kass is on board with this. I certainly hope that this pans out. But before the anti-embryonic-stem-cell crowd rushes to say “so it’s okay to ban research on embryonic stem cells!” I think I should add a cautionary note: We don’t know if this will pan out yet, and making it work may well depend on, or be sped by, research on embryonic cells.

LA SHAWN BARBER thinks that conservative bloggers are piling on Cindy Sheehan, and doesn’t like it. I was happily on vacation when this broke, and don’t really have an opinion. In general, I think that, as with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the media love to find a grieving mother in a politically correct cause, and don’t look too hard at what else is going on. (M.A.D.D.’s finances, and shifting agenda, deserve a closer look but won’t get it.) But that doesn’t excuse nastiness, which La Shawn says there’s a lot of.

UPDATE: Related post here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: James Taranto emails that La Shawn is wrong: “The “flip flop” argument was weak, but Sheehan’s views are truly despicable, and it’s entirely fair to point that out. See http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110007110.”

MICHAEL SILENCE has a roundup of Justice Sunday blogging, and Ann Althouse has some observations: “It sounds as though the event was well run, but I’m hardly sorry I wasn’t there. The obsession with homosexuality is tiresome – quite aside from its wrongheadedness. And ‘judicial activism’ really is a bland topic, even though people get all excited about it.”

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF is withdrawing from the blogosphere, but others are picking up the torch, as this roundup of underreported good news from Iraq demonstrates.

Plus, a bodybuilding competition in Afghanistan. (Both via The Dawn Patrol, which is like The Note for milbloggers.)

RAY KURZWEIL’S NEW BOOK, The Singularity is Near, gets a review by James Miller, who thinks that Kurzweil’s predictions are a bit too optimistic: “Kurzweil partially overcomes this prediction problem by showing there are many possible paths to the Singularity. But it’s possible that all of these paths will prove too steep for humanity to climb. I would have that Kurzweil title his book The Singularity Is Probably Near.”

MICKEY KAUS: “Washingtonians always assume there’s some compromise deal that can be cut–the Bob Dole Fallacy. But sometimes there isn’t.”

UPDATE: Meanwhile, John Fund notes that Democrats are trying to outflank the GOP on immigration.

President Bush is vulnerable on immigration. Earlier this summer House Republicans bluntly told him that his proposal to admit guest workers would be dead on arrival unless accompanied by more border enforcement. “All my constituent town meetings want to talk about is immigration and why Washington is still spending so much money,” Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas told me. Indeed, 17 of the 37 GOP House and Senate members who responded to a National Journal survey last month identified immigration as the issue “most on the minds” of their constituents. One Republican identified immigration as the issue on which “the mismatch between the federal government’s inaction and the realities at home is the greatest.”

It’s a wedge issue, splitting the business-party from the rest of the GOP base.

SCOTT JOHNSON says that reviewers are missing the point of The Great Raid.

I haven’t seen the film. Having read Hampton Sides’ book, Ghost Soldiers, on which the movie is based, it seems to me that the story would have to be terrific, though I suppose Hollywood is capable of ruining anything . . . .

The audience reviews of the film seem to be very positive, though, and I suspect that they’re more reliable than the comments of the professional reviewers.

UPDATE: Here’s a review of “The Great Raid” by a military historian:

That is one thing that makes The Great Raid so remarkable. It is a Hollywood movie, made by a guy in Harvey Weinstein who has been pretty active from the left of American politics. If it is politically incorrect to portray a negative vision of the Japanese in World War II, then there would seem to be no way that Miramax was going to do it.

But the Great Raid is unflinching in its depiction of Japanese crimes. Japanese police torture and execute Filipinos and others who may or may not have been in the resistance. The movie begins, as did the book Ghost Soldiers, with Japanese guards herding POWs into an air raid trench, dousing them with gasoline, and lighting them on fire. Japanese guards beat, purposefully starve, and summarily execute prisoners throughout the film. This brutality is central to the film: the Japanese were going to execute all of the roughly 500 prisoners in the Cabanatuan camp—that’s why the Americans had to stage the raid. The movie does not sugarcoat the reality; it sticks as close to the truth as possible.

That is ultimately what makes The Great Raid compelling and watchable: it is so damn sincere. They wanted to get it right. They wanted to do justice to the story.

Sounds pretty positive to me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Robert Greer emails:

I fear your cited reviewer (Tom from The Big Tent ) and by implication, you, may be missing the point in regard to Miramax’s depiction of Japanese cruelty in The Great Raid. The Japanese have lined up pretty much four square on the side of the Bush Administration in the War on Terror. Bashing the Japanese these days — by depicting their horrific cruelty during WWII — has the side effect of undermining the moral legitimacy that Japanese support of the war in Iraq provides to Bush. The Japanese just aren’t politically correct these days. So Weintstein and Miramax probably feel okay with the harshness of their film vis-a-vis Japan.

I haven’t seen the film so I don’t know if that would impact my suspicions here, but that’s the only explanation I could come up with and it seems to fit here. As I’m sure you’re aware, the Japanese have become somewhat of a “whipping boy” these days: witness the inexcusable activities of the Chinese government recently in stirring up anti-Japanese sentiments and riots a few months ago. That met with all too little outrage by the world at large, I think in part, because of their (the Japanese’s) relatively pro-American stance. I don’t mean to excuse the brutality of the Japanese during that time, but it just seems a little too convenient, given, as you note, the tendency in recent years, to portray them as victims rather than the victimizers that they indeed were.

Hmm. I don’t know if I’m that suspicious of big-media agendas or not.

POPULAR MECHANICS looks at NASA’s new Mars probe:

The whole MRO mission costs $720 million, and its main objective is to scan the Martian landscape with a high enough resolution to spot a table from its 200-mile orbit. Three cameras will take enough images to map the entire surface in unprecedented detail, looking for areas where future craft such as landers and rovers may be deployed. A radar provided by the Italian space agency will look up to a half-mile under the surface in search for water ice. Minerals that may have formed in water a long time ago also will be sought.

Ideally, we’ll find that Mars has water, but no life.

Meanwhile, here’s a report on the latest Martian terraforming plans. More on that subject here, and there’s some related stuff here.

DANNY CARLTON offers a list of blogs that he says are especially good deals for blogad advertisers. People keep telling me that I should raise my rates — since I’m on this list, maybe they’re right!

UPDATE: BTW, I’ve noticed a few people bitching in comment threads that Blogads is now invite-only. If you want to run blogads, and haven’t been able to get in, let me know. I’ve got some invitations left.

ANOTHER UPDATE: All gone now. Sorry — the race is to the swift!

LECH WALESA IS PUSHING FOR A REVOLUTION IN BELARUS: Gateway Pundit has much more on this subject, and Publius notes that it’s diplo-War between Belarus and Europe now.