AS I MENTIONED A WHILE BACK, I liked Tobias Buckell’s novel Crystal Rain, rather a lot. (Including the cover art.) He’s now put the first third of the book online, downloadable for free.

MICHAEL TOTTEN is photoblogging from Kurdistan.

SPACE ELEVATOR UPDATE: This is cool:

A slim cable for a space elevator has been built stretching a mile into the sky, enabling robots to scrabble some way up and down the line.

LiftPort Group, a private US company on a quest to build a space elevator by April 2018, stretched the strong carbon ribbon 1 mile (1.6 km) into the sky from the Arizona desert outside Phoenix in January tests, it announced on Monday.

The company’s lofty objective will sound familiar to followers of NASA’s Centennial Challenges programme. The desired outcome is a 62,000-mile (99,779 km) tether that robotic lifters – powered by laser beams from Earth – can climb, ferrying cargo, satellites and eventually people into space.

The recent test followed a September 2005 demonstration in which LiftPort’s robots climbed 300 metres of ribbon tethered to the Earth and pulled taut by a large balloon. This time around, the company tested an improved cable pulled aloft by three balloons.

I love it.

HOWARD KURTZ has a big Cheney roundup.

It’s possible to make fun of the press’s self-involvement here, and it’s hilarious to hear — as I did in the car on the way home just now — Hillary Clinton complaining about this Administration’s secretiveness, as if we’d forgotten the health care task force, the Rose Law Firm billing records, etc. But nonetheless, Cheney screwed up bigtime.

Anyone can have an accident, and absent, you know, actual facts there’s not much to say about the actual shooting (though as Kurtz notes, that hasn’t stopped some people from proposing theories as if they were fact). But they’ve played to everybody’s characterization of them, and it’s the classic political mistake of not responding quickly.

That said, it’s also a classic example of the press’s instinct for the capillary. This is getting Natalee Holloway level coverage, when there’s lots of more important stuff going on.

NEXT, THEY CAME FOR THE plastic clowns.

ARMY OF DAVIDS gets a recommendation from The Manolo. Super-fantastic!

MICKEY KAUS offers message advice for the Democrats. Trouble is, I’m not sure “normalcy” is what the Democratic base wants.

MY VALENTINE’S EVENING: Spent the night with my 91-year-old grandmother, so my mother could watch my sister’s kids, so my sister could accompany my brother-in-law to Nashville for some medical tests. It’s familial love, not the romantic variety, but extended families are good.

IT’S ALL ROBOTS ALL THE TIME over at Ann Althouse’s today. First a look at robotic Senators, then a reference to robotic frigidity, and finally advice on the growing robotic menace.

I say, don’t rage against the machine. Embrace the machine! After all, robots are people too — or at least they will be, someday.

I’d say Ann’s following that advice, as the robots are everywhere on her blog today — the above examples are just the beginning.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Ted Barlow is ready to put an ad program on the block. “I really hope that there’s some teacher, somewhere, getting some use out of Energy Ant.”

MARK GLASER offers a guide to podcast directories.

CANADIAN POLITICO Warren Kinsella is suing a blogger for libel.

As the old joke has it, I think he’s liable to regret doing so.

ANOTHER FASHION FELON for the Capitol Fashion Police. Okay, it’s too silly to be a felony. But definitely a misdemeanor.

JOSHUA SHARF REVIEWS An Army of Davids.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: I blame — well, okay, not John Ashcroft this time.

G.M. ROPER: “Cancer, me, and the blogosphere.” It’s good news.

MY THOUGHTS ON MONEY AND HAPPINESS: Part of this Forbes Magazine issue on the topic.

PAUL HACKETT has dropped out of the Ohio Senate race. He calls the Democratic party’s effort to get him out a “betrayal.”

MICHAEL TOTTEN reports from Iraq.

PERHAPS BUSH SHOULD DEFEND HIS WIRETAPPING PROGRAM as an effort to be more European: “The fact is that in much of Europe wiretapping is de rigueur—practiced more regularly and with less oversight than in the United States. Most Europeans either don’t know about this or, more likely, simply don’t care.”

HERE’S A QUAGMIRE DECLARATION that seems about right to me.

A HALF MILLION LEBANESE rally on the anniversary of Hariri’s murder: No embassies were burned.

DAVID BERNSTEIN HAS MORE on the ABA and affirmative action.

IN THE MAIL: Elemental: The Tsunami Relief Anthology : Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Steven Savile and Alethea Kontis. Looks pretty good, with contributions by Larry Niven, Brian Aldiss, Joe Haldeman, and many more, and an introduction by Arthur C. Clarke.

MICHAEL BARONE looks at the politics of negation.