I want to echo others here and thank you for the great article, and wish you a good break. Get a nice omega 3/folic acid/vitamin D/zinc cocktail and recharge that brain :)

"The Second World War, as a whole, was probably the most catastrophic event in humanity's recorded history. The world was pretty much screwed as soon as it started -- indeed, probably as soon as Hitler acquired control of Germany."

WWII was just a continuation of WWI, which was a much less 'noble' war, if such a thing can even be said to exist.

War begets more war.

"What if the alternative was for the U.S. to firebomb and blockade Japan [...]"

That was probably another possibility, but certainly not the only alternative to nuking cities.

How about nuking somewhere very visible but not so populated with the message: "We have more where that came from. Surrender or the next one won't be in a daisy field." ?

I wrote something a little while ago about how Nagasaki was a secondary target, and Kokura was saved by cloudy conditions.

http://michaelgr.com/2008/02/01/nagasakis-nuke-was-supposed-to-be-dropped-on-kokura/

"Actually, the apple-recognition machinery in the human brain really does turn off on a regular basis. You have to be awake in order to recognize an apple; you can't do it while sleeping."

I don't remember ever dreaming about fruits, but I'm pretty sure I could recognize an apple if it happened. Did I just set myself up to have a weird dream tonight? Oh boy...

The fact that the pattern that makes the apple module light up comes from different places while dreaming than while awake doesn't matter; you don't stop recognizing it, so the model probably isn't 'off'.

Thank you for writing, Anne. Your comments here, as well as your recent 'interview' posts on your blog, have been most interesting.

"Once upon a time, when all of civilization was a single galaxy and a single star: and a single planet, a place called Earth."

Did this dialogue take place aboard the Battlestar Galactica? :-P

Great post!

"later came to reject (on a deliberate level) the idea that the Bible was not written by the hand of God

Don't you mean "was written by..." here?

Not too different from the rest of this crowd: Fund a bunch of high risk, high reward scientific research projects.

Will the eBooks also be available as hard copies? I'm probably not alone in preferring to read long texts on paper, and printing them out isn't quite the same.