The news is bad, and it’s coming in fast. Turn tens of thousands of scientists loose on a problem for two decades, and the results will seem pathetic for the first few years, because it takes time to gather the data – even to build the equipment with which you gather the data. But slowly the flow of data will grow, and at the end of twenty years you can expect major new insights every month or so.

The Iranians have been watching too many James Bond movies. If you want to hide a secret uranium enrichment plant, you should bury it under some existing structure in the heart of the city. Hollowing out a mountain just attracts the attention of every intelligence service in the world. They start watching as soon as the first approach road shows up on the satellite photographs.

Based on a recent opinion column I wrote, some people in county law enforcement are now telling me that I have falsely accused both the Athens County Sheriff’s and Prosecutor’s offices of being populated by “racists.”

I have made no such accusation. But the anger I’m hearing, and the feeling of having been deeply and publicly insulted, are obviously sincere, and so I would like to do some air-clearing. I figure if I’m going to be enraging people, it should be based on what I actually write and believe, not on what they imagine I’m saying.

Early this week two German-owned container ships will arrive in Rotterdam from Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, having taken only one month to make the voyage. That’s much faster than usual – but then, they didn’t take the usual route down through the South China Sea, past Singapore, round the bottom of India, through the Suez Canal (pay toll here), across the Mediterranean and up the west coast of Europe. They just went around the top of Russia.