I have seen a lot of woolly bears recently. Also called woolly worms, they are familiar caterpillars with black bands at the ends of their bodies, separated by a reddish-orange band in the middle. These common little critters grow up to become Isabella tiger moths after winter is over.

When they are seen out crawling around in the fall, they are also the subject of an old legend that says that they are useful in predicting the winter.  According to this bit of country folklore, the more black they have on them, the worse the coming winter’s weather will be.

There must be a better way to rig an election.

First the Western powers occupying Afghanistan let President Hamid Karzai stay in the job for months after his term actually expired, on the grounds that an election in the late summer would be easier to arrange. They finally held the election in August and declared it a shining success: Karzai, Washington’s man in Kabul, had been re-elected, even though turnout nationally was only 30 percent. (In the Taliban-dominated south, it was only 5 percent.)

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.