The evolution of tactics knows no mercy ...

"Children in the back seat, lower suspicion, we let it move through," Barbero said. "They parked the vehicle, the adults run out and detonate it with the children in the back."

In case you didn't know this about Esther:

Ms. Dyson is also a player.

For those in the Boston area:

Former president Bill Clinton will speak to Harvard University's graduating seniors at Class Day on June 6, the university announced today.

Class Day is a less formal, more student-focused celebration held the day before commencement. This year's commencement speaker is Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

What's the deepest cosmic puzzle for the next 20 years?

Cory Doctorow:

"The difference between alchemy and science is if you tell people what you’ve learned."

Bruce Schneier:

"It’s the pollution of our age. How we will solve the data problem is what will define us as a people."

”Why isn't plain old pollution the pollution of our age? Last I checked we hadn't solved that ...

Some Hofstadter coverage:

An Idle Mind, or More? Alpha Oscillations and Consciousness

In the new issue of Seed, Douglas Hofstadter talks about "strange loops" - his term for patterns of level-crossing feedback inside some medium (such as neurons) - and their role in consciousness.

Strange Ways: A weaving together of minds, machines, and mathematics

Hofstadter argues that this lack of consciousness also applies to newborn babies. Although children are born with the basic apparatus to host a strange loop, it takes time for a self-representing feedback loop to form from the whirl of their experiences. In fact, Hofstadter argues that it takes several years for a child to develop full-fledged human consciousness.

On books about books:

John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel and Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer are mildly entertaining, more or less harmless bits of fluff, ideal for winter beach reading (You don't go to the beach in winter? Exactly.), while Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night is a real book, masterfully written and actually about something.

Francine Prose: "Instead of looking at works and point out what is wrong with them, why not look at brilliant works and see how they did it."

... and some books that made a palpable impression ...

Are you a fox?

Hedgehogs tend to be either spectacularly wrong or spectacularly right, and that last category smooths the path to greater formal recognition.

For more on fox/hedgehog distinctions in other disciplines ...