Ryan Cooper

Ezra Klein presents the Pumpple Cake. It's a pumpkin pie and an apple pie baked inside layers of vanilla and chocolate cake. Vanilla buttercream gives it enough structural integrity to stand on its own.

The Stuxnet worm is perhaps the first demonstration of genuine cyber-warfare : THE internet is abuzz this week with speculation about Stuxnet, a " groundbreaking " computer worm that attacks industrial-control systems. Put that way, it doesn't sound very exciting. But the possibility that it might have been aimed at one set of industrial-control systems in particular—those inside Iranian nuclear facilities—has prompted one security expert to describe Stuxnet as a "cyber-missile", designed to seek out and destroy a particular target. Its unusual sophistication, meanwhile, has prompted speculation that it is the work of a well-financed team working for a nation state, rather than a group of rogue hackers trying to steal industrial secrets or cause trouble. This, in turn, has led to suggestions that Israel, known for its high-tech prowess and (ahem) deep suspicion of Iran's nuclear programme, might be behind it. But it is difficult to say how much truth ther...

In a surprising bit of good news, another volunteer is moving in to the nearest village, the one recently vacated by a married couple. It'll be nice to have someone that close again, hopefully we can manage to keep each other company all the way to the end of service. Apparently she was having some troubles in her old village and having this one right there was the perfect option, as Peace Corps wouldn't have to go and develop an entirely new site—especially in that I could vouch for this one's quality; Peace Corps' record on site development in South Africa is spotty at best. They certainly didn't do even a cursory inspection of mine. In other news, my fan just died, which is devastating for my sanity. It is unseasonably hot already (today we hit 37 C) and I am just bathed in sweat anytime I'm in my room during the day. It's probably because I refused a fan offered me by Justin during his recent departure as "I already have one." I may not...

A friend of mine recently signed up for the Special Forces, and he sent along some thoughts on why he did it. Suffice to say it's not exactly the normal reason. I'm reprinting it below with permission. "I was finally feeling cracks begin to form in my skull from the benign day-to-day life of this place. While fun, the school work wasn't exactly challenging me. I had been working two jobs since I came up to [REDACTED], leaving very little time to actually have an "American College experience" (not that I can say I would have enjoyed such a lifestyle any more or less). I came up here thinking I'd find something different. I assumed that, through school, I could find something to eventually do with myself. Instead, I found a city full of people happily headed down a path of materialism and overconsumption. Even in my "environmental science" classes, I found a generation of people who babble about how important recycling is to our survival before ...

This year's winners of the Nobel Prize in physics studied graphene , which is basically a flat layer of benzene rings all connected together. They had an unconventional way of the obtaining the material: Graphene is a form of carbon in which the atoms are arranged in a flat hexagon lattice like microscopic chicken wire, a single atom thick. It is not only the thinnest material in the world, but also one of the strongest. If scaled up to the thickness of plastic refrigerator wrap, a sheet of graphene stretched over a coffee cup could support the weight of a truck bearing down on a pencil point, according to tests conducted by two Columbia University researchers, Jeffrey Kysar and James Hone... Graphene is closely related to two other forms of carbon that have generated intense interest in recent years: buckyballs, which are soccer-ball arrangements of carbon atoms, and nanotubes, which are rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms. It was long thought, however, that an essentially two-dim...

I specifically recommend this one to my father. It's Matt Taibbi's latest on the Tea Party: Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them . At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to under...

The other day the single outlet in my room, something I wired up with the help of my host brother when I first arrived, started sparking deep in the guts of the thing and partially melted the casing. I was unable to fix it myself, so with the help of a different host brother (the one with the medical issues some time back) we took it apart and found the switch had gone and wasn't making a proper connection. We fixed it by jamming a piece of stripped wire insulation inside to force the switch closed. Jerry-rigged, I suppose, but it's still better than when I arrived, when there was no light switch, just a five-amp breaker hanging by a live wire. Of course the first thing I did when I arrived was shock the bejesus out of myself trying to turn on the lights, and if I wanted to turn anything else on I also had to have the lights going. This is the lap of luxury by comparison. Here you can see an innovative way of attaching a the light fixture—if you don't have any fastener...