In the last ten years, 16 people have died because of terrorism in the United States. Bruce Schneier nails it, as usual.

Given the credible estimate that we've spent $1 trillion on anti-terrorism security (this does not include our many foreign wars), that's $62.5 billion per life saved. Is there any other risk that we are even remotely as crazy about?

Note that in the last ten years 400 thousand people have died in car accidents in the United States.

It is hard to get a cartoon in the New Yorker:

When my life didn't offer usable material I started reaching for the low hanging fruit: desert-island gags and gorillas.

Some of his cartoons are actually quite good.

Also, this seems like as good a time as any to point you to a site that takes New Yorker cartoons and gives them the most literal, straightforward captions possible.

P. J. O'Rourke starts with this fun sentence:

What is admired as whimsy could be awful as fact — real slithy toves in an actual wabe.

His article is about the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, and I found it pretty interesting, but probably mostly because I saw all the stuff he talks about pretty recently.

If a Gothic cathedral is (as some have said, misapplying their Shakespeare) a sermon in stone, then La Sagrada Família is a sermon in broccoli.

Somehow that sentence is a compliment. And one I agree with - I am no expert on architecture, but Sagrada Familia is the most astonishing building I've ever seen.

In Warsaw, in 1941, a Jewish father is expecting to die at the hands of the Nazis. But he wants to save his daughter:

Leon Weinstein bundled Natalie, 18 months old, in heavy pants and a thick wool sweater. He headed for a nearby apartment, the home of a lawyer and his wife. The couple did not have a child. Weinstein hoped they wanted one.

He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us.

In New York, in 2011, a woman wants a child. But only one:

She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment — and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion. As the doctor inserted the needle into Jenny’s abdomen, aiming at one of the fetuses, Jenny tried not to flinch, caught between intense relief and intense guilt.
[...]
"We created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

A very good sentence from Ta-Nehisi Coates, about the Civil War and the civil rights struggle:

Freedom was most literally achieved through the reception and infliction of horrific violence, and completed through the utter rejection of that violence.

Tuesday we were talking about the social status of scientists on this blog. And last night I hear will.i.am on Marketplace talking about science, education, and what it's like to go to a robotics competition:

You know when you watch the movie Waiting For Superman, you're like, oh man. You're all, 'Aw man, we're so doomed.' And your heart breaks. This is the total opposite of that. Here, you would think like somebody sprayed magic dust and out popped genius little kids.

This is great, and I really do think he's doing a good thing by bringing attention to this and by playing at the "halftime show" of the robotics competition.

But (of course there's a but), the guy who gets interviewed on NPR is the musician, not the scientist. The Super Bowl is a big thing because it's the Super Bowl, and will.i.am at the halftime show is just an extra. This robotics competition is (now) a big deal because will.i.am is talking about it and playing a show there. Otherwise we wouldn't know about it.

Tyler Cowen has a book, The Great Stagnation, which complains of a slowdown in innovation. His solution (to drastically over simplify) is to raise the status of scientists. Today, he has a blog post titled "The status of scientists" that links to a New York Times piece about scientists organizing to get involved in politics.

I'm all for raising the status of scientists. I might even be for getting scientists more involved in politics. But the two are completely unrelated - have you seen the approval numbers for politicians lately? That's not status. Take a quick look at the Google trends for today, or the popular Bing searches or whatever. There are no scientists. But there are no politicians, either.

Another thing. In the NYT piece you can take a quiz to see if you can correctly identify ten scientists - I scored 6/10, for what it's worth. But you're supposed to recognize these scientists by their pictures.

I might move to Vilnius:

Fed up with the number of luxury vehicles parking in a bike path along a main thoroughfare in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, the city’s mayor, Arturas Zuokas, released a video in which he uses some military-grade machinery to crush an illegally parked Mercedes Benz.

This goes way beyond the idea that the punishment should fit the crime. But it's entertaining anyway.