I’ve been having so much fun with a little project I’m working on that I just had to share my first results with you. I’m doing a little network diagramming of Instapundit and the sites that Glenn links to. Just to see what kinds of relationships emerge. My early results are still a little rough but here goes.

One interesting note is that four sites account for about 10% of all of Glenn’s links.

For the month of September 2004 so far Glenn’s links look like this:

Total links	960
Total distinct sites	438
Sites linked to once	278
Sites linked to twice	76
Sites linked to three times	31

The detailed results follow.
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I have added Caerdroia to my blogroll. As you can see I don’t have a huge number of blogs there. It’s mostly reserved for the blogs I find the most interesting and thought-provoking. Caerdroia is at least a daily stop for me and it should be for you.

Jeff Medcalf of Caerdroia has just published an interesting post on information gathering in the blogosphere. He does get one detail wrong, in my opinion:

Information gathering is the process of actually finding information, while information filtering is the process of determining which bits of information that you have collected are meaningful, rather than trivial. Information is all around us, but most of it is not meaningful except in very specific contexts. For example, if a city council passes a resolution against US involvement in Upper Slobonia, that is certainly information. However, it’s meaningless in and of itself (though it may be meaningful if virtually every city council in the country does so, as it would be an indicator of public opinion).

The major media actually does not do a great job at these functions, mostly due to laziness as far as I can tell.

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Wretchard has a typically excellent analysis of fading hopes for a peaceful diplomatic approaches to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. What the analysis doesn’t disclose is the scope of the danger confronting the Iranian people.

Examine the map of Iran’s nuclear sites on the left (Source: Global Security). Click the map for an enlargeable version. Here’s the population of the cities in which the sites are located (Source: City Population):

City	Population (2002)
Bonab	63,240
Bushehr	140,615
Chalus	?
Darkhovin	?
Esfahan	1,266,072
Fasa	81,706
Karaj	940,968
Mo’allem Kalaych	?
Natanz	?
Neka	?
Saghand	?
Tabas	50,000
Tabriz	1,191,043
Tehran	6,758,845
Yazd	326,776

If anyone can fill in any of my blanks, please leave a note in the comments section.

Some of the sites are located in Iran’s most populous urban areas: Tehran, Esfahan, Tabriz. Other sites, notably Darkhovin, are adjacent to Iran’s most productive oil fields.

In contemplating the amount of damage that might be done by any weapons capable of destroying the hardened facilities I think it’s instructive to examine the results of a recent natural disaster: the December, 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran. In this earthquake, measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale, 43,000 people were killed. Compare this with the January 1994, Northridge earthquake, which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale (20% more severe than the Bam quake). 57 people were killed. What accounts for the difference? In my opinion lower building standards, lax or no enforcement of existing standards, and the failure of what meagre disaster recovery personnel were available to respond.

This table lists the numbers of American soldiers killed in some of America’s wars:

War	Military deaths
Revolutionary War	4,435
War of 1812	2,260
World War I	116,516
World War II	405,339
Korean War	36,568
Viet Nam War	58,199
Gulf War	529
Iraq	1,049

Source: Infoplease
Source for Iraq: Boston Globe
The table includes in-theater military deaths from all causes.

Discuss.

This table lists the duration of some of America’s wars:

War	Duration (days)
Revolutionary War	3,060
War of 1812	976
World War I	585
World War II	1,366
Viet Nam War	5,233
Gulf War	210
Iraq	570

Source: Wikipedia

Which of the above was a quagmire? Discuss.

One of my favorite bloggers, Noah Millman of Gideon’s Blog, is posting again. He has a trio of posts about the Republican National convention, neocons, and Iraq.

There’s a pair of interesting posts that I think are worth considering. The first is from from Ali of the Iraqi blog Iraq the Model. In his post Removing the Caliphate he writes:

At least most religions were incorporated in one way or another to power and authority at a certain time, and in most case if not all, such power was abused by clerics and it took wars or strong conflicts to separate ‘church’ from the state each time. The difference with Islam is that it didn’t acquire power later as with Christianity for example. From the first beginning the state was founded on a religious base. The ruler was the leader regarding politics, daily life issues and spiritual affairs. The power was concentrated in one hand; the caliphate. Some Muslim thinkers tend to believe now that this was not only unnecessary, but it was wrong. Those are still minority of course.

As he sees it what we’re seeing worldwide is at least in part due to the dissolution of the caliphate attendant to the creation of the modern state of Turkey.
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Jeff Jarvis has posted a new entry in his Issues2004 series and this time his issue is energy. I’ve posted my views on this subject before here. If you want to get the straight skinny on the real issues behind the issue, as it were, this is a good place to start.
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The city of Philadelphia is proceeding with a project to provide wireless Internet service city-wide:

FORGET cheese steaks, cream cheese and brotherly love. Philadelphia wants to be known as the city of laptops.

The city recently announced a two-year effort to string a free wireless network across its 135 square miles, potentially giving Philadelphia an entirely new identity as the most wired – or unwired – municipality on the planet.

I think this is a very exciting development and it will be interesting to see how well Philadelphia succeeds. It certainly provides an opportunity to level the playing field for both companies and individuals.

One issue that the article doesn’t discuss is the potential for security problems with such a large wireless network. That should provide an opportunity for competing companies to differentiate themselves by providing a product with enhanced security. And that would also be a benefit to Philadelphia.

Another issue that doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the article is that the technologies of Internet connectivity change sufficiently rapidly that it might not make any sense for municipalities—in my experience not the most agile in responding to technological change—to go to the expense and effort.

The initial electrification of American cities required quite a bit of support from city governments so I wouldn’t be surprised if providing universally available high-speed Internet connectivity does as well.

On Don Imus’s program this morning, Mr. Imus interviewed Jeff Greenfield of CNN. In the course of a series of questions about Rather^thergate, Mr. Greenfield leapt to the defense of bloggers:

Imus: What a bunch of idiots.
Greenfield: You should read them. Some of them are pretty good.
Imus: Do you read blogs?
Greenfield: Yes, I do. Instapundit, he’s conservative. Mickey Kaus, he’s kind of a neoliberal. Daily Kos is partisan Democrat. And Wonkette, she’s really filthy. You’d love her.

The characterizations are pretty close. Instapundit is more libertarian than conservative but, hey, Greenfield was on a roll.

I’d that the hipper folks in Big Media (or those who wish to appear so) are checking blogs out.