Flying down to Def Con tomorrow. If any of you 3l33t hax0r d00dz want publicity, I'll be the short Australian with the spiral-bound notebook and the faintly alarmed expression.

Finished The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It's astonishingly good. If you read it, make sure you have a bottle of wine and a reassuring SO around when you get to the Hiroshima chapter. I'd read John Hersey's book, but nothing could have prepared me for spending all this time inside the heads of Oppenheimer and Groves and learning to respect them -- then walking around the ruined city facing the consequences.

The whole book -- written in 1985 -- is a plea for openness and the free exchange of information in science and technology. I had some revelations about the fundamental interconnectedness of things. Fr'instance, I think it's interesting that Vannevar Bush is chiefly famous for three reasons: for his work on the Manhattan Project, for the legend that he was the head of Majestic-12, and for writing As We May Think.