Rather good. Scalzi's generous with his aliens: it's a Hobbsian galaxy in a permanent state of war, so the hero gets to meet and kill a pleasant variety. I liked the one-inch-tall humanoids, whose tiny fighters are deadly in space combat, but who present little challenge to infantry using the Stepping On Them tactic. There's some attempt to bring things up to date: everyone has brain implants to communicate and access tactical information, though they're pretty crude by, say, Revelation Space standards. The action scenes are fairly effective, and there's a bit of a human element too.

Does take a certain amount of suspension of disbelief: hard to see why blokes with guns are better than specialized combat drones, or why they don't just download a handful of the same supersoldiers into these bodies: apparently they value life experience.

However, this is the first in a series of five: more advanced GM warriors are hinted at in subsequent volumes, as well as some questioning of whether all this killing is really necessary. The wars are supposed to be over habitable planets, but you'd think some alliances would be more effective than all-against-all warfare. However, in a deeply Heinleinish scene the Loudmouth Former Politician is eaten alive when he starts trying to think that way.

Pretty fun, will look out for further volumes.

Coming Soon
Next book: NHS Plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care, as recommended by Herring.

Next TTC course: Great Philosophical Debates: Free Will and Determinism.

Me
Wisdom tooth removal seems to have gone very well so far, medically speaking. Didn't take long, and everything seems to have gone smoothly. Was surprised at how little pain there was from the needle; no pain in the operation itself; slight ache afterwards, eliminated by over-the-counter stuff (paracetomol+codeine).

However, I really hate this kind of thing, and I freaked out a bit in the later stages, though fortunately not enough to affect the procedure. Felt pretty shell-shocked afterwards. Hope I never have to have the tricky lower two pulverised and removed. Maybe I should try getting drunk first.

Definitely glad to live after the discovery of anaesthetics though. Can't imagine what it would be like to go through it with just a loblolly-boy pounding a drum to distract me and drown out the screams.

Web
Video. All the cats join in: A Jazz interlude (via K5). Cascading sticky notes. Impressive capoeira skills, up to a point.

Big planes.

Somalia's pirate kingdom.

Web 2
Roundup of the econoblogs on the big giant bailout.

Dani Rodrik (leftish development economist) asks where did we go wrong?

What is happening in the U.S. is no different from what took place in Thailand in 1997 or in Argentina in 1999, with the entire financial sector going belly-up. The only thing that remains to be seen is whether the costs to the real economy will be as high too. The rough rule of thumb for emerging markets is that banking crises are associated with an output loss of around 10% (see here for example). The best estimate we have at present is that U.S. real GDP will take a hit of something like 3.6% over the next couple of years. This is a fraction of the loss experienced in a typical emerging market crash--but of course this particular estimate may also prove to be wildly optimistic.

The key problem on this side of the Atlantic is that the largest European banks have become not only too big to fail but also too big to be saved. For example, the total liabilities of Deutsche Bank (leverage ratio over 50!) amount to around 2,000 billion euro, (more than Fannie Mai) or over 80 % of the GDP of Germany. This is simply too much for the Bundesbank or even the German state to contemplate, given that the German budget is bound by the rules of the Stability pact and the German government cannot order (unlike the US Treasury) its central bank to issue more currency. The total liabilities of Barclays of around 1,300 billion pounds (leverage ratio over 60!) surpasses Britain’s GDP. Fortis bank, which has been in the news recently, has a leverage ratio of "only" 33, but its liabilities are several times larger than the GDP of its home country (Belgium).
...
The authorities in the UK and Switzerland -- who cannot rely on the ECB - can only pray that no accident happens to the giants they have in their own garden.

I'm afraid to say, we're facing much more regulation.

And much more government.

And much less willingness to trust markets.

We're in the Slough.

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Hank Paulson, the Goldman Sachs tycoon who became US treasury secretary, have done more for socialism in the past seven days than anybody since Marx and Engels.

Over and above the extraordinary individual events, there was the capitulation of the prevailing economic model. History will show that the great postwar experiment with financial deregulation lasted from the first oil shock in 1973 to the third oil shock in 2008.

Anatole Kaletsky, who's been pro-intervention for a while, is optimistic

Assuming that events unfold as described above, fears of bank failures and financial panics should soon dissipate.