Alexis Madrigal at Wired Science writes about stimulus money being pumped into steam technology. “Take a jet engine,” he writes, “hooked up to some big magnets, add some steam pipes, and what do you have? The comeback of some old-school technologies that could help solve our modern energy problem.”

The idea is simple — generate both electricity and heat in the same place, but the potential benefits are big.

Unlike a traditional electric power plant, which can convert about 40 percent of its fuel into electricity but wastes the rest as heat, these combination plants capture that heat and use it to warm or cool buildings. The efficiency of combined heat and power plants can reach into the 80 percent range. If you hook up that plant to a network of steam pipes and electrical wires, you’ve got the tools to power an entire campus or community.

Combined heat and power, or CHP, could get a a push from possible climate legislation. And this week, the Department of Energy bet $156 million of stimulus funding on these steam-age ideas. It fits with industrial, commercial and municipal interest in reducing fuel costs and environmental footprints.

Read the rest here.

Tom Ricks, on Kimberly Dozier: “The more I hear from Kimberly Dozier of CBS, the more impressed I am. This is from her commencement address at Wellesley College. She is talking about being hit by a car bomb a few years ago in Baghdad:

Now I was lying there on the ground, didn’t know what was wrong with me. I’d lost most of my blood, I had shrapnel to the brain, both eardrums were blown out, both femurs shattered and there was burning shrapnel studded in my legs from my hips to my ankles.

Now they say your true nature is revealed at a time like that. I immediately started alternately asking questions… and then a bit later, bossing my poor besieged rescuers around. I’m O positive. I have extra bandages. They are right here. Do you need them? You don’t need them. Is my helmet on? If my helmet is not on, I think you should put my helmet on because I can hear some ammunition burning off and that’s not good if it hits me. The poor guy is trying to put tourniquets on me and probably thinking, Lady, that is the least of your problems….

I had to do physiotherapy. Now because they hammered titanium rods through my legs, and I had a head wound. Some bizarre things happen with these injuries. Bones overheal. My bones were overhealing with like flakes of coral bone that were going into my joints and fusing them. There was one way to fix this, otherwise they would fuse and I would walk like a peg leg for the rest of my life. I had to pick up my legs, and crack the knees, and break the flakes of bone. They would have to give me extra painkillers and it still hurt like hell. You would scream through gritted teeth. They had to lock mom in the waiting room, behind two closed fire doors, to allow this to take place.

My dad, meanwhile, knew this had to be done, would stand next to me, hold my hand and listen to me scream. Both of them are just absolute love, just different ways of expressing it.”

Holy smokes. Ricks: “A lot of people have suffered similar agonies in recent years, but Kim does a good job of capturing it.”

This is exactly why leaving the day job is so important. Sitting in offices has its benefits, but at the end of the day, it’s bullsh*t. Not because there’s a masochistic imperative to suffer in the name of enhanced credibility, or a requirement to chase the the glamour of gore and groundwork, but because ultimately there’s little to be gained by second guessing the character of war as a REMF, and everything to be gained by witnessing it and knowing it first hand. But I digress…

As someone who’ll soon be walking away from the day job to pursue research, writing, and teaching opportunities, I find this sort of thing useful (if terrifying). Pundits like Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Peter Howard have been making some pretty clear points on the vicissitudes of pursuing an academic career. Drezner’s take on their discussion puts things in perspective:

Over at Duck of Minerva, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Peter Howard have had a lively exchange of blog posts about the decision to become a professor — i.e., is it a calling, or just one of many kinds of symbolic analyst jobs? Start with Patrick’s first post(arguing that the academy is like a religious calling), then Peter’s response(pointing out the structural problems with this analogy), and then Patrick’s reply.

I’m far more sympathetic to Peter’s argument. Indeed, I confess to a visceral distaste for the undercurrent in Patrick’s disquisitions that, “oh, this is just the most special job in the world!” It is to him, to be sure — but there are many aspiring academics who don’t ever get the “good” jobs, and there even more inquisitive souls who possess the intellectual heft and curiosity but feel no need to enter the academy to continue a life of the mind. I also think Patrick completely ignores the powerful socialization effects that take place in graduate school — effects that can thoroughly f*** up people’s priorities in unhealthy ways, to the point where they start sounding like… Patrick.

That said, he still has half a point. There is a certain type of mindset that is well-suited to the academy, and will be happy even if theylive a life of post-doctoral fellowships, adjunct positions,andvisiting positions. And given that higher education might be the next bubble to burst, it would be good if we had some kind of Sorting Hat mechanism to inform people before they entered a doctoral program whether they’re doing the right thing.

For those academic wannabes out there, here’s a simple three-question survey to help guide you through this very important choice:

A) You are happiest when you see your name:

1. Mentioned on television.
2. Tagged on Facebook.
3. Listed in the acknowledgments of an obscure article written by a former professor for whom you were an RA.

B) It is 2 AM on Saturday morning. You are:

1. Asleep.
2. Still out partying.
3. Feeling an odd compulsion to catch up on Arts & Letters Daily.

C) Which of the following phrases gets you the most excited?

1. “This job offer comes with a 401(k).”
2. “I scored two tickets to the Red Sox game.”
3. “Your paper has been accepted without revision.”

If your answer to all of the above was (3), then yeah, you’re pretty much doomed fated to trying out academia.

Or something along those lines. Active participation in blogging  by academics has come a long way over the last few years, but it still has a way to go before it achieves the sort of critical mass of credibility that will satisfy the ivory tower. In some disciplines – like law and architecture – blogging seems to be more prevalent than in others (I write “seem” simply because I’m assuming it to be so, but haven’t really counted the beans, so I don’t actually know on empirical grounds whether blogging predominates in one or the other academic discipline).

This case – holy smokes – looks and feels like a malicious outing of a formerly anonymous blogger who also happens to be a non-tenured law professor. What if, as a result of this, said formerly anonymous blogger could demonstrate that he suffered professional discrimination, was not granted tenure, or suffered other repercussions? as a direct consequence of having his identity revealed against his wishes? 

Robert Kaplan’s recent Foreign Policy essay, The Revenge of Geography, was vintage stuff, entirely consistent with his tried and true essentialist arguments about the world. Whatever you might think of his ideas, Kaplan’s most recent foray also articulates a number of salient and timely points about realism resurgent in international relations. Anyone reading new work on Afghanistan and insurgency will recognize  elements of this trend in recent publications by Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason of the Naval Postgraduate School, and David Kilcullen of David Kilcullen the Center For a New American Security and the Crumpton Group.

Foreign Policy has just published a series of critical responses to Kaplan’s essay. From the FP intro:

Fights over geography have gone on ever since early man first dropped from the trees and started marking the territory he landed on. So it is little surprise that Robert D. Kaplan’s “The Revenge of Geography” has sparked some controversy and a number of smart responses.

In recent decades, talk of a “death of distance” at the hands of globalization has fed hopes that politics, economics, and even humans themselves might once and for all transcend the constraints of the physical world. Not so, Kaplan contends. His article reflects insights gleaned from decades of reporting from some of the most remote parts of the globe, marrying them to his readings of the great geographical determinists of the Victorian age. It is these thinkers, Kaplan argues, who offer the truest guidance to the many ways that geography continues to constrain human action. And “The Revenge of Geography” is his effort to breathe new life into an old way of looking at the world — one that respects the relief map and tries to discern the limits it imposes.

The responses to Kaplan come from academic geographers, students and teachers of geopolitics, and a world-traveling journalist. We decided to continue the discussion here at ForeignPolicy.com. Six responses to Kaplan are published below, and we are sure the debate will only continue to rage. Fights over geography may never end, but at least they now occur in print and in cyberspace, rather than with sticks and stones.

That last line is pretty flip and stupid, and makes me want to throw sticks and stones at FP for printing it, but at least the debate’s happening. Go read the rest: “Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts,” by Gerald Toal; “Back to the Field,” by Christian Caryl; “Imperial Geopolitics,” by John Morrissey; “Rotten Tree, Rotten Apple,” by Gerry Kearns; “The Human Element,” by Simon Dalby; and “The Use and Abuse of Geography,” by David Polansky.