In the last decade, there’s been a noticeable uptick in the number of countries joining the nuclear club. India, Pakistan and North Korea have tested weapons. Libya and Iran have acquired nuclear technology.

How did they get it? Well, not to disparage scientists in those countries, but it’s widely agreed that they mostly stole it, or bought stolen information on the black market.

It now looks increasingly likely that most of the technology was stolen from the US, with the help of moles in the US government and foreign agents at high-security nuclear facilities. That is the barely covered story of Sibel Edmonds, a Turkish and Farsi language translator who worked at the FBI translating telephone intercepts until 2002, when she blew the whistle and was subsequently fired and placed under a gag order.

After years of government secrecy and media indifference, her frightening story is finally getting out, though you still have to hunt for it.

The Sunday Times of London has a three-part (so far) series here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. The Huffington Post provides a nice summary and an argument for why Edmonds needs to be heard. And finally, the Dallas Morning News, the first major print publication in the US to delve into this issue, has a piece running which includes corroboration for some of Edmonds’ claims. A documentary named “Kill the Messenger” was made about her case. It aired on French television in 2006, and is scheduled to be shown in other countries soon. There is information about it and more on Sibel Edmonds’ official site.

If even half of Mrs. Edmonds’ allegations turn out to be true, this could end up being the greatest national security breach in the history of the country, and it has worldwide implications. Americans owe it to themselves to stay informed, and to pressure media outlets and Congress to investigate further.

It used to be that speech was protected in America… not just by the Constitution, but by the speakers themselves. I remember when you could strongly disagree with what someone had to say, but also strongly defend his right to say it.

But over the last 20 years, a wave of political correctness and abdication of personal responsibility has left people on all sides trying to limit, rather than defend, the speech of others. They make assertions like:

In a public place or forum, people don’t have a right not to be offended by someone else’s speech. Just because I say something that upsets another person, it doesn’t mean that I’ve done something wrong. The person I’m talking to may have an irrationally negative reaction to a certain word or phrase. If I happen to use that word in a sentence, does it mean I have aggressed upon him? No. He is responsible for his own sensitivity.

The whole idea that it’s incumbent upon the rest of us to adjust our behavior to accommodate the sensitivities of certain people is an unworkable construct of the sensitive people themselves. Every person has some small set of things that he really doesn’t like to hear. If the views of each one of those people has the power to restrict speech in all of us, then eventually, it won’t be possible to say anything.

[I have changed this post to "Volume 2" after realizing that an entry from a year ago was really the first installment of Steve's Peeves.]

I have a lot of pet peeves. Most of them are about bad design or bad social behavior. Here’s the second installment of Steve’s Peeves.

I cook a lot and I like to use the plastic resin type of cutting board. They’re easy to clean, light weight, dishwasher safe, don’t harbor bacteria, and won’t dull your knives.

But has anyone noticed that it’s almost impossible these days to buy this kind of cutting board without a hole in it? Yeah, that’s right… a hole. I can’t figure out why anyone would want a hole in a cutting board, yet I can’t find many without them. Here’s a typical, small plastic cutting board:

Yes, I know it’s a handle. But why? Is lifting and/or carrying a cutting board so cumbersome that one needs a handle to accomplish the task? Are there people who walk long distances with cutting boards for some reason that I’m not aware of? I do fine picking mine up by the edges and carrying it three steps across the kitchen.

The usable area of a cutting board is already limited by the fact that nobody wants to cut or keep food near the edges. There is an effective “margin” of usability. With the board in my example, the hole reduces the usable area by over 15%.

This seems like one of those design “improvements” that happens when one company produces a variation on the standard, hoping it will sell better. Then all the other manufacturers follow suit, without anyone ever wondering if was a good idea in the first place. Well, it wasn’t. The very purpose of the cutting board is to chop stuff into small pieces… small enough to fall through that hole.

So, if you’re reading this and you happen to design cutting boards, please… stop and think, OK?

And if you’re just someone like me who is now thinking, “Yeah… I really would like a cutting board without a hole in it,” then go to a restaurant supply store. You’ll find plenty of them there. The people who use these devices professionally every day understand what the design requirements are.