What happens when two F18 fighter-jets collide at high speed? You'd expect lots of flames and smoke right? Well these guys were lucky enough to get away with it -- but I'd hate to be the one doing their laundry.

The New Scientist magazine seems prepared to answer some of the really hard questions. For example, if you were unfortunate enough to face execution by beheading, would it hurt and how long would your head remain conscious?

If you're worried about the potential for a catastrophic nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, maybe you'll be interested to discover that it might just have happened once before.

Look Who Came To Dinner
In the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, governments all around the globe have ramped up their intelligence gathering and monitoring of telecommunications.

Of course this is a smart thing to do -- we don't want more acts of terrorism to kill other innocent people and the terrorists have to coordinate their activities some how, with the phone or Internet being the most likely channels for such communications.

Just how alert the US and other authorities are to things which might affect national security became clear to me after I put up the low cost cruise missile page that I linked to last friday.

This week I've had several calls from US-based news organisations requesting information and interviews about the viability of such a device and, perhaps a little more soberingly, I've seen a marked increase in the number of visits from the proxy at NIPR.MIL which is the second-level domain for this website

Readers Say (updated hourly) Nothing Yet Have Your Say

The webpage concerned has attracted quite a bit of email -- including several messages of Eastern European origin with suggestions that I might like to relocate my development activities there.

Is my email now being intercepted and monitored?

I doubt it -- but I would not be surprised (or upset) if it was.

Should I now be paranoid when I hear clicks and pops during phone conversations on a line that has, up until now, been nice and clean?

Frankly I don't really care.

I have nothing to hide and am certainly not involved in terrorist activities so anyone monitoring my communications is probably going to fall asleep from boredom pretty quickly.

It's sure nice to know however, that someone's paying attention out there.

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