One bright spot in the war is that we're seeing a bunch of really independent journalists - people just up and go to the war zone and write about what they see. Judging from some of the reports, journalists outnumber the Special Forces in northern Iraq. I've been reading Back to Iraq 2.0 and Salon's Phillip Robertson. Apparently Slate has a guy in there too:

I sat in Kirkuk last night with a bottle of whiskey and an MRE donated by a kind Marine. I feasted on beef in mushroom sauce, chicken breast with apple jelly, and M&Ms. An American journalist told me about the first day of liberation in Mosul; she said it was the most frightening place she'd ever been. While she was at the hospital, two Arabs and a Kurdish peshmerga were brought in dead. She went to interview a doctor, and when she returned someone had cut off the Kurd's head and taken it away. She kept repeating, "I mean, when heads are missing; Jesus Christ, his head was gone; they took his head. ..."

The difference, as I understand from reading ... independent journalists ... is that Kirkuk is still mostly Kurdish and Turkomen, whereas Mosul was force-populated by Arabs in the last few decades. Why can't we all just get along?

The version of this joke that I heard/tell goes like this: a mathematician, physicist, engineer, and computer programmer are all challenged to determine whether all odd numbers are prime. The mathematician says, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is not prime - nope." The physicist said, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is probably experimental error because eleven and thirteen are prime - yep." The engineer says, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is prime, eleven is prime - yep." The computer programmer says, "One is prime, one is prime, one is prime, one is prime ...." Here, courtesy of the internet and Dave Berry's blog, is some more material.

Computational linguist: 3 is an odd prime, 5 is an odd prime, 7 is an odd prime, 9 is a very odd prime,...
Chemist: 1 prime, 3 prime, 5 prime... hey, let's publish!
Programmer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 will be fixed in the next release ...
Richard Nixon: Put nine on the enemies list. I'm gonna get that number.