A few midday links.

* In my previous election prediction thread I forgot to mention tomorrow's marriage equality vote in Maine, on which Adam Bink has an update at Open Left. I always think people will do the right thing on these marriage equality votes and I am always disappointed, so this year I'm expecting to lose but still hoping to be wrong.

* Looking past health care: can a climate bill actually pass the Senate? Steve Benen has more.

* The Climate Race: How Climate Change Is Already Affecting Us. Via Boing Boing. In the American Southeast:

* Average daily temperature about 2 degrees higher with the greatest increase in winter.
* Days below freezing (32 degrees) reduced to four to seven per year.
* Average fall precipitation 30% higher since 1901, with the exception of South Florida.
* Moderate to severe droughts in spring and summer have increased 12% and 14%, respectively.
* Destructive potential of hurricanes has increased since 1970, due to an increase in sea surface temperature.

* 23 Private College Presidents Made More Than $1 Million. I was a little surprised not to see Brodhead's name on the list, until I remembered how much money we pay Coach K.

* Elsewhere in North Carolina, a majority favors the public option.

Fifty-four percent of North Carolina residents surveyed by Elon University said they would support a public option. Forty-one percent said they would use a public option plan should one become available.

It's crucial to recognize here that the health care reform that is under discussion is far less ambitious than what the public would actually support; nothing close to 41% of the state will be eligible for the very limited version of the public option that is actually going to be voted on.

* How is televised science fiction doing in the ratings? What this list really shows, Dollhouse aside, is how bad TV SF is right now. Even the shows I do watch—FlashForward, Fringe—aren't exactly what I'd call good.

Coach K and Obama get into it—what are you going to do now, Su?—while The New Republic traces the relationship between Duke hatred and homophobia.

Duke is probably the most despised team in college basketball. And proud Duke haters--like my colleague Jason Zengerle and Will Blythe, author of To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry--have often imbued their dislike of the Blue Devils with a political subtext. To many of its staunchest enemies, Duke is a malevolent Goliath--an elitist, corporate, conservative force out to crush more virtuous, liberal Davids. In the UNC-Duke rivalry, Blythe explains, "[i]ssues of identity--whether you see yourself as a populist or an elitist, as a local or an outsider, as public-minded or individually striving--get played out." He also notes that UNC's long-time coach Dean Smith, who retired in 1997, was a vocal Democrat while Duke's coach Mike Krzyzewski is an active Republican. This has only added to the sense that there is something fundamentally liberal about loathing the Blue Devils.

But there's one major problem with the neat morality play that left-leaning Duke haters have constructed for themselves: the jarring and disproportionate level of homophobia that routinely gets directed at the basketball players. There's the classic "This is Why Duke Sucks" YouTube video that has received more than 1.6 million hits--and boasts lyrics about one Duke player being a "bitch" and another having a "dude's face all on [his] balls." Or the more recent (and explicit) video, "Greg Paulus--'I Kissed a Boy,'" which mocks Duke's senior guard for, among other things, enjoying the taste of men's sweat. Or another video about Paulus ("Tea Bag: A Greg Paulus Tribute"), posted by user TarHeel32Blue, which shows several clips of the guard near or between the legs of other players.

Exhibit A, however, is the cascade of homophobia directed at superstar three-point shooter J.J. Redick during his years in Durham. In 2004, N.C. State guard Scooter Sherrill said publicly that, after Redick shot threes, he had "his hand up like he's gay or something." A quick perusal of Redick's Wikipedia history reveals dozens of now-deleted comments like, "J.J. Redick is a confirmed homo sexual" with whom it's rumored "coach K made sexual arrangements." A notorious photo snapped during a game shows a Duke fan with a "JJ is Redickulous" sign standing unsuspectingly next to a Maryland supporter who adds "-ly gay" with his own poster. The New York Times wrote about the cheers of "Brokeback Mountain" often shouted at him during games, and you can still find photos on Tarheeltimes.com that show Redick's face superimposed on images from the movie.

Friday morning links.

* Is Dollhouse already canceled? Fox is advertising that Prison Break returns to Fridays on 4/17.

* Mike Krzyzewski gets a tough evaluation on ratemyprofessor.com.



* Alternate-universe Watchmens. Only the Woody Allen hypothesis really sings.



* And this xkcd is quieter than the ones that usually get ricocheted across the Internet, but damn if it didn't make me laugh.



* And is time really the fire in which we burn? Consider the thermal time hypothesis. More at MetaFilter.

According to Connes and Rovelli, the same applies to the universe at large. There are many more constituents to keep track of: not only do we have particles of matter to deal with, we also have space itself and therefore gravity. When we average over this vast microscopic arrangement, the macroscopic feature that emerges is not temperature, but time. "It is not reality that has a time flow, it is our very approximate knowledge of reality that has a time flow," says Rovelli. "Time is the effect of our ignorance."

I think Rovelli just wrote Alan Moore's next three graphic novels. Grant Morrison's, too.

Academic priorities.



Duke's a little bit of an outlier here because our football team sort of sucks—our coach makes a paltry $300,000.

And then there's Coach K.

Via Edge of the American West.