A few more.

* #Nabokovfail.

* Scenes from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

* Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels and meet energy needs, the International Energy Agency warned today.

* A woman is six times more likely to be separated or divorced soon after a diagnosis of cancer or multiple sclerosis than if a man in the relationship is the patient, according to a study that examined the role gender played in so-called "partner abandonment."

* Picasso and his love of Japanese erotic prints.

* Always start your viral marketing campaign after your show is already doomed.

* The New Yorker takes down Superfreakonomics. I like this coda from Crooked Timber a lot:

Kolbert’s closing words are, however, a little unfair.

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

Not unfair to Levitt and Dubner, mind you, but to science fiction. After all, two science fiction authors, Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, had their number down way back in 1953 with The Space Merchants (Pohl, amazingly, is still active and alive).

The Conservationists were fair game, those wild eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way “plundering” our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.

The Space Merchants is truly great, incidentally. Read it if you haven't.

* Twenty years after the Berlin Wall. The "click to fade" images are stunning.

What's bringing a 'smile' to my face today? Impotent whining.



Some good analysis of what's been going on with this committee here.

Late night links.

* The 1990s are back! My hometown paper, The Star-Ledger, reviews DVD releases of The State and Parker Lewis Can't Lose.

* John Scalzi rates science fiction films by the only rubric that has ever made sense, their explosions. There seems to be some grade inflation at work here.

* Grist has a new feature called "No, there’s not a debate about the science of climate change," debunking denialist memes currently in circulation.

* The Atlantic investigates the elusive green economy.

In 1977, the country appeared poised on the brink of a new age, with recent events having organized themselves in such a way as to make a clean-energy future seem tantalizingly close at hand. A charismatic Democrat had come from nowhere to win the White House. Reacting to an oil shock and determined to rid the country of Middle East entanglements, he was touting the merits of renewable energy and, for the first time, putting real money into it— $368 million.

But things peaked soon afterward, when Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. “A generation from now,” Carter declared, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken—or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people; harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

Oh, Jimmy.

* And MetaFilter investigates how to fall out of a plane.

American Stranger has a report on Left Forum 2009 that segues into a smart discussion of the future of American ideology.

Another proposal involved upgrading the nation’s electrical grid, to allow power generated, for example, by wind turbines in the Midwest to be transmitted to population centers in the Northeast.

“You say, We can’t do it,” he observed. “And I’m going to say, Au contraire, mon frère, and I’ll prove my case. We used to have a country, allegedly, but you couldn’t drive across it, because all we had was a bunch of old dirt roads. Somebody, in the name of national security, said, ‘Hold on a sec. What if we get invaded on the West Coast, how can we get troops from the East Coast?’ So we created an interstate-highway system that connected the country to itself.”

He lowered his voice to a grumble: “ ‘Oh, we can’t afford to do it! This is insane!’ We couldn’t afford not to do it. Because the minute you did that the economy went through the roof. It was such a good idea that we did it again. In the name of national security, people in the Pentagon said, ‘If we have one big communications tower, and somebody knocks it out, then we’re blind, deaf, and dumb. We’ve got to figure out a way to distribute our information system.’ So they came up with the idea of the information superhighway—for you young people, that’s what we call the Internet. ‘We can’t afford to do this!’ We couldn’t afford not to do it. The minute we connected the country to itself, the economy went through the roof. All we’re saying is, let’s do it again. But this time, instead of connecting the country to itself to move bodies and vehicles or data around, let’s connect the country to itself so we can move clean-energy electrons around. Then you’ve got the strongest economy in the world.”

Speaking of the work beginning: a good article from the New Yorker tackles the Green Recovery.

Obama starts to get specific about the New New Deal. As you know, the top of my wishlist is energy, and as I've said before, it's a place where I just don't think Obama's rhetoric has ever been ambitious enough.

ENERGY: “[W]e will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient. Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that. We need to upgrade our federal buildings by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs. That won’t just save you, the American taxpayer, billions of dollars each year. It will put people back to work.”

It's a few sentences from a short speech, but it's not at all a good sign. If there are four words Obama needs engraved into his desk in the Oval Office, it's these: "Manhattan Project for Energy." If not just one: Moonshot. Lightbulbs hardly even qualify as a baby step.

The morning news.

* The bailout has cost more than "Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget -- *combined*!" But think of all we have to show for it!

* Related: Alternet's ten worst corporations of 2008. How did they limit themselves to just ten? Via MeFi.

* Marginal Revolution casts some cold water on wind farms, points (where else?) to nuclear energy instead. Isn't the problem here our poor energy infrastructure? The sort of redesigned, rebuilt grid Obama talks about would make these wind farms much more efficient than just about any other source of power, including, I'm given to understand, solar.

* Because of the downturn, colleges aren't hiring. Ugh.

* Cory Doctorow is looking to change the world.



* Confidential to Mac users: an update for Handbrake has been released.

* And Wendy Whitaker is today's poster child for obscenely stringent sex offender laws: because she had oral sex with a 15.9-year-old boy when she was 17, she's a sex offender for life and is currently being forced to vacate her home because it is too close to a church that runs a daycare service. A judge, unbelievably, just upheld this order. Via MeFi.

Adding electricity from the wind and the sun could increase the frequency of blackouts and reduce the reliability of the nation’s electrical grid, an industry report says.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation says in a report scheduled for release Monday that unless appropriate measures are taken to improve transmission of electricity, rules reducing carbon dioxide emissions by utilities could impair the reliability of the power grid. Via Dot Earth.

The person I'd most like to see with a cabinet-level position in the new Obama administration is Al Gore, who should be made all-purpose Eco-Czar. Here he is in the New York Times laying out an energy agenda for the next ten years.

Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

What follows is a five-part plan to repower America with a commitment to producing 100 percent of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. It is a plan that would simultaneously move us toward solutions to the climate crisis and the economic crisis — and create millions of new jobs that cannot be outsourced.

With carbon in the "danger zone" and humanity increasingly running out of biocapacity to exploit, Obama comes into power at just about the last possible second to save us all from the eco-apocalypse—I hope.

Three quick links.

* The Michigan GOP gets spanked over their illegal scheme to disenfranchise foreclosed homeowners.

* Green recovery watch: California’s emphasis on energy efficiency has created more than 1.5 million jobs over the last 30 years and boosted payroll in the state by nearly $45 billion, according to a report from the University of California, Berkeley.

* Is college for everyone? Marty Nemko argues in The Chronicle of Higher Education no, it's not. As a PhD candidate looking to go on the job market in the next few years, I must strenuously, strenuously disagree.

The-End-of-the-World-as-We-Know-It Watch.

* There's only one way out of the financial mess: spend, spend, spend. Democratic lawmakers are said to be already on this, with a special December session planned following the likely Obama victory next month. The bill is likely to focus around infrastructure, and that's good, but it needs to be green infrastructure—as I wrote last week, a "green recovery" is our best bet to fix both the economic and environmental crises in one go.

* The food crisis is reaching cataclysmic proportions in the Caribbean, with Cuba limiting sales and poverty-stricken Haitians forced to literally eat dirt to survive. Michael Pollan argues in the Times that food will be a central issue for the next administration despite its receiving almost no attention in the campaign.

* The situation in Iceland continues to astound. Britain has declared Iceland a terror-sponsoring state (seriously) as a pretext for seizing control of Icelandic assets within the U.K., while there's some talk that Russia may bail them out, presumably in exchange for Arctic access. I hope Matt's right and Canada eats Iceland before things get too crazy.

* But don't lose your heads—Stephen Hawking assures us that if we manage to survive the next 200 years, we'll be just fine.

More politics updates.

* That "overheard projector" John McCain was talking about last night? A projector for Chicago's Adler Planetarium. Sounds like a reasonable expenditure to me.

* How will Obama save the economy and the planet at the same? As Matt Yglesias mentions, it's a two-fer: a green recovery plan that creates jobs modernizing the nation's antiquated energy infrastructure. We're getting closer and closer to the point where a truly solar economy is possible—there were two major solar innovations just this week, cheap, more absorptive panels and light, more flexible panels—and frankly it's all happening just in the nick of time.

The miracle of an Obama presidency reminds me a bit of the old Bismarck line: "God protects fools, drunkards, and the United States of America."

* The language of "Green Recovery" also provides the necessary "crisis" rhetoric required for an massive expenditure of this nature, as if the ecological and energy crises weren't already reason enough. Because apparently they aren't.

* And the polls all show the same thing: Obama is winning big.