Tuesday night linkdump #3.

* Here comes the Dollhouse? 'Scientists Erase Painful Memories Without Drugs.'

* Both Inside Higher Ed and Barack Obama himself can declare victory alongside UNC.

* Even the National Review says it's time for Coleman to concede.

* Environmental reporters at The Washington Post hit back at George Will over the many inaccuracies in his climate change columns.

* More on the Morristown UFO hoax.

Two self-admitted skeptics who rigged highway flares to weather balloons to create a UFO hoax are now facing misdemeanor charges in Morristown, New Jersey for endangering public and air traffic safety. (via Posthuman Blues)

Where the UFOs at? Popular Mechanics has your map of UFO hotspots, and so much more. Via io9.

Last one for awhile.

* The UFO-themed art of Esther Pearl Wilson. Via io9.

* Bruce Sterling on geo-engineering: We are (lousy) climate engineers, so we might as well get good at it.

* Three years undercover with identity thieves.

* Critical Studies in Television: Essays on Dr. Horrible. Via Whedonesque.

* Neuroscience on how we read. Via Boing Boing.

* And the National Science Foundation is not quite as Utopian as Kim Stanley Robinson led me to believe.

More.

* The headline reads: "UFO over Germany official." Via Posthuman Blues.

* More important, a different headline reads: "Arrested Development Movie finally a go?" Sadly, the article is mostly about Jeffrey Tambor threatening violence against Michael Cera, not about news of any actual deal.

* The stimulus bill gives a boost to the credit power of small colleges, probably good news for a lot of folks (not least of all budding academics, if only incidentally).

* As is pretty well-known, Republicans in the House managed to vote unanimously against economic recovery because they are unbelievably massive tools. Luckily, nearly everybody has finally figured this out, except of course a handful of red states and of course telvision news producers, who still give Republicans twice as much coverage despite their having almost no power or relevance.

More on the Republican Party's massive-tool nature as events warrant.

* While we're on the subject of Republicans, Steve Benen has a pair of good posts, one about the one line Republicans can't cross—disagreeing with Rush Limbaugh—and the other a reminder for 2012 about the legitimacy of widespread claims of "voter fraud". I don't even want to get into the whole stupid thing about Obama's tie.

Sweet merciful crap, I have a lot of tabs open. Well, I'd better get started.

* Up first: Colbert's "Better Know a Beatle" interview with Sir Paul McCartney from last week, definitely one of his funniest in a while.

* George Saunders remembers John Updike. Saunders also had a typically good story in the New Yorker last week.

* The piece on Caroline Kennedy was pretty good too. I remain persuaded that she would have been a very good Senator but also that she shouldn't have been appointed on anti-dynastic grounds.

* Nor can you lose with a New Yorker story titled "The Invasion from Outer Space" that is actually about an invasion from outer space...

The headline reads, "Police Puzzled By Strange Lights Over Morris County."

John Hodgman talks about his long history of contact with the aliens. Via Biology in Science Fiction.

The headline reads 'UFOs Have Been Filmed At Bruce Springsteen Concert.' Can you blame them?

[Undisclosed Location] minus three and counting.

* This summer's Battlestar Galactica TV movie looks like it might improve on the superfluity of Razor; judging from who's going to be in it I'd guess the storyline will involve the secret origins of this season's replacement Starbuck.

* Dark Roasted Blend has a brief item with three weird examples of mass hysteria: the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, and the Monkeyman of Dehli.

* All about the Tunguska Event.

* And David Owen explains the surcharged services on his airline in the New Yorker.

Laughing out loud at anything in any movie, whether it is playing on the cabin system or on your own DVD player, is fifty dollars per incident. Asking me to turn off my reading light so that you can see the screen better: also fifty dollars.

If you and your spouse are dressed almost identically, or if you are carrying your passport in a thing around your neck, or if you are wearing any form of footwear or pants that you clearly purchased specifically to wear on airplanes, or if you make it obvious (by repeatedly turning around and talking to passengers in seats not adjacent to yours) that you are travelling with a group, the charge is fifty dollars.

The Vatican's chief astronomer has said that belief in the existence of aliens would not contradict either the Bible or faith in God.

"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes said. "Just as we consider earthly creatures as 'a brother,' and 'sister,' why should we not talk about an 'extraterrestrial brother'? It would still be part of creation."

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion "doesn't contradict our faith" because aliens would still be God's creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like "putting limits" on God's creative freedom, he said.

Via MeFi.

Links from the weekend I'm only now having the chance to blog:

* It's finally come to this: they're remaking Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Via SF Signal, which has the only response one can have: Why?

* Stop the Planet of the Apes: Charlton Heston has gotten off.

* The Office's John Krasinki has spent the last five years trying to make a movie out of DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Now he's gone and done it. Here's an interview.

* Seven superheroes who will never get their own movie (but should). The moral of this story is that the Legion of Superheroes has had a large number of silly superpowers in its pages.

* McSweeney's hunts the most dangerous game, while Sisyphus enters analysis.

* The best UFO pictures of 2007.

Random Friday morning links.

* Strangeusa.com is a clearing house for weird and uncanny events across America, including hauntings in Durham and UFO sightings in my hometown. (via)

* A look back at the first issue of Wired. (via)

* Who are the best female science fiction authors?

* Detailed city-planning model of Ancient Rome. (via)

* Glimpses of South Asia before 1947. (via)

I'm using today to catch up on a few things I've let slide, but it would hardly be a day at all if I didn't link to stuff on the internet:

* Radar Magazine has the skinny on how to survive just about any apocalypse.

* Nabokov's last, unfinished novel sits in a Swiss vault while Dmitri Nabokov decides whether or not to destroy it as his father asked before his death. This has the form of a moral dilemma, but it actually isn't one. The dead are gone, Dmitri; we owe them nothing. Publish the stupid thing already.

Does it matter what V.N. would feel, since he's long dead? Do we owe no respect to his last wishes because we greedily want some "key" to his work, or just more of it for our own selfish reasons? Does the lust for aesthetic beauty always allow us to rationalize trampling on the artist's grave? Does the greatness of an artist diminish his right to dispose of his own unfinished work?

No, yes, yes, yes. Publish! My heirs have free reign to do the same to me.

* Via Boing Boing, there's an interview with comic artist Peter "Backwards City #1" Conrad [PDF] at The Reverse Cowgirl, including pages from a recent project about sex workers.

* Speaking of BCR, it just occurred to me to check if Verse Daily had published any poems from our last issue. It turns out they did, two of my favorites: Lynne Potts's "Whole Worlds Had Already Happened" and Tim Lockridge's "On Realizing That I Tend to End with Nature Imagery."

* Have geneticists discovered a way to increase the human lifespan to 800 years?

* UFO spotted in Texas.

* And finally, AICN reports that the prolonged writer's strike may have revived the thought-dead Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica.

Thirty-nine pages of UF0-themed pulp magazine and book covers. Via Posthuman Blues and SF Signal.

The always wonderful strangemaps has this great map of American UFO activity. It's not just New Mexico anymore; stay out of the whole West.

Dennis Kucinich has seen a UFO, says TPM by way of Shirley McClaine. Via MetaFilter, which also has the Robbers Cave psychological experiment and the worst mayor in America.

Welcome to the '60s: Hippies and UFOS.

Conspiracy theory of the night: The CIA origins of the National Enquirer.