Post-exam link catchup.

* Today's abolish-the-Senate factoid: The 10 Senators on the Senate Finance Committee who voted for the public option yesterday represent millions more people than the 13 who voted against it. Dramatically depowering or outright eliminating the Senate should be near the top of any long-term political agenda for progressives. Also in Senate health care news: Tom Harkin says the public option has the votes to pass, while Ben Nelson thinks it's 2008.

* I don't usually play look-at-the-wingnut, but John Derbyshire says women shouldn't have the right to vote because we "got along like that for 130 years." Also, we should repeal civil rights legislation because it's wrong to "try to force people to be good." Well done, sir.

* Okay, a second round of look-at-the-wingnut: Newsmax ran a column yesterday advocating a military coup to solve "the Obama problem." Remember, conservatives love America and progressives hate America.

* Corzine continues to gain in New Jersey, with independent Chris Daggett now polling at 12%.

* Background ephemera from the new Red Dawn remake. It sounds like the Commies may have a point in this one.

* Where Superman gets his powers. At MeFi.

* New Scientist is having a flash fiction contest.

* Another entry in Jonathan Lethem's ten-million-part series on why he loves Philip K. Dick.

* People think torture works because it works in movies.

* New favorite song: Zork rock. (You know where I found it.)

* Also from Boing Boing: Trotsky: The Graphic Biography.

You had me at "reviving Zork."

This thread from YayHooray (via MeFi) is easily the coolest thing I've linked to this year and possibly the coolest thing I've linked to in the entire time I've been doing this, with all the great flowcharts and infographics you've come to love from years on the innertubes. Some highlights:

this week's blog icon, the LEGO anatomy chart
probably next week's blog icon, the gummi anatomy chart
the week after that, sci-fi awesomeness
the interstate highway system as a subway map
your digestive system as a subway map
area codes in which Ludacris claims to have hoes
Sarah Palin pregnancy decision map
the map of Zork that doubles as my desktop
New Jersey invites you to come and see it all
extinction timeline, 1950-2050
narrative map of classic Choose Your Own Adventure novel The Cave of Time
risk perception and actual hazards
a chart of how Americans spend their money that seems to strongly argue for a national salary cap around $100,000
a map of the United States expressed in terms of proximate distance from Knoxville, TN
the Indo-European family tree (and again)
a visual guide to the financial crisis
a flowchart history of Cubism

Keep in mind those are just highlights. This is can't miss.

9:05, a text adventure. For the more adventurous among you, there's also Lock & Key by the same author. Via Jay is Games.

Day -5 news roundup.

* Evolution has been demonstrated in laboratory conditions. This is actually a pretty impressive experiment involving 12 separate E. coli colonies over twenty years; after three mutations and 40,000 generations, one of the lines developed the ability to eat citrate. More discussion at Daily Kos.

* Robert Pinsky on the poetics of Zork.

I believe that the poetics of Zork and its modern descendants tell us more about the literary potential of the computer than we could learn from any amount of ambitious literary theorizing. At the beginning of Zork, the player-reader faces a small, empty house, on a barren plain: a visible territory that can be walked over by entering a handful of keyboard commands. But ah! -- after looking under the carpet, and opening the trapdoor, and descending and entering the tunnel: then one sees the world of Zork unfold outward into an immense network of concentric chambers, looping passageways, branching and terraced corridors. The map of this voluminous (if monotonous) universe was itself gigantic. Primitive though this world was, it would become absorbing, even transporting. A successful artist recently said to me, looking back on a time of great psychological stress, "Zork kept me alive."

* Carville floats Al Gore for VP. I think this is a fantastic idea whose excellence is mitigated only by its sheer impossibility.

* Everyone's linking to the J.K. Rowling Harvard speech. I think it's mandatory.

* Kevin "Out of Control" Kelly introduces me to a new term: scenius, the specie of genius devoted to mastery of a cultural scene.

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or "scenes" can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: "Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius."

Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.

The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

• Mutual appreciation -- Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques -- As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
• Network effects of success -- When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
• Local tolerance for the novelties -- The local "outside" does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.

* And even President Bush admits he's been a terrible, terrible president. Well, almost:

In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”

Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”.

He's absolutely right, of course—it's his rhetoric that was the problem.

Things I'm guaranteed to fall for:

* Video-game theme songs for the string quartet.

* Teller, after the apocalypse.

* Oil paintings inspired by video games and Internet memes.

* Articles titled "Welcome to the Post-Carbon World," with sci-fi subtitles like "Why do some planets survive their carbon crises and others don’t? A plan for how ours could."

* Stanley Kubrick.

Pac-Txt, the other Pac-Man text adventure. (See also: DotQuest.) It's utterly pointless, and yet there's something about it I find really compelling. Be sure to use the autolook and autonibble commands. Via Waxy.