Friday night roundup.

* Why would they send Obama to Copenhagen if there was any chance it might not work? Really poor showing from the White House on this one.

* Best thing on the Internet today: Liu Bolin's extreme camouflage photography. Warning: May blow your mind.

* The Sesame Street Mad Men parody. Warning: probably will not.

* Scenes from the A-Team movie.

* Bill Simmon is rapidly losing patience with Flashforward. I agree—but as I wrote in the comments over at his place, we have to remember that Lost's first great episode was episode four, and that the show was by and large pretty terrible until at least the second half of season three. So there's still hope. It's doing well enough in the ratings that the producers should have time and leeway to develop the story however they want.

* Related: What caused the flashforwards?

* Jaimee has a review in the Indy this week.

* Presenting the gas mask bra.



* And some bad news: Supermassive Black Holes Bringing Universe Closer to Death.

A few more missing links from the last few days.

* What sort of game are Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld playing? First the pilot for Curb Your Enthusiasm is a preemptive parody of Comedian, several years before the fact—now Jerry Seinfeld has signed with NBC to do a reality TV show that sounds like nothing so much as Curb Your Enthusiasm.

* Supermen of Pre-Golden-Age SF.

* How they made The Godfather.

* Is Switzerland the next Iceland?

* The Milky Way Transit Authority.

* Simulation of a black hole destroying a star.

* And is the FiveThirtyEight.com brand ruined?

* Black holes, baby universes, and loop quantum gravity.

* Creeping environmental stress fueled by volcanic eruptions and global warming was the likely cause of the Great Dying, or Permian-Triassic Extinction, 250 million years ago. (Both science links via Gravity Lens.)

* Ezra Klein takes a look at the way agricultural subsidies determine what we eat.