So I've passed my exams. (Hooray!) This should free up some much needed time for playing World of Goo. (Hooray!) Sincere thanks for all the best-wishes; if I can ask, please direct all future "good thoughts" towards my dissertation (expected completion date May 2017).

Tuesday night!

* The buzzword at the heart of my dissertation got a bump today.

* 'Good Night and Tough Luck': a short web comic about the misery of insomnia.

* Good news/bad news: the total implosion of the global economy has caused CO2 emissions to plummet 6%, to 8.5% of 2005 levels.

* Corzine takes his first polling lead over Chris Christie in the New Jersey governor's race.

* Osama bin Laden blurbs a few of his favorite books, including Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and (apparently) Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. (via)

* American debt, the Chinese economy, and mutually assured financial destruction.

* The House passed a resolution of disapproval against Congressman Joe Wilson along strict party lines? You lie!

* When will the MSM break its silence on Obama's secret rat love?

* 'Wealthcare': A brief history of Ayn Rand. Some talk at MeFi.

(The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite "sales tax" or "income tax." The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

* Conservative bloggers have truly outdone themselves in their efforts to hype the 9/12 rally; Steve Benen and Media Matters have the details on "the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever." It's the greatest propaganda FAIL since they tried to pass off a picture of the Promise Keepers rally as being from last weekend.

* And this interview from one of Bush's last speechwriters has been linked by nearly every mainstream political blog I read: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Steve Benen, Kevin Drum, Atrios, Ben Smith, Think Progress, MetaFilter, and Crooks and Liars, each with their own favorite moment from the piece. The Palin line is sort of inescapable:

“I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?”

Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.” Then he made a very smart assessment.

“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.”

Dissertation haiku. Via @ryancordell.

Late night links.

* Here comes your Seinfeld reunion. God bless Larry David.

* You won't have Dr. Sanjay Gupta to kick around anymore.

* From My Unfinished Doctoral Dissertation on Breakfast Cereal.

* The artist-less art of Tim Knowles.

* ...each extra close friend in high school is associated with earnings that are 2 percent higher later in life after controlling for other factors. I had no idea I was so deeply disliked. (via MR)

* The headline reads, 'Diebold Voting System Has 'Delete' Button for Erasing Audit Logs.' No way that could be abused. Via MeFi.

A few more.

* Acephalous explains what it is to write a dissertation.

* Is college a waste of time for most people? Ask Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve! Better yet, read Matt "Harvard" Yglesias on the subject, whose opinions have the advantage of furthering academia as a growth industry and therefore, by extension, my job prospects.

The real answer, of course, has to do with how you define "waste," "time," "most people," and "college." In the contemporary American context, a college degree by and large is the price of admission to the middle class, and "worth it" on that basis alone—but there are other possible cultural and economic contexts, with no guarantees that ours is either optimal or permanent. College is also, again by and large, a pretty enjoyable way to spend a few years figuring out what sort of person you're going to want to be. The latter will remain true even if the former subsides, though it does seem to me unlikely that people will be willing to shell out quite so much money just for critical thinking skills and parties on the weekend.

* The works of Philip Roth, Chuck Palahniuk, and Haruki Marukami demonstrate in the New York Times how to tell a book by its cover.

A thesis is much like a graduate student: it has a limited purpose and a small audience; it is often insecure and defensive, justifying itself with excessive documentation; it is too narrowly focused; and it has not yet developed a style of its own.

From the Graduate Student Handbook of Fordham's Department of Theology, "A Dissertation upon Dissertations." Via MeFi.

One last bit of advice. The peculiar nature of a doctoral dissertation obviously puts constraints on its style, as well as its content, form, and method. However, the readers, for all that they are professional theologians, are also human beings (at least this is considered by moralists to be a probable opinion). Therefore, keep in mind the injunction found in the ethics of the Zoroastrians: "Strive not to bore your fellow creatures."