ads without products has a neat post on icons and the Utopian possibility of universal chat, featuring this pleasing narrative from artist Xu Bing. Via @SEK.

News roundup.

* There's rioting in Oakland following the shooting of Oscar Grant by BART police last week.

* The Odyssey as a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

* Sean P. Murphy at Inside Higher Ed says teaching at a community college isn't as bad as it is sometimes made out to be.

* The Gallery of Obscure Patents.

* At right, via grinding.be, your image of the day.

* A person's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from American actor Kevin Bacon. The lower the number, the closer an individual is to Erdős and Bacon.

* What Obama will look like after four years as president.

* And just for kicks: Scrabulous is back.

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.

In this week's PostSecret. (Thanks, Kate. These tattoos are pretty cool, too.)