Late night.

* What is the jobless rate for people like you? Post-racial America is awesome. (via)

* Salman Rushdie totally doesn't know his kryptonite.

* DC caught mishandling its recycling. (via)

D.C. law requires recycling at all city buildings, though the law appears to stop at the threshold of all alleys. There, behind businesses and apartment complexes all across the city, this sloppy ritual goes down with striking regularity: In a blur of asses and elbows, workers throw stuff from green containers, black containers, and blue containers in the same truck, creating a jumble of trash and recycling that can never be de-mingled.

* Behind The Men Who State at Goats. (via)

* Alan, who looks much younger than his 72 years, speaks in a meandering monotone, while Sylvia makes tea. "Sylvia is going to put arsenic in our tea." It's an ongoing joke, and one that gets to the nub of their problem. The cryonicists are not dying quickly enough, so the opportunity to hone their skills is limited. (via)

An early Vonnegut story on longevity and overpopulation, apparently out of copyright, via Pete Lit.

Some links for Sunday.

* Robin Sloan has a filtered #iranelection Twitter feed with most of the repetition and chaos stripped away. Via Boing Boing.

* Salinger and kids today: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ” Via MeFi.

* Another ruins of the modern world roundup. This one has some repetition but also a few I hadn't seen before.

* Advantage: chubbiness. People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.

Tuesday night roundup.

* Just posted to MetaFilter for the first time in a long time: Tomorrow, Obama will extend federal employee benefits to same-sex partners. But is it too little, too late to mend the growing rift between Obama and gay rights advocates, especially after last week's controversial (to say the least) DOMA brief? From my perspective it's a very small first step in the right direction, but very small—until the Lieberman-Baldwin Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act passes Congress it won't even cover health benefits.

* Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles.

* Alex Pareene's new blog reports that everyone is trying to kill you.

* Let UNC tell you how old your body is. More here and here.

* Busted-up Pokémon.

Even if you think my periodic endorsements of This American Life are just so much hot air, you should really give a listen to this week's podcast, "Mistakes Were Made." Act 1 on the disastrous birth of the cryogenic movement is a great listen, and the William Carlos Williams spoofs in the second act are a good time too.

A 109-year-old woman, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has cast her ballot for Barack Obama.

Polygamists live longer.

Advantage: hippies—vegetarians live longer.

Are humans designed/evolved to eat everything and at risk of malnutrition as vegetarians? Or is vegetarianism the healthy and ethical choice? The most impressive data arises from a study of 1904 vegetarians over 21 years by the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsche Krebsforschungszentrum). The study's shocking results: vegetarian men reduced their risk of early death by 50%! Women vegetarians benefit from a 30% reduction in mortality.

30% of female vegetarians will never die.

What's your virtual life expectancy? I took the test twice, and depending on the brutal honesty of my answers I can apparently expect to live between 95 and 99 years, just like Great-Grandpa Canavan. Sweet.

UPDATE: I got a second opinion: 98. Peak Oil and global warming just got a lot more pressing.

Brain death has never been a particularly reliable way to gauge whether or not somebody has died, but this story is pretty striking:

Thirty-six hours after the accident, Zack was declared brain dead. The hospital notified the authorities, news reports of his death were published, and preparations were made to harvest his organs.

But when family and friends were called in to make their last goodbyes, Zack's cousin, Dan Coffin, decided to check Zack's vitals one last time. When he ran his pocket knife along Zack's foot and applied pressure under a fingernail, the young man's body responded.

After 48 days in the hospital, Zack was able to return home to Frederick. He continues with rehab, which he finds challenging. "Just ain't got the patience," Zack told NBC.

Meanwhile, io9 shows life expectancy actually going down in a lot of places in America since the 1980s, what the writers of the study call a "growing health gap":

However, beginning in the early 1980s the differences in death rates among/across different counties began to increase. The worst-off counties no longer experienced a fall in death rates, and in a substantial number of counties, mortality actually increased, especially for women, a shift that the researchers call "the reversal of fortunes." This stagnation in the worst-off counties was primarily caused by a slowdown or halt in the reduction of deaths from cardiovascular disease coupled with a moderate rise in a number of other diseases, such as lung cancer, chronic lung disease, and diabetes, in both men and women, and a rise in HIV/AIDS and homicide in men. The researchers' key finding, therefore, was that the differences in life expectancy across different counties initially narrowed and then widened.

Is it possible John Edwards was right all this time?

MSNBC.com's running a series on longeivity that puts the blame squaring on you, the couch potato...

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.

This here longevity game says I'm going to live to 90, so let's hope the immortal robot bodies come out before 2069.