Wednesday miscellany!

* Startling: 50% of people think women should be legally required to take their husbands' names. Watch out, most married woman under forty I know! They're coming for you.

* Jonathan Lethem talks to The Jewish Daily Forward about the greatness of Philip K. Dick.

* Have we reached our civilization's tipping point? See also: why climate change is worse than we feared.

* AMC greenlights zombie series. Sounds promising. Between this and Red Mars AMC is making a strong push for my particular demographic.

* As of tonight, Microsoft can no longer sell Word.

* Another Battlestar reboot? Already? Really?

* Lesser-known editing and proofreading marks. (via)

* 'Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing.'

* And Ze gets philosophical.

You partake in a medical experiment. In the experiment you are given one of two pills. You don't know which one until after you take it. One shortens your life by 10 years, and the other lengthens your life by 10 years. You have just found out which pill you took. The question is: which pill do you think will increase the quality of your life the most? Would one make you change the way you live your life more than the other?

Other links:

* This post on the Golden Age of Blogging from 11D is circulating pretty widely, and generally comports with my sense of things as a longtime C-list blogger. The first-mover advantage in the blogosphere is hard to overstate, yet this is one of its more overlooked characteristics; it's still possible to "break through," but much harder, and it's nothing like it was in the glory days of 2001-2003. I often wish I'd started earlier.

* Is C-list too generous? Is there a D-list?

* Of course the real problem with this blog is its utter lack of focus, as will now be demonstrated forthwith.

* 200 Characters from Dick Tracy, 1931-1977.

* U.S. gets second-to-worst grade on emissions from the WWF. The worst? Blame Canada.

* Dear Plagiarist.

* 200-year-old cipher cracked; Jefferson pwned.

* The psychology of scams. Via Schneier on Security, via this AskMe on the Craigslist check kiting scam in Canada, via Neil.

* Worst case scenarios: A bar examinant's $400,000 student loan debt (and admittedly poor history of repayment) has blocked their ability to practice law in the state of New York (and therefore ever hope to pay the loan back). Via Steve.

* And good news from India: Delhi's high court has decriminalized homosexuality. Via MeFi.

Midday Tuesday!

* Those of you participating in Infinite Summer (hey kate) may enjoy IJ blogging from Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and others at A Supposedly Fun Blog.

* Bleeding Cool reviews Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man script.

* Maybe information doesn't want to be free? Malcolm Gladwell pours cold water on Chris Anderson's Free, itself famously in trouble for some apparent plagiarism:

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money). The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.”

Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other.

* Kunstler: Don't call Americans "consumers." Because when you rename a problem it suddenly goes away.

Monday night bloggity blogs.

* Samuel Delany's "The Star Pit" as a radio show. Really good.

* More on the surprise Dollhouse renewal, including word that "Epitaph One" will likely be aired after all and an interview with Joss. Too bad about Terminator; Bill Simmon links to a Fox executive explaining the one had nothing to do with the other, except insofar as it did.

"[Sarah Connor] has completed its run," Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly confirmed at a press conference this morning. "I think it had a nice little run. It was a good show. It was not an either or [with Dollhouse]. We did see it tailing off a bit [in the ratings]. It had a nice creative core, but, ultimately, we made the bet on Dollhouse, so that's it for [Sarah Connor]... We make no apologies. We gave it a lot of support and some consistent scheduling. We tried and thought it was time to move on."

* Benen and Yglesias explain how the right's schoolyard strategy on Pelosi and torture may be making a truth commission much more likely.

* Rick Perry has abandoned neosecessionism. Score one for the Northern aggressors.

* I was so outraged by the very idea of this I completely forgot to blog it: someone's written a Catcher in the Rye sequel and their name isn't J.D.

"Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he's not at a prep school, he's at a retirement home in upstate New York," said California. "It's pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past. He's still Holden Caulfield, and has a particular view on things. He can be tired, and he's disappointed in the goddamn world. He's older and wiser in a sense, but in another sense he doesn't have all the answers."

Bunch of phonies.

* Maureen Dowd plagiarizes Josh Marshall and everyone has a really good time with it.

* The New Yorker covers the sixth mass extinction event. Print edition only, because analysis of an ongoing mass extinction event isn't something you just give away for free. A few more links at Kottke.

* Kos and Yglesias on epically bad ideas to save newspapers.

Wednesday, Wednesday.

* Why is Boing Boing giving valuable blog real estate to global warming denialism? I see Cory has admirably tried to push back against the guest blogger, but still. What a sad day for Boing Boing.

* Michael Bérubé just took the GRE Literature in English subject test again. And lived to tell about it.

* Rethinking plagiarism? Sorry, but this isn't that hard. Students know exactly what they're doing when they plagiarize. Turn them over to Judicial Affairs and don't think twice.

* Ten privacy settings every Facebook user should know.

* Joe the Plumber is now advising the GOP. WTFRepublicans?

* Fimoculous has found Wikipedia's list of lists of fictional things.

* The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertberg was not impressed with Obama's first inaugural. More shocking still is the unabashed anti-Hindu prejudice expressed in a demand that they be listed last in the litany of religious belief, even after hated atheists. Via Edge of the American West.

Tuesday bits.

* Is it Tim Kaine? Staffers called in from all across Virginia for emergency meeting to discuss line of succession if Kaine steps down as governor.

* A Veronica Mars movie?

* Ten weird medical conditions, including the woman who can't stop orgasming, the girl allergic to water, and the boy who can't sleep.

* McCain goes after the Dungeons and Dragons lobby.

* Remember that whole Solzhenitsyn plagiarism thing? Turns out the original story was falsely attributed to Solzhenitsyn and actually came from a right-winger named Chuck Colson.

* And everyone is happy Rachel Maddow's been given her own show.

Political Wire catches John McCain plagiarizing his speech on Georgia from Wikipedia. Via Open Left.