Friday morning links.

* Is Dollhouse already canceled? Fox is advertising that Prison Break returns to Fridays on 4/17.

* Mike Krzyzewski gets a tough evaluation on ratemyprofessor.com.



* Alternate-universe Watchmens. Only the Woody Allen hypothesis really sings.



* And this xkcd is quieter than the ones that usually get ricocheted across the Internet, but damn if it didn't make me laugh.



* And is time really the fire in which we burn? Consider the thermal time hypothesis. More at MetaFilter.

According to Connes and Rovelli, the same applies to the universe at large. There are many more constituents to keep track of: not only do we have particles of matter to deal with, we also have space itself and therefore gravity. When we average over this vast microscopic arrangement, the macroscopic feature that emerges is not temperature, but time. "It is not reality that has a time flow, it is our very approximate knowledge of reality that has a time flow," says Rovelli. "Time is the effect of our ignorance."

I think Rovelli just wrote Alan Moore's next three graphic novels. Grant Morrison's, too.

Another round: religion and politics.

* The U.N. has apparently passed a resolution banning the defamation of religion. In the U.S., at least, truth is absolute defense to defamation...

* Don't tell the U.N.: quantum theory may make omniscience mathematically impossible.

* Richard Nixon analyzes an episode of All in the Family. Those White House tapes are a national treasure.

* Truth commissions vs. prosecutions.

* A visitor's guide to Chinese conceptions of hell. Via MeFi.

* And are video games teaching kids the skills they need for the Apocalypse? The Onion reports.

"All the Myriad Ways," a fun Larry Niven story that riffs off the notions of quantum suicide, linked to from Wikipedia's quantum immortality page. There are others, like this amusing and extremely complicated comic I know I've linked to before: Jason Shiga's "Meanwhile." Still another: The Wigner's friend paradox.

Quantum physics, multiple universes, and solving the "scandal" of probability, in the Telegraph. Ignore the lead's focus on time travel; the real meat is towards the end:

According to quantum mechanics, unobserved particles are described by "wave functions" representing a set of multiple "probable" states. When an observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles down into one of these multiple options.

But the many worlds idea offers an alternative view. Dr Deutsch showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes. This work was attacked but it has now had rigorous confirmation by David Wallace and Simon Saunders, also at Oxford.

Dr Saunders, who presented the work with Wallace at the Many Worlds at 50 conference at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, told New Scientist: "We've cleared up the obscurities and come up with a pretty clear verdict that Everett works. It's a dramatic turnaround and it means that people now have to discuss Everett seriously."

Dr Deutsch added that the work addresses a three-century-old problem with the idea of probability itself, described by one philosopher, Prof David Papineau, as a scandal. "We didn't really know what probability means," said Dr Deutsch.

There's a convention that it's rational to treat it for most purposes as if we knew it was going to happen even though we actually know it need not. But this does not capture the reality, not least the 0.1 per cent chance something will not happen.

"So," said Dr Deutsch, "the problems of probability, which were until recently considered the principal objection to the otherwise extremely elegant theory of Everett (which removes every element of mysticism and double-talk that have crept into quantum theory over the decades) have now turned into its principal selling point."

Quantum immortality, please.

Mathematicians claim proof of "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum theory. GeekPress already gets in the best possible line about this—Personally, I am [very excited]|[deeply skeptical] about this development— so I'll just point out that this brings me one step closer to my long-held dream of quantum immortality.