Early morning Wednesday.

* We finally saw Up! tonight. All I can say is if the first ten minutes don't break your heart you have no soul.

* Blackwater founder Erik Prince has apparently been implicated in a huge swath of crimes by a former employee and a Marine working with the company, ranging from tax evasion and money laundering to weapons smuggling to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence to crimes of war and even to the murder of federal informants. (See MetaFilter for more.) My now-incredibly-timely review of Master of War is getting bumped up accordingly and will probably be online (updated) at Independent Weekly in a day or so. This is all pretty shocking, even by Blackwater standards.

* In not-completely-frakked-up news, Bill Clinton did a good thing today, a win for just about everybody but infamous douchebag of liberty John Bolton.



* More on the Olbermann/O'Reilly saga from Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, and David Sirota. While I appreciate that he finds himself in a tough spot here, Olbermann is not doing himself any favors with his behavior; making one type of statement on-the-air and another off makes it very clear what is going on, and makes him look like a fool.

* The 100 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies. Outraged to see Galaxy Quest only squeaking by at #95. And 12 Monkeys quietly buried in the 80s? Nonsense.

* "In Which I Ruin Rashomon For Everyone, Forever."

* And your short pictorial history of robots.

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators. And it gets worse: the robots are already eying the Moon.

Whoops, missed a day somehow. (Even grad students get busy sometimes.) Here's a few links I've been saving; scroll all the way to the bottom for your daily dose of Watchmen panic.

* One of our most beloved blog denizens has started up a March Madness blog. Add it to your feeds immediately.

* Executing someone on their birthday may seem hilarious, but actually it's sort of cold. (via Srinivas)

* Same goes for trading your minor-league pitcher for ten bats. Via MeFi.

* All about experimental philosophy.

* The Daily Show's evisceration of CNBC was amazing last night. Also, incredibly well-deserved.

* Forget man-on-dog: will gay marriage start us down the slippery slope to human/robot marriages? It could happen right here in North Carolina. Only Steve Benen sees where this really leads: man/dog/robot/robot-dog polygamy.

* Two games: Linear RPG and Exploit, the second from amateur-game-creator of the moment, Gregory Weir, (The Majesty of Colors, Bars of Black and White).

* “You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.” Vanity Fair has a huge feature on the Icelandic financial collapse that really makes for fascinating reading. More discussion at MetaFilter. (via my dad)

Global financial ambition turned out to have a downside. When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, last October, Iceland’s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own bizarre private foreign-currency speculations, and even more from the 85 percent collapse in the Icelandic stock market. The exact dollar amount of Iceland’s financial hole was essentially unknowable, as it depended on the value of the generally stable Icelandic krona, which had also crashed and was removed from the market by the Icelandic government. But it was a lot.

Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.” In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.) As absurdly big and important as Wall Street became in the U.S. economy, it never grew so large that the rest of the population could not, in a pinch, bail it out. Any one of the three Icelandic banks suffered losses too large for the nation to bear; taken together they were so ridiculously out of proportion that, within weeks of the collapse, a third of the population told pollsters that they were considering emigration.

* When will voters start blaming Obama for the economy? Nate Silver has the numbers suggesting that will start in 18 or so months, though I bet that timeline could halve or worse that as people grow frustrated with prolonged economic hardship.

* What Obama could learn from Watchmen: Matt Yglesias reports on Ronald Reagan's own Ozymandian scheme for global unity.

* And Jacob sends along your hope-crushing Watchmen reviews for the day.

J. Hoberman in Village Voice: The philosopher Iain Thomson (who valiantly brought Heidegger's Being and Time to bear on his reading of Watchmen) maintained that Moore not only deconstructed the idea of comic book super-heroism but pulverized the very notion of the hero—and the hero-worship that comics traditionally sell. For all its superficial fidelity, Snyder's movie stands Moore's novel on its head, trying to reconstruct a conventional blockbuster out of those empty capes and scattered shards.

David Edelstein, New York Magazine: ...this kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.

Meanwhile, Steve Benen and Adam Serwer take a stand against Anthony Lane on behalf of geeks everywhere.

The music video for Coparck's "A Good Year for the Robots" is great fun. Via Tor, which rightly says the video is "part Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and part the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz," but misses the third inspiration: Ricky Gervais's The Office.

io9 has your top ten early robots.

10) W.K. Mashburn, "Sola" (Weird Tales, April 1930). Though he despises women and can't stand their company, Dr. Franz Dietrich desires them sexually. So he invents a flesh-like substance, which a sculptor helps him shape into a gorgeous female android. Having wired Sola with complex responses — the apparatus is supposed to react in particular ways, immediately upon perceiving his telepathically projected emotions — the mad scientist invites a group of colleagues over to dinner. Growing tipsy, Dietrich flies into an embarrassed fury, because he thinks Sola is unresponsive, and tries to destroy it. But his colleagues — and eventually, the entire town — pitch in to raise his self-esteem by treating Sola as a member of the community. Oh wait, I'm thinking of Lars and the Real Girl. What actually happens is that Sola's emotion receptors are activated by the professor's rage, and his own creation crushes him to death. A classic example of what McLuhan — in The Mechanical Bride (1951) — would call "the curious fusion of sex, technology, and death."

light-Bot: Program the robot to turn on all the lights. Via MeFi.

The surrealism of Mark Bryan. Fantastic. Via Posthuman Blues.

Thursday links as I just about catch up to where I need to be:

* My friend, fellow culturemonkey, and "Ecology and Ideology" co-editor Ryan Vu is doing a series on his home blog called Dispatches from the American Left about a recent trip he took to Mountain Justice Summer, a retreat in Kentucky for environmental activists.

* In the wake of cataclysmic Arctic Sea melting, humanity has finally decided to come together and figure out how to begin to solve the environmental crisis who owns the new shipping lanes. Sigh.

* Robokill: a game. Just about exactly what it sounds like.

* "It’s not a happy ending, we end up with almost nothing." Edward James Olmos on the end of Battlestar Galactica. Via io9.

* Also of BSG note: a blog all about the science of Battlestar Galactica.

* What Liberal Media? Part 1,000,000: In the wake of the Scott McClellan book, Jessica Yellin reports that network executives at ABC pressured her to make Bush look good.

Chronotron, the Flash game involving multiple interactions between a single time-traveling robot and itself. I'm in heaven.

Short links this morning because I'm self-consciously going into manic mode today to try and get a paper done.

* America still needs a hero (woo ooo): they're actually trying to make a Short Circuit 3.

* "It's not that the genie is out of the bottle — it's that 100 genies are out of the bottle," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Normally known for optimistic forecasts of lowering oil prices, Mr. Yergin's firm now says the price could rise to $150 a barrel this year.

The world's diminished spare production capacity remains the strongest single catalyst for high prices, Mr. Yergin says. The world's safety cushion — the amount of readily available oil that could be pumped in a moment of crisis — is now around two million barrels a day, according to most estimates. That's just 2.3% of daily demand, and nearly all of the safety cushion is in one country, Saudi Arabia. Everyone else is pretty much pumping all they can, which makes the world vulnerable to political or other shocks. Via Washington Monthly.

* And at McSweeney's, Borges teaches self-defense.

After buying myself a deliciously expensive MacBook Pro yesterday, which is still en route to my house, I wiped the hard drive of my Toshiba so Jaimee can use it until we buy her her MacBook (hopefully sometime in [late] 2009).

I named the computer Poet-Bot 3000, because she's a little bit of a poet-bot herself. Little did I know the name was already taken.

It's a slow blogging day, so here's some robots acting out Pulp Fiction.

I've been all over the automated killer robot issue this week, and I'm sorry to report that the news has only gotten worse.

"The trouble is that we can't really put the genie back in the bottle. Once the new weapons are out there, they will be fairly easy to copy," Sharkey will tell a one-day conference organised by Britain's Royal United Services Institute on Wednesday.

"How long is it going to be before the terrorists get in on the act? With the current prices of robot construction falling dramatically and the availability of ready-made components for the amateur market, it wouldn't require a lot of skill to make autonomous robot weapons."

Cosmic Log weighs in on the critical killer death robot issue brought to our attention only last night.

Expert: 'Automated killer robots "threat to humanity."' Finally, someone dares to take on the real problems.

Stuff to look at.

* This week's blog icon is one of my favorite pieces from Eric Joyner, whose website is a virtual treasure trove of robots and donuts. Eric, of course, is the artist who provided the cover image for Backwards City #3.

* Jacek Yerka, painter of fantasy worlds. Via RaShOmoN. The one at left is called "Pearl Harbor."

* I enjoyed watching The King of Kong, the recent documentary about intense rivalries in the arcade community, but it's now obligatory to follow up that admission with a link to the criticism of the film on both factual and aesthetic levels.

* And xkcd explains how it works.

Are robots the sex partners of the future? Obviously.

I'm actually still catching up from the weekend, so that "return to full strength" I mentioned will probably have to wait until later this afternoon or Tuesday morning. Still, I have been saving up some links:

* Be warned: delicious Coca-Cola will destroy your kidneys.

* Via Pandagon, Pittsburgh man Tasered in his own home while sleeping on his own couch.

Police Chief Henry Wiehagen said the officers would not comment, but he disputed Hicks' version of events.

Hicks wasn't asleep, Wiehagen said, he was on the couch prone. The officers could not be certain he was unarmed and Hicks "didn't respond to their reasonable commands," he said.

"These policemen are very cautious and I don't blame them for being cautious," Wiehagen said, noting officers in his department have been shot at.

* Via blucarbnpinwheel, Jonathan Lethem interviews Paul Auster. Two of my favorite writers in one place is very nice.

* Mini-Obama Endorsement Watch: Toni Morrison, who famously proclaimed in 1998 that Bill Clinton was "our first black president. Blacker than any actual person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime," endorses Barack Obama.

* And at Paleo-Future, how experts think we'll live in 2000 A.D. Other experts have a different opinion.

* Daily Kos has a roundup on the Michigan results and non-results, while John Nichols at The Nation begins the important task of spinning them for Barack.

* A complete list of Dr. Smith's insults for the Robot.

* My Life, Rewritten as a Chinese Takeout Menu and Slipped, Unwanted, Under My Door, at McSweeney's.

A Robot Performs Standup Comedy to a Lackluster Response, at McSweeney's.