Cultural melange.

* David Gill reviews Christopher Miller's fictionalized biography of Philip K. Dick, A Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank, for Boing Boing.

* Judy Han's dissertation on Korean-American Christian missionaries and U.S. imperialism is available in comic form. (Via @barbarahui.)

* A nine-word story that will take one thousand years to read. Kottke says this problem is just crying out for good old-fashioned American know-how.

* The five people still watching Heroes will be devastated when they find out Bryan Fuller's left again.

* NPR remembers Harvey Kurtzman and the heyday of Mad Magazine.

* Trending upward today: references to Paul Simon's "Kodachrome."

Wednesday links.

* Scandal at UConn! The Plank says the story is peanuts; this sort of corruption is endemic to the NCAA.

* Cover Stories From the Most-Requested Back Issues of The American Prognosticator (1853–1987).

* Duke University professor and civil rights icon John Hope Franklin has died.

* Upright Citizens Brigade parodies Wes Anderson. Bastards!

* A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of the Second World War.

* The first unambiguous case of electronic voting machine fraud in the U.S.?

* Solitary confinement as torture.

* Roman engineers chipped an aqueduct through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. The monumental effort took more than a century, says the German researcher who discovered it. How could the Romans think in terms of centuries but we can't think past a single business cycle?

* Lots of people are linking to this letter from an AIG bonus recipient. The merits of the contracts aside—I've said before they should be enforced unless fraudulent or predicated on fraud—but I don't think he helps his case much when he puts a number on it. His one-time after-tax "bonus" is more than I would have made in thirty years of adjuncting.

* David Brin wants to "uplift" animals, i.e., make them sentient. This is exactly why people don't take science fiction seriously; it's totally crazy, pointless, and cruel and it wouldn't even work...

Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz's new book is a World Without Us for the very long now: 100 million years.

Morning links.

* The protests in St. Paul turned violent yesterday, with police tear-gassing the crowd.

They had come in their thousands – grandmothers, veterans, young families and even disgruntled Republicans bearing banners and peace flags, to demand an end to the five-year conflict. And for the most part, the demonstrations passed off peacefully.

But once the main antiwar march had finished, splinter groups embarked on a violent rampage, smashing windows, slashing car tyres, throwing bottles and even attacking Republican delegates attending the nearby Xcel Centre.

Many of those involved identified themselves to reporters as anarchists. These protesters, some clad in black, wreaked havoc by damaging property and starting at least one fire.

* Washington Monthly has a nice pair of posts detailing the entire Sarah Palin fiasco so far, if you haven't been following the coverage closely here and elsewhere. And for a good articulation of the gambling frame I've been pushing as the best way to understand John McCain, see Josh Marshall.

* Barack Obama loves science and science funding.

* Google releases its long-awaited browser, Chrome, tomorrow. MetaFilter's talking about it.

* Neal Stephenson and the 10,000-Year Clock. There's more Stephenson links at MeFi.

* “The Night Gwen Stacy Died": The End of Innocence and the Birth of the Bronze Age.

Warren Buffet recently made a one million dollar bet that a hedge fund "won't beat the returns of S&P 500 after their extremely hefty fees are accounted for." The bet was made using the Long Bet mechanism set up and operated by the Long Now Foundation.

Of course, we're talked about the more scammy aspects of hedge funds before. Via Boing Boing.

The Long Now Foundation: thinking responsibly about the next 10,000 years.