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?

As many of you have probably already heard through Duke email alerts or anguished Facebook status updates, they're shutting down Hogwarts a week early because of the swine flu. My instructional work now suddenly ends tomorrow, with a few days of absolute residential chaos scheduled to follow.

The swine flu has come to Duke. I'm sure glad I'm not teaching [Undisclosed Location] this term; I hear from friends working there that they've been keeping a bunch of cases quietly under wraps.

Good thinking.



(via HuffPoGreen)

Monday night ecology.

* Starbucks has an official corporate policy of wasting a whole lot of water for no good reason.

* At least 25% of the world's mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to the first assessment of their status for a decade.

* Are we past the global warming tipping point?

'Wake Up, Freak Out, Then Get a Grip'—the single best viral video about apocalyptic climate change and the urgent necessity to at last act that I've yet seen. Via MetaFilter.


Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.