Research teams at the Danish Golf Union have discovered it takes between 100 to 1,000 years for a golf ball to decompose naturally. A startling fact when it is also estimated 300 million balls are lost or discarded in the United States alone, every year. It seems the simple plastic golf ball is increasingly becoming a major litter problem.

The scale of the dilemma was underlined recently in Scotland, where scientists -- who scoured the watery depths in a submarine hoping to discover evidence of the prehistoric Loch Ness monster -- were surprised to find hundreds of thousands of golf balls lining the bed of the loch.

Late night.

* What is the jobless rate for people like you? Post-racial America is awesome. (via)

* Salman Rushdie totally doesn't know his kryptonite.

* DC caught mishandling its recycling. (via)

D.C. law requires recycling at all city buildings, though the law appears to stop at the threshold of all alleys. There, behind businesses and apartment complexes all across the city, this sloppy ritual goes down with striking regularity: In a blur of asses and elbows, workers throw stuff from green containers, black containers, and blue containers in the same truck, creating a jumble of trash and recycling that can never be de-mingled.

* Behind The Men Who State at Goats. (via)

* Alan, who looks much younger than his 72 years, speaks in a meandering monotone, while Sylvia makes tea. "Sylvia is going to put arsenic in our tea." It's an ongoing joke, and one that gets to the nub of their problem. The cryonicists are not dying quickly enough, so the opportunity to hone their skills is limited. (via)

Junk we left on the Moon. (via Gynomite)

Friday politics roundup.

* Early returns from the Iranian elections suggest things could get heated, with both sides declaring victory.

* On the day Jon Kyl threatened a Republican boycott of the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearing, George H. W. Bush cautioned his party not to go overboard.

"I don't know her that well but I think she's had a distinguished record on the bench and she should be entitled to fair hearings. Not - [it's] like the senator John Cornyn said it," [the elder former President Bush] told CNN. "He may vote for it, he may not. But he's been backing away from these...backing off from those radical statements to describe her, to attribute things to her that may or may not be true.

"And she was called by somebody a racist once. That's not right. I mean that's not fair. It doesn't help the process. You're out there name-calling. So let them decide who they want to vote for and get on with it."

* Kos analyzes party ID, empathy, and the generation gap.



* High-school student discovers plastic-eating microbe. We're saved!

Have I told you about how nerds destroy the world? From Pictures for Sad Children, via grinding.be.

New Jersey: now literally running on garbage.

Midday links.

* MTV cut down a rainforest to film a series of the world's most trivial show, Road Rules/Real Word Challenge.

* Will the collapse of the financial markets delay professorial retirements and thereby destroy my chances of tenured employment? Phil Gramm will pay for this.

* The Department of Homeland Security has partnered with Sesame Street in a desperate bid to completely evacuate its last shred of credibility. Godspeed.

* The National Endowment for the Arts announced Monday that it has begun construction on a $1.3 billion, 14-line lyric poem—its largest investment in the nation's aesthetic-industrial complex since the $850 million interpretive-dance budget of 1985.

* That one was a joke, but the NEH has announced grants of $25,000 for the development of multidisciplinary courses on the "Enduring Questions."

* Toronto may ban the coffee cup, or else tax it into oblivion.

* 'Showdown or Shutdown at the Star-Ledger.' Who mourns for Northern New Jersey's finest journalistic institution?

* A brief history of the Cylons.

News roundup!

* Surprising sat: 2/3 of U.S. corporations pay no taxes at all.

* In the latest sign of trouble in the planet's chemistry, the number of oxygen-starved "dead zones" in coastal waters around the world has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s, killing fish, crabs and massive amounts of marine life at the base of the food chain, according to a study released yesterday. More at Political Animal.

* 'Honeybee deaths reaching crisis point' in U.K.

* And they've finally, finally invented Mr. Fusion. For real this time. (We're saved.)

Slouching towards Ecotopia: San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom has proposed fines of up to $1000 for failure to properly sort one's trash.

The proposal, which city officials said the mayor could bring to the Board of Supervisors in about a month, calls for every residence and business in the city to have three separate color-coded bins for waste: blue for recycling, green for compost and black for trash.

Food vendors would have to supply them for customers. Managers of multifamily or commercial properties would be required to provide them for tenants or employees.

Trash collectors would be required to check the bins for proper sorting, which Blumenfeld said would require only a cursory visual inspection, not combing through the contents.

If they found a bin with the wrong material in it, collectors would leave a tag on the container identifying the problem. A second time would result in another tag and a written notice to the service subscriber.

On a third offense, the collector could refuse to empty the container, although this would not apply to multifamily properties like apartment buildings or to commercial properties with multiple tenants and joint collection.

The city could also levy a fine of up to $500 for the first violation, $750 for the second in one year and $1,000 for the third in a year.

Via SF Signal: Video of classic s.f. authors speaking about the value of science fiction.



Perhaps not surprisingly I'm struck by what dirty hippie Harlan Ellison has to say about the connection between science fiction, ecology, and disaster:

What it is is that we're beginning to realize and recognize ourselves as part, literally, of the universe, not just of ourselves, and #1, but our responsibility for the entire universe. We throw a cigarette butt down in the grass, or we throw our picnic lunch in the lake—that's not just us getting rid of our garbage so we don't have to be burdened with, man, we are screwing up the ecology, and that's all the ecology, that's the whole planet. And that means that we're thinking in larger terms.

Scientists have genetically engineered a insect bacteria that eats garbage and craps crude oil. We're saved!

LATE UPDATE: I don't know where the hell I got the word "insect" from up there, except that I'm pretty tired when I come home from seven hours at [UNDISCLOSED LOCATION] at night...

Leading off this lovely Tuesday linkdump is Barack Obama's college poetry. (Thanks, Tim!) Also in what I loosely refer to as the news:

* Strange Maps tracks the path of a shipment of plastic yellow duckies that fell off their transport in 1992 and still turn up in surprising places. Paging Ze Frank...

* Marginal Revolutions has fun naming ethics papers.

* Bitter Laughter has the sad story of the Rainbow Man.

* And hulu has the original Japanese inspiration for The Office, a surreal and characteristically too-long SNL skit to which there is little to add but Ricky Gervais's own valedictory remarks: "It's funny because it's racist."

'World of Waste: American Mass Consumption in Images. Via Jaimee.



That's 2,000,000 plastic bottles, the amount America throws out every five minutes.

Thursday morning links.

* For my people, the right to listen to Bruce Springsteen is literally a matter of life and death.

* Also in the news: a "sniff-squad" of qualified experts is being brought in to determine whether the landfills in Northhampton, Massachusetts, are "bearable" or "foul beyond belief."

* Retro Sabotage has a 100% true documentary on the secret origins of Pac-Man as a tool for mass manipulation and brainwashing.

Very early in its development, it was decided that the game itself should also, at a symbolic level, carry consumerist values. The main character was then reduced to a mouth eating everything that came across its path. At first it would be chased by a stylized specter, symbolic of guilt, but, during play, the guilt itself would be overcome and swallowed.

The North Korean version of the game, towards the end of the documentary, is actually sort of fun...

Thursday links:

* The North Pacific Trash Vortex, which was the size of Texas in September, is now larger than the entire United States. My horror about what we're doing to the planet has likewise quintupled in size in that time—though I must admit there's something eerily poetic about the idea that our wasteful patterns of consumption are creating a kind of shadow U.S. comprised entirely of garbage. Via Daily Kos.

* Science fiction and space technology, an educational site at NASA. Thanks to Klarr for the pointer.

* ...imagining the future is not an issue of imagination vs. actualization, and neither is it an issue of affirming the future, or "keeping the future alive." Rather, science fiction can configure the future as the conditions of possibility and constraint for social change in the present. A short essay concerning Jameson's Archeologies of the Future at CTheory.net, also via Klarr.

* "Marinaded in war and violence: Philip Dodd interviews J. G. Ballard."

* Top-earning dead celebrities, at Forbes. This year, no one can touch Elvis, not even John Lennon. Via Bitter Laughter.

* Rumors of her demise may be exaggerated: While Obama's supporters have raised $7.5 million dollars since Super Tuesday, Clinton's people have still raised about $4 million (almost enough to cover that loan she gave herself a few days ago). We don't want a repeat of New Hampshire on our hands—she's going to be in this fight for a while. Still, john in the comments notes that Obama's taken the lead in the Rasmussen prediction markets for what we think is the first time, 57-43, bolstering my claim that he is now the strong frontrunner. Can victory for the cult of Obama be far off?

* The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, online.

Was 2007 the year we all finally realized how unbelievably stupid it is to be making all these plastic bags? MetaFilter investigates.

Waste in the fiction of J.G. Ballard.

First, they discovered a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico so oxygen-deprived that nothing can live in it; now researchers have discovered a Texas-sized area of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean.