Still more links.

* Shepard Smith: Fox News's email has become "more and more frightening." I've asked before, but why is this man still on Fox?

* Rush Limbaugh picked the wrong day to make a birther joke.

* Jeremiah Wright picked the wrong day to say something incredibly moronic about "them Jews."

* There is no right day to propose a Full House remake. Stamos! Via Occasional Fish.

* Fear the Emanuel hegemony.

* Fear the myth of perpetual copyright.

* 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive. In terms of understanding the human psyche, the academy is still decades behind the advertising industry.

* 'Supervolcano may be brewing beneath Mount St Helens.' Yikes. (And get me Bobby Jindal on the phone.) Via MeFi.

* Guantánamo's Uighurs have been sent to Palau. More from Yglesias, Attackerman, Greenwald, and the Plank.

* Linda Holmes criticizes Pixar for going to the princess well for its first female lead.

* The Sopranos and postmodern irony.

Yet formally self-conscious and deliberately ambiguous though it tended to be, "The Sopranos" was by no means so completely decentered in its “overall moral or thematic attitude” as all that. On the contrary, it seems to me to have been very definitely grounded what might be called (for want of any better phrase) a deeply pessimistic Freudian moral sensibility.

Via Kotsko.

Poet Craig Arnold has apparently gone missing in Japan while working on a book about volcanoes and the end of the world. Paper Cuts has details.

Oink, oink, baby, in the most Orwellian and neo-Freudian senses.

* At McSweeney's: Saved by the Bell: The Grad School Years.

* The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital.

* J.G. Ballard's Alien and Starsky and Hutch.

* Every time a bell rings a volcano erupts, Bobby Jindal doesn't become president.

* Life as a $100,000-a-year clown.

* Life as the world's hottest basketball prospect—in sixth grade.

The verdict is in: another Republican political career has been destroyed by contact with the mind of Tina Fey. This time it's Bobby Jindal, who I don't think will ever recover from this Kenneth the Page thing. (Not that he did so well on the merits, either, as Steve Benen handily demonstrates in a series of posts. "Volcano monitoring"? What, pray tell, is a "volcano"? Even Fox News lays the smack down.)

Meanwhile, in other political news, Ezra Klein looks back on the eventful first month of the Obama administration. That pseduo-State of the Union sounded pretty ambitious; let's go change the world.

Thinking of the days when this blog wasn't about the presidential election 24-7—just sixteen long days to go—here are a few links to more traditional gerrycanavan.blogspot.com fare.

* Life on earth may have originated in volcanic eruptions.

* Invest in solar, says solar industry.

* 'Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death.' Via MeFi.

* Atomic explosions. Lots.

* Buy your own deep shelter underneath London.

* How British police foiled the IRA by opening a laundromat.

* Mad Men will be back for a third season, but showrunner Matthew Weiner may not be: he wants more money.

* Consistent with Environmental Security Hypothesis predictions, when social and economic conditions were difficult, older, heavier, taller Playboy Playmates of the Year with larger waists, smaller eyes, larger waist-to-hip ratios, smaller bust-to-waist ratios, and smaller body mass index values were selected. These results suggest that environmental security may influence perceptions and preferences for women with certain body and facial features.

Earthquakes, volcanoes, and civilization: Eric Force argues in Geoarchaeology that major ancient civilizations tended to align themselves over major tectonic plate boundaries:

First, he mapped plate boundaries and what archeologists say are the birthplaces of 13 major ancient civilizations. They ranged from Rome and Corinth in Western Europe, to Memphis and Jerusalem in the Middle East, to historic sites in India and China. Then, Force calculated the probability that the sites were randomly located, given that plenty of suitable land was available for settlement. The number crunching suggests that 13 of the 15 sites aren't the product of chance. Instead, ancient people appear to have chosen to snuggle up close to a tectonic crack-- often within 75 kilometers--despite the risk of quakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. (The exceptions were in ancient Egypt and China.) The analysis did find that civilizations farther from plate boundaries seemed to persist longer, perhaps because they had to contend with fewer natural disasters.

Theories abound about why tectonic zones might have boosted the growth of early civilizations, says Force. Geologists know that plate boundaries often have ample water supplies that might have attracted early settlers, for example. And volcanoes can help create rich soils. But no factor explains the pattern, Force says. He is intrigued by a psychological explanation: "Maybe the elders are telling the kids that they'd better be prepared to cope with a lot of risk and change," he says--spurring the next generation to develop more sophisticated quake-resistant architecture, for instance, or create better ways to store food.

That idea appeals to archeologist Geoff Bailey of the University of York in the United Kingdom. "It could be that a certain level of geological instability demands organizational responses from the societies that live in such areas," he says, calling it "a sort of challenge-and-response theory of social development." In his own work, he's even speculated that similar tectonic challenges, and not just factors such as climate change, could have spurred the evolution of humans in Africa. A little shaking up, he suggests, isn't necessarily a recipe for disaster.

There's a pretty convincing takedown at Dienekes' anthropology blog, but still it's food for thought.

Via MeFi.

The Big Picture blog has your daily dose of volcano porn.

In the news:

* In response to public outrage—and who thought that could still accomplish anything?—the Bureau of Land Management has reversed the absurd two-year moratorium on public-land solar projects that got me so riled up a few days ago.

* Is Bush about to close Guantánamo? I imagine extralegal prisons are a whole lot less fun lately, though knowing the Bush administration they'd probably only plan to close it in preparation for Guantánamo II on the Moon.

* Utah responds to the high price of energy by moving to a four-day workweek for state employees. Meanwhile, Sal Cinquemani at Slant Magazine takes aim at the central contradiction that has crippled the Democrats' ability to properly respond to the high price of gasoline: so long as we are unable to think the crisis outside a capitalist, market-oriented framework, $140 a barrel still isn't high enough.

* Jesse Helms died today, one day after Bozo the Clown, and everyone else has already made the joke.

* Despite the latest denialist meme, volcanoes are not melting Arctic ice.

* Christopher Hitchens now agrees waterboarding is torture. Why? He let himself be waterboarded. (Here's video.) I really hate to kick a guy just when he's finally starting to see the light, but it's worth saying that there are still plenty of people whose moral sense is not so deformed by eight years of Bushism that we knew better than to torture people without an object lesson in basic human decency—and it'd be nice if, you know, we were maybe listened to occasionally. Via MeFi.

* And, at NPR, the strange odyssey of Napoleon's penis.

Enviro-Friday! The Nation is running a lot of enviro-political stories this morning:

* "Running on Empty" (Peak Oil)
* Bill McKibben on the need for a 'Green Corps' along the lines of the WPA.
* Still more on the world's food crisis.

In other news, geneticists have proven the existence of a genetic bottleneck in the human genome, suggesting that we almost went extinct around 70,000 years ago. They don't reference it at CNN, but it seems likely to me that this is tied to the Toba catastrophe event.

See? The environment matters.

I like to think I'm fairly well-read on the development of human civilization, but I had a lot to learn from this Flash timeline about prehistoric human migration. For instance, I hadn't remembered that the South Pacific was actually populated by Homo sapiens before Europe was, and for all my fascination with castraophe I'd somehow completely missed the supereruption of Mt. Toba. Via MeFi.