A few more.

* #Nabokovfail.

* Scenes from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

* Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels and meet energy needs, the International Energy Agency warned today.

* A woman is six times more likely to be separated or divorced soon after a diagnosis of cancer or multiple sclerosis than if a man in the relationship is the patient, according to a study that examined the role gender played in so-called "partner abandonment."

* Picasso and his love of Japanese erotic prints.

* Always start your viral marketing campaign after your show is already doomed.

* The New Yorker takes down Superfreakonomics. I like this coda from Crooked Timber a lot:

Kolbert’s closing words are, however, a little unfair.

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

Not unfair to Levitt and Dubner, mind you, but to science fiction. After all, two science fiction authors, Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, had their number down way back in 1953 with The Space Merchants (Pohl, amazingly, is still active and alive).

The Conservationists were fair game, those wild eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way “plundering” our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.

The Space Merchants is truly great, incidentally. Read it if you haven't.

* Twenty years after the Berlin Wall. The "click to fade" images are stunning.

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.

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.