Friday night in Albuquerque.

* Today in tasers: 72-year-old grandmother Tasered for refusing to sign a speeding ticket. New York judge allows Tasering to force compliance with DNA test. The system is working as intended; obviously these are both cases where lethal force would have been necessary in the absence of a Taser. (Via MeFi.)

* The Memory Card covers iconic moments from classic video games. Also via MeFi.

* Remembering Tiananmen.

* 'Graveyard Civiizations': The idea here is that we can explain the Fermi paradox (’Where are they?’) by assuming that exponential growth is not a sustainable development pattern for intelligent civilizations.

* Blue Eyes: The Hardest Logic Puzzle in the World.

* Empire Magazine has your spot-the-reference movie poster. Via Denise.

* Conan v. Super Mario. (Last two via Neil.)

* 40 Fantastic Sand Sculptures. Via my dad.

But I hope that our Mars probes discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.

Nick Bostrom turns his usual probabilistic method on the search for extraterrestrial life in Technology Review.

From these two facts it follows that the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come...

Leonard David at LiveScience has a short post about songs that have been intentionally beamed out into space by SETI researchers. The Beatles' "Across the Universe" was sent out earlier tonight, but Bob Marley's "One Love" has it beat by almost a decade. Which will the aliens prefer? We have a few decades to speculate. Via Gravity Lens.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

Not content to just passively listen, some SETI researchers have begun to send out transmissions as well. Of course, there's controversy, even though any possible consequences are Sci-Fi-Channel outlandish.

Zaitsev has already sent several powerful messages to nearby, sun-like stars—a practice called "Active SETI." But some scientists feel that he's not only acting out of turn, but also independently speaking for everyone on the entire planet. Moreover, they believe there are possible dangers we may unleash by announcing ourselves to the unknown darkness, and if anyone plans to transmit messages from Earth, they want the rest of the world to be involved. For years the debate over Active SETI versus passive "listening" has mostly been confined to SETI insiders. But late last year the controversy boiled over into public view after the journal Nature published an editorial scolding the SETI community for failing to conduct an open discussion on the remote, but real, risks of unregulated signals to the stars. And in September, two major figures resigned from an elite SETI study group in protest. All this despite the fact that SETI's ongoing quest has so far been largely fruitless. For Active SETI's critics, the potential for alerting dangerous or malevolent entities to our presence is enough to justify their concern.