Windsuit base jumping is your new favorite extreme sport. (via Fiona)

Slow motion bullet impacts.

Second exam written. Now we play the waiting game.

* Did Republicans accidentally defund the military-industrial complex? That's kind of fantastic.

* Darcy Burner spatializes the political spectrum on a left-right horizontal axis against a purist-pragmatist vertical access to uncover why bipartisanship compromise can't happen in contemporary America politics; there's no one in the northeast quadrant.

* The Daily Mail reports on an fascinating in vitro fertilization case in which a woman has decided to bring a baby to term after another woman's embryo was mistakenly implanted in her. What I find most interesting is the assertion that the genetic parent, and not the pregnant woman, is plainly the "real" mother; it's not at all clear to me why that should be true from either a legal or ethic standpoint.

* Rather specific genre watch: Top 10 YouTube acoustic Michael Jackson tributes.

Required viewing: YouTube episodes from Prisoners of Gravity, an early-'90s Canadian television show on the history and practice of science fiction. Also via MeFi.

Another Tuesday night linkdump.

* Anthony Karen photographs the KKK for Life Magazine.

* A public records request to the offices of Mark Sanford has revealed actually existing media bias: conservatives outlets promising the governor a safe place to spin his story. Even Colbert got into the act, writing Sanford in character. (Via Steve Benen.)

* Neil sends along this video of four artists painting the same (digital) canvas at once, though both he and I agree it's somehow not quite as cool as it seems like it should be.

* Happy birthday, MetaFilter!

Verso has your video from the Marxism 2009 last week in Bloomsbury. Below: David Harvey.

Midday Tuesday!

* Those of you participating in Infinite Summer (hey kate) may enjoy IJ blogging from Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and others at A Supposedly Fun Blog.

* Bleeding Cool reviews Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man script.

* Maybe information doesn't want to be free? Malcolm Gladwell pours cold water on Chris Anderson's Free, itself famously in trouble for some apparent plagiarism:

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money). The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.”

Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other.

* Kunstler: Don't call Americans "consumers." Because when you rename a problem it suddenly goes away.

Sunday night links.

* I can't bring myself to watch the murder of Neda Soltani on YouTube, but a lot of other people have. It's remarkable how quickly her face has become that of the protests in Iran.

* The New York Times has an article exposing abusive practices in the freelance textbook market in New York, with my good friend and old co-blogger PClem providing some of the ugly details.

* Polls show widespread public support for a public health care option. Will this remind Democrats in Congress that they swept the last two elections?

* Buffy vs Twilight.

* Infinite Summer begins tonight. Kottke kicks things off.

The astounding world of the future. Via Candleblog.

Wednesday!

* I have a review in the Indy this week of Lucas Hilderbrand's Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Keywords: copyright Constitution Buffy pornography Superstar Mystery Science Theater 3000.

* Cases for and against Buffy without Joss.

* Sarah Connor creator: I won't be back.

* Some days I think Marvel just doesn't get women. Via MeFi.

* theauteurs.com: Streaming video of Criterion Collection films. (via Vu)

* And the year of Senatorial madness shows no sign of ending: Joe Sestak intends to unseat Arlen and Burris's scumbaggery is caught on tape.

Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.

* Swine flu in NC! PANIC!

* Another article on Homeland Security's use of science fiction writers for brainstorming.

* Test your knowledge of literature with the Amazon Statistically Improbable Phrase Quiz. Via MeFi.

* New Yankee Stadium homerun theories.

* 'The Making of Rushmore.'

* Two from Steve Benen: on the improbable discovery of Democrats at Liberty University and a roundup of recent misogynistic attacks on Nancy Pelosi.

* And our friend Tim Morton has a new video on YouTube: The Mesh.

And just because it's been a while: Leonard Nimoy's psychedelic and inscrutable "The Legend of Bilbo Baggins."

YouTube user ekimp252 already has clips from last night's Springsteen show. So does blueboyb.

Off to see Springsteen at the Greensboro Coliseum. Everyone'll be there.

Okay, I think YouTube and I have reached an accord, and all of the clips from the Morton/Rudy roundtable are now up and viewable. The whole playlist is in order here.

Rudy Introduction
Morton Introduction
On Discursive Intervention in Ecology
On Ontology and "Ground"
On WALL-E, Sentiment, and Irony
On Dark Ecology and "Bambification"
On Science
On Marx and Anti-Capitalism

Excerpted moments from the Tim Morton / Kathy Rudy / Polygraph "Ecology, Ideology, Politics" Roundtable are now up on YouTube. You'll note the clever product placement of our secret sponsor, Dasani.

The poor camera angle, somewhat poor audio quality, and incomplete coverage are all functions of the device used to capture the video, but still, I think these excerpts came out pretty well.

Introductions (YouTube messed with this one. Up in two bits soon.)
Question #1 (on rhetoric)
Question #2 (on ontology and "ground") (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)
An Excerpt Concerning WALL-E, Sentiment, and Irony
Dark Ecology and "Bambification"
On Science
On Marx and Anti-Capitalism (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)

YouTube Thursday!

* 1988 Inside Edition report on Super Mario. Don't miss the cameo appearance by a marginally less evil Bill O'Reilly.

* The Diff'rent Strokes titles recut as a horror sequence.

* Star Wars/MacGyver mashup.

Here's a nice video on open- and closed-mindedness from that paragon of skepticism, Candleblog.

Hour-long Jared Diamond lecture on the evolution of religion.

Kill Bill in one minute and one take. YouTube, is there no end to your treasures?