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.

Saturday night, and I can't stop reloading the blogs to see how health care is doing. Image at the right via kate.

* The White House press corps does not believe you have not heard of V.

* Democratic congresswomen shouted down by Republicans. Matt has the video, and it's pretty astounding.

* Krugman: "There’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980."

* Kurt Vonnemutt.

* Ladies and gentlemen, Mars. Related: 1924, the year Navy radiographers were asked to listen for communication from Mars.

Links for a Thursday without joy.

* Don't forget about him: John Hughes has died.

* Margaret Atwood, Twitterer.

* The Big Picture visits Hiroshima 64 years ago today.



* Long Vanity Fair profile of Mad Men and Matthew Weiner. Best show on TV. Via Kottke.

“Matt wants real,” said Charlie Collier, president of AMC. For Weiner, Collier continued, “it’s not television; it’s a world.” Perhaps the only other producer as committed to the rules of his imagined universe is George Lucas. “Perfectionism” is a word the show’s writers tossed around when I asked a group of them about working with Weiner. “Fetishism” was another. Alan Taylor, who has directed four episodes of Mad Men, labeled Weiner’s attention to detail “maniacal.” Call it what they will, it is a charge that is largely embraced. “We’re all a little bit touched with the O.C.D.,” Robin Veith, one of the writers, told me, describing how she and her colleagues have researched actual street names and businesses in Ossining, the suburb where Don and Betty live; checked old commuter-train schedules, so that they know precisely which train Don would take to the city; pored over vintage maps to learn which highways he would drive on.

* Towards a four-day work week.

* And Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed, 68-31, making her the first Latina woman racist on the Supreme Court.

Wednesday 3.

* First Read considers the curse of the 2012 GOP candidate, noting that only Mitt Romney has avoided total credibility implosion. But stay tuned: it's a long way to Iowa, and I believe in the Mittpocalypse.

Of course, it's also worth noting that Obama's political opponents tend to be cursed in this way: consider that his main opponents for Illinois State Senate were pulled from the ballot for insufficient signatures, that his original run for Senate was facilitated by the scandal surrounding the divorce of Jack and Jeri "Seven of Nine" Ryan, and that his opponent for the presidency actually thought Sarah Palin was a credible vice presidential candidate.

* More on Kay Hagan and health care from Triangulator. Contact information for Hagan's Senate office is here.

* The MTA is trying to sell name rights for subway stations. Can't we get a court to bar this kind of silliness? "Atlantic Avenue" is a useful and informative name for a subway station; the name of a bank in London is not remotely. UPDATE: I'm 99% less outraged upon realizing that Barclay's is building a basketball stadium near that subway station.

* Michael Bérubé on the futility on the humanities. Said futility is not a bad thing.

* Žižek on Iran (at least allegedly).

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

* Soccer in South Africa, at the Big Picture.

A study from a British think tank purports to show definitive evidence of electoral fraud in Iran; Juan Cole backs the study up with some analysis. Violence has been amping up in Tehran over the last few days, with worse likely to come; an article in Time suggests that renewed violence may flare up on the 3rd, 7th, and 40th days following deaths like Neda Soltani's in accordance with Shi'ite mourning practice. This significantly complicates, Jason Zengerle argues, comparisons to Tiananmen.

The Big Picture continues to collected photos from Iran; here are the two most recent updates.

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.

Tuesday!

* Cold fusion is back. More here. We're saved!

* Radiology art. (Hat tip: Neil.)

* My pursuit of all Wes Anderson-flavored cultural ephemera has led me to this video from Company of Theives, as well as Tenenbaum Fail. Via Fimoculous.

* The first eleven episodes of Quantum Leap are up at NBC.com.

* Anarctica travel blog.

* Who was dead at your age?

Misc.

* The claim that 'independent researcher' Dr. John Casson has discovered six new plays by William Shakespeare (alias Sir Henry Neville alias Christopher Marlowe alias "Tony Nuts" alias Queen Elizabeth alias Harvey the Rabbit) is all over the place today—but my proof that Shakespeare/Newfield is a time-traveling Lizard Person born 3000 A.D. remains completely ignored by the fools in the MSM.

* (South) Indian Superman. I love this video.

* Gynomite! has sitcom maps of New York City and the U.S. There's more from Dan Meth, who started it all off with the trilogy meter from not that long ago.

* WSJ.com has the latest bracketological research into the science of upsets. See also: Nate Silver crunches the numbers on Obama's shameless bias towards universities in swing states.

* Scenes from the recession, at the Big Picture.

* And a short piece at BBC News considers the science in science fiction. Of the four, Paul Cornell's gesture towards satire seems by far richest to me, especially with regard to its Darko Suvinian disdain for fantasy:

The mundane movement is challenging writers to drop ideas that once promised to be scientific ones, but are now considered as fantasy - faster than light travel, telepathy etc - and to concentrate on the problems of the human race being confined to an Earth it is using up.

But this is as much an artistic movement as an ethical one. The existence of such a movement, though, suggests that science fiction feels a sense of mission.

Unlike its cousin, fantasy, it wants to be talking about the real world in ways other than metaphorical.

One of the problems is that where once there was a consensus view, broadly, of what the future was going to be like - bases on the Moon, robots etc - post-Cold War chaos leaves everyone thrashing around, having to invent the future anew.

Artificial intelligence, aliens and easy space travel just haven't shown up. They may never do so.

It's an exciting moment, but the genre needs to be strong to survive it, and see off fantasy's vast land grabs of the territory of the stranded human heart.

UPDATE: Paul responds in the comments to this notion of disdain:

Just to be clear: I love fantasy as much as SF, but we asked to talk about some of the current issues facing, specifically, SF. I think fantasy's done really well lately, and that SF has to respond to match it. No anti-fantasy thing going on there with me at all.

The Big Picture, Blog of the Year 2008 by almost any measure, makes an early bid for Blog of the Year 2009 with pictures of people at work.

More links because if there's one thing I hate it's getting done the things I planned to get done.

* Huge gigapixel panorama of the inauguration, with very close zoom.

* The Obameter tracks 500 of Obama's campaign promises.

(both of those via Cynical-C)

* More inaugural poem talk from the New Republic and Edge of the American West.

* Obama reminds Republicans that he actually won the election and that in fact they have no credibility at all. Also, that Rush Limbaugh is a tool.

* And Time considers the future of the publishing biz.

So if the economic and technological changes of the 18th century gave rise to the modern novel, what's the 21st century giving us? Well, we've gone from industrialized printing to electronic replication so cheap, fast and easy, it greases the skids of literary production to the point of frictionlessness. From a modern capitalist marketplace, we've moved to a postmodern, postcapitalist bazaar where money is increasingly optional. And in place of a newly minted literate middle class, we now have a global audience of billions, with a literacy rate of 82% and rising.

Put these pieces together, and the picture begins to resolve itself: more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City's entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.

The Big Picture comes through with its inevitable, much-needed dose of inauguration porn.

Thursday links while I should be doing other things. Also, for the tiny handful of Final Crisis fans out there&mash;spoiler alert.

* DC is pretending they've killed off Batman. It's adorable.

* Was Che Guevara "a type of Batman"? So claims Benico del Toro.

* Superuseless superpowers. Via Kottke. "13th Bullet Bulletproof" made me laugh.

* In my email: the Wikipedia page for the hilarious sounding but actually fairly tragic Boston Molasses Disaster.

Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Here and there struggled a form — whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was... Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings — men and women — suffered likewise.

* Earth from space. Just another awesome post from the Big Picture.

* Obama's people: portraits of 52 top members of the Obama team.

* Did the Victorian novel make us better people? Will computer screens kill literacy? What's going to happen all the white people? And is there life on Mars?

Malcolm Gladwell gets a smackdown from The Morning News. Whedon says more Dr. Horrible on the way. What happens when a space elevator breaks. How exactly it was you came to fall in love with the majesty of colors. 3-D representations of 2-D video games. Scenes from Gaza. Bush White House precisely as dickish as originally thought.

The Big Picture has your daily dose of space shuttle porn. In 2009 I'm going to switch things up and link to The Big Picture only when it isn't completely great.

The Big Picture has your year in review in three parts.



January: Cthulhu awakes, is angry.



February: Toy Story fandom hits an all-time high.



March: America learns the hard way you can't kill fire with a gun.



April: Finland's Harri Olli does it wrong.







May-July: Superpowers develop, are immediately misused.



August: NASA fakes another moon landing.



September: Even weirder stuff starts to happen.



October: Obama challenges Agent Smith to a final duel in the rain.



November: The world ends.



December: George Bush hobbles out of office a defeated, broken man. And there was much rejoicing.

Bad Astronomy has your top ten astronomy pictures 2008.

The Big Picture has characteristically stunning pictures of Guantánamo Bay.

It was forty-five years ago today.

Your daily dose of apocalypse: images of the California wildfires at The Big Picture.

Blog of the year The Big Picture visits the bottom of the world.