Wednesday catchup 2.

* Duke University researchers have proven that Barack Obama kills Republican boners.

* Also in Republican news: only 1 in 5 Americans now identify as a Republican. These numbers are terrible. It's hard to believe, but could we really be seeing the end of the GOP?

* An interview with the prop master for Mad Men.

* Chasing down the earliest common ancestor and the secret of abiogenesis. More at MeFi.

* From universal literacy to universal authorship?

* The House Next Door reviews The Yes Men Save the World, saying it's everything Capitalism: A Love Story wasn't.

With delightful wit, the Yes Men are saying, “Yes, we can!” to the making of a better world, doing what’s right on behalf of the corporations that do so much wrong. Instead of the Moore strategy of passively shaming, they actively participate in change, as when Bichlbaum, in the guise of a Dow Chemical spokesman, goes on the BBC in front of 300 million viewers to announce that the Bhopal catastrophe, the largest industrial accident in history, will finally be cleaned up by his employer. This simple act is a million times more radical and risk-taking than Moore’s noisily wielding a bullhorn in front of AIG headquarters. Moore may be responsible for the highest grossing documentary of all time, but not one of his films ever led to a two billion dollar drop in share prices in 23 minutes as this Yes Men stunt did!

* Lionel Shriver: "I sold my family for a novel." I had no idea this market existed! Obviously this is why my novel has stalled.

I've decided to radically alter every aspect of my life from diet to exercise to procrastinative laziness, beginning today. Let's start with some blogging.

* I'm with Alex Greenberg: why were judges ever allowed to rule on cases concerning major campaign contributors? For that matter, why are jurisdictions still electing their judges? It's nuts.

* Also on the legal front: I'm beginning to suspect that "judicial activism" is just an empty buzzword designed to discredit court decisions the right-wing doesn't like.

* Almost seventy percent of Americans support allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the military. What the hell is Obama waiting for?

* George Dvorsky on the top ten existential movies of all time. (Thanks, Bill!) It's a good list, but when your top ten list of existentialist film is missing The Seventh Seal it's time to consider whether limiting yourself to English-language film was a wise choice.

* Blogging wasteland: According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled. (Thanks, Steve!)

* Kids today have it easy; in my day, we had send professors corrupted files we'd made ourselves. And what happened to pretending to forget to attach the document? Too low-tech for you?

* 'Manufactured Controversy': A new report by Free Exchange on Campus, a coalition of groups opposed to David Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" and similar measures, argues that the entire movement is built on false premises and is designed to attack higher education.

* Enjoyed this from Boing Boing: lecture from Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky on evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality, arguing by analogy to sickle cell that schizophrenia is the hypertrophic result of genes that in isolation reward their holder with feverous religious certainty. I've become increasingly skeptical of attempts to map every feature of human existence onto genomic evolutionary pressure—and Sapolsky's lecture is much more speculative than empirical—but it's an interesting notion.

I had a nasty case of food poisoning or something last night—fever, chills, the whole bit. But now I'm back and quite literally better than ever. A few links to celebrate my recovery:

* Early reviews of Dollhouse remain mixed. We'll know tomorrow....

* This YouTube clip (via MeFi) captures just the barest sliver of the greatness of the Conan DVD commentary. It is our civilization's highest cultural achievement.

* The trailer for the new Tarantino is out.

* How to teach non-canonical material responsibly in a composition class: lesson plans from Scott Eric Kaufman on Dark Knight and Watchmen.

* Two satellites have collided in orbit. Apparently that's never happened before. More from MeFi.

* Happy birthday, Charles Darwin. More from Satisfactory Comics.

Monday!

* Almost as if they all receive their talking points from a single, central location, the entire right-wing spin machine has spontaneously decided to start talking about how the New Deal didn't actually work. Uh, sure.

* The first link doesn't make the absurdity clear, but Karl Rove is Twittering.

* Also in alternate-universe news: George Bush: Greatest President.

To prove his point, Barnes points to Bush's "ten great achievements":

1. Bush stood up to "global warming hysteria," and helped undermine the agenda of "alarmists."
2. He endorsed "enhanced interrogation," "secret prisons," and "wireless eavesdropping."
3. He seized unprecedented executive authority, and ignored congressional attempts at oversight.
4. He offered "unswerving support for Israel."
5. He signed the No Child Left Behind initiative.
6. He delivered his second inaugural address.
7. He signed the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
8. He pushed the Supreme Court even further to the right.
9. He improved U.S. relations with Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
10. He created a "fragile but functioning democracy" in Iraq.

You'll note Barnes is padding his list just a bit—delivering a second inaugural address is sort of light for a "top ten accomplishments" list, as is "improved relations with Australia."

* Also via Washington Monthly, Jon Swift has your retort.

* Not capturing Osama bin Laden isn't on Barnes's list, but Cheney tells us that doesn't matter.

Today on CNN’s Late Edition, host Wolf Blitzer asked Vice President Cheney, “How frustrating is this to you personally, knowing he’s [bin Laden] still at large?” Cheney hesitated, then simply replied that he would “obviously…like to solve that problem.” He added that it’s more “important” to “keep…this country safe,” indicating that bin Laden is inconsequential.

* North Carolina in the news! The Brunswick school district wants to teach creationism to kids. In 2008.

"I wasn't here 2 million years ago," Fanti said. "If evolution is so slow, why don't we see anything evolving now?"

There's your evidence.

* Eight reasons why we are in a depression.

* Half of world’s population could face climate-driven food crisis by 2100.

* After ten days of not sleeping, Randy Gardner was able to hold a press conference and beat a journalist at pinball. Note: this happened forty-four years ago, but I just found out about it yesterday.

Female dolphins have begun to use tools. Can invasion be far behind?

As best the researchers can tell, a single dolphin may have invented the technique relatively recently and taught it to her kin. The simple innovation dramatically changed their behavior, hunting habits and social life, the researchers found. Those that adopted it became loners who spend much more time on the hunt than others and dive more deeply in search of prey. The sponging dolphins teach the technique to all their young, but only the females seem to grasp the idea.

"It is indisputably tool use," says primate anthropologist Craig Stanford at the University of Southern California, an authority on animal cognition and behavior who wasn't part of the dolphin research group. "Despite the fact they lack hands and legs, dolphins make do."

For those seeking a glimpse of our own beginnings, the dolphins of Shark Bay offer a hint of the inventive impulse when our earliest ancestors first shaped destiny by fashioning implements with their own hands.

Via MeFi.

Afternoonery.

* Support for renewable energy technology to fight global warming is weakening in the face of worldwide economic problems and the true scale of the carbon reductions required, a survey published today has suggested.

Figures presented at the UN climate talks in Poznan, Poland, show that climate experts have less faith in alternative energy than they did 12 months ago.

* Grist reviews 2008's most essential book on shit.

* DFW's last book will be published next year, based off the Kenyon College commence speech he gave in 2005. Devotees may recall that this speech was the basis for my MetaFilter obit post.

* Everyone's in love with this evolved Mona Lisa. More evolution fun at Pharyngula and MetaFilter.

* Everyone's in love with Macs.

* Don't miss Metallica's latest music video, a prophecy of zombie disaster originating with the Tungska Event.

A few random links of the sort that's been crowded out by Obamania.

* Kevin Kelly is looking for evidence of a global superorganism.

* Fire > language: Humans built fires 500 thousand years before they could speak.

* Haruki Murakami: "We are living in the future now, in a kind of science fiction - 9/11 itself was kind of unreal to me, those images of planes diving into the buildings. I felt like I stepped into the wrong world." I've felt that way about nearly everything since the 2000 election, to be honest.

* The Apocalypse according to Dan Clowes.

* Cosmic apocalypses at Discover.

Playing catch-up.

* Al Giordano reports good news out of Virginia, where Obama has taken an unexpected lead. Flipping VA and NM to Obama and flipping IA to McCain (which admittedly looks unlikely at this point) is, incidentally, one of the many combinations resulting in a 269-269 tie, which would throw the election to the House and cause a legal clusterflunk of epic proportions. (As of right now, we'd win, but it would make 2000 look pretty.)

* Also in politics, people are taking notice of what I've been saying since the primaries: Claire McCaskill is a better surrogate for Obama than just about anybody in the business. Oh, and Obama gave McCain a much-needed bloody nose on the "fundamentals" line.

* The long-neglected art of Iron Man fan fiction has finally been perfected.

* Bad news for veggietopia: eating vegetables shrinks the brain.

* They've found the 20-ft. fence that used to keep the rabble away from Stonehenge.

* I don't trust anyone with a real job in the banking industry, but this shocked even me: Citibank was caught flat-out stealing $14 million from its customers.

* Congratulations, George Takei.

* The Church of England apologizes to Charles Darwin.

* The David Foster Wallace memorial thread I posted to MetaFilter went really well, I thought. So did MetaTalk. Here's something else for the collection—a DFW reading from UC-TV, via my editor at the Indy.



* And the Big Picture has stunning photographs of the 2008 Paralympic Games.

Day -5 news roundup.

* Evolution has been demonstrated in laboratory conditions. This is actually a pretty impressive experiment involving 12 separate E. coli colonies over twenty years; after three mutations and 40,000 generations, one of the lines developed the ability to eat citrate. More discussion at Daily Kos.

* Robert Pinsky on the poetics of Zork.

I believe that the poetics of Zork and its modern descendants tell us more about the literary potential of the computer than we could learn from any amount of ambitious literary theorizing. At the beginning of Zork, the player-reader faces a small, empty house, on a barren plain: a visible territory that can be walked over by entering a handful of keyboard commands. But ah! -- after looking under the carpet, and opening the trapdoor, and descending and entering the tunnel: then one sees the world of Zork unfold outward into an immense network of concentric chambers, looping passageways, branching and terraced corridors. The map of this voluminous (if monotonous) universe was itself gigantic. Primitive though this world was, it would become absorbing, even transporting. A successful artist recently said to me, looking back on a time of great psychological stress, "Zork kept me alive."

* Carville floats Al Gore for VP. I think this is a fantastic idea whose excellence is mitigated only by its sheer impossibility.

* Everyone's linking to the J.K. Rowling Harvard speech. I think it's mandatory.

* Kevin "Out of Control" Kelly introduces me to a new term: scenius, the specie of genius devoted to mastery of a cultural scene.

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or "scenes" can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: "Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius."

Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.

The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

• Mutual appreciation -- Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques -- As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
• Network effects of success -- When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
• Local tolerance for the novelties -- The local "outside" does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.

* And even President Bush admits he's been a terrible, terrible president. Well, almost:

In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”

Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”.

He's absolutely right, of course—it's his rhetoric that was the problem.

A few links before I head back to class, all but the last from the good people at MetaFilter:

* 'Striking Out': On the surprising failure of labor stoppage in America. (thread)

* The lie at the bottom of the fantasy goes something like this: serious college football players go to college for some reason other than to play football. These marvelous athletes who take the field on Saturdays and generate millions for their colleges are students first, and football players second. They are like Franciscan monks set down in the gold mine. Yes, they play football, but they have no interest in the money. What they’re really living for is that degree in criminology.

Of course, no honest person who has glimpsed the inside of a big-time college football program could actually believe this. (thread)

* Elena Dorfman photographs the strange worlds of cosplay and RealDolls. (thread)

* John Scalzi goes inside the Creation Museum. Here are photos. (thread)

* The Obama speech that's got everyone Baracking again.

Two trips to the creation museum (so you don't have to): Ars Technica (with Flickr set ) and BlueGrassRoot. Via Cynical-C and Crooks & Liars.

Strange Maps is just about exactly what it sounds like, but it's also the most fun specialty blog I've visited in a good while. Where else are you going to find the the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World, which proves Sweden's status as secular paradise in graph form, plus a mapping of Middle-Earth onto Regular-Europe, a mapping of how evolution is taught in the U.S., the world as seen from 9th Avenue, Tatooine, and the most generic country ever? At right: Inside the Hollow Earth.

Via Cynical-C, which this morning also brings us "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as performed by choir.

Complimenting "How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic", Cynical-C links to talk.origins's massive Index of Creationist Claims.