Sid Meier wants to destroy your productivity forever.

Thursday night links!

* I saw Zombieland tonight and was impressed with how well America kept its Big Cameo secret. (I won't spoil things either.) The movie itself is pretty fun, if less funny than it thinks and a little cartoonish at times. I find in general that I prefer my zombie movies to be psychologically realistic and thematically bleak, with roughly two-thirds of the film devoted to the building of systematic fortifications and the last third devoted to the spectacular destruction of said fortifications.

* This is a great blog and Imma let you finish, but MetaFilter has the best Balloon Boy thread of all time. Don't miss what could be the exciting start of Phase 2: "You guys said we did it for the show."

* Why Your Idea to Save Journalism Won't Work.

* Nice to see Mad Men getting some press in the Atlantic, but couldn't they have found someone who actually gets the show?

Mad Men’s most egregious stumble—though seemingly a small one—involves Betty Draper’s college career, and it is generally emblematic of this extraordinarily accomplished show’s greatest weaknesses, and specifically emblematic of its confused approach to this poorly defined character. Betty, the show establishes, was in a sorority. So far, okay. Pretty, with a little-girl voice and a childlike, almost lobotomized affect; humorless; bland but at times creepily calculating (as when she seeks solace by manipulating her vulnerable friend into an affair); obsessed with appearances and therefore lacking in inner resources; a consistently cold and frequently vindictive mother; a daddy’s girl—Betty is written, and clumsily performed by model-turned-actress January Jones, as a clichéd shallow sorority sister. (Just as Don’s self-invented identity is Gatsby-like, so Betty, his wife, is a jejune ornament like Daisy, though without the voice full of money.) But she’s also a character deeply wronged by her serial-philanderer husband, and she’s hazily presented as a stultified victim of soulless postwar suburban ennui (now there’s a cliché). So, perhaps to bestow gravitas on her, or at least some upper-classiness, the show establishes that she went to Bryn Mawr. But of course Bryn Mawr has never had sororities. By far the brainiest of the Seven Sisters—cussed, straight-backed, high-minded, and feminist (its students, so the wags said, preferred the Ph.D. to the Mrs.)—Bryn Mawr was probably the least likely college that Betty Draper, given to such non-U genteelisms as “passed away,” would have attended. So much for satiric exactitude.

As I complained in the MeFi thread, Betty's problem isn't that she's bland, humorless, or stupid but that she hates her life.

* Chicago and the Great Flood of 1992.

* How the Freaknomics authors blew a chapter on climate change in the book's new sequel, Superfreakonomics.

* “The original Gauntlet was released with no ending. The hundred or so levels were randomised and looped for as long as play lasted. Atari saw Gauntlet as a process, a game that was played for its own sake and not to reach completion. The adventurers continue forever until their life drains out, their quest ultimately hopeless.”

Tuesday!

* Elsewhere in actually existing media bias: Rupert Murdoch supposedly wants to buy NBC Universal, for what I can only assume is pure spite.

* Yesterday's bogus insurance industry "bombshell" seems to have backfired, galvanizing support for reform and making the passage of some sort of public option more likely. Olympia Snowe just cast a vote for the Senate Finance Committee bill on its way out of committee, saying, "When history calls, history calls."

* This American Life is doing back-to-back shows on the same topic (health care) for the first time in its history this week and next. This week's episode on the doctor- and patient-side pressure that contribute to rising costs is quite good, if perhaps a bit generous to the insurance companies; next week's episode, promisingly entitled "Somebody Else's Money," will focus on the insurance companies themselves.

* If classic games had achievements.

* At the core of the C.T.E. research is a critical question: is the kind of injury being uncovered by McKee and Omalu incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

In 2000 and 2001, four drivers in Nascar’s élite Sprint Cup Series were killed in crashes, including the legendary Dale Earnhardt. In response, Nascar mandated stronger seats, better seat belts and harnesses, and ignition kill switches, and completed the installation of expensive new barriers on the walls of its racetracks, which can absorb the force of a crash much better than concrete. The result is that, in the past eight years, no one has died in Nascar’s three national racing series. Stock-car fans are sometimes caricatured as bloodthirsty, eagerly awaiting the next spectacular crash. But there is little blood these days in Nascar crashes. Last year, at Texas Motor Speedway, Michael McDowell hit an oil slick, slammed head first into the wall at a hundred and eighty miles per hour, flipped over and over, leaving much of his car in pieces on the track, and, when the vehicle finally came to a stop, crawled out of the wreckage and walked away. He raced again the next day. So what is football? Is it dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?

* And bad news, everyone: we're post SF again.

Tuesday night.

* First on the Threatdown: coyotes!

* Winooski, Vermont: Great Domed City of the North.

* "How Health Care Reform Won."

* Is Metroid Prime the Citizen Kane of video games? Hard to pick Metroid Prime over, say, Ocarina of Time, just in the GameCube category alone.

* CNN, always three weeks behind the story, asks whether Obama has lost his mojo in the very moment it becomes apparent that his polls numbers are again rising.

* Also in poll news: contrary to Nate Silver's recent NJ-GOV analysis it does seem clear that Corzine is moving sharply upward in the polls.



* "Wall Street’s Near-Death Experience."

* And Life celebrates dumb inventions of the 1950s and '60s.

Thursday!

* Is Tim Pawlenty the candidate to beat in the 2012 Republican primary? Some followup here and here suggesting maybe not.

* I liked this post from Matt Yglesias on the Alan Grayson "scandal" and rhetorical moralism in American politics.

* Matt also thinks TMBG needs more science studies.

* Winds shifting: Reid promises a public option. But Orrin Hatch has declared that bills with less than 70 votes don't count.

* Stephen Joyce has lost his lawsuit with English professor Carol Loeb Shloss. Tim is glad.

* Wes Anderson is coming under fire from his fans for apparently signing a pro-Roman-Polanski petition. People I admire really need to stop signing petitions.

* Classic old-school video game The Incredible Machine is now a $10 download.

George Romero, novelist. But there's something I'm not sure about:

Publisher Vicki Mellor said that zombies were "one of the new buzz words in publishing". "I think that the world is ready to re-embrace the zombie culture - after the massive amount of vampire novels that have been published, it's time for a change of antagonist," she said. "We are very aware that there is going to be an explosion of zombie novels being published over the next year, but we absolutely believe that we have the definitive novel from the one author whom every fan of the genre will want to read."

There's been a big-budget zombie movie every year since 28 Days Later in 2002, and that's not even getting started on video games, comics, and some already successful novel franchises. The zombie bubble is clearly about to burst; I'm urging strong sell on zombies and buy on the Wolfman.

So I've passed my exams. (Hooray!) This should free up some much needed time for playing World of Goo. (Hooray!) Sincere thanks for all the best-wishes; if I can ask, please direct all future "good thoughts" towards my dissertation (expected completion date May 2017).

Game of the night: Max Connect.

Saturday links.

* Fox News caught stage-managing 9/12 protestors.

* Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, speaking to fellow members of his Conservative Party: "Fifty years from today, Americans will revere the name, 'Obama.' Because like his Canadian predecessors, he chose the tough responsibilities of national leadership over the meaningless nostrums of sterile partisanship that we see too much of in Canada and around the world."

* Also at TPM: new polling data suggests that resistance to health care reform peaked at the emergence of the town hall disruptions, suggesting this strategy may have backfired for the Republicans.

* Also backfiring on the Republicans: everything. More here and here.

* Game of the weekend: MagnetiZR.

* Cynical-C catches Kids in the Hall parodying Glenn Beck over a decade in advance.

* Collapse IV, "Concept Horror," is a free download.

* Between 2010 and 2050 each $7 spent on basic family planning can reduce emissions more than a ton; to achieve that same level of reduction using low-carbon tech would on average cost $32 per ton. Via Donkeylicious.

* Great find: Virginia Woolf's fan letter to Olaf Stapledon. Via Kim Stanley Robinson's New Scientist piece on British SF.

Cracked has a Photoshop feature titled "If Video Games Were Realistic."

Day after Labor Day links.

* The U.S. drops to second-place in international competitiveness, behind the hated Swiss.

* Food flags.

* Washington Monthly foretells the death of the university in favor of trade schools like ITT. MeFi debates.

* Also at MeFi: Google Maps Monopoly and a time-travel linkdump.

* Gawker reports Facebook makes you smart and Twitter makes you stupid. Be advised.

* And a commenter on my Flickr account asks the real question: what's a young George W. Bush doing in my current blog icon?

Took a long nap today. That wasn't bad. Here are some links.

* Lots of speculation today about what sort of health care bill could actually come out of the reconciliation sausage factory. Meanwhile, the always-wrong Politico is once again reporting Obama will back off the public option entirely.

* Game of the night: Canabalt.

* Classic SF of the night: John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There" (1938), the inspiration for John Carpenter's The Thing.

* Man Men has already been renewed for a fourth season.

* Cheney '12!

* To boldly go where no one has gone before does not require coming home again. Lawrence Kraus, formerly of Case Western, writes about the possibility of one-way trips to Mars in The New York Times. Taking the neg is this Metafilter commenter:

Yes, you have to bring them back. Otherwise, what's the point of the trip, to prove that you can shoot people into space to die? We already know how to do that.

Yes, helplessly listening to people die on Mars would certainly be horrible. But if we could keep them alive, or better yet, independent and (quasi-)sustainable, that would be amazing. And, I think, worth the risk and costs.

* Four-year-old Fantastic Four franchise to be rebooted already. In the future franchises will be rebooted before the first film even comes out.

As promised, some Sunday links.

* Jon Stewart had odious liar Betsy McCaughey on his show Thursday night, and you should watch it; video at Crooks & Liars. Kevin Drum says Stewart shouldn't have had her on at all; I think the video made McCaughey look terrible and in that sense was an important public service.

* Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica.

* Mandatory pre-Mad-Men reading: Pandagon's defense of Betty Draper.

* Have we reached Peak Crazy? Fox forces Glenn Beck to take a vacation.

* Responding to Krugman, Glenn Greenwald considers whether Obama has lost the trust of progressives. More on the latest polls showing progressives' loss of faith from Steve Benen, while Matt Yglesias ponders the meaning of GOP approval numbers that "appear to be stuck near some kind of theoretical minimum" and TPM reports Sarah Palin winning the all-important Birther primary.

* Margaret Atwood blogs her book tour.

* Cynical-C has the trailer for Michael Moore's next film, Capitalism: A Love Story.

* Lt. William Calley has apologized for the My Lai massacre, though the MetaFilter thread suggests there may be significantly less here than meets the eye.

"In October 2007, Calley agreed to be interviewed by the UK newspaper the Daily Mail to discuss the massacre, saying, "Meet me in the lobby of the nearest bank at opening time tomorrow, and give me a certified cheque for $25,000, then I'll talk to you for precisely one hour." When the journalist "showed up at the appointed hour, armed not with a cheque but a list of pertinent questions", Calley left."

* Also at MetaFilter: SIGG admits to misleading the public about its water bottles and BPA.

* Inglourious Basterds as alternate history.

* Game of the night: Max Damage.

* And the Smart Set looks at The Martian Chronicles in the context of 1960s optimism and the New Frontier. My Writing 20 for the spring ("Writing the Future") begins there as well (though with Star Trek instead of Bradbury) before veering off into The Dispossessed and, later, Dollhouse.

Thursday night!

* President Edwards prepares to resign the presidency tonight after admitting he had lied about the fathering of Rielle Hunter's baby during the third debate with John McCain. Vice President Barack Obama is expected to assume the presidency tomorrow morning.

* Paul Krugman, legendary futurist?

* Luck, math, and how to win at gambling.

* What's hot: potbellies!

* Multitask: the game. Note: you will hate this game.

* On the cinematography of Mad Men. Nice video to get you ready for the third season.

* Behold, NASA's secret plan to move the Earth.

Hence the group’s decision to try to save Earth. ‘All you have to do is strap a chemical rocket to an asteroid or comet and fire it at just the right time,’ added Laughlin. ‘It is basic rocket science.’

The plan has one or two worrying aspects, however. For a start, space engineers would have to be very careful about how they directed their asteroid or comet towards Earth. The slightest miscalculation in orbit could fire it straight at Earth – with devastating consequences.

What could possibly go wrong? (Not a hoax. Via Occasional Fish.)

* Behold, the banned Family Guy episode.

* Nerdivore points out District 9 is getting great reviews.

* GLAAD flunks SyFy.

* And a physicist at Slate says The Time Traveler's Wife checks out.

Sunday links! May include Saturday links at no additional charge.

* Last night we saw the very nice Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul exhibit at the Met (on advice of AskMetaFilter) and then saw Apatow's Funny People. What I appreciated most about the Met exhibit is the "West of What?" attitude implicit in the presentation of the history of the Silk Road; what I appreciated least about Funny People were the thirty minutes of excess footage Apatow refused to cut. But I laughed

* How violence against women still doesn't register in our national consciousness —a must-read op-ed from Bob Herbert. I can't help thinking of "The Screwfly Solution" by James Tiptree, Jr. / Alice Sheldon, in which a (literal) plague of misogyny goes largely unchallenged because it is couched in the language of patriarchal religion.

* It's not a new story, but North Korea's abduction of Japanese citizens and their subsequent staggeringly dishonest handling of the situation is truly stunning.

* "Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire And Ten Steps to Take to Do So." By Chalmers Johnson, via MeFi. The first of the ten steps is a nice example of the securitization rhetoric surrounding climate change, in which climate change is reframed as a national security issue and in the process depoliticized; today's New York Times approaches the issue in this way as well. The problem is that the struggle to protect the environment can't be depoliticized; in a finite world of limited resources there is no political question more basic than how we should distribute ecological costs. Securitization/depoliticization obscures the reality of the decision being made, to the benefit of the already privileged and the detriment of everybody else.

* More Mad Men teases from Salon and the New York Times.

* This Is the Only Level: a game.

It's Friday night; time for Demolition City.

LucasArts teasing the long-awaited return of the X-Wing video game franchise. I would pay any price for this game.

Still busy. Here's Tuesday's links.

* Sesame Street will parody Mad Men. Everyone is excited.

* Old-school Tweetspeak at the New York Times.

The 140-character limit of Twitter posts was guided by the 160-character limit established by the developers of SMS. However, there is nothing new about new technology imposing restrictions on articulation. During the late 19th-century telegraphy boom, some carriers charged extra for words longer than 15 characters and for messages longer than 10 words. Thus, the cheapest telegram was often limited to 150 characters.

Concerns for economy, as well as a desire for secrecy, fueled a boom in telegraphic code books that reduced both common and complex phrases into single words. Dozens of different codes were published; many catered to specific occupations and all promised efficiency.

* Mountain Dew as engine fuel.

* Play Pixel. You'll never want to do anything else.

* Right now, Detroit is as close as any city in America to becoming a food desert, not just another metropolis like Chicago, Philadelphia, or Cleveland with a bunch of small- and medium-sized food deserts scattered about, but nearly a full-scale, citywide food desert. (A food desert is defined by those who study them as a locality from which healthy food is more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head of lettuce.) About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.

Detroiters who live close enough to suburban borders to find nearby groceries carrying fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables are a small minority of the population. The health consequences of food deserts are obvious and dire. Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, and obesity are chronic in Detroit, and life expectancy is measurably lower than in any American city.

* Glenn Beck in CYA mode.

* How do Americans spend their day?

I enjoyed this post from Matthew Baldwin at Infinite Summer about the somewhat limited appeal of IJ as it relates to Baldwin's to child-of-the-'80s nuclear nostalgia, especially the footnote on Eschaton and Eschaton-like games. As the recent solo winner of an email game of Diplomacy, I can back this description up:

Diplomacy (board, 5-7 players): The great-grandfather of negotiation games, which numbers among its fans John F. Kennedy’s, Henry Kissinger, and Walter Cronkite. (No joke.). Though set in the early 20th century, the back-stabbing, treachery, and deceit necessary to win Diplomacy are as underhanded as hitting a Kittenplan in the back of the head with a 5-megaton thermonuclear weapon. WARNING: Do not play with anyone you cannot afford to hate forever.

Great game. And of course it goes without saying that my victory was achieved through completely legitimate tactics and was in no way tainted by deceit. Right: The Grand Empire of Gerrytopia.

Wednesday catchup.

* Rest in peace, Rosie the Riveter.

* Dollhouse tease: Joss will write and direct the premiere.

* Transformers FAQ. Spoiler alert:

I am already incredibly sick of this movie, and I'm just typing questions about it. Sam resurrects Optimus, Optimus kills the Fallen, end of story, right?
Pretty close. Sam dies, though.

Really?
Yeah, for a little while. But then the Transformers in heaven send him back because he still has work to do.

Fuck you.
I'm serious.

Fuck you. There's no way.
It's true. The 6-7 Primes are there in the clouds like Mufasa's head in The Lion King, and tell Sam he's awesome and he needs to live again so he can bring Optimus back to life.

* MMORGS and sociology: "City of Heroes character 'Twixt' becomes game's most hated outcast courtesy of Loyola professor." Via MeFi.

* "Judgment Day," famous anti-racist EC comic from 1953, controversial in its day, at Comics Should Be Good: