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.

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.

If I'm reading this article correctly, science has proven that emotion is merely a special case of smelling.

Wednesday night quadruple threat.

* Maybe my favorite science story ever: A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the [Large Hadron Collider] before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather. I love this story so much I don't care that they're only half-serious.

* Why Are Insurers Exempt From Antitrust Laws? Ezra Klein investigates in light of Harry Reid's statements on the Senate floor today.

* Wes responds to his FMF critics. (Via Eli Glasner)

* One thing that's being lost in all this discussion of the Saudi proposal that oil-producing nations be compensated for declines in oil demand is, as Jaimee reported for the Indy not that long ago, energy companies in the U.S. want the same thing.

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.

Reading Kafka makes you smarter, says a headline at Science Daily. Does this mean English departments matter again?

Fact: America loves They Might Be Giants.

Paging David Horowitz: "[O]ur results suggest that postmodernism, rather than science, is the bête noir—the strongest antagonist—of religiosity." Via @traxus4420.

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.

Catching up from travel back to NC tonight. Here are a few random links.

* Why aren’t universities spending their endowments?

* 'Sci-Fi Writer Attributes Everything Mysterious To "Quantum Flux."'

A reading of Gabriel Fournier's The Eclipse Of Infinity reveals that the new science-fiction novel makes more than 80 separate references to "quantum flux," a vaguely defined force the author uses to advance the plot, resolve conflict as needed, and account for dozens of glaring inconsistencies.

* Ten things we don't understand about humans.

* The world's oldest map?

* Jared Diamond has lunch with the Financial Times.

With a nod to the feast before us, I say there seems little chance that Chinese or Indians will forgo the opportunity to live a western-style existence. Why should they? It is even more improbable that westerners will give up their resource-hungry lifestyles. Diamond, for example, is not a vegetarian, though he knows a vegetable diet is less hard on the planet. “I’m inconsistent,” he shrugs. But if we can’t supply more or consume less, doesn’t that mean that, like the Easter Islander who chopped down the last tree, thus condemning his civilisation to extinction, we are doomed to drain our oceans of fish and empty our soil of nutrients?

“No. It is our choice,” he replies, perhaps subconsciously answering his critics again. “If we continue to operate non-sustainably, then in 50 or 60 years, the US and Japan and Europe will be in bad shape. But my friends in the highlands of New Guinea will be fine. Some of my friends made stone tools when they were children and they could just go back to what their ancestors were doing for 46,000 years. New Guinea highlanders are not doomed,” he says, draining his pomegranate juice. “The first world lifestyle will be doomed if we don’t learn to operate sustainably.”

* And the line between fake news and real news continues to blur.

Wow, things got away from me today. Here's your massive Monday linkdump #1.

* As every other blog on the Internet has already told you, Slate now allows you to Choose Your Own Apocalypse. Also at Slate: four futures.

* Another story you've probably seen all over today: "College Grad Sues College Because She Can't Find a Job." Watch your back, Duke.

* Birthers are funny.

* I had been led to believe that redheads' resistance to anesthesia was the result of superpowers, but now I discover it comes from their superweakness.

* This week in corporate logos: why Coke is better that Pepsi.

Wednesday afternoon links 2!

* Wikipedia's Rorschach cheat sheet. My contempt for the discipline of psychology really got in the way of my reading this article; I kept thinking, "Wait, people actually take Rorschach tests seriously?"

* For more information on my feelings about the Rorschach test see the story I published in Five Fingers Review #23 (now defunct). Note: I'm not sure this issue ever actually materialized. I never got a copy.

* Two takes on how to improve your teaching: restructure your expectations about college composition and teach naked.

* If I'm reading this article correctly, M&Ms cure spinal injury.

* The only rule at Fox News is that there are no rules.

* NPR considers the uncanny intelligence of crows. Via MeFi, which has more in the comments, including video of crows exploiting traffic patterns in Tokyo to crack nuts.

But criminal forensics has a deeper problem of basic validity. Bite marks, blood-splatter patterns, ballistics, and hair, fiber and handwriting analysis sound compelling in the courtroom, but much of the “science” behind forensic science rests on surprisingly shaky foundations. Many well-established forms of evidence are the product of highly subjective analysis by people with minimal credentials—according to the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, no advanced degree is required for a career in forensics. And even the most experienced and respected professionals can come to inaccurate conclusions, because the body of research behind the majority of the forensic sciences is incomplete, and the established methodologies are often inexact. “There is no scientific foundation for it,” says Arizona State University law professor Michael Saks. “As you begin to unpack it you find it’s a lot of loosey-goosey stuff.”

Forensic "science": Popular Mechanics explores the uneasy history of forensic science, developed (as the article's subhead puts it) "not developed by scientists" but by "cops who were guided by little more than common sense." Some truly eye-opening anecdotes here:

A 2006 study by the University of Southampton in England asked six veteran fingerprint examiners to study prints taken from actual criminal cases. The experts were not told that they had previously examined the same prints. The researchers’ goal was to determine if contextual information—for example, some prints included a notation that the suspect had already confessed—would affect the results. But the experiment revealed a far more serious problem: The analyses of fingerprint examiners were often inconsistent regardless of context. Only two of the six experts reached the same conclusions on second examination as they had on the first.

Ballistics has similar flaws. A subsection of tool-mark analysis, ballistics matching is predicated on the theory that when a bullet is fired, unique marks are left on the slug by the barrel of the gun. Consequently, two bullets fired from the same gun should bear the identical marks. Yet there are no accepted standards for what constitutes a match between bullets. Juries are left to trust expert witnesses. “‘I know it when I see it’ is often an acceptable response,” says Adina Schwartz, a law professor and ballistics expert with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Via MeFi, where commenters like Optimus Chyme point out the problems go much deeper:

I'm an avid reader of criminology textbooks; the best/most interesting book in my little collection is probably "Practical Homicide Investigation," 3rd edition. It is extremely detailed and well-researched and much beloved in the field.

And it has a chapter about psychics.

Not "this is bullshit and you should ignore it." A whole chapter that says, more or less "if you are really stuck, you might want to consult with a psychic." This is in the definitive homicide investigation handbook for professional law enforcement.

So, uh, no: I'm not very surprised by this.

Sunday links.

* How Neil Armstrong ruined science fiction.

* Increasing cell phone use may be largely responsible for highway fatality numbers that remain static in the face of widespread safety improvements. If you're looking for hyperbolic commentary on this subject, check out Matt Yglesias and the good people at MetaFilter, none of whom have ever used their cell phones while driving, of course not, no sir.

* Curing blindness by implanting a tooth in the eye. Also via MeFi.

* And Buster Bluth stars in Ctrl, about a man who can use keyboard commands to modify his life.

Friday morning and one week down!

* David Sedaris delivers a pizza.

* Stephen Colbert rightly demands that he be named worst person in the world. I certainly hope a Special Comment™ is forthcoming on this travesty.

* Confidential to climate change deniers: A headline that reads "Global Warming: Scientists' Best Predictions May Be Wrong" doesn't necessarily help your argument. See also. (Via Atrios.)

Tuesday Miscellany.

* Sarah Palin's controversial proposal to create a "Department of Law" with the power to block ethics claims against the president is turning a lot of heads this morning.

* I really want to read 1Q84.

* Swine flu: now more popular than Viagra.

* Steve Zissou: scientist.

* Another That Makes Me Think Of from Ze.

* We Are Wizards, a Harry Potter fandom documentary, with appearances from Brad Neely of Wizard People Dear Reader fame. (via @austinkleon)

Sunday night links.

* The flag at right (via MeFi) is the marriage equality flag, which only includes those states which allow gays and lesbians to marry.

* Return of a meme I haven't seen since the 1990s: the end of science.

* Krugman spills the beans on Al Franken's secret wonkitude. A reader of his books and an infrequent listener to his radio show, I can confirm this is true: he has a much sharper and more wide-ranging intellect than the press gives him credit for.

* The Nation gets excited about the rediscovery of Secular America.

Obama agreed and remained true to his word. And then came the moment approximately 50 million Americans-- who identify themselves with terms like agnostic, atheist, materialist, humanist, nontheist, skeptic, bright, freethinker, agnostic, naturalist, or non-believer -- will never forget. In his inauguration speech, Obama said, "…Our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers."

Like 50 million other Americans I tell my nonexistent children about the Great Inclusion every night. And then, together as one all across the nation, we weep from joy.

* Lev Milman, a Duke undergrad, has been named a chess grandmaster.

* Grant Morrison is apparently working on a comic that will highlight the undisguised bondage imagery that makes up to the Wonder Woman mythos. (More here and here.)

“Tell me anybody's preference in story strips and I'll tell you his subconscious desires... Superman and the army of male comics characters who resemble him satisfy the simple desire to be stronger and more powerful than anybody else. Wonder Woman satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them.”
—Dr. William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman

And why not another?

But Marston was intent on more than merely fulfilling the fantasies of his male readers. In a letter to comics historian Coulton Waugh, he wrote, "Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world." Marston believed that submission to "loving authority" was the key to overcoming mankind's violent urges, and that strong, self-realized women were the hope for a better future. Wonder Woman was very consciously Marston's means of spreading these notions to impressionable young minds. As he said to Olive Richard, "I tell you, my inquiring friend, there's great hope for this world. Women will win!" He then goes on, "When women rule, there won't be any more [war] because the girls won't want to waste time killing men...I regard that as the greatest - no, even more - as the only hope for permanent peace.”

* Also on the "comics and sex" beat: X-Men Rictor and Shatterstar are out and proud, prompting a promise from Shatterstar creator Rob Liefeld to "someday undo this."

Happy Canada Day. Let's celebrate with links.

* SEK considers Infinite Summer's weird morbidity (yes, it is weird), as well as the murky fluidity that constitutes literary "generations." Despite the many other projects that already threaten to consume July I've decided to halfheartedly participate in this, and may even post about once I've caught up to where I'm supposed to already be in the book.

* "Pseudo-Liveblogging Tenure Denial": just reading the headline is enough to fill me with dread.

* Richard Dawkins helps fund the world's least-fun summer camp.

* Following up on my post about Ricci and originalism from earlier in the week, in which as usual the comments are better than the post, here's Chuck Todd on MSNBC calling out the judicial activism to a speechless Joe Scarborough.

* Wal-Mart on the side of the angels? The monolith has endorsed an employer mandate in health care.

* Video games as murder simulators? The same claim can be made about just about any immersive media experience (and has been), with the existence of negative effects always taken as obvious but never actually demonstrated. (via /.)

* I have only vague memories of the original Alien Nation, though it's been in my Netflix queue for a while—so I'm glad to see rumors of a sequel series helmed by Angel's Tim Minear. More at Sci-Fi Wire.

* Sainthood in America: the Archdiocese of Baltimore may soon recommend a local 19th-century priest to the Vatican for canonization. I found it an interesting look at the balancing act that must now be played when looking for miracles in an age of science:

"Something worked very well," said Dr. Larry Fitzpatrick, chief of surgery at Mercy Medical Center, who will serve as medical expert on the archiocesan committee.

Preparing for his committee role, Fitzpatrick spoke to specialists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

"They've all got a few stories like this," he said. "Is this woman really any different from these, what I would call 'statistically improbable' cases? The outcome is very unusual, but it's not the only one."

Fitzpatrick said his role on the panel is to be the scientist, to "be the Doubting Thomas," but as a Catholic, he says, he must entertain the possibility of a supernatural cause.

What method could one possibly use to divide what is merely "statistically improbable" from what is "genuinely miraculous"?

Even more Sunday night links.

* Ev psych on the ropes? We can only dare to hope.

* MetaFilter remembers the Stonewall protests.

* Also from MetaFilter: Are we doing enough to prevent the asteroid apocalypse?

* Pawlenty says he'll finally let Franken be seated once the state Supreme Court issues its ruling. Aren't we moving a little fast, Tim? It's only been eight months.

* Katrina vanden Heuvel with Steve Benen against bipartisanship.

* 3 Quarks Daily's top science blog posts of 2009.

* And Ze Frank plays "That Makes Me Think Of" again at Time, this week about thigns that are and aren't black and white. Can't we get The Show back already? We keep getting closer and closer.

Some links for Sunday.

* Robin Sloan has a filtered #iranelection Twitter feed with most of the repetition and chaos stripped away. Via Boing Boing.

* Salinger and kids today: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ” Via MeFi.

* Another ruins of the modern world roundup. This one has some repetition but also a few I hadn't seen before.

* Advantage: chubbiness. People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.