We're off to sample Detroit today. While we're waiting for showers to finish here are a few links I never got around to yesterday.

* Dollhouse 2.3, which I haven't seen yet, ticked upwards in the ratings, managing this week to beat reruns on ABC. Related: Ten TV Spin-offs That Were Better Than the Original Shows includes Angel—I agree in the main—Daria, Xena, DS9, and, The Simpsons. Also related: Flashforward is falling fast, endorsing Bill's thesis that the show is blowing it. Related and ridiculous: "Is science fiction becoming feminized?" Mary Shelley will be heartbroken.

* Josh Marshall on the Nobel: [T]he unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration. More from Steve Benen.

* Something, something, something, Detroit.

* The big Moon bombing appears not to have gone so well. Did the aliens step in?

* Iceland, an epicenter of the last financial crisis, looks to recover with data centers that offer free air-side cooling.

* The L.A. Times discusses the Fantastic Mr. Fox directing controversy. (via)

* Some bad news: Universe To End Sooner Than Thought.

* And more bad news: time has not ceased its unrelenting march.

Thursday!

* The First Rule of J-School Is You Don't Talk About J-School Debt.

* Nowhere in Manhattan. Hard to believe it is Manhattan. Via MeFi.

* Nnedi Okorafor has a nice guest post at Nebula on Africa and science fiction.

* The CEO of Whole Foods doesn't want us to have health care. OpenLeft doesn't want us to shop at Whole Foods anymore. Everyone at MetaFilter is mad at everyone.

* Top 10 Superhero Comics 2000-2009. I've read more of these than I would have expected, and can plug a bunch: All-Star Superman, Monster Society of Evil, New Frontier, Omega the Unknown, and Planetary are all worth reading in their own ways, as are some of the sillier Big Two offerings (I'll admit to being fond of Booster Gold). Y: The Last Man is good, too, but of course it doesn't really count. Via NeilAlien.

* Language and time. I found this interesting.

David Hauser and colleagues first showed that people with an angrier temperament are more likely to think of themselves as moving through time, than to think of time as moving towards them. You can test this on yourself by considering which day of the week a meeting has changed to, if it was originally planned for Wednesday but has been moved forward two days. If you think it's now changed to Friday, then you're someone who thinks of themselves as moving through time, whilst if you think the meeting is now on Monday, then you're more passive, and you think about time passing you by.

I'm a Monday person for sure. I see can see why Ezra thinks it would be Friday, but it seems very unnatural to me to spatialize the week that way.

* And you can now tweet @Gliese581d.

When I was younger I would sometimes be seized, usually at night, by sudden intense depressions I usually thought of as "darkness." I haven't felt that way in a long time, not since before I was married, and I'm certain a lot of that has to do both with Jaimee and with the way my life has generally improved in all categories since I was younger. But tonight I feel something like that feeling, except totally benign, a kind of overpowering sense of nostalgia that has been caused in varying degrees by:

* my high school reunion, in process tonight a mere 600 miles from my current location;
* the fifth anniversary of my cousin Andrew's death, which puts his phantom self as old this year as I was when he died;
* a new diet that seems to be having immediate and positive effects on my energy and concentration;
* yesterday's rereading of Jimmy Corrigan;
* some eerily on-the-nose "nostalgia rock" recommended by Jacob B;
* my obsessive attention to the youth rebellion in Iran and hope at least for one night that the arc of history bends towards Utopia.

I feel nostalgic and hypercontemplative, but not sad, except insofar as we all only live life once, and the portions are too small.

The iceberg wins: 'Last Survivor of the Titanic Dies at 97.'

Umberto Eco writes in "The Myth of Superman" of the way superhero comics need to suspend time in order to function as consumer goods, perpetually staving off any movement towards the end of the narrative (and, thus, death) by refusing to allow the hero to progress, change, or even begin one story where the last left off. Among the things superheroes cannot do, he says, is marry or have children—and Eco's not the only one who feels this way.

After sixty years of playing the field, Archie is about to defy this logic.

Thanks, Derek!

How could it be anyone but Betty?

They say time is the fire in which we burn: 'Old age begins at 27.'

Friday morning links.

* Is Dollhouse already canceled? Fox is advertising that Prison Break returns to Fridays on 4/17.

* Mike Krzyzewski gets a tough evaluation on ratemyprofessor.com.



* Alternate-universe Watchmens. Only the Woody Allen hypothesis really sings.



* And this xkcd is quieter than the ones that usually get ricocheted across the Internet, but damn if it didn't make me laugh.



* And is time really the fire in which we burn? Consider the thermal time hypothesis. More at MetaFilter.

According to Connes and Rovelli, the same applies to the universe at large. There are many more constituents to keep track of: not only do we have particles of matter to deal with, we also have space itself and therefore gravity. When we average over this vast microscopic arrangement, the macroscopic feature that emerges is not temperature, but time. "It is not reality that has a time flow, it is our very approximate knowledge of reality that has a time flow," says Rovelli. "Time is the effect of our ignorance."

I think Rovelli just wrote Alan Moore's next three graphic novels. Grant Morrison's, too.

Found on the Internet: grown-up Calvins and Hobbeses. I've seen a couple links to this one and it made me want to poke around.



That's Susie Derkins, of course.

This one, I think, is my favorite:



A few others. I found these via a Google image search, so I confess I don't know where they came from.





(original context)

This last one is less a grown-up Calvin than an updated one, but there's a similar poignance to it all the same. And I know from the file name it comes from Jim Rugg, who I published way back in Backwards City #1:



It's quite reminiscent of this better-known "end of Calvin," which I've linked before.



If you're not done yet, there's always Fight Club.

(a couple via NeilAlien and this Marvel Peanuts MeFi thread, but mostly just via Google)

It's Philip K. Dick's 80th (!) birthday, and io9 has some suggestions on how to celebrate. To this list I can only add my PKD linkdump from a few months back.