links for 2008-12-29

  • "I've been thinking more about explaining what we mean by "insulators", in light of some of the insightful comments [on the last post]."
  • "CSI? Unrealistic? Hate to break it to you kids, but, yeah. At the very least, the speed with which our intrepid heroes get their results would make any cop, ADA, or defense attorney double over in laughter, when they're not crying. DNA rape kits, appallingly, have as much as a six year backlog, according to a recent NY Times Op-Ed. That's not just because of the volume of cases involved, but the time it takes to analyze and match DNA samples. "
  • Frank Wilczek is planning a mystery novel: "The idea is that two men and two women from Harvard and MIT collaborate and discover dark matter. It's clear that they should win a Nobel Prize, but according to the rules of the prize, only three people at most can share."
  • "What seemed to have been an elaborate allegory about the emotional weather of high school actually turns out to concern the decisions one makes about how to be an adult, and the options Gaiman presents have a distinctly '90s inflection: it may be Gen-Y's gateway drug to high literature, but when considered in the company of Slacker, Before Sunrise, Reality Bites, Nevermind, Vitalogy, Wonder Boys and, yes, The Corrections, it's every inch a Gen-X book, a compendium of slacker lassitude, dot-com ambition, Starbucks ennui and battle-0f-Seattle fury."

More like this

I generally skim only a few political/public policy weblogs via my RSS to get a sense of the Zeitgeist. M. McArdle and M. Yglesias are two of the blogs I sample. Anyway, if you read their blogs, check out the latest installment of The Table, the intro is really hilarious. Most-def trying to do…
We are busy preparing for The Open Laboratory 2008. The submissions have been trickling in all year, and a little bit more frequently recently, but it is time now to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and submit them. Submit one, or two, or several - no problem…
tags: humor, Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing, streaming video This streaming video shows Doris Lessing's reaction upon learning that she won the Nobel Prize in Literature [0:10] "Oh, Christ!" British writer Doris Lessing won the Nobel Literature Prize for five decades of epic novels that…
We are in the final strecth! The submissions have been trickling in all year, and a little bit more frequently recently, and many more over the past couple of weeks, so, if you have not done it yet, it is high time now to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and…