Links for 2010-06-11

"A well blowout that shot gas and water polluted with drilling fluids as high as 75 feet into the air in Pennsylvania is a vivid reminder how a new generation of gas drilling is becoming more of a presence in the Northeast.

Discussion of whether the main result will be jobs and royalty payments or environmental degradation still remains surprisingly below the radar screen in New York State, aside from the upstate communities that will probably be affected. But the issues are already a huge fact of life just across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania."

"I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work. It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to commodify everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don't want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won't, because I am weird."

"If you have been following the news about arts funding, you have reason to be concerned. A vast pool of private, public, and philanthropic capital has gone down the drain in the US, and elsewhere, in the "Great Recession"--with predictable consequences. What's more, we may be on the cusp of a generational shift in giving priorities. "I am not optimistic that a restoration of the market and the economy will necessarily augur well for renewed or increased support of arts and culture, governmental or private," says Charles Bergman, chairman and chief executive of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, echoing a widely shared concern. Arguments that used to work on behalf of the arts no longer always do. And the arguments advocates are using instead all too often miss the point, by making roundabout claims that ignore what makes art appealing on a gut level."

A look at some of the potentially interesting stars within 15 light years of us, and whether they would be good targets for a future interstellar mission.

"In an analysis of professional burnout among professors, a Texas Woman's University Ph.D. candidate found tenure track professors had more significant symptoms of workplace frustration than their tenured and non-tenure track faculty counterparts.

Janie Crosmer, who conducted the survey of more than 400 full-time faculty across the U.S. in December 2008, said she was unsurprised that the high stresses of pursuing academe's most coveted status led to burnout. As she discussed those stresses during a presentation Wednesday, audience members nodded in agreement, and one faculty member among them described the pursuit of tenure as "a living hell." "

"There are many situations where one would love to have great mass detection capabilities in a liquid environment (e.g., to detect the binding of some cancer marker). The problem is, if you immerse a mechanical resonator in a liquid, viscous damping completely kills your sensitivity by damping the resonance. An old acquaintance of mine from graduate school, Scott Manalis at MIT, has come up with a solution to this problem. Don't put the resonator inside liquid; rather, put liquid inside the resonator."

"Creators of science fiction are by nature forward-thinking and occasionally prescient, but after rewatching Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers--to my mind the most subversive major studio film in recent (or distant) memory--I now wonder if Verhoeven and his screenwriter, Ed Neumeier, had access to a time machine. Because even though it was produced in 1997--and based on a Robert Heinlein novel from 1959--Starship Troopers is such a clean, strong, almost direct post-9/11 allegory that Verhoeven and Neumeier had to have seen what was coming."