Links for 2012-01-19

The blackout and other protests today are the result of a long, sustained, full-court press against legislation that's being pushed through despite widespread opposition. Yet, Lamar Smith and many other members of the U.S. House and Senate have been plowing ahead full-steam. Why? Yes, in part because they're well-funded by the entertainment industry, and it wants the bill passed, but also because they think they can. The dirty little secret of SOPA is not that the entertainment industry has far more influence than it ought to have on Congress. Anyone who pays attention already knows this. The dirty little secret of SOPA is that almost nobody pays attention to what Congress is doing 99% of the time.

The scale of the universe is almost incomprehensible. Galaxies are so massive it bends the mind, while on the other end of the size spectrum, subatomic particles are so tiny it twists the brain in completely different ways. There's a 1977 short movie, "Powers of Ten," which takes viewers on a journey of scale, showing the size of things in the universe from the building blocks of atoms, to the entire cosmos. It's a great little film, but I always thought it wasn't really huggable enough. Now you can take the same journey, in stuffed animal form!

Soccer fans know soccer is boring. Soccer fans have seen more soccer than anyone. We're aware that it can be a chore. Fire up Twitter during the average Stoke City-Wigan match and you'll find us making jokes about gouging out our own eyes with wire hangers, about the players forgetting where the goals are, about what would happen if we released a pride of lions onto the pitch. (Answer: The game would still finish 0-0.)

[C]onsider this: the fact that you "don't understand" why you didn't earn full points for a particular question might itself help explain why you didn't earn full points. Don't take this personally or interpret it as a sneer. See it as a learning opportunity. If you understood the material-and do note that there is a large difference between really understanding the material and being able to reproduce a graph or definition you might remember from class-you would have answered the question flawlessly. I recommend (as I have recommended to many others) that you go back, take another crack at it, and see if you can find where you have gone wrong. Then bring it by my office, and we will talk.