Links Dump
drorzel | August 31, 2009
LOLSaints | Saints with a Smile
Even religious iconography can be improved by strategic misspelled text.
(tags: religion blogs culture silly pictures art history)
Making Light: Flash of insight: swift, blinding, pointless
"Saints were the Pokémon of the Middle Ages."
(tags: history culture art religion television games kid-stuff silly making-light)
Flickr Photo Download: Mythical Creatures
Categorized in convenient Venn diagram form.
(tags: animals art history science biology silly sf pictures)
drorzel | August 29, 2009
slacktivist: Vincible GooFiness
"Set aside the edges of the bell curve -- the innocent fools and the diabolical Becks and Limbaughs and the rest of their kind. The vast, vincible middle is constituted of people who, like the GooFies, are to some degree simultaneously innocent victims and deliberate charlatans, simultaneously deceived and deceiver.
They don't know any better because they have decided not to know any better.
They ought to know better. And they need to know better.
What they require, in other words, is both liberation and repentance. The former must be extended to them. The…
drorzel | August 28, 2009
Roger Ebert's Journal: Archives
"In my case, I haven't taken a drink for 30 years, and this is God's truth: Since the first A.A. meeting I attended, I have never wanted to. Since surgery in July of 2006 I have literally not been able to drink at all. Unless I go insane and start pouring booze into my g-tube, I believe I'm reasonably safe. So consider this blog entry what A.A. calls a "12th step," which means sharing the program with others. There's a chance somebody will read this and take the steps toward sobriety."
(tags: drugs booze blogs movies psychology medicine)
Infinite Summer »…
drorzel | August 27, 2009
Why Our Analemma Looks like a Figure 8 : Starts With A Bang
"We got a good number of thoughtful comments, many of which are on the right track, and many of which have some misconceptions. Let's clear them up, and then let's give you the explanation of what gives us our figure 8, and why other planets make other shapes."
(tags: science astronomy blogs starts-with-bang)
Are recent developments in scholarly communication relevant to undergraduates? « the Undergraduate Science Librarian
"I am very excited about these changes, and I spend some of my time checking out real-time science blogs…
drorzel | August 26, 2009
News: Flu and Football Season - Inside Higher Ed
"Personally, I don't see any major college or professional sporting events being canceled as a result of H1N1," said Bronson Hilliard, a spokesman for the University of Colorado at Boulder, where eight probable cases of the virus have recently been identified. "Right now, the virus is smaller in its impact than the seasonal influenza. I mean, every year we have the seasonal influenza, and we don't cancel basketball games because of it. Still, if we were considering canceling an event, that decision would be made on health considerations for…
drorzel | August 25, 2009
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Making Lists: Mindblowing SF by Women and People of Color
"[S]ince someone always finds a way to claim that they just don't know where to find such or who the women and/or people of color writing in the genre are, I hope that this list will go a long way toward alleviating that problem."
(tags: sf race gender blogs tor books literature)
Eeyore and the Unintended Consequence « Easily Distracted
"I'm all for accepting that the gap between intent and practice will inevitably be quite wide, and that in that gap, all sorts of devils can…
drorzel | August 24, 2009
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Goodbye, Dortmunder: Donald Westlake's Get Real
"There couldn't really be a conclusion to these books -- what could it possibly be? The gang will just keep on forever looking for one more job to keep them going. The regulars in OJs will keep on having their senseless conversations. Dortmunder hasn't aged and now he will never die, because the one person who could have killed him chose to spare him. Dortmunder is immortal now, and in this last adventure, he smiles twice in one day."
(tags: books literature mystery crime culture review tor…
drorzel | August 22, 2009
Dan Brown tops Oxfam's chart of most-donated books | Books | The Guardian
"But as secondhand bookshop shelves flood with battered editions of Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress, Brown can comfort himself with the fact that he's also Oxfam's second most bought author: there are, apparently, still readers out there who have yet to follow the adventures of the dapper symbologist Robert Langdon. There's no such consolation for Grisham, whose legal thrillers fail to make Oxfam's bestseller charts at all."
(tags: books literature business silly)
A modest proposal for improving football: the…
drorzel | August 21, 2009
Liberal Arts Rankings - Best Colleges - Education - US News and World Report
The annual clown show begins anew. Williams is #1, Union #43, for those who care.
(tags: academia education silly us-news)
Francis Collins' "Five Themes" for the NIH : Respectful Insolence
"In the end, I don't give the proverbial rodential posterior what Francis Collins' religious views are, as long as they don't directly impact NIH science policy, and I see no evidence from his track record that there's any reason to be concerned that he'll be somehow injecting them into the NIH or using them to determine policy…
drorzel | August 20, 2009
Cosmological Gravitational Radiation : Dynamics of Cats
Steinn explains what the LIGO null results mean
(tags: science astronomy cosmology blogs cat-dynamics)
PaulCornell.com: Thirty Comics for Hugo Voters
"The Hugo Awards for 2009 are going to be presented at the World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne in September next year. The Best Graphic Story category is only a year old, and I think SF fans might benefit from a broad brush introduction to some of the many comics out there that they might consider nominating. I'd like this to be the first of many such articles, from many…
drorzel | August 19, 2009
Regifting Robin. How does it work? | Dot Physics
The simple math behind a silly game.
(tags: science blogs math silly dot-physics)
As 81-year-old Mubarak heads to Washington, Egyptians wonder about their leader's health -- latimes.com
An update from Uncertain Principles Senior Middle East Correspondent Paul Schemm.
(tags: news politics world)
Making graphene in a flash - physicsworld.com
"In a video released by the group, brown, transparent sheets of graphite oxide can be seen to blacken and expand, accompanied by a loud popping sound. Huang's team describes the resulting black material…
drorzel | August 18, 2009
slacktivist: The IndigNation
"That's an example of what's often missing today in dealing with the IndigNation. These people are offended and outraged and so politicians and journalists respond by trying not to further offend or enrage them. As though that were possible. Indignation is their raison d'etre. They will take offense whether or not it is given. There is no point trying not to offend them. There is no point in trying not to make them angry.
An appropriate response isn't to be more offended or more offensive, but it should involve going on the offense. The IndigNationalists are…
drorzel | August 17, 2009
In a Queens Park, Duke Riley Leads a Battle on the Low Seas - NYTimes.com
"This was an art exhibition -- a term that perhaps conjures a more subdued event. But the art in this show, called "Those About to Die Salute You," involved humans in motion, boats on water and those tomatoes. It was the creation of Duke Riley, whose work skews aquatic and unpredictable: He once built a wood and fiberglass submarine, floated it too close to the Queen Mary 2 and was arrested.
His vision for Queens on Thursday night was a Roman-style staged naval battle among representatives of museums in four New York…
drorzel | August 16, 2009
Rick Perlstein -- Birthers, Health Care Hecklers and the Rise of Right-Wing Rage - washingtonpost.com
"The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest."
(tags: politics stupid evil media society culture US)
drorzel | August 15, 2009
Making Light: Panels and parlor games
"So all you lucky devils went to Worldcon and I didn't. And now I get to read panel reports, which are always both fun and tantalizingly vague.
So let's have a game of it. What fictional characters would you put on a panel, what would you have them talk about, and how would the panel go, do you think?"
(tags: SF conventions games blogs making-light)
Alternate history | Books | A.V. Club
"British essayist William Hazlitt once observed that only mankind is capable of noticing the difference between how things are and how they might have been. It's both…
drorzel | August 14, 2009
A Burning Dog Needs No Chimney - White House unveils death panel
"After a week of unconvincing denials, the Obama administration reversed course today and released photos of the "death panel" that would, under a proposed new health-care system, make decisions about "when to pull the plug on grandma":"
(tags: politics health-care medicine silly pictures blogs)
Pimp My Novel: Genre-Specific Sales, Part 4 of 8: Science Fiction
"Hard science fiction (think Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven) has been on the decline since the end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, i.e. for about…
drorzel | August 13, 2009
Physics and Physicists: On the Role of the Michelson-Morley Experiment: Einstein in Chicago
"The conventional thought, based on many accounts given by Einstein in his later years, is that he can't quite remember if he was aware of it, and thus, it didn't play any influential role in his formulation of the principles of relativity. This new paper, in press, reveals a slightly different version of what plausible could have happened, based on two accounts : a translation of Einstein's speech he gave in Kyoto in 1922, and a series of speeches he gave in Chicago a year earlier, and especially at…
drorzel | August 12, 2009
Pimp My Novel: Genre-Specific Sales, Part 1 of 8: Fantasy
"The good news, however is this: fantasy is actually doing all right, and in many instances, sales of fantasy books are up over last year's sales. Without quoting you exact BookScan numbers, I can tell you that fantasy book sales are up at my house by roughly 10%, which is the number currently being quoted for most of the major trade publishers."
(tags: publishing writing business economics books SF)
Dealing With Corporate America | Mother Jones
"Frankly, my dealings with the government, on average, are better than most of my…
drorzel | August 5, 2009
Large Hadron Collider Struggles, Adding to the Mysteries of Life - NYTimes.com
"Many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies.
Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine across the ocean.
After 15 years and $9 billion, and a showy "switch-on" ceremony last September, the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, has to yet collide any particles at all. "
(tags: science…
drorzel | August 4, 2009
Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch - NYTimes.com
Some decent points, but as with all NY Times Magazine articles, it's crawling with annoying class assumptions. There's a passing acknowledgment that the decline in cooking is related to the increase in hours worked, and then it's back to somewhat over-written laments for idyllic days gone by, with no real consideration given to how we might help make time for people who work for a living to cook.
(tags: food culture society class-war)
The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals -- The American, A Magazine of Ideas
"I'm so tired…