- The Star Trek: TNG casting that almost was. Personally, I would have loved to have seen Yaphet Kotto as Picard or Wesley Snipes as Geordi.
- It is possible to over-think things, even when you’re Superboy.
- Alligators in the sewers: not just an urban legend anymore!
- I think I’ve discovered a reason to visit Kansas City. [via]
- And finally, we are doomed: The Jersey Shore‘s “The Situation” will make $5 million this year. Maybe their visit to the NY Stock Exchange wasn’t so crazy after all. Still: doomed.
comics
Thursday various
- Scholars beware!
Experts on the various fungi that feed on the pages and on the covers of books are increasingly convinced that you can get high–or at least a little wacky–by sniffing old books. Fungus on books, they say, is a likely source of hallucinogenic spores. [via]
- I have to admit, I didn’t immediately understand this video (a collaboration with NPR’s Radiolab), but I liked it enough to re-watch from the beginning once my brain kicked in. [via]
- I have no idea if the new Scott Pilgrim movie will be any good or not. Some say awesome, some not so much. I know this will lose me some indie geek cred, but I’ve been stuck halfway through the first volume for several months, not particularly loving it. That said, I can totally get behind this:
There’s no reason to be angry at the people you imagine a movie will make happy just because you didn’t like the movie. [via]
- Oh come on, it’s an honest mistake. [via]
- And finally, I need to start riding the subways more often!
Thursday various
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Wednesday various
- Following up on the “there is no Triceratops, only Zuul” story I posted yesterday, here’s Caitlin R. Kiernan’s take on the whole thing:
People are used to looking at species as static entities. But biologists work with species (and all other taxonomic units— the case of Triceratops is a genus-level problem) as hypotheses. And any given hypothesis may be discarded by future discoveries. That is, the name Triceratops is a hypothesis seeking to explain a collection of seemingly related fossils of a Late Cretaceous horned dinosaur. The hypothesis says that all specimens of Triceratops are more closely related to one another than they are they are to any other genus of chasmosaurine dinosaur. But, like all hypotheses, it can be falsified in light of future discoveries. In this case, the discovery of new fossils giving us a more complete picture of Triceratops as a living population of animals, and allowing us to realize that the morph we used to call “Torosaurus” is actually only the very mature form of Triceratops. As an hypothesis, “Torosaurus” appears to have been falsified. Now, it’s possible that Scannella and Horner are wrong, and that future discoveries and/or research of old discoveries will show that Triceratops and “Torosaurus” really are two taxa (though I’ve read the paper, and this seems unlikely). All hypotheses are provisional. Nothing is ever certain. Never. The best argument may be in error. That’s how science works, even if the press seems unable to grasp this.
- Following up on the Gaiman/McFarlane legal battles I also posted about yesterday, Erik Larsen’s defense of McFarlane needs some work [via]:
It’s one thing to start a flame-war, or be a loudmouth, or try to argue that, say, a court ruling was unfair. That, after all, is just another Tuesday on Twitter. It’s a very different thing to blame a judicial ruling you disagree with on sexist caricatures of women as irrational, swooning groupies — especially if you’re starting to make a habit of it.
- FBI wants its seal removed from Wikipedia. Whichever side is right in this, I do like Wikipedia’s official response [via]:
While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version of Section 701 that you forwarded to us…
- Gio Clairval on Lightness: Italo Calvino’s hope for the future of literature. There are some really interesting thoughts here:
Steampunk is often—not always, but often—set during the industrial revolution, a time that revolves around the heaviness of steel. A weighty century, indeed. Too-heavy ships crossed the oceans. Eiffel’s tower represented Man’s victory over iron. The ponderous consciousness of matter—inevitable—dominated until the late eighties. Asimov imagined immense computers. Arthur C. Clarke let enormous steles fall from the sky.
But today, what fascinates us most in Steampunk? Airships pulled upward by light gasses. Impossibly floating cities.
- And finally, for something completely different, a dog mowing the lawn [via]:
Tuesday various
- I’ll bet Chelsea Clinton didn’t have wedding invites this adorably geeky. [via]
- Oh my god! The triceratops may never have existed! That’s so–oh, wait, it might have been the younger form of another dinosaur that looks almost identical except for some cranial features? And, if it is the case that they’re one and the same, palaeontologists will just rename them both triceratops? Wow, what seemed like a stunning revelation is curiously a non-story by paragraph’s end.
- Syfy Announces Development Slate of 7 New Scripted Projects. Only eighteen of them are Battlestar Galactica or Stargate spinoffs. [via] [Related: Cracked on the Syfy Channel.]
- I think what I find most interesting and amusing about this whole recent Neil Gaiman/Todd McFarlane thing is that the judge’s decision is ultimately an argument over comics continuity.
- And finally, as someone who, as part of his day job, spends a great deal of time hunting down potential authors and reviewers at universities, can I just say how right xkcd is?