- Oh, that Tucker Carlson…what a kidder! [via]
- Still, he’s gonna have to step up his comedy game if he’s going to match “off with their mics and their heads” Bill O’Reilly! [via]
- I think John Seavey may be right about this recent election — namely, that “the Republicans’ only winning strategy was to shut up and let the Democrats lose.”
Those Republicans lost, big time. Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle–every one of them said in detail what they’d do if elected, and every one of them heard the resounding voice of the American people saying, “No thank you.” Even in reliable red states or red districts, outspoken conservatives like Rand Paul and Michelle Bachmann had to spend millions of dollars to hang on to what should have been safe seats. The fact of the matter is, in order to get re-elected, the Republicans had to pretend not to be Republicans. That’s the narrative that you’re not hearing about right now. But you might hear a lot about it in a couple of years. Because two years is a long time to ask the Republicans to pretend not to be Republicans.
The sad thing is, shutting up and letting the Democrats lose is pretty frequently a winning strategy.
- Thudfactor points out the difference between security and authentication.
- And finally, Abstract Pixel Art. Below, the cast of Futurama [via]:
legal
Thursday various
- Okay, this Great Expectations cake might be in slightly bad taste, but it’s still a clever idea. [via]
- Student finds tracking device on his car; FBI demands it back. More here. [via]
- Horrible band causes horrible traffic jam to promote horrible song.
- Clark Kent vs. Facebook [via]
- And finally, some sci-fi LOLcats.
Wednesday various
- I think this Arcade Fire video/Chrome plugin would seem neater to me if Google Street View had been to my neighborhood.
- Then again, if you want to see where Street View has been, you could do a lot worse than the random shuffle that is Globe Genie. [via]
- Google (and everybody else) better be careful when driving in Vancouver… [via]
- Meanwhile, over the summer, Google Maps “lost” a major Florida city. [via]
- And finally, xkcd’s revised online communities map. Are we sensing a theme to today’s links?
Tuesday various
- Roger Ebert: No Longer an Eater, Still a Cook
- I’ve been told that the best thing to do when you get an earworm is to sing or hum “The Girl from Ipanema.” Of course, then you get that stuck in your head. Unhear It seems to work along similar reasoning. [via]
- Worried about full-body scans at the airport? Okay, now imagine that technology deployed in street-roving vans. [via]
- Mysterious full-size Dalek replica left anonymously at English school.
- And finally, herding cats in IKEA [via]:
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]: