Link Roundup

Beautiful things from around the web. Collect 'em all.

Flock of 30,000 Starlings Like the monster from Lost or a really lively cloud.

The Illusionists Paintings by Jared Joslin

The horrors of French medicine.

Material well-being, a photo essay.

xkcd's Lord of the Rings flowchart, map. About one in five of Randall Monroe's cartoons are outstanding and mindbending. The rest are merely excellent.

Dread and Horror

Peter Straub, who is arguably the great master of interior horror, has a great interview in Salon this week, about the new Library of America anthology of fantastic literature.

Did you learn any new secrets about scaring readers from going through so many stories for this new anthology?

I'm not sure I can explain exactly how it works. It has to do with creating believable people for whom the reader can feel affection, then putting them in danger of the unnameable and unseen. And it has to be suspended. You can't just pull a gun out and have them get shot. You have to allow the sense of underlying unease to intensify over time. As crucial as fear is dread. Dread is essential.

How would you distinguish the two?

Well, dread leads to fear, to shame and to terror. And before dread comes foreboding.

And foreboding is ...

A prescience that something bad is about to happen. You don't know why you don't like that guy, but you just have a bad feeling about him. Dread is when foreboding shows itself to be justified. Something like foreboding is built into all fiction, I think. Even Barbara Pym novels have a point where you think, "Is that altar cloth going to work or not?"

I love the sleekness of his work. It's all about the embedded threat and the ongoing impact after the splatter has been mopped up.

Frightened Rabbit: Swim Until You Can't See Land

Nasty Copyright Treaty

The ACTA intellectual property treaty is being developed in near-total secrecy, without any input from consumer advocates or other neutral groups, and is shaping up to be extremely toxic. Michael Geist and the boingboing crowd have been on top of this one, and you should be, too.

Ed Boyden: Synthetic Neurobiology

Ed Boyden at Singularity Summit 2009 -- Synthetic Neurobiology: Optically Engineering the Brain to Augment Its Function from Michael Anissimov on Vimeo.

John Stewart on Glenn Beck

The REAL story behind the appendectomy.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The 11/3 Project
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Malki's Action Movie Wedding Cake

If you think this is awesome, you shoulda seen the reception. Blood everywhere, or so I'm told.

What the Elections Mean

In Virginia, minority vote was down 30% from last year, and youth vote was down 70%. New Jersey likewise showed lackluster turnout numbers. The smart consensus on this is that it's time to start following through on some of the rhetoric from the '08 campaign.

Pass real healthcare reform, fix the banking system, increase the stimulus, close down Guantanamo and other War on Terror relics, and push forward on gay rights. The temptation to water down and avoid conflict isn't going to get Democrats reelected.

As Markos puts it:

This is a base problem, and this is what Democrats better take from tonight:

1. If you abandon Democratic principles in a bid for unnecessary "bipartisanship", you will lose votes.

2. If you water down reform in favor of Blue Dogs and their corporate benefactors, you will lose votes.

3. If you forget why you were elected -- health care, financial services, energy policy and immigration reform -- you will lose votes.

Tonight proved conclusively that we're not going to turn out just because you have a (D) next to your name, or because Obama tells us to. We'll turn out if we feel it's worth our time and effort to vote, and we'll work hard to make sure others turn out if you inspire us with bold and decisive action.

Update: Aaand of course, the nitwit congressional Democrats took exactly the opposite lesson, and want to throw the "controversial" agenda overboard. One more time: nothing succeeds like success. Pass the priorities, and you'll be rewarded. The alternative is to placate your opponents, which just emboldens them.

Diversions

When the leadership of Great Britain pressed too heavily on him, Gladstone did one of three things: felled large trees with an ax; walked around London talking to prostitutes; or arranged books. It was an odd trio of diversions, especially the second, which, although its ostensible purpose was to reform fallen women, sometimes stimulated so many carnal thoughts in the reformer that he whipped himself afterward with a contrition-inducing scourge.

-Ex Libris
Anne Fadiman

Gladstone was also well known for his obsessive attention to detail, and in addition to his other hobbies, designed home library storage systems, which Fadiman also describes at length in Ex Libris. The two main shelving systems are both very clever and a little overspecified. It speaks well of the man that he had such a diversity of pastimes.

Pursuit of Happiness

Gay marriage, legal pot, and visits to Cuba within 10 years, according to Jacob Weisberg. The old prohibitions fall:

The chief reason these prohibitions are falling away is the evolving definition of the pursuit of happiness. What's driving the legalization of gay marriage is not so much the moral argument but the pressures from couples who want to sanctify their relationships, obtain legal benefits, and raise children in a stable environment. What's advancing the decriminalization of marijuana is not just the demand for pot as medicine but the number of adults—more than 23 million in the past year, according to the most recent government survey—who use it and don't believe they should face legal jeopardy. What's bringing the change on Cuba is not just the epic failure of the 48-year-old U.S. embargo, but the demand on the part of Americans who want to go there—whether to visit their relatives, prospect for post-Castro business opportunities, or sip rum drinks at the beach.

Your TV Meta Moment

Captain Reynolds from Firefly cameos in Castle for Halloween.

"Didn't you wear that 5 years ago? ... Don't you think you should move on?"

Krugman on the Stimulus

As of 3Q2009, shorter Krugman: Keynes was right, more stimulus needed.

Bill Gurley's Opinion Unchanged

Bill Gurley on the state of the venture capital industry: some signs of strength in spite of LP commitment reductions.

Dream Journal

Monumental dream sequence requiring me to break into the Smithsonian, collaborate with Harry Dean Stanton against that character actor who played the villain in about 30 episodes of early 80's TV series, bump into George W Bush who showed me the new stealth bomber with onboard television studio, eat a frittata with grape nuts, and survive an assasination attempt from someone trying to throw acid in my face.

Thanks, Charlie Stross, for that last one. (Comments to his post are worth reading separately.)

Athulf's Death Song

A cypress-bough, and a rose-wreath sweet
A wedding-robe, and a winding-sheet,
A bridal-bed and a bier.
Thine be the kisses, maid,
And smiling Love's alarms;
And thou, pale youth, be laid
In the grave's cold arms.
Each in his own charms,
Death and Hymen both are here;
So up with scythe and torch,
And to the old church porch,
While all the bells ring clear:
And rosy, rosy the bed shall bloom,
And earthy, earthy heap up the tomb.

Now tremble dimples on your cheek,
Sweet be your lips to taste and speak,
For he who kisses is near:
By her the bridegod fair,
In youthful power and force;
By him the grizard bare,
Pale knight on a pale horse,
To woo him to a corpse.
Death and Hymen both are here;
So up with scythe and torch,
And to the old church porch,
While all the bells ring clear:
And rosy, rosy the bed shall bloom,
And earthy, earthy heap up the tomb.

—Songs from Death's Jest-Book
Thomas Lovell Beddoes

A little something for Halloween.

(via BPAL)

A Helix in the House

Great Spiral Staircases, a photo essay, with occasional ghost.

Is the Public Option Dead?

Let's check with Fox.

File under: reliable counterindicators.

Shrimp That See in 12 Colors

...and can detect polarized light across an entire spectrum.

Just why the mantis shrimp needs such a rarefied level of vision is unclear, although researchers suspect it is to do with food and sex.

Food and sex? Big surprise. Everything in evolution is about food and sex. Also, scientists don't usually get enough of either, so those topics are always front-of-mind.

(via @Templesmith)

Banjolele

Chap Hop History with Mr. B on the Banjolele

Yeah, buddy.

(via boingboing)

Visualizing the Brain

A survey of the last 100 years, from Ramon y Cajal to the present.

Alowine

Peter Mayle on the holiday that invaded France and spoiled all the pumpkin recipes.