Dresden Dolls

Saw them give a scorching show at the Vic on Wednesday. It looked like they'd never been happier. Openers Mucca Pazza did a bang-up job, too.

Links for Later

1. How to Draw an Owl



2. "The Northmen came to Paris"

3. London panorama

4. Couple document their marriage while wearing Imperial Stormtrooper masks. Bizarre.

5. Edward Tufte's rare book collection (via kottke)

6. Warrantless searches of laptops at the border

7. Gargantuan Sikh ritual turbans

8. "Are any parts of your body sore?" asks the TSA. A sequel to "the Resistance"

9. Nassim Taleb's non-fragility diagrams

10. Start Up City

The Big Cave-In

Paul Krugman puts the finger on Obama's woes:

In retrospect, the roots of current Democratic despond go all the way back to the way Mr. Obama ran for president. Again and again, he defined America’s problem as one of process, not substance — we were in trouble not because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas, but because partisan divisions and politics as usual had prevented men and women of good will from coming together to solve our problems. And he promised to transcend those partisan divisions.

This promise of transcendence may have been good general election politics, although even that is questionable: people forget how close the presidential race was at the beginning of September 2008, how worried Democrats were until Sarah Palin and Lehman Brothers pushed them over the hump. But the real question was whether Mr. Obama could change his tune when he ran into the partisan firestorm everyone who remembered the 1990s knew was coming. He could do uplift — but could he fight?

So far the answer has been no.

When are we going to see the fight?

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and an outspoken critic of the White House, said liberal anger has less to do with fears of a Clintonian move to the middle by Obama and more with a misreading of the election results by the administration.

“It’s less ‘Oh no, they’re triangulating,’ and more ‘Boy, their political instincts are really stupid,’ ” said Green, who along with other liberals has blasted the White House for suggesting it would compromise with Republicans on expiring tax cuts.

The White House “fundamentally” doesn’t get that “the only way to get Republicans to deal in good faith is to fight them, crush them and teach a lesson that if Republicans are on the wrong side of an issue there will be consequences ... so it makes sense to negotiate,” Green said.

“Right now, every time Republicans are on the opposite side of an issue from the public, it’s the Democrats who cave and talk about ‘compromise.’ It’s ridiculous.”

(via Americablog)

Airport Scanner Roundup

Would you rather be groped or scoped? The correct answer is "neither". Get ready for National Opt Out Day, November 24th.

The TSA's degrading electronic strip searches and punitive fondlings are a 4th Amendment violation, and it's really time to put an end to them before they go any further.

There's been a lot of news on this topic this week: a hundred naked scanner images were leaked today, New Jersey and Idaho introduce bills to ban the scanners, a man is threatened with a bogus $10,000 lawsuit for opting out, and airlines and pilots are boycotting the things due to health risks and humiliation.

Oh, and one of the founders of the TSA agrees that it's a violation, but says we'll all have to get used to it. Asshat.

Teenage Dream/Just the Way You Are

Before it was on Glee, Mike Tompkins did the one-man a capella version of Katy Perry's hit. Love the cymbal face.

Religion and Politics

In which Scott Beach delivers an important message on the state of discourse.

Religion and Politics

Scott Beach delivers an important message on the state of discourse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5gr1p_Pp0U&feature=related

Daniel Radcliffe Sings Tom Lehrer's the Elements

on the Graham Norton show.

Favorable Lie

Bundaberg Rum






(Thanks, Charlie)

Links for Later

1. NYT on the Deficit Catfood Commission

2. Paul Krugman on same

3. Firedoglake on same

4. Workflowy

5. Outsourcing in the pharma industry (what no one is saying in public)

6. Explaining Google's 10% raise

7. How to become a millionaire in three years (via lone gunman)

8. Great "about the team" page (referred by a tweet)

9. How Hedcuts are made at the WSJ

10. A guide to theoretical physics

The Catfood Commission Reports

The Chairmen's Mark is out from the Deficit Reduction Commission, and it is a steaming turd.

from Brad DeLong's inbox:

I don't know if my favorite part is adding co-pays to the VA or cutting the schools for soldiers' kids. Or the 23% top tax rate.

Talk about breaking what doesn't need fixing.

Witch House

The witch house music movement, which prides itself on being really, really obscure, to the point of being hard to find on Internet searches, has been profiled in the NYT, kind of taking the wind out of their marketing strategy, there, also.

Brian Eno on Oblique Strategies

What Needs Doing

Who was it that asked me if I had any good Web 2.0 ideas that needed coding? I know it was one (or maybe more) of you underworked webheads. If whoever it was gives me a call, I've got a one of a pair of them sitting here unused, depending on your background and capabilities.

The Future Is Now, Vol. LXXXIII: Military Medical Technology

Wired Danger Room has a roundup of the cutting-edge projects currently underway. Two big overlapping areas here: prosthetics and stem cells, with some lasers thrown in for good measure. Because, who doesn't need a stem-cell generated prosthetic with a frikkin' laser beam strapped to it?

Images of the Week

Typing ball (via boingboing)
Me too.

Tony Wilson's grave (via kottke)

Oh, that kind of electrical cables.

Whoop whoop.

When Do I Run Out of Money?

The Smart Bear's Startup Death Clock is a marvelous way to focus the mind.

Raising a Second Fund

Ben Horowitz talks about the reasoning behind Andreesen Horowitz's 2nd fund, and why they raised the size, shape and stage of fund that they did.

Post Election Post Mortem

Opinions on the causes of the election are a bit of a Rorschach test. The Blue Dogs think the Democrats need to move to the center, the Progressives think the Democrats should be more liberal, and the Republicans think that the Democrats should do whatever the Republicans want.

The best answer so far comes from Marshall Ganz, who helped create Obama's 2008 grassroots network. He believes that there's been a failure of leadership; that after the election, Obama shifted from a transformational to a transactional mode in the face of the immediate problems facing the country. In doing so, he gave up his leadership potential and created the situation we're now in.

Obama and his team made three crucial choices that undermined the president's transformational mission. First, he abandoned the bully pulpit of moral argument and public education. Next, he chose to lead with a politics of compromise rather than advocacy. And finally, he chose to demobilize the movement that elected him president. By shifting focus from a public ready to drive change — as in "yes we can" — he shifted the focus to himself and attempted to negotiate change from the inside, as in "yes I can."

During the presidential campaign, Obama inspired the nation not by delivering a poll-driven message but by telling a story that revealed the person within — within him and within us. In his Philadelphia speech on race, we learned of his gift not only for moral uplift but for "public education" in the deepest sense, bringing us to a new understanding of the albatross of racial politics that has burdened us since our founding.

On assuming office, something seemed to go out of the president's speeches, out of the speaker and, as a result, out of us. Obama was suddenly strangely absent from the public discourse. We found ourselves in the grip of an economic crisis brought on by 40 years of anti-government rhetoric, policy and practices, but we listened in vain for an economic version of the race speech. What had gone wrong? Who was responsible? What could we do to help the president deal with it?

And even when he decided to pursue healthcare reform as his top priority, where were the moral arguments or an honest account of insurance and drug industry opposition?

In his transactional leadership mode, the president chose compromise rather than advocacy. Instead of speaking on behalf of a deeply distressed public, articulating clear positions to lead opinion and inspire public support, Obama seemed to think that by acting as a mediator, he could translate Washington dysfunction into legislative accomplishment. Confusing bipartisanship in the electorate with bipartisanship in Congress, he lost the former by his feckless pursuit of the latter, empowering the very people most committed to bringing down his presidency.

Read the op-ed at latimes.com: it's good strategic thinking, and is essential for anyone tryingto understand the current political landscape.

Links for Later

1 Building a venture capital fund

2 Python for research

3 Surfer Andy Irons dies

Tea Party Dialogue

The Art of Scaling Sales

Mark Suster has some smart advice for anyone trying to scale their sales force. Qualify, qualify, qualify, and let marketing handle the rest.

More at the link.

A Little Night Music

rrritualzzz releases a couple of tracks. Happy Halloween.
RITUALZ - SAY YOU WILL by rrritualzzz

I'm with Kottke on This One

People are awesome.

Obama on Jon Stewart

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Barack Obama Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Barack Obama Pt. 2
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Barack Obama Pt. 3
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

The Scariest Building in Britain

The Masonic School for Boys, built in 1903 has the belfries and the bats, though perhaps not as many as depicted here.

It must also have been a dreadful place to get an education, once upon a time:

A record of school life written by Geoff Kirby, a pupil from 1949 to 1953, is divided into sections entitled: I Enter Hell, The Curse of Games, Censored Letters and Beaten Bare Buttocks, and My Eyes Are Ruined By Incompetent Medical Staff.

Quote of the Day

From Shorpy: In classical Egypt when the cat of a household died, the family shaved their eyebrows as a sign of mourning.

Cell Phone in a 1928 Movie

Someone (man or woman) appears to be speaking into a small, handheld device while attending the 1928 premiere of Charley Chaplin's move The Circus. One of Roger Ebert's commenters thinks that this person resembles Nicola Tesla, who described the cell phone in the 1920's.

Time traveler, Tesla, or figment of your imagination?

Links for Later

1. How Obama lost the narrative

2. Gary Trudeau on 40 years of Doonesbury. Top Doonesbury moments.

3. Robert Reich on the post-Citizens United world and why Democrats move to the center

4. SNL does Jimmy McMillan of the Rent's Too Damn High Party

5. Computational Structure of Neuronal Spike Trains

6. Obama's problem with The Gays

7. HTML5 primer

8. Liam O Maonlai teaches you Irish

9. Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things

10. Five Founders from Paul Graham

11. 40-somethings turn to triathlons for fitness

12. Bill & Ted, together again

13. Chamillionaire, tech entrepreneur

House Porn 16: The Smith Tower Pyramid

Michael Tortorello and Stuart Isett of the NYT visit a pyramid-shaped apartment located on top of Seattle's Smith Tower. I love these apartments that have very specific architecture, and that aren't part of a big residential development, but it's got to have taken a lot of work to fix up. Fortunately, that seems to have paid off:

the main attraction of a night at the top of Smith Tower must be the Imax-strength views: Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains to the west, the Cascades to the east and, below, thousands of people doing the things they do when they believe no one is watching.

From the apartment she calls the “Lighthouse,” Ms. Franklin can see almost the entire city. But the city cannot see her. So the residence on top of the tower has taken on the status of an urban legend.

The tour guides around Pioneer Square can be heard to claim that “there’s a shut-in who’s lived up there for 80 years and has 200 cats,” said David Lahaie, 51, an energy and recycling executive. Mr. Lahaie is skeptical, to say the least: he lives in the apartment himself and is Ms. Franklin’s husband.

Stephen Willis, the Smith Tower’s docent and de facto historian, has encountered many odd theories in the 10 years he has guided visitors through the building. “I heard the other day that it’s still family owned by the Smiths,” the heirs of the Smith Corona typewriter fortune. “They haven’t had a stake in the building since the mid-1920s.”

The Agnostic's Prayer

Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.

-Roger Zelazny

Creatures of Light and Darkness

Somehow, this comes to mind whenever I think of Christopher Hitchens' cancer diagnosis.

The Toronto Unicorn

The Toronto Science Center made this. Click for more information.

Matthew Ryan's Taxidermy Wunderkammer

Something for Spirit Day

This too shall pass.

The Rent is Too Damn High Party

This guy is great. Bonus points for the excellent 19th century facial hair, the gloves and the non-sequetur rejoinders about being a "karate expert" and marrying shoes.

Quote f he Day

The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.

-George Orwell

on this day, 1940.

Links for Later

1. Lev Grossman interview about The Magicians and The Magician King

2. Whatthefuckismytransmediastrategy? (via Warren Ellis)

3. Tony Kushner profiled

4. How the White House's DADT strategy backfired

Legion

Max Hastings starts his thrilling review of two books on the French Foreign Legion,

The world contains more misfits, sadists, masochists, and people who enjoy fighting than we sometimes like to suppose. How else can one explain the fact that the French Foreign Legion is heavily overrecruited?

...and goes on a long, burning march from there. Highlights include the sentry in Indochina snatched by a wall-leaping tiger who left behind only a freshly rolled cigarette and the man's rifle, having leapt back into the jungle to consume its prey.

I have no idea if the books themselves are as good as the review, but if they are, they should make for great under-the-covers reading.

Zola Jesus "Poor Animal"

Zola Jesus - Poor Animal by souterraintransmissions
As recommended by Xeni, who sez:

Takes me back to a moment on a front stoop in the South at 16, listening to my first Cocteau Twins and Bauhaus vinyl, smoking opiated hash, lightning bugs flickering in the night sky like living blink tags.

RIP Benoit Mandelbrot

Image: Wikicommons

Benoit Mandelbrot passed away at the age of 85. He was best known for his work on fractals, a branch of mathematics with applications in biology, finance, physics, art and other areas involving roughness in growth processes in any complex system.

More: "A Theory of Roughness," an Edge lecture (via John Brockman)

Do I claim that everything that is not smooth is fractal? That fractals suffice to solve every problem of science? Not in the least. What I'm asserting very strongly is that, when some real thing is found to be un smooth, the next mathematical model to try is fractal or multi fractal. A complicated phenomenon need not be fractal, but finding that a phenomenon is "not even fractal" is bad news, because so far nobody has invested anywhere near my effort in identifying and creating new techniques valid beyond fractals. Since roughness is everywhere, fractals — although they do not apply to everything — are present everywhere. And very often the same techniques apply in areas that, by every other account except geometric structure, are separate.

Links for Later

1. A life as photographed up the barrel of a gun

2. The correct answer is: Chicago Booth and Northwestern

3. Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Decide

4. The Falkirk Wheel

Peace

Liu Xiaobo, newly minted Nobel Laureate and luminous individual, from prison in China, "I Have No Enemies--My Final Statement":

Twenty years on, the innocent souls of June Fourth are yet to rest in peace, and I, who had been drawn into the path of dissidence by the passions of June Fourth, after leaving the Qincheng Prison in 1991 lost the right to speak openly in my own country, and could only do so through overseas media, and hence was monitored for many years; placed under surveillance (May 1995 – January 1996); educated through labour (October 1996 – October 1999s), and now once again am thrust into the dock by enemies in the regime. But I still want to tell the regime that deprives me of my freedom, I stand by the belief I expressed twenty years ago in my “June Second hunger strike declaration"— I have no enemies, and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested and interrogated me, the prosecutors who prosecuted me, or the judges who sentence me, are my enemies. While I’m unable to accept your surveillance, arrest, prosecution or sentencing, I respect your professions and personalities. This includes Zhang Rongge and Pan Xueqing who act for the prosecution at present: I was aware of your respect and sincerity in your interrogation of me on 3 December.

For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and block a nation’s progress to freedom and democracy. I hope therefore to be able to transcend my personal vicissitudes in understanding the development of the state and changes in society, to counter the hostility of the regime with the best of intentions, and defuse hate with love.
...

Ask me what has been my most fortunate experience of the past two decades, and I’d say it was gaining the selfless love of my wife, Liu Xia. She cannot be present in the courtroom today, but I still want to tell you, my sweetheart, that I'm confident that your love for me will be as always. Over the years, in my non-free life, our love has contained bitterness imposed by the external environment, but is boundless in afterthought. I am sentenced to a visible prison while you are waiting in an invisible one. Your love is sunlight that transcends prison walls and bars, stroking every inch of my skin, warming my every cell, letting me maintain my inner calm, magnanimous and bright, so that every minute in prison is full of meaning. But my love for you is full of guilt and regret, sometimes heavy enough hobble my steps. I am a hard stone in the wilderness, putting up with the pummeling of raging storms, and too cold for anyone to dare touch. But my love is hard, sharp, and can penetrate any obstacles. Even if I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with the ashes.

A Case of the Creeping Coup

More seditious weirdness in the military.

It Gets Better

After five gay teeneager killed themselves in a single week in separate incidents related to bullying, Dan Savage started the It Gets Better Project to let kids know that their lives will improve after high school. He and dozens of others have recorded videos to support this effort, including a 25-video team effort from Jake in Chicago and friends. Keep up the good work, people.

See also: The Make It Better Project

Links for Later

1. Problems with the ACTA intellectual property treaty here and here

2. Charles Mohun, "infamous duellist" and grandson of the first Earl of Anglesey

3. The look: vintage Barbour jacket

4. Review of Bill Hicok's new book of poetry

5. Art collection found in Paris flat after 70 years of disuse

6. Lighthouse Traveling Library

7. Paul Kennedy on the slow decline of Imperial America

8. Top 10 haunted houses

Evangelicals Overrunning Air Force Academy

Wasn't this sort of thing supposed to have been dealt with five or six years ago? Why is it still going on now?

An anonymous cadet at the US Air Force Academy (USAFA ) spoke out against alleged religious discrimination at the school last week, saying that some cadets must pretend to be evangelical Christians in order to maintain standing among their peers and superiors. In an email to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), the whistleblower stated that he is part of an "underground group" of about 100 cadets who cannot rely on proper channels to confront evangelical pressure...

The letters details the startling testimony of two Catholic parents of a 2010 graduate who, at first, were happy to hear that their daughter joined a Bible study group at the academy. That was before they discovered that their daughter was being taught that her "career should be that of a wife and mother," and in Biblical terms, "the female is the sheep and the male is the shepherd."

"Our daughter was methodically brain washed into believing that she was unsaved in the Catholic religion," the anonymous parents wrote in an email to the MRFF. "During spring break 2009, she urgently asked that we read the Bible everyday in order to 'receive the grace of God and be saved.' This manner of speech took us completely off guard."

(via AmericaBlog)

Links for Later

1. Maximilian's Triumphal Procession

2. Secretary Gates on the challenges of the all-volunteer military. Not convincing anyone to sign up with talk like that, I think.

3. Dave's eclectic apartment tour

4. Brief Jeff Sharlet interview, includes a response to the recent New Yorker puff piece on C Street

5. Earth-like exoplanet found capable of supporting life

6. Obama in Rolling Stone

7. Matt Taibbi on the Tea Party: "Narcissism"

Lineage

Among his brief remarks this past Monday night prior to the Lincoln Center screening of Howl starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg, the poet Lou Asekoff, retired director of the Brooklyn College poetry program recalled how Ginsberg once burst into his office to say, “I just blew the guy who knew a guy who blew a guy who knew the rough-hewn tradesman who as a boy lay all night in Whitman’s
lap.”

So I knew the guy who blew the guy who...Whitman. And I'm less than six degees away from Kevin Bacon.

Not Quite Cabinet

And still no Piblokto Madness bed. Zero History from William Gibson featured Cabinet, the best little fictional boutique hotel/private club in London. RL Magazine has the roundup of some real world near-analogs, ranging from a 10,000 pound a year (including 5,000 pound bar tab) club, a Zaha Hadid designed club, and others. So now, you can meet your very own Hubertus Bigend-analog in luxury & weirdness.

Daniel Domscheit -Berg Leaves WikiLeaks

Wired has the chat logs. Looks like some major meltdown over there.

Links for Later

1. Art Crimes, a link list

2. The negative marginal value of a $50,000 mattress over a $20,000 mattress

3. Mark Suster on Angelgate

4. Man kills himself, leaving behind a 1,904-page suicide note

5. Explosions in space that appear to move faster than the speed of light

6. Nick Sullivan's desk at Esquire

7. Visvim store

Images of the Week, Part II

Images of the human connectome.

House stencil.

Sion Gospel.

Images of the Week

Neutrino image of the Sun, taken through the Earth.

Biedermeier secretary from Colombo Mobili. The world's most awesome piece of furniture. Look at it. It's got colonnades and roundels and marquetry and decorations that were most likely modeled on narwhal tusks. I must possess it.

Rollout of the last space shuttle mission. Click to embiggen. (via cousin Steve)

Punk Frog

Harlan Ellison is Dying

But is up and moving about the cabin for as long as possible.

Angelgate

This week, either Michael Arrington caught an elite group of Silicon Valley archangels in the process of colluding to fix prices and terms for early stage investments, or merely crashed a casual discussion and get together by a group of friends at a Bin 38. Either way, a lot of highly active investors who were at the meeting are scrambling to do some damage control.

It's stories like this one that make me thankful I'm doing startups out here in the wilds of the Midwest. The egos are a lot smaller and it's possible to just do the work necessary to build businesses. You know, making things to sell and then selling them.

At any rate, someone has made the inevitable Hitler parody about the whole thing.

DADT

True Knight

Sir Terry Pratchett mines, smelts, forges and decorates his own knightly sword

Alexander McQueen's Funeral

Alexander McQueen's memorial service was held this week. One of the guests was overheard to say that they wished his muse, Isabella Blow, could have been there. Of course, if she could have been there, she wouldn't have had to be there, as her death was likely one of the factors that led to his.

The Hypomanic Entrepreneur

Just how crazy should you be to be a great entrepreneur? The answer, as with so many things, is: a little bit.

If you give him $750,000, he says, you can have a stake in what he believes will be a $1-billion-a-year company.

Interested? Before you answer, consider that the man displays many of the symptoms of a person having what psychologists call a hypomanic episode. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — the occupation’s bible of mental disorders — these symptoms include grandiosity, an elevated and expansive mood, racing thoughts and little need for sleep.

“Elevated” hardly describes this guy. To keep the pace of his thoughts and conversation at manageable levels, he runs on a track every morning until he literally collapses. He can work 96 hours in a row. He plans to live in his office, crashing in a sleeping bag. He describes anything that distracts him and his future colleagues, even for minutes, as “evil.”

...“It’s about degrees,” says John D. Gartner, a psychologist and author of “The Hypomanic Edge.” “If you’re manic, you think you’re Jesus. If you’re hypomanic, you think you are God’s gift to technology investing.”

This theory of the weak version of some disorder resulting in an improved adaptation under specific circumstances fascinates me. Previously, Robert Sapolsky expounded this theory in relation to religion: that people who are schizotypic (weakly schizophrenic) make great shamans, people who have a touch of temporal lobe epilepsy have visions and become hypergraphic, and those with a touch of OCD make great ritualists and priests. Tyler Cowen and others have talked about how Asperger's neurovariants make great tech geeks. This is another neat example here.

Quote of the Day

To read the newspapers just now is to see Bedlam let loose. Every person in the country of super asinine propensities, everyone who hates social progress and loves deflation, feels that his hour has come, and triumphantly announces how, by refraining from every form of economic activity, we can become prosperous again.

-John Maynard Keynes

1931

Links for Later

1. iPhone color recognition for the blind

2. Liam Gallagher's clothing line Pretty Green

3. Tavi Gavinson profile

Becoming Green Lantern

An oddly melancholy interview with Ryan Reynolds appears in the forthcoming issue of GQ, in which he describes his motion capture suit as "made of actual woven misery", and which describes his workout system in some detail. I mentioned this article to my personal trainer, who said, "if that's what you really want, there's a lot of work to be done...grilled chicken...tilapia...back to chicken." That's what you eat if you want to be Ryan Reynolds.

His remarkable torso was first developed during rehearsals for Blade: Trinity, the unsatisfying continuation of Wesley Snipes's vampire series. "Everything went so horribly wrong on that set," he remembers, though he still takes some pride in the film's most celebrated linguistic invention ("you cock-juggling thundercunt"). At least Blade: Trinity gave him the body. He worked out for six months beforehand. "It was like a project. I just did everything they told me to."

Right now he has that body again. ­Reynolds is at pains to point out that this isn't his natural, or permanent, way of being, just something he is currently doing for the third time, for Green Lantern, after Blade: Trinity and The Proposal. (Precisely why a New York publishing assistant—his character in The Proposal—should have, or need, this level of muscular definition is unclear, other than that he is the star of a movie that will often find him partially or fully unclothed in Sandra Bullock's company.) "It was a strange sort of sleight-of-hand trick I learned—I could do it again if I needed to and get there faster if I needed to."

On the Green Lantern set, I watch him eat his usual plate of steamed chicken, salmon, broccoli, carrots, and rice. On the kitchen counter of the house he rents in New Orleans is a huge jar of a white powder called Isolyze, primarily whey protein. Wherever he is, he snacks on these orange bars called Zero Impact Pumpkin Supremes—"sort of like a pumpkin made out of cinder block," he quips. It takes his co-star to spell out the full grim reality of his commitment. "If you saw him coming to work at five in the morning, when I could barely open my eyes and he'd been up for two hours in the gym…," says Lively. "If everyone had that discipline, they, too, could have abs of steel."

If you'd rather have his playlist, that's easier. A lot of acoustic guitar-y, happy-sad music, and unsurprisingly, a bunch of his wife's music:

On a whim, I ask to see his most-played list on his iTunes. Top—with 456 plays—is "World Spins Madly On," by the Weepies. The rest of the top ten, all of which have more than 150 plays: Gomez's "See the World," the Be Good Tanyas' "Ootischenia," Magnet's "Duracellia," the Damnwells' "Jesus Could Be Right" and "For My Own Good," and four songs from the National: "Green Gloves," "Start a War," "About Today," and "City Middle." For contrast, I ask him to show me what has had twenty-five plays, a list that includes songs by CocoRosie, the Eels, Elton John's "I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues," and three songs by his wife.

Hand Dancing

Something cheerful for the weekend. Riverdance power couple Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding (Up and Over It) hand dance to "We No Speak Americano".

(via Coilhouse)

Links for Later

1. Brad "Deling" responds to Todd Henderson with a lecture on relative incomes, expenses and taxation

2. Charles Stross on future shock as a possible source for Tea Party nonsense

3. Review of al Kindi on cryptography

4. Christine O'Donnell dabbled in witchcraft, had a date "on a Satanic altar"--no wonder celibacy looks good by comparison

5. Really good interview with William Gibson on Zero History

6. Pocket notebooks of 20 famous men (via Andrew Sullivan)

7. Does Rwanda make your arm hair grow faster, or are you just more awake?

8. Nietsche reconsidered

9. How many muslims are in al Qaeda?

10. Rush Limbaugh's take on global warming

Most Important Economic Problems

Yesterday at breakfast, a retired engineering professor asked me what the biggest problem facing my business was: "uncertainty about government policy and taxes" or "uncertainty about business conditions". Like most of the people in the survey graphed above, I've got to say that the problem is slack sales (for our customers--we're actually doing really well, especially considering economic conditions). Healthcare cost increases have, mercifully, begun to stabilize, so that's out of the way, but we need more stimulus.

That is all.

Links for Later

1. Scott Horton: State Secrets and Official Criminality

2. Frank Rich: Obama disconnected from everyday people; time to reconnect

3. Decoding individual words with electrodes and exploring the connectome (via Warren Ellis)

4. Scholarpedia on the connectome

John Kenn

John Kenn.

Recommended by @GreatDismal (or someone else) as being like Gorey on a diet of Lovecraft.

Entertaining lunch at a sidewalk cafe in the Short North. A man walked by and asked if I'd like the bag of groceries he was carrying. I said, "no thank you, I'm full."

Links for Later

1. The Untamed Prince

2. Technomads

3. Diary of a returning soldier

4. Freakangels on the difficulty of communicating without temporal anchors

5. Jeffrey Steingarten tries to avoid becoming a coffee nerd

6. YouTube time travel

7. James Franco interviewed

8. Frank Lloyd Wright house up for sale, used as set for Blade Runner, Angel, others

9. Celebrities with unusual features

10. TSA bullying travelers into 'optional' full body scanners

11. Black Hotels (and goldmines) for money laundering (via Felix Salmon)

12. American economic inequality growing

13. "Who's funding these radical Christians?"

14. Adam Smith by Nicholas Phillipson (via marginal revolution)

15. "At the bookstore later in the day, my son stood in front of the Sci Fi section and said, in a very loud voice: 'Mom, this is my new gender.' I bit back 'genre,' which is something I also try to do when I am alone."

16. The shaving cycle of men

17. Why Chesterton doesn't make any sense in his Christian apologetics

18. Spontaneous badassery (via linkmachinego)

19. B vitamins protect against senile dementia, brain shrinkage in early stages

20. Shakespeare's face recreated in 3-D from death mask

The Courts get Two out of Three Right

But that still only adds up to 50%. While judges wisely issued a stay on DADT and dropped a stay on stem cell funding, they still fell down on the big decision: the appeals court ruling to allow the state secrets defense to utterly trump the right to bring suit against the government.

Why is this such a big deal? Andrew Sullivan:

The case yesterday is particularly egregious because it forbade a day in court for torture victims even if only non-classified evidence was used. Think of that for a minute. It shreds any argument that national security is in any way at stake here. It's definitionally not protection of any state secret if all that is relied upon is evidence that is not secret. And so this doctrine has been invoked by Obama not to protect national security but to protect war criminals from the law. There is no other possible interpretation.

The Bush executive is therefore now a part of the American system of government, a system that increasingly bears no resemblance to the constitutional limits allegedly placed upon it, and with a judiciary so co-opted by the executive it came up with this ruling yesterday. Obama, more than anyone, now bears responsibility for that. We had a chance to draw a line. We had a chance to do the right thing. But Obama has vigorously denied us the chance even for minimal accountability for war crimes that smell to heaven.

And this leviathan moves on, its budget never declining, its reach never lessening, its power now emboldened by the knowledge that this republic will never check it, never inspect it, never hold its miscreants responsible for anything, unless they are wretched scapegoats merely following orders from the unassailable above them.

And this means almost certainly that torture will return. The GOP base loves it, as long as it is done against people with dark skin and funny names in places they can look away from. And they know now something they didn't know in 2008. They will always get away with it. Even a liberal Democrat will protect you for ever with a golden shield that creates two classes of people in this country: one above the law - even a law as profound as that against torture - and those outside the government obliged to obey it.

This knowledge tells me one thing. If we are to recover as a nation under law rather under a prince, it will not be through the channels of the two major parties or through any president acceptable to the mainstream of either party. It will require a citizenry so enraged and protective of its core liberties against this security Leviathan that it compels dismantling this machinery and exposing it to the light of day - not recklessly, not abruptly, but by close examination, judicial review, press inquiry, protest. There are legitimate trade-offs between national security and liberty. But the protection of war criminals where no secrets are at stake except the scandal of torture itself is not one of them. Alas, there are few such citizens around. And, most tragic of all, those who say they care about liberty above all - the tea-partiers who invoke the founders - seem only too willing to surrender every liberty for the prize of a security against a threat we cannot even measure, and to bow down before a new king (and probably warrior-queen) rather than elect a new president.

Whoops!

Largest Republican party preference in Gallup history completely evaporates. Get to work, people.

Links for Later

1. Mind control your Moog

2. Jimmy Breslin on the national mood

3. Jehovah's Witnesses mad that atheists won't stop proselytizing (via Tom Coates)

4. Michael Moorcock tells us how to write a novel in three days

5. A binary star's trillion mile death spiral

6. Glen Reynolds spouts a lot of smack

7. Nine Inch Nails' gear: 1, 2, 3, 4

8. Dresden Dolls going on tour

Old School Printing

Interview and video essay with Nick Sambrato of Mama's Sauce letterpress printing business. He displays a surprising nonchalance at the frequency with which printing presses snip off the printers' fingers--less surprising in light of the fact that he's clearly having the time of his life in this business. A finger is a small sacrifice for finding your bliss.

Story of Isaac

Story Of Isaac † † Haunted House MIX by Story of Isaac

A witch house compilation from fr4nk3nst31n

(via Warren Ellis)

Francis Crick

Of the Nobel prize winners I've talked to, some were in the category of "smart people who got lucky" and some were in the category of "people much smarter than the smartest people you've ever met". Francis Crick was one of the latter. He was a big thinker. You got the impression talking to him that if it hadn't been the structure of DNA it would have been some other huge thing. Toward the end of his life, he spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship of consciousness to the underlying biological process. I wish he'd had more time to work on the problem.

Oliver Sacks on Francis Crick

in the New York Review of Books:

It was not until May of 1986 that I met Francis Crick, at a conference in San Diego. There was a big crowd, full of neuroscientists, but when it was time to sit down for dinner, Crick singled me out, seized me by the shoulders, sat me down next to him, and said, “Tell me stories!” I have no memory of what we ate, or anything else about the dinner, only that I told him stories about many of my patients, and that each one set off bursts of hypotheses, theories, suggestions for investigation in his mind. Writing to Crick a few days later, I said that the experience was “a little like sitting next to an intellectual nuclear reactor…. I never had a feeling of such incandescence.

and in an interview by Steve Silberman:

Silberman: A vision researcher I know online, Mark Changizi, told me he had lunch with you at Caltech in 2005, when you were writing the chapter of your book on “Stereo Sue.” He said that you asked him if he considers himself a naturalist. “Although that’s not a term I readily use,” he said to me in email, “I realize that I am indeed a naturalist, as the fundamental premise of my research concerns understanding our biology in the context of the natural evolutionary environment.” But Mark is still not sure what you meant by asking him that question.

Sacks: I don’t think I meant anything quite as lofty as this. What I meant was that although I love general principles, I am no great shakes at extracting them myself. I feel that I’m sort of collecting specimens and observing phenomena. In this way, I’m like Wallace or Bates, but not like Darwin. Darwin of course was a fabulous collector, but his son says that he seemed to be charged with theorizing power, so that everything immediately generated a hypothesis. Crick was also like that.

Silberman: Didn’t Darwin himself say something about how his mind had become a “machine” for generating hypotheses?

Sacks: Yes, yes, exactly. There’s a peculiar passage in Darwin’s autobiography where he says how, when he was young, he took great delight in poetry, and painting, and music. But now, he said, his mind had become a sort of machine for extracting general laws from large collections of facts.

When I met Crick at a neuroscience meeting in 1987, he seized me by the shoulders at dinner, sat me down next to him, and said, “Tell me stories.” In particular, he wanted to hear stories of visual disorders. You probably saw the piece I wrote about Crick in the New York Review of Books. Crick was a theoretician who felt starved of the data that he needed. Some of this data would come from experimental work, but some of it would come from observations like mine, which look at experiments of nature, in a sense. It’s similar with Ramachandran, though he is more active and ingenious at devising experiments.

Quote of the Day

Let me speak plainly. After my long experience, after my patience and forbearance, I have surely the right to protest against the untruth (would that I could apply to it any other word!) that evangelical religion, or any other religion in a violent form, is a wholesome or valuable or desirable adjunct to human life. It divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative, It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse.

-Edmund Gosse

Quote of the Day

Let me speak plainly. After my long experience, after my patience and forbearance, I have surely the right to protest against the untruth (would that I could apply to it any other word!) that evangelical religion, or any other religion in a violent form, is a wholesome or valuable or desirable adjunct to human life. It divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative, It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse.

-Edmund Gosse

Khameleon808: Apple Tree

Eye kicks from a hundred of your favorite movies edited over the top of some crunchy tracks. We live in a very strange age for the visual arts.

Fullscreen viewing is mandatory.

(via Dangerous Minds)

House Porn 14: Martin Gee

Sarah Rainwater of Apartment Therapy Boston found these photographs by Simon Upton of Martin Gee's very blue apartment. The apartment is decorated as a man's house should be: with collections of strange scientific apparatus, religious paraphenalia, vintage military clothing and architectural building blocks. I am positively agog with envy.

Library Porn

Book collectors Louis & Sue Ainworth found themselves with a house overrun with books, and decided to buy the house next door to house their library. After a gut rehab, they attached the two houses by an atrium that attaches at both floors. Note the extra space available for their future collection.

Bonus: another book collector builds an apartment size set of sinuous shelves to house an extensive art & book collection.