[links] Link salad wakes up from a bad night
Metastasis: An Anthology to Support Cancer Research - In which I have a reprint piece.
Polemic: how readers will discover books in future - Charlie Stross is as usual smart and funny.
Mark Forsyth's top 10 lost words - From snollygoster to wamblecropt, these forgotten words just might come handy, says the author of The Horologicon. (Via AH.)
Check Out the 1,500-Bottle Multnomah Whiskey Library - Huh. This is pretty cool. (Via Lisa Costello.)
Memory Is Inherently Fallible, And That's a Good Thing
Mothers Pass Depression to Kids, Study Finds
A Strange Lonely Planet Found Without a Star - An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago -- a newborn in planet lifetimes. Centauri Dreams with more on this. (Via Ellen Eades.)
Measuring a superconducting qubit by manipulating its environment - Putting microwaves in the environment lets researchers track a qubit's evolution.
The mathematician's defense of Bitcoin: It's just another option
An Open Letter to the Editors of the Los Angeles Times - Yup. This. Climate change denialism has all the intellectual credibility of Flat Earthism (itself once Biblical position) and evolution denial (also a claim with exactly the same scientific authority as Flat Earthism). Cherished biases are not facts, no matter how desperate the true believer is to convince everyone around them otherwise.
Red Dawn delusions and an unmet longing for real community - “The data suggests to us that outrage-based programming offers fans a satisfying political experience,” they write in the journal Poetics. “These venues offer flattering, reassuring environments that make audience members feel good. Fans experience them as safe havens from the tense exchanges that they associate with cross-cutting political talk they may encounter with neighbors, colleagues, and community members.” This is fascinating.
Bachmann: Obama Funding Al-Qaeda Proves 'We Are in God’s End Times' - Ah, the measured, rational discourse of your Republican party. If you're Republican, this is what you vote for. Because if there really are reasonable Republicans in Congress, they certainly don't do a damned thing to curb this vile insanity in the party. (Via David Goldman.)
What the Shutdown Has Achieved - Post-Bush Republicans have managed to achieve what I thought couldn’t be done-they have made their party even more unattractive to the country than it was at the lowest ebb of Bush’s last years in office. I hope this finally means more voters are seeing the GOP for what it really is, but I am very dubious of such a happy outcome.
7 things @ 9 o’clock (10.10) - Slacktivist Fred Clark is on fire with a series of links to interesting reporting on the ethics, morality and racist impulses behind the Tea Party-inspired GOP government shutdown.
“A Federal Budget Crisis Months In The Planning” - It's very emotionally convenient for conservatives to blame Obama for the shutdown, but the shutdown is an extraordinary event which only happened because conservatives drove toward that goal in defiance of over two centuries of Constitutional process, parliamentary procedure, and traditions of the House and Senate. Obama wasn't the one gleefully planning this months in advance. Republicans were.
?otD: Got cramps?
10/10/2013
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemo brain)
Hours slept: 7.0 hours (badly interrupted)
Body movement: 30 minutes (stationary bike)
Weight: n/a (scale broken)
Number of FEMA troops on my block enforcing laws passed under the Constitutional process and fully subjected to judicial review: 0
Currently reading: n/a (chemo brain)
Polemic: how readers will discover books in future - Charlie Stross is as usual smart and funny.
Mark Forsyth's top 10 lost words - From snollygoster to wamblecropt, these forgotten words just might come handy, says the author of The Horologicon. (Via AH.)
Check Out the 1,500-Bottle Multnomah Whiskey Library - Huh. This is pretty cool. (Via Lisa Costello.)
Memory Is Inherently Fallible, And That's a Good Thing
Mothers Pass Depression to Kids, Study Finds
A Strange Lonely Planet Found Without a Star - An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago -- a newborn in planet lifetimes. Centauri Dreams with more on this. (Via Ellen Eades.)
Measuring a superconducting qubit by manipulating its environment - Putting microwaves in the environment lets researchers track a qubit's evolution.
The mathematician's defense of Bitcoin: It's just another option
An Open Letter to the Editors of the Los Angeles Times - Yup. This. Climate change denialism has all the intellectual credibility of Flat Earthism (itself once Biblical position) and evolution denial (also a claim with exactly the same scientific authority as Flat Earthism). Cherished biases are not facts, no matter how desperate the true believer is to convince everyone around them otherwise.
Red Dawn delusions and an unmet longing for real community - “The data suggests to us that outrage-based programming offers fans a satisfying political experience,” they write in the journal Poetics. “These venues offer flattering, reassuring environments that make audience members feel good. Fans experience them as safe havens from the tense exchanges that they associate with cross-cutting political talk they may encounter with neighbors, colleagues, and community members.” This is fascinating.
Bachmann: Obama Funding Al-Qaeda Proves 'We Are in God’s End Times' - Ah, the measured, rational discourse of your Republican party. If you're Republican, this is what you vote for. Because if there really are reasonable Republicans in Congress, they certainly don't do a damned thing to curb this vile insanity in the party. (Via David Goldman.)
What the Shutdown Has Achieved - Post-Bush Republicans have managed to achieve what I thought couldn’t be done-they have made their party even more unattractive to the country than it was at the lowest ebb of Bush’s last years in office. I hope this finally means more voters are seeing the GOP for what it really is, but I am very dubious of such a happy outcome.
7 things @ 9 o’clock (10.10) - Slacktivist Fred Clark is on fire with a series of links to interesting reporting on the ethics, morality and racist impulses behind the Tea Party-inspired GOP government shutdown.
“A Federal Budget Crisis Months In The Planning” - It's very emotionally convenient for conservatives to blame Obama for the shutdown, but the shutdown is an extraordinary event which only happened because conservatives drove toward that goal in defiance of over two centuries of Constitutional process, parliamentary procedure, and traditions of the House and Senate. Obama wasn't the one gleefully planning this months in advance. Republicans were.
?otD: Got cramps?
10/10/2013
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemo brain)
Hours slept: 7.0 hours (badly interrupted)
Body movement: 30 minutes (stationary bike)
Weight: n/a (scale broken)
Number of FEMA troops on my block enforcing laws passed under the Constitutional process and fully subjected to judicial review: 0
Currently reading: n/a (chemo brain)