- Anybody wanna chip in together and buy Miramax?
- I mean, I’d be happy to write Errol Morris another letter like this if you think it would help. (I love how Weinstein asks Morris for casting suggestions to play himself.)
- Well that’s just weird: Barack Obama and Scott Brown are cousins. [via]
- Texas bans a children’s book because they thought it was written by a Marxist. Not only is that pretty dumb, they were also wrong. [via]
- And finally, are there aliens already among us? Inside us?
Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth — which used to pump out a loud tangle of radio waves, television signals and other radiation — has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.
Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television — which uses a far weaker signal — and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.
“Very soon we will become very undetectable,” he said. If similar changes are taking place in other technologically advanced societies, then the search for them “will be much more difficult than we imagined.” [via]