- Alfred Shaheen, inventor of the Hawaiian shirt, has passed away. I know at least one person who will be inconsolable for days. [via]
- So it’s official: Sci Fi Wire has become another io9. Although, as Glen points out, there are probably better things to be.
- An online planetarium. It’s a neat, if at first somewhat dizzying, application. [via]
- I don’t often (that is, ever) post Metallica videos here. But that’s only because I’ve never seen any as seriously entertaining and weird as this one. From Tunguska Event to zombie disaster, it’s worth watching even if the music isn’t your cup of tea. [via]
- It’s The End of the Financial World as We Know It:
Say what you will about our government’s approach to the financial crisis, you cannot accuse it of wasting its energy being consistent or trying to win over the masses. In the past year there have been at least seven different bailouts, and six different strategies. And none of them seem to have pleased anyone except a handful of financiers.
Substantial and sweeping reform is going to be needed to get us out of this mess. [via]
various
Monday various
- This is mostly for my own future reference, but should also be of interest to anyone else with an ebook reader in the audience. (I’m really loving mine by the way.) One Dollar Orbit. Orbit Books is offering an ebook a month for just $1. I’m not too interested in this month’s selected title, but I do think I’ll pick up Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons in February. Maybe it will encourage me to finally finish Consider Phlebas.
- Also mostly for my own benefit, xkcd’s Guide to Converting to Metric. We’re making very slow progress on this in the United States, and I find it very difficult to think in terms of degrees Celsius or kilometers instead of miles. When we were in England this past November, a co-worker and I were walking around Brighton when someone on the street asked us for directions. We had just passed the building they were looking for, so my co-worker said, “It’s about maybe half a mile back that way.” To which this clearly more-local-than-us gentleman replied, “Half a mile?!” Like we’d told him it was 23 and a third radishes away or something equally nonsensical. We probably should have stuck with guessing the number of city blocks.
- Alberto Gonzales: casualty of the Iraq war. Won’t anybody think of the real victims? [via]
- Speaking of real victims, though: There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history. This is a very disturbing idea. [via]
- But rather than end on a downer like that, may I present — Cute Things Falling Asleep. It’s like a very specialized Cute Overload. [via]
Monday various
- I don’t always agree with Abigail Nussbaum, but I can always count on her for insightful and interesting commentary. This time it’s on the third season of Dexter, which I finally finished watching (and really enjoying) yesterday afternoon. The whole post is worth reading — provided you’ve seen all three seasons, since it’s quite heavy on spoilers — but here’s a taste:
I’ve written before about the qualities that separate successful multi-season novelistic TV shows from the unsuccessful kind. The key, I speculated, was formula. Not the kind that brings CSI and Law & Order‘s detectives back to the same starting point every week, but the kind that identifies the fundamental, ur-story the show is trying to tell and, though constantly changing its garb, retells it again and again. Buffy is a story about a girl whose impulses towards heroism and normalcy are constantly at war. Angel, the story of an ordinary man faced with the inadequacy of heroism in an imperfect world. For all the differences between its three seasons and their genres, Dexter is that kind of show, telling the same story with each of those seasons.
And if you haven’t seen the show, the first two seasons are available on DVD.
- Speaking of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — we were, honest; read up there if you don’t believe me — here’s a terrific fan-made “trailer” for the first season. (The one for Season 2 isn’t bad at all either.) [via]
- Speaking of dolphins — which we weren’t, but we could have been — apparently some of them have started to use tools. I’d say the invasion couldn’t be far off if it wasn’t for this:
I think maybe the dolphin invasion’s already here. [via and via]
- Neil Gaiman does seem to be going out of his way to not directly call The Spirit a terrible movie, doesn’t he?
It doesn’t say anything about the quality of the film, I should point out. You could make a great film called Batman, in which Batman’s costume is pink and green and he’s a lawyer who works all day and into the early evening to save a small health-food franchise from being taken over by a big conglomerate, and at night he goes on a succession of dates with odd people… and it would be a very bad Batman film.
Plenty of other people are willing, though. The AV Club, for instance, said it “feels like the follow-up to Batman & Robin no one wanted.” Peter David, on the other hand, suggests “viewing it as a surrealist comedy,” rather than whatever it was Frank Miller thought he was directing.
- If Hollywood really wants make a movie about a crime-fighting spirit, they could do worse than to look at this news story, about a Malaysian burglar who claims to be have been held captive for three days by a ghost. I’m just saying. [via]
Monday various
- The Twelve Days of Zombie Christmas. This one’s mostly for Heather, but hey, who doesn’t like holiday zombies?
- I haven’t revisited It’s a Wonderful Life in years, but it always did seem just as heartwarming as people claimed to me. Maybe I was wrong.
- A game that lets you design your own levels with pen and paper? It looks neat. If I had a webcam, I might even give it a try. [via]
- “The Fox network is developing Bitches, a dramedy about a quartet of female friends in New York who are werewolves…” Yeah, this will end well.
- Speaking of Fox, Yahoo reports that with Alan Colmes’ departure, Sean Hannity to become solo act at Fox News. So nothing new then, huh? [via]
Thursday various
- I just assumed we were past the whole “Harry Potter is bad for children!” But I guess Richard Dawkins didn’t get that memo:
- Twilight Body Glitter — now there’s something with a detrimental effect! [via]
- “Michael Platt’s editorial on July 21, 2008 may have inadvertently left the impression that General Motors in some way supported neo-Nazis.” Regret the Error has many more. [via]
- A helpful Guide to Understanding Flow Charts, courtesy of xkcd.
- Job discrimination against World of Warcraft players? I don’t play — watching The Guild is about the closest I get — but even so, what worker doesn’t sometimes lose focus or have erratic sleep patterns? These recruiters might want to check out the counter-argument.
The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in “anti-scientific” fairytales.Prof Hawkins said: “The book I write next year will be a children’s book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking.
“I haven’t read Harry Potter, I have read Pullman who is the other leading children’s author that one might mention and I love his books. I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.”
I do like that he’s willing to think about the issue critically. He’s actually not saying the books are harmful; he’s saying the possibility of their detrimental effect on children should be examined closely. But still, the underlying assumption — that children read these fairy tales and believe in them, that they are unable to differentiate fantasy from reality — seems to me rather flawed. It’s an assumption we usually see from fundamentalist Christian groups who are afraid that witchcraft will poison the minds of our youth. If nothing else, it’s interesting to see it come from the other side of the aisle.