Wednesday Links

* …American University professor Allan Lichtman, “whose election formula has correctly called every president since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election,” says Obama is a shoo-in. My two-pronged election formula [(1) Is everything terrible? (2) Is one of the parties visibly insane?] put Obama’s chances at 50-50. I guess we’ll see.

* Yes please: DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is planning on disbursing a $500,000 grant in November for interstellar starship research.

* Crimes against the future: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change.”

* ‘Overhyped’ Hurricane Irene Likely To Be One Of The 10 Costliest Disasters Ever.

* 25 Corporations Paid More To Their CEO Last Year Than They Paid In Taxes.

* Stephen King’s Under the Dome will come to Showtime.

* Shaviro on post-continuity.

In my book Post-Cinematic Affect (2010), I argue that American commercial filmmaking has, in the last decade or so, been increasingly characterized by what I call the stylistics of post-continuity. This is a filmmaking practice in which a preoccupation with moment-to-moment excitement, and with delivering continual shocks to the audience, trumps any concern with traditional continuity, either on a shot-by-shot level or in terms of larger narrative structures.

* Play around with this and make some art with fractals.

* And a very happy birthday to #7,000,000,000.