Tuesday!

* C21′s book on Debt is finally almost out. My essay draws on the bits of the Polygraph introduction I wrote and is about ecological debt.

* Syllabus minute: I have W.H. Auden envy.

* MOOC Completion Rates: The Data.

* How neoliberal universities build their football stadiums.

Some projections showed Athletics might not be able to make payments starting in the 2030s when the debt service balloons. The debt is structured so that for the next 20 years, Cal only needs to make interest payments on the debt. The principal kicks in in the early 2030s, resulting in payments between $24 million and $37 million per year.

Look, if it’s good enough for an idea man who settled out of court on securities fraud, it’s good enough for me.

* Kent State fires adjunct who built their journalism master’s.

* Ian Morris, psychohistorian.

* What If? on The Twitter Archive of Babel. The Twitter Archive of Babel contains the true story of your life, as well as all the stories of all the lives you didn’t lead….

* Proud Species Commits Suicide Rather Than Be Driven To Extinction By Humans.

* A People’s History of “Twist and Shout.”

* PPP: Russ Feingold Poised For Comeback, Could Top Scott Walker Next Year.

* Michael Chabon: Dreams are useless bodily effluvia. Nicholson Baker: Dreams are all we have.

* You and I are gonna live forever: 72 is the new 30.

* Settling nerd fights of the 1990s today:  Is This the Smoking Gun Proving Deep Space Nine Ripped Off Babylon 5?

* The Star Wars Heresies: Star Wars and William Blake. Tim Morton’s essay in Green Planets has a similar impulse with respect to Avatar.

* And in even more insane mashup news: WWE Keeps Pressure On Glenn Beck.

Friday Night Links, Special ‘Jesus Year’ Edition

* Reality is a hoax: If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve never experienced a colder-than-average month. That’s right; there hasn’t been a colder-than-average month in twenty-seven years.

* “We Would Never Propose A Carbon Tax,” Says White House Spokesman. I’m so glad the pro-science, reality-based candidate won!

* Aaron Bady vs. the excluded middle.

* Federal Court Rules that Banning Affirmative Action Is Unconstitutional.

* The new normal: Missouri police foil mass murder plot at ‘Twilight’ screening, Walmart.

* Hostess successfully looted, crime pinned on unions.

* Meanwhile people in Miami are looking to prosecute the owners of the Marlins for racketeering. 

* Walmart Strike Spreads to Texas as Organizers Promise Massive Black Friday Protest.

* Vietnam War photo gallery.

* Patriot Coal agrees to stop using mountaintop removal mining.

* The age of the password is over. We just haven’t realized it yet.

* And the frame giveth, and the frame taketh away: after the insanity of the last year, Americans describe themselves as pro-choice again.

The Rich Are Different from You and Me

The world’s super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy.

‘The Trick Is to Rob Them in Ways That Are Systematic, Impersonal, and Almost Impossible to Trace to Individual Perpetrators’

How Corporations and Local Governments Use the Poor As Piggy Banks.

Friday Linkfest

* The Portal 2s that could have been. I do, I happily admit, want to play all of these.

* Drop everything! My brilliant friend and colleague Melody Jue is now blogging at Philosophy of Water.

* At right is your photo of the day: An aurora over Faskrudsfjordur, Iceland.

* Joss Whedon explains how to write a sequel.

* Steal $80 million in a Ponzi scheme, get 18 months. Steal $4,367 in food stamps, get 3 years.

* “A dozen earthquakes in northeastern Ohio were almost certainly induced by injection of gas-drilling wastewater into the earth,” Ohio oil and gas regulators said today.

* The year without a winter. Things are going to get weirder. But don’t worry: God told James Inhofe global warming is a hoax.

* “I have not heard of another hug”: Janet Bell, Derrick Bell’s widow, speaks out.

* Pat Robertson gets one right: he says we ought to legalize it.

* The Seuss book no one’s bought us (yet): The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History’s Barest Family.

* Jacob Burak crunches the odds on Russian Roulette. But he’s completely failed to account for the quantum immortality factor.

* Science quantifies the Tina Fey effect.

“When all other variables in the model are held at their mean, those who watched the SNL clip had a 45.4 percent probability of saying that Palin’s nomination made them less likely to vote for McCain,” they write. “This same probability drops to 34 percent among those who saw coverage of the debate through other media. Exposure to the clip had no significant effect on the likelihood of voting for Obama.”

* When Terry Kneiss wins a Showcase Showdown, son, he wins it.

* On chess, gender, and Laszlo Polgar’s Grandmaster Experiment.

* For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the “stats” that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports. I’m shocked, shocked! Followup to this This American Life story.

* The headline reads, “Breakthrough Alzheimer’s treatment stops brain damage in mice.”

* And TPM has today’s sci-fi architecture porn.

Dibs on the Screenplay

Via Mitch, from last August: ‘Tome raider’ conman jailed for trying to sell stolen Shakespeare manuscript for £2m in bid to bring Cuban showgirl to Britain.

A Ferrari -driving fantasist who tried to make £2million by selling a stolen copy of a rare first collection of Shakespeare’s plays was jailed yesterday.

Raymond Scott, 53, hoped to pay off £90,000 in debts and bring 23-year-old Heidy Rios, a raven-haired exotic dancer he met on holiday in Cuba, to Britain.

He ran up the debts posing as an international jetsetter, wearing designer clothes and driving the yellow supercar, while all the time living on benefits with his mother in Tyne and Wear.

The conman walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC with a copy of the 1623 First Folio and asked for it to be verified as genuine.

The copy had been stolen a decade earlier from Durham University.

Experts at the library, which houses around a third of the world’s 228 surviving copies of the First Folio, found it had been ‘damaged, brutalised and mutilated’ to hide its provenance and called the FBI.

Jailing him for eight years at Newcastle Crown Court, Judge Richard Lowden said: ‘You wanted to fund an extremely ludicrous playboy lifestyle in order to impress a woman.’

Monday Night

* Sorry, Hillary; my current SCOTUS bet is Leah Ward Sears, who would be the first African-American woman on the court. She feels like a smart pick that the GOP would have trouble moving against after the Sotomayor debacle. She’d also fulfill the crucially important non-Ivy criterion. I think she’s the one.

* I just hope someone in the White House is reading Scott Lemieux.

* The city of Birmingham was founded in 1871, at the dawn of the Southern industrial boom, for the express purpose of attracting Northern capital — it was even named after a famous British steel town to burnish its entrepreneurial cred. There’s a gruesome irony in it now lying sacked and looted by financial vandals from the North. The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren’t number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. Via MetaFilter.

* Probably the end of my Conanblogging: Conan signs a deal with TBS. Here’s some insider details involving George Lopez.

* People with Williams Syndrome lack 26 genes found in a typical human genome. As a result they are inordinately friendly, and experience no social anxiety. Now a new study reveals that they may also be free of racial bias.

* And contra Krugman: Is climate economics a mirage? Via Kevin Drum.

Now, if the economy is going to be a bit more than three times larger, but we are only going to emit 17% of the current level of carbon emissions, then the carbon intensity of the economy – that is the ratio of carbon emitted per dollar of goods and services created, is going to have to be only 5% of the current value. Next you have to figure that there are certain things in an industrial society that are very hard to do without liquid fuel – construction and agricultural machinery come to mind, along with aviation. Relying heavily on biofuels is a very dubious prospect in a world that also needs to feed 9 billion (assumed wealthier) people from its limited agricultural land. So you can probably figure that the residual 5% of carbon emission intensity is all going to go on these kind of specialized uses that are hard to substitute.

Therefore, these goals basically imply that the ordinary living and working of most citizens would be essentially carbon free by 2050. That is in 40 years time…

How to Cheat in Online Poker

How (and how not) to cheat in in online poker. Related: confessions of a golf hustler. At MetaFilter.