Saturday Night Links!

* Chris Ware: The Story of a Penny.

* There’s nothing sweet in life: Daytime Napping Linked to Increased Risk of Death.

* So it’s come to this: the University of California is now arresting striking workers, their leaders and supporters for legally sanctioned labor activity.

* On the gender gap in academia.

* America’s total newsroom workforce dropped 17,000, from 55,000 in 2006 to 38,000 in 2012, according to the Pew Research Journalism Project.

* “D.C.’s homeless children deserve a great play space. Let’s build one.” End homelessness.

* Tasers out of schools, out of everywhere.

* The NSA has exploited Heartbleed bug for years, Bloomberg reports. The NSA denies it.

* EFF seeks student activists for campus network.

* Great moments in arbitrary government nonsense.

Social Security officials say that if children indirectly received assistance from public dollars paid to a parent, the children’s money can be taken, no matter how long ago any overpayment occurred.

* And then, as always, there’s the LAPD.

* Albuquerque police have ‘pattern’ of excessive, deadly force, report says.

* Blogs to watch: http://carceralfeminism.wordpress.com/

* PETA unable to make cannibal Dahmer’s home a vegan restaurant.

* Science is amazing.

* “May I play devil’s advocate?”

* Go on….

* Special bonus Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal!

* The Second Colbert Decade.

* Muppet mash-ups.

* Climate Change Drying Out Southwest Now, With Worse To Come For A Third Of The Planet. Extreme Weather Has Driven A Ten-Fold Increase In Power Outages Over The Last Two Decades. If We Don’t Stop Now, We’ll Surpass 2°C Global Warming.

* Jed Whedon explains why Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has been so bad all this time.

* Kickstarter of the night: Geek Theater: Anthology of Science Fiction & Fantasy Plays.

* And of course you had me at “Game of Thrones in Space.”

Saturday Night Links

* SOPA update from Cory Doctorow: The Judiciary Committee will have another chance to pass the bill out of committee at a special session on December 21.

* The headline reads, Australia’s most cherished marsupial, the koala, is in danger of becoming extinct in the wild within 30 years after an outbreak of chlamydia.

* The headline reads, Two deaths from brain-eating amoeba linked to sinus remedy for colds. Does the world seem a little strange today to anyone else?

* Only the super-rich can save us now! An anonymous cabal of millionaires and billionaires is looking to do something in the 2012 election by running an independent candidate in all 50 states. Just what is that something? I guess we’ll find out.

* Obama vs. the pipeline? As @thinkprogress notes, that’s the whole point of this payroll tax blackmail in the first place.

* Media Matters celebrates Fox & Friends, 2011.

* I’m with Ta-Nehisi: Occupy Wall Street shouldn’t turn into Occupy Trinity Church. If that puts me at odds with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, well, so be it…

* Today in the permafrost apocalypse: A recent estimate suggests that the perennially frozen ground known as permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.

* Glenn Greenwald: To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic. More, specifically on Hitchens, from Lenin’s Tomb.

* And your game of the night: Greens Survive Only When Reds Die. Like Lemmings for sociopaths. Enjoy!

The End of SOPA?

I’ve been an exceedingly poor member of HASTAC this semester, but I did managed to put together a brief end-of-term link post on the apparent end of SOPA tonight, if you’re interested in the subject.

If We’re All Bad Then No One Has to Feel Bad

If you’d like to waste your Sunday the way I just wasted my Saturday, might I recommend VVVV from Humble Bundle 3? Proceeds go to the EFF, so if you think about it it’s practically charity.

URGENT UPDATE: Atom Zombie Smasher is also very fun.

Bloggers, Know Your Rights

The EFF has updated its legal guide for bloggers. Via Boing Boing.

When can I borrow someone’s images for my blog post?

Images are subject to the same copyright and fair use laws as written materials, so here too you’ll want to think about the fair use factors that might apply. Is the image used in a transformative way? Are you taking only what’s necessary to convey your point? A thumbnail (reduced-size) image, or a portion of a larger image is more likely to be fair use than taking an entire full-size image. If you want to go beyond fair use, look for Creative Commons licensed images.

I break this guideline all the time. I blog from the outskirts of the law.