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.

Radicals

A TPM reader responds to the latest nonsense.

Professor Bell was a HERO who dedicated his life to desegregating the United States. From his job as the only black lawyer in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the 1950’s, to his work alongside Thurgood Marshall bringing hundreds of desegregation actions in Mississippi, right up to his leaving Harvard, Professor Bell lived what he preached. That his life’s work was radical or provocative says more about how far we have left to go. If its radical to be appalled that Harvard Law School had no women law professors and only five black male law professors among hundreds of professors, then the world could use a lot more radicals.

I Give Up

So this is the dumbest fake scandal yet, right?

Saturday, Is It?

* Wearing a revealing prom dress? That’s a paddlin’.

* Do corporations have an obligation to increase shareholder value over all other considerations? Turns out the answer is “not really”—and corporate personhood is actually on the side of angels here:

Oddly, no previous management research has looked at what the legal literature says about the topic, so we conducted a systematic analysis of a century’s worth of legal theory and precedent. It turns out that the law provides a surprisingly clear answer: Shareholders do not own the corporation, which is an autonomous legal person…

More at MeFi.

* California Attorney General Jerry Brown has seen the unedited tapes of the James O’Keefe hoax that brought down ACORN and has determined they were dishonestly edited.

* Phil Jones and the Climate Research Unit have been cleared (again) in the Climategate stolen email “scandal.”

* Slate has the four craziest lies about health care reform.

* Didn’t Joss say Dollhouse was over and that the story wouldn’t continue in any form? Now there’s talk of comics.

* Questions with too many answers: “Why America hates Duke basketball.”

* I Can Hold My Breath Forever.

Tuesday Night

* Today in science: Australian scientists are describing “fat” as a taste. Those more sensitive to fat consume less and have a lower BMI.

* Today in science 2: Doctors are gross, not washing hands.

* Support for health-care reform growing as Obama gets more publicly involved? Quick, somebody please tell Congressional Democrats.

* Urban farming in Detroit and mall farming in Cleveland.

* Ana Marie Cox explains Washington as the Venn intersection of science fiction geeks, politicians, indie rock fans, and gay people.

* In short, this entire genre of political coverage is useless. If/when the economy picks up, Obama’s speeches will start “connecting” and everyone will marvel at how effective the White House political team has become. Via Matt Yglesias.

* South Park Reenacts Actual Thing Blackwater Did.

* Winning fifteen-year-old arguments: Clintons cleared in FBI Filegate.

While this Court seriously entertained the plaintiffs’ allegations that their privacy had been violated–and indeed it was, even if not in the sense contemplated by the Privacy Act–after ample opportunity, they have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode–about which they do have cause to complain–was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu.

* Continental Will Cancel Flights To Avoid Fines For Late Takeoffs. I’m sure their customers will understand.

* The 10,000th Glenn-Beck-related outrage of the day: The Census Is The Government’s Attempt To ‘Increase Slavery.’

BECK: Why were they asking the race question, you said when, in 1790? … Right, they want to know, do you count as three-fifths? Do you count at all? So, you have to know how many slaves did you have? People find that offensive today because the idea was, if we’re going to count, we want to know how many are here for services etc. etc. and slaves would get less. Well that’s not right. One. One. ‘I’m not three-fifths, I’m one. Whites are not worth than me.’ Now reverse it, why are they asking this question today?

CO-HOST: Because minorities are worth more than whites.

BECK: Exactly right. So you will get more dollars if you are a minority. So you are worth more as a monitory. Well there is no difference. The reason you don’t answer the race question is because one, everyone counts as one. All men are created equal. If you were offended back in 1790 about slavery and that everyone should count the same, do not answer the race question. How dare you. How dare you. At least in 1790, they were doing it to slow the South down on slavery. To try to stop it as much as they can. Today they are asking the race question to try to increase slavery. Your dependence on the master in Washington. No way, don’t answer that question.

* How America tortures.

* “Wash. Post accuses White House of demonizing insurance industry by accurately portraying industry’s actions.”

* “I Tickled Aide, but That Was All, Massa Says.”

* And Jim Halpert is and is not your Captain America.