All the Weekend Links You’ll Ever Need

* Key Findings in Chapel Hill’s Academic-Fraud Investigation. I find the scale of this thing totally amazing; that the NCAA is still claiming it has no jurisdiction here is also amazing. It’ll be interesting to see UNC’s next accreditation report.

* Another sportsball-related disaster that the NCAA, alas, just can’t do anything about: Many Athletes Receive Little Education on Concussion.

* Lawsuit Alleges College Athletes Should Be Paid at Least Minimum Wage. The NCAA wishes it could act.

* S’More Inequality: The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education.

* Miami University gave George Will four adjuncts’ yearly salary for this nonsense. But presidents of higher ed nonprofits say that’s chump change.

* Study: we should probably just abolish men.

* Law Will Allow Employers to Fire Women for Using Birth Control. So old I can remember when giving employers direct veto power over health care was the reductio ad absurdum of the Hobby Lobby case.

* Surfers of the nightmare Internet: The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed.

* The Anti-Socialist Origins of Big Data.

* African Writers in a New World. The interviews in this series will lead up to the Symposium of African Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. The event, which will take place December 2-3, 2014, will feature conversations with Laila Lalami, Maaza Mengiste, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, and Taiye Selasi. “African Writers in a New World” will conclude with a conference report from the Symposium. 

* It became necessary to destroy Detroit in order to save it. And Chicago. And pretty much everywhere.

* Rio has used mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics as a “state of exception” to push through private development projects and neoliberal reforms. The Jock Doctrine.

* America’s perpetual state of emergency.

* I said on Twitter that this “13th grade” pilot program in Oregon seems like an example of Goodhart’s Law, though I think I could probably be convinced otherwise.

* Republicans increasingly saying the quiet part loud.

* And that’s not even a link to this utterly bizarre video from AEI about roofies.

* Infidels defile the sacrament: I suspect some of the irrationality around voter ID laws might be linked to Stephen Keating’s notion of voting as religious ritual.

* Speaking of saying the quiet part loud: Seattle Cops Bring Lawsuit Claiming They Have A Constitutional Right To Use Excessive Force.

* At about 4 a.m., officers were dispatched to 3779 W. 5300 South to check on a man who had called a suicide hotline, according to Detective Matt Gwynn, the public information officer for Roy Police Department. A negotiator from the SWAT team was then brought in, and Gwynn says a 6- to 6 ½-hour standoff ensued. “At some point those negotiations failed and unfortunately the SWAT team was involved in a shooting, and the subject is now deceased,” Gwynn said.

* Cops Use Action-Movie Arsenal to Catch Teen Who Stole Cigarettes. I just thank god they caught the guy.

* CHP officer says stealing nude photos from female arrestees ‘game’ for cops.

* Cash damages for woman duped into having undercover spy’s child.

* Climate Change Is Causing Mountain Goats To Shrink. Will you act now, America?

* Methane Leaks Wipe Out Any Climate Benefit Of Fracking, Satellite Observations Confirm.

* By pretending climate change isn’t real we develop the tax base to deal with climate change. With a plan this solid, what could go wrong?

* I’m sure Miami seceding from the rest of Florida would solve it. Of course Republicans have a better idea.

* No one trusts Buzzfeed.

* The United States of Reddit.

* It’s nearly impossible to fire a tech millionaire.

* I mean really, we need to figure out how to fire some of these guys.

* On the Internet, Men Are Called Names. Women Are Stalked and Sexually Harassed. Cassandra among the creeps.

* Matt Yglesias Entirely Misunderstands Why [Anything] Exists.

That Yglesias piece is actually really good at revealing neo/liberalism as Panglossian in-this-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds-ism.

— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2014

Everything that exists is necessary; everything that exists is good. -Matt Yglesias

— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2014

* Your daily running total.

Americans killed by Ebola today: 0 Americans killed by ISIS today: 0 Americans killed by guns today: 86 Source: http://t.co/QCOpdKkjPN

— Sam Johnston (@samj) October 24, 2014

* Peter Jackson vows Battle of the Fire Armies will be literally unwatchable.

* J.K. Rowling releasing new Harry Potter story about Dolores Umbridge.

* If you call slipstream “transrealism” it sounds like a new thing.

* You’re finally getting (another) dark, gritty Archie reboot.

* What’s my risk of catching Ebola? But that’s no reason not to panic.

* Kim Stanley Robinson on “Mount Thoreau” and the naming of things in the wilderness.

* Science proves I listen to Counting Crows because I’m just that smart. So it’s not my fault and no one can blame me. I’m as much a victim as anyone.

* And io9 has your Top 100 Science Fiction-Themed Songs Of All Time. That they left off “Nothing But Flowers” is a crime against all time and space.

These Are Monday Links; There Are Many Like Them, But These Are Mine

* If you’ve been following Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, there’s a new chapter out.

* A One-Item List For Tenure-Track Faculty: Do the job you were hired to do.

* The next wave of Afrofuturism.

* Kim Stanley Robinson: Science Fiction and the Realism of Our Time.

* Bring on the Snowpiercer thinkpieces! 1, 2, 3, 4.

* When we peer into the fog of the deep future what do we see – human extinction or a future among the stars?

* Even the liberal George Will: “We ought to say to these children, ‘Welcome to America, you’re going to go to school and get a job and become Americans,’” Will implored. “We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can’t assimilate these eight-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.”

* Identifying the bodies of those who tried to cross the border illegally.

* Halbig, King, and the Limits of Reasonable Legal Disagreement.

* There is a lizard sex satellite floating in space and Russia no longer has it under control. UPDATE: Russia Regains Control of Gecko Zero-G Sex Satellite.

* If you want to know how I do it. More links below the image!

* Iron Man Should Move to Cleveland, Not San Francisco.

* A friend said it best: Ricky Gervais is scripting Congress now.

* Star Fleet uniforms: not OSHA-compliant.

* The mask slips: Tax agency says ‘preventing poverty’ not allowed as goal for charity.

* Slave Leia is a bummer.

* “Our bad!” It Turns Out Hamas Didn’t Kidnap and Kill the 3 Israeli Teens After All.

* Cupcake fascism.

* This is horrible: First case of ebola reported in Africa’s most populous city Lagos.

* When Tonga Was a Vast Empire.

* The Five Most Overrated Weapons of War.

* On “Bad Feminism.”

* Community colleges and the art of the hustle.

* A lawsuit may determine whether “Happy Birthday” is really still under copyright, which is a bananas notion to begin with.

* Scientists: Rich People, Poor People May Have Shared Common Ancestor.

* BuzzFeed Writer Resigns In Disgrace After Plagiarizing ‘10 Llamas Who Wish They Were Models.’

* Blastr teases Grant Morrison’s Multiversity.

* Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars, says expert.

* If I major in philosophy, what are the career prospects?

* Ascension sounds… pretty good?

* The deadliest Ebola outbreak in recorded history is happening right now. And now the Liberian government has confirmed that a senior doctor working to fight the disease, Samuel Brisbane, has died, the Associated Press reports. That makes him the first Liberian doctor to die of Ebola in the current outbreak.

In addition, an American doctor has been infected. Keith Brantly, a 33-year-old working for American aid organization Samaritan’s Purse, has been treated and is in stable condition, according to USA Today.

This news comes just days after an announcement that the top Ebola doctor in Sierra Leone, Sheik Umar Khan, had been infected.

* And before there was The State, there was You Wrote It, You Watch It.

Tuesday Links!

* One last bit of self-promotion for my Octavia Butler series at LARoB, reviewing the forthcoming eBook Unexpected Stories and the never-to-be-a-book Parable of the Trickster.

* Meanwhile, my new best friend Levar Burton says Octavia Butler is the writer he most wishes he’d met.

* John Oliver for/against the World Cup. Five Thirty Eight’s World Cup Predictions. How to Nerd Out about Soccer. The World Cup and the Corporatization of Soccer.

* An itinerary is by no means the only thing required for setting out on a trip. And the itinerary will change along the way. But for a deliberate departure from capitalism, rather than a blind flight, a preliminary itinerary will be necessary. Whatever we think of the term communism, the crossroads Marx and Engels glimpsed in the Manifesto is coming more clearly into view: either a left alternative to capitalism or “the common ruin of the contending classes”.

* The Church of Science Fiction.

* Heinlein and the Right.

* As horrific as recent mass killings have been, the idea of a slide into ongoing domestic terrorism is just  nightmarish.

* Meanwhile: War Gear Flows to Police Departments.

* Dads Want To Spend Time With Their New Children, If Only We’d Give Them Paid Leave.

* Leaving Homeless Person On The Streets: $31,065. Giving Them Housing: $10,051.

* We’re not giving moms credit when we pose them as the decisive factor in a child’s development, we’re sticking them with the bill.

* The Prison-Industrial Complex and Orange Is the New Black.

* Temple University is investigating an ethics complaint that two of its professors did not properly disclose funding from the private prison industry for their research on the cost of incarceration.

* Grad Students Could Win Big as Obama Slashes Debt Payments. Understanding the CBO’s bullshitting about how the government doesn’t make money on student loans. Lawsuits and the end of the NCAA. College’s inequality disgrace: Millionaire university presidents and indebted students. In the Near Future, Only Very Wealthy Colleges Will Have English Departments. Yes, the Humanities Are Struggling, but They Will Endure. And Now We Know I’ll Never Be MLA President.

* Emily Bazelon covers the Title IX crisis in American colleges. Taekwondo Is Great but Not the Solution to Campus Rape. U. of Oregon Student Who Alleged Rape by Athletes Writes Open Letter. And then there’s George.

* Jezebel covers Wikipedia’s internal fighting over #YesAllWomen.

* Towards a theory of jerks.

* The case against sharing.

* How to drive through all 48 of the contiguous United States in 113 hours.

* The unbearable sadness of Milwaukee tourism videos.

* I thought this was genuinely stunning even by Fox’s already low standards: Fox News Guest Launches Race-Based Attack On Neil deGrasse Tyson.

* Waffle House Forces Waitress To Return $1,000 Tip.

* “The way US immigration laws operate is absurd.”

* The media warns readers about violent pimps stealing girls from malls, but most victims’ stories are very different. I know this because I was a teen trafficking victim, and my experience reflects much of the research that’s been done with trafficking victims.

* The rise of the noncompete clause.

* A Brief History of the Gendered Pronoun in English. In defense of the singular “they.”

* Yes, Nixon Scuttled the Vietnam Peace Talks.

* If We’re Lucky, There’s Going to Be a Clone High Movie–IN MY PANTS.

* Review getting picked up: five stars.

* And 4°C only sounds like no big deal.

Wednesday! Night! Links!

* Jonathan Senchyne on Breaking Bad, cancer, and Indian Country. I like the way he teased this on Facebook: “Walter White has lung cancer, but doesn’t smoke…”

* You know that newfound Van Gogh painting has the TARDIS in it, right?

* From the archives, just in time for application season: Should I Go to Grad School in the Humanities? I wrote that a year ago. If I wrote it today I think I’d write basically the same thing, just be more emphatic about every part. In particular — with all the necessary caveats about the falseness of meritocracy fantasy — going to a highly ranked program with strong recent placement rate is absolutely crucial. If you don’t hit that, and you want to go, work on your writing sample for a year and apply again. Your grad school’s reputation becomes instant proxy for your reputation. It’s not something you should plan to make up for by working hard.

* Also with all the usual anti-meritocracy caveats: On selling yourself on the academic job market.

* From the Washington Post archives: This amazing George Will there-are-too-many-states-nowdays rant against denim crossed my stream today.

* The Inside Story Of How A Fake PhD Hijacked The Syria Debate.

* Go Play This 8-Bit Version of Game of Thrones Immediately.

* Thinking through The World’s End: Part One, Part Two.

* Rich people are freaked out about Bill de Blasio. Sounds like a good start.

* Nate Silver vs. Public Policy Polling. I’m amazed anyone is taking PPP’s side on this. If you don’t like a poll, run it again and release both; otherwise you’re introducing a massive bias into your process and destroying the credibility of your brand.

* Medical Examiner In Zimmerman Trial Sues For $100M, Claims Prosecution Threw Case.

* Long Lives Made Humans Human.

* An oral history of The Shield.

* The New Yorker on Truman Show Delusion. Subscription required, alas.

* Years later, everyone remembered the Cheese Winter: The city’s Department of Public Works will go ahead this winter with a pilot program to determine whether cheese brine — a liquid waste product left over from cheesemaking — can be added to rock salt and applied directly to the street.

* Life imitates the Onion, as always in the worst possible way.

* And Salon interviews the great Margaret Atwood.

It Was The Week That Wouldn’t End and It Was Only Half Over

* The time has come for all good people to follow Conan O’Brien on Twitter.

* Pay attention, North Carolina: “It is impossible for any candidate to get to the right of me.” I honestly don’t care who is running against him, I’ll pull the lever.

* Rush Limbaugh is this and every day’s worst person in the world.

* Glenn Beck: Judas!

* Ezra Klein hates America so much he’s trying to pretend that reconciliation isn’t just another world for communofascism.

* Matt Yglesias and Climate Progress explain to the editors of the Washington Post where all this climate misinformation mysteriously originates: their own completely useless editorial page and the liars they happily print there.

* Related: Reid wants a climate bill.

* Also related: Vermont has voted to close its problem-plagued Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. How long can a nuclear reactor last? Via MeFi.

* The secret origins of TV Tropes. Historical footnote: the first TV Trope ever was the Gilligan Cut.

* Behold the terror of the Zeigarnik Effect: “the tendency to experience intrusive thoughts about an objective that was once pursued and left incomplete.”

* “DNA’s Dirty Little Secret: A forensic tool renowned for exonerating the innocent may actually be putting them in prison.” Via Steve Benen.

Barlow’s main point of contention was statistics. Typically, law enforcement and prosecutors rely on FBI estimates for the rarity of a given DNA profile—a figure can be as remote as one in many trillions when investigators have all thirteen markers to work with. In Puckett’s case, where there were only five and a half markers available, the San Francisco crime lab put the figure at one in 1.1 million—still remote enough to erase any reasonable doubt of his guilt. The problem is that, according to most scientists, this statistic is only relevant when DNA material is used to link a crime directly to a suspect identified through eyewitness testimony or other evidence. In cases where a suspect is found by searching through large databases, the chances of accidentally hitting on the wrong person are orders of magnitude higher. 

The reasons for this aren’t difficult to grasp: consider what happens when you take a DNA profile that has a rarity of one in a million and run it through a database that contains a million people; chances are you’ll get a coincidental match. Given this fact, the two leading scientific bodies that have studied the issue—the National Research Council and the FBI’s DNA advisory board—have recommended that law enforcement and prosecutors calculate the probability of a coincidental match differently in cold-hit cases. In particular, they recommend multiplying the FBI’s rarity statistic by the number of profiles in the database, to arrive at a figure known as the Database Match Probability. When this formula is applied to Puckett’s case (where a profile with a rarity of one in 1.1 million was run through a database of 338,000 offenders) the chances of a coincidental match climb to one in three.

* Why autism is different for girls.

* Chat Roulette: a documentary.

* Do MFA programs hurt poetry?

* Teach the controversy: “There is no unified flat Earth model,” Shenton suggests, “but the most commonly accepted one is that it’s more or less a disc, with a ring of something to hold in the water. The height and substance of that, no one is absolutely sure, but most people think it’s mountains with snow and ice.”

* In response to a new federal mandate to fix under-performing schools, every teacher will be fired at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. Via MetaFilter, where the conversation is by turns fascinating and soul-crushing. I’m expecting another round of (justified) anti-Duncan, anti-Obama diatribes from my friends in public education in five… four… three…

* And an awesome post I missed from Tim a few weeks back: the top-ten most desirable rare video games.

Sunday Always Comes Too Late

* “The New Poor: Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs.”

* Leading Democrats increasingly willing to talk about doing the only thing that ever made any sense in the first place.

* “Justice Department Will Not Punish Yoo and Bybee Because Most Lawyers Are Scum Anyway.” I guess they have us there. More from Glenn Greenwald and Inside Out the Beltway, who writes:

In other words, “heads I win, tails you lose” results when the justice system does both of the following: (1) allows government officials to avoid culpability for their actions by commissioning legal hacks to justify what they want to do; and (2) makes it nearly impossible to punish the advising lawyers for their bald-faced hackery. As a result, as long as a government official launders his or her preordained illegal activity through the hocus-pocus of a sufficiently loyal legal hack, neither the official nor the legal hack will ever be held to account for their central roles in breaking the law.

* Campaigns I can get behind: Fire George Will.

* And rest in peace, Yitta Schwartz, who leaves behind 15 children, 200 grandchildren, and as many as 2,000 great-grandchildren.

Is a Dream a Lie If It Don’t Come True, or Is It Something Worse?

Such ardor has a history. In 1984, George F. Will, in a bow tie and double-breasted blazer, his ears plugged with cotton, attended a Springsteen show. “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics,” wrote a swoony Will, before declaring them like his: “He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’ ” That same year, President Reagan, visiting Jersey, declared, “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.”

‘The right’s unrequited crush on Bruce Springsteen.’ Via Kevin.

I and We

Language Log is doing the hard work of debunking a new conservative meme about Obama’s supposed imperial arrogance.

Sunday!

Sunday!

* Literature: no cell phones allowed.

JULIET: Fakn death. C U Latr.

ROMEO: gud plan.

Recently published narrative fiction is still uneasy about the telephone, much less cell phones or the Internet…

* In defense of The Life Aquatic: Jamie Rich defends the most unfairly maligned of all of Wes Anderson’s films. (Via Rushmore Academy.)

* ‘North Carolina Town Prints Own Currency to Support Local Business.’ I support the effort, but I thought that was illegal…

* The Washington Post continues its efforts to make up for allowing George Will to lie with impunity on its editorial pages.

* Muppets vs. Zombies. If only it were real.

Tuesday Night Linkdump #3

Tuesday night linkdump #3.

* Here comes the Dollhouse? ‘Scientists Erase Painful Memories Without Drugs.’

* Both Inside Higher Ed and Barack Obama himself can declare victory alongside UNC.

* Even the National Review says it’s time for Coleman to concede.

* Environmental reporters at The Washington Post hit back at George Will over the many inaccuracies in his climate change columns.

* More on the Morristown UFO hoax.

Sunday Linkdump #3

Sunday linkdump #3.

* The local food movement gets a big boost with news of a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. More at MeFi.

* Visualizing the organic food industry in the U.S.

* The Washington Post finally gets around to kind of correcting George Will’s dishonest columns on climate change. Sure, it’s been a month, but it’s not like the paper comes out every day.

* You may remember from Jon Stewart’s well-placed mockery when Barack Obama gave Gordon Brown a gift of twenty-five DVDs during his visit that paled in comparison to Brown’s gift of a pen-holder made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute. Well, it’s a little worse than you think.

Alas, when the PM settled down to begin watching them the other night, he found there was a problem.

The films only worked in DVD players made in North America and the words “wrong region” came up on his screen.

I’ve told you before, information wants to be free…

Even the list of DVDs itself is fairly unimpressive. Star Wars? The Godfather? Really? I’ve got to be honest, I think Brown’s probably seen some of these.

Ecolinks!

Still working through a backlog of open tabs. First up: ecology and the environment.

* There’s no such thing as clean coal. Just ask the Coen brothers. Also at Grist: dealing with the fact of environmentalism’s soft public support.

As I have argued before, our attention to wide but weak public support is misplaced, leaving us vulnerable to the cycles of an ADD media and alienating our potential core. It is increasingly evident that the vast scale of climate risk provokes a number of numbing psychological responses — pre-conscience cognitive dissonance and buffering in various forms — which exacerbates the usual forces of diffusion.

The only means by which a worldview and solution that is significantly at odds with majority public opinion may be driven onto the public agenda is through the agency of “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens” — in other words, a determined, partisan core.

* George Will: still lyin’.

* ‘Hacking the planet: The only climate solution left?’ First up: a sunshield. I guess it’s true what they say: from the dawn of time mankind really has yearned to block out the sun.

* Sympathy for the Unabomber? Don’t open any packages from Kevin Kelly for a few days.

* Times Square and several blocks of Broadway are being shut down to cars for most of the year in the name of traffic management and pedestrian malls. Awesome.

* Nuke your city. Via BLDG BLOG (which has a lot of examples) and io9. Of course, we’ve already done Durham.

A Rare Treat

A rare treat: good news on climate change. A glitch in satellite sensors caused scientists to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), a California- size area, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said. Of course, it’s good news on an objective level, but perhaps bad news politically, as this is just now other isolated data point for the ignorant, the deluded, and the actively dishonest to latch onto in their efforts to deny real progress.

Friday Night Links

Friday night links while I wait for Jaimee to get home so I can watch some science fiction and turn my brain off.

* George Will is in the news this week for his latest stunningly dishonest column on climate change, which the Washington Post has perversely decided to stand behind. The statement from the paper’s ombudsman is here.

* The EPA under the Obama administration will finally be able to take carbon seriously.

* Secure website authentification questions.

* Howard Machtinger looks back at his participation in the Weather Underground to acknowledge the group’s failures. Via MeFi and Matt Yglesias.

While “New Morning” signaled the WU’s commitment to taking greater care after the accident to target property and not people, it did not acknowledge the WU’s own responsibility for the politics of the Townhouse collective.

WU leaders––then and since––failed to reckon candidly and directly with what it meant, politically and humanly, that core members of the organization had planned to use fragmentation bombs to kill attendees at a dance.

* The complete Pac-Man dossier: everything there is to know about the game, from ghost logic to how to play the kill screen. Via MeFi.

* Hard to believe we’ve all outlived Late Night with Conan O’Brien. I haven’t watched the show in years, but it was formative to my sense of “funny” as a teenager. Here’s Colbert saying goodbye the only way he knows how.

* Wither Burris? It doesn’t look good for the man nobody wanted to be Senator anyway.

Busy Day Today

I have an unpleasantly busy day today, and the open tabs are already building up. Here’s a few links just to relieve the tension.

* Lieberman saved the stimulus? I guess the people who said we should be nice to him despite everything he’s done may have had a point.

* Four Tennessee state representatives, all Republicans, have signed up to be plaintiffs in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama, aimed at forcing him to prove he is a United States citizen by coughing up his birth certificate. Good lord. How many times do we have to do this one?

* George Will v. climate science. Spoiler alert: Science wins. More (including charts!) from Nate Silver. I did a post like this over the weekend, if you missed it.

* Relatedly, from Marginal Revolution: What if all the smart people are in one party?

* Do not attempt to eat the world’s hottest peper. That’s just common sense. (Via Neil.)