Thursday Links!

* Some seriously great news for my particular demographic: Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars Trilogy is colonizing TV.

* Flooding risk from climate change, country by country. Meanwhile: World’s Cities All Becoming Teeming Hellscapes.

* A brief history of mana: How an Austronesian Concept Became a Video Game Mechanic.

* A History of The Lord of the Rings in Video Games.

* LARoB considers the criminally underrated Chronicles of Pyrdain and the night genre was born.

* Age discrimination and adjuncts. I still think this is a seriously underreported story considering how dramatically it would change the landscape of hiring in higher education if it were to prevail.

* While surely a simple economic determinism would be distorting, it should still be clear that the epistemic and cultural divide between the “hard” sciences and the humanities cannot be easily disentangled from a noticeable financial divide.

* How For-Profit Universities Make a Killing By Exploiting College Dreams.

* Udacity has moved on to a new scam: nanodegrees.

* Angry Letters to the One Member of Congress Who Voted Against the War on Terror.

* “Reluctant Warrior Bombs Yet Another Country.”

* FSU chooses a politician as its new president despite major opposition from faculty and students. From the archives: FSU to phase out academic operations.

* Head’s up, math geeks: big discovery about prime numbers.

* Chimpanzees Raised by Humans Have Social Difficulties With Other Chimps.

* Listen, it’s about yardage: FiveThirtyEight provides the cheat sheet necessary for me to interact with other Wisconsinites.

* ESPN suspends Bill Simmons for repeating ESPN’s own reporting about the NFL and drawing the only possible conclusion.

* 15.4% growth of Harvard’s endowment brings the total to a cool $36 billion, assuring Harvard’s continued existence for another year. And thank goodness.

* I think I’ve discovered a way to precrastinate my procrastination, which means I’m always so late I never bother to get off the couch.

* Science proves no one is allowed to have any fun: Researcher shows that black holes do not exist.

* Fraternities finally look in the mirror and confront the enemy within: drunk female guests. Should we ban frats?

* What it’s like to be struck by lightning. What it’s like to lose your memory at 22.

* Please don’t ever drive and text.

* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine Mitt Romney running for president, forever.

Even More Friday Links!

* CFP: Far Eastern Worlds: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction.

* Morally odious monsters: Rich white man explains why poor black kids must go to jail to serve as a cautionary tale for the privileged.

* The franchise now has until 4 p.m. Friday to sell the tickets or face a TV blackout in the Milwaukee, Green Bay and Wausau markets. The last time a Packers game was blacked out was an NFC first-round playoff against the St. Louis Cardinals on Jan. 8, 1983.

* The Scandal Bowl: Tar Heels Football, Academic Fraud, and Implicit Racism.

Implicit racism colors this entire episode. One of the most horrifying aspects of the exploitation of high-level college athletes, especially football and basketball players, is the vastly disproportionate impact on African American “students.” Too many black athletes with unrealistic dreams of NBA or NFL stardom arrive on campus unprepared academically and are allowed to depart with little meaningful classroom education. Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA and now a critic of its practices, has described the “plantation mentality resurrected and blessed by today’s campus executives”—painful words, carefully chosen. Would UNC have tolerated the thorough undermining of an entire academic department other than Afro-American studies? Hard to picture. Could Nyang’oro and those who presumably aided and abetted him have come up with course titles any more likely to please skeptics of black-oriented scholarship?

* Duke University scientists find women need more sleep than men.

* The Amazon of Higher Education: How tiny, struggling Southern New Hampshire University has become a behemoth.

* Friendship is Maddness, A Cthulhu-Themed My Little Pony.

* And 10 Animals That Went Extinct in 2013.

8 of the 19 NFL Players She Has Autopsied; Three NHL Enforcers; and a Boy Just 17 Years Old

Dr. Ann McKee, the Packers fan who might kill football.

Sunday Morning Wisconsin Links!

* Wisconsin Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca lets the GOP majority have it. Via the latest incarnation of the MeFi thread, which also offers up the picture at right.

* 12 Things You Need to Know About the Uprising in Wisconsin.

* Succinct primer from Rortybomb: Wisconsin Draws the Line on Austerity Opportunism and Class War.

* More reasons why the Green Bay Packers are the only football team to support.

* Wisconsin Union Battle: A Convenient Distraction From the Real Culprit in State Budget Woes.

Corporations repeated at the state and local levels what they accomplished federally. According to the US Census Bureau, corporations paid taxes on their profits to states and localities totalling $24.7bn in 1988, while individuals then paid income taxes of $90bn. However, by 2009, while corporate tax payments had roughly doubled (to $49.1bn), individual income taxes had more than tripled (to $290bn).

As long as raising taxes on corporations and the rich is off the table states will continue to face these sorts of manufactured budget crises. A functioning government costs money.

* Wisconsin’s union employees are upset about a loss of collective bargaining and a mandated increase in benefit payments, including for health insurance. But at least these employees would still have health insurance. What has been widely ignored about Walker’s bill (in part because of the speed with which he’s fisting it down Wisconsin’s gullet) is a sneaky provision that paves the way for him to cut, or eliminate, Medicaid and BadgerCare healthcare benefits for low-income people.

* No unions on the teevee. I don’t watch the sunday morning shows, but I hear on the Twitter that there were no union members on television to discuss the issue today, either.

* The latest protests have drawn 80,000 people.

* How Abraham Lincoln wrote the breaking quorum playbook.

* If you want more links, zunguzungu’s got ’em, including a great little piece on a taxicab co-op that has joined the protestors in solidarity.