Thursday Night

* An asteroid buzzed us yesterday, but the real terror (as Neil de Grasse Tyson reminds us on this week’s Nerdist podcast) remains Apophis in 2036. Get me Bruce Willis!

* Some perspectives on the Keystone XL delay: We’ve been sold out! We’ve won (for now)! We’ve won!

* “We regret that, given the instruction to take down tents and prevent encampment, the police were forced to use their batons to enforce the policy.” Please, stop making us beat you!

* Occupy Oakland’s Big Challenge: The Mayhem Factor.

* Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home will be a musical.

* The next Cold War will be fought with greenhouse gas.

* Naomi Klein: Capitalism vs. the climate.

* And ladies and gentlemen, for the last time anywhere: the Western Black Rhino.

Lots and Lots of Monday Night Links

* ThinkProgress reports solar is surging. We’re saved! Krugman has more, and so does Steve Benen.

* Via my dad: Soviet Bus Stops.

* Occupy my dad: Class war is intergenerational war.

* Rortybomb: Two Steps Toward Tackling Our Current Student Loan Problems. Robert Cruickshank: …any student loan reform proposal that does not include some form of principal writedowns is not likely to be very effective.

* Chris Newfield: The real issue is that imposing higher teaching loads and more on-line instruction on public universities won’t reverse the relentlessly growing gulf between elite privates and their once-elite public peers. 

* Tor reviews Stephen King’s 11/22/63. I’m much more interested in his pitch for what sounds like a truly horrifying next novel: Occupy Bangor.

* “Without knowing what they ought to fear, US citizens might otherwise fail to support profitable national security initiatives.”

* A new AAUW study shows there’s an easy way for young women to avoid sexual harassment in schools: just avoid being either pretty or not pretty.

* Polling shows Americans have begun to realize Republicans are intentionally sabotaging the economy.

* Anti-vaccination fever just got a little more crazy. Via MeFi.

* Marriage equality increases property values. Is that a good enough reason?

* Also on the equality front: Dan Harmon kind-of, sort-of apologizes for the way Community treats gay and trans people.

* Everybody still hates Romney. Poor guy.

* And Bors memorializes one of the windows broken during the Occupy Oakland protests last week.

Wednesday!

* The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has once again rejected Troy Davis’s appeal. Terrible.

* Occupy Wall Street, Day 5. Some more here.

* Apocalypse 2012: Just shy of a majority of registered voters, 49 percent, say they definitely plan to vote against Barack Obama in 2012, but just 36 percent say they definitely plan to vote for him, according to a newMcClatchy-Marist poll.

* House and Senate GOP leadership are taking fire from all sides for publicly pressuring Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke not to further loosen monetary policy, even if he thinks it will help the economy.

* Things Apple is worth more than.

* And some good news for a change: our energy problems are over forever. We’re saved!

“This system could produce hydrogen anyplace that there is wastewater near sea water,” said Bruce E. Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering. “It uses no grid electricity and is completely carbon neutral. It is an inexhaustible source of energy.”

Saved!

Promised Linkdump

* Ryan has rightly demanded that these images of superheroes photoshopped into old war photographs be posted on this blog.

* Also via Ryan: David Harvey, “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition.”

* As promised, nuclear power will shortly save us all.

Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.

Today, however, Sorensen spearheads a cadre of outsiders dedicated to sparking a thorium revival. When he’s not at his day job as an aerospace engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama — or wrapping up the master’s in nuclear engineering he is soon to earn from the University of Tennessee — he runs a popular blog called Energy From Thorium. A community of engineers, amateur nuclear power geeks, and researchers has gathered around the site’s forum, ardently discussing the future of thorium. The site even links to PDFs of the Oak Ridge archives, which Sorensen helped get scanned. Energy From Thorium has become a sort of open source project aimed at resurrecting long-lost energy technology using modern techniques.

Via MeFi.

* The way the White House has been trumpeting the “Passenger Bill of Rights” today suggests to me they may finally be getting the hang of the publicity end of things.

* Another round of MLA interview suggestions from ProfHacker.

* Ten ways to traverse deep space.

* Top ten cryptozoology stories of 2009. Via Boing Boing.

* The ten worst things about the Bush presidency.

230

GM says the Volt will get 230 miles per gallon in city driving. More astounding, Nissan says its electric car (the Leaf) will get 367 mpg. Of course the carbon cost of electricity generation (*cough* *cough* coal plants) needs to be accounted for, which will make the Volt roughly equivalent to a 55 mpg vehicle—still a potential gamechanger in a nation addicted to the automobile.

Friday Politics

Friday politics roundup.

* Early returns from the Iranian elections suggest things could get heated, with both sides declaring victory.

* On the day Jon Kyl threatened a Republican boycott of the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearing, George H. W. Bush cautioned his party not to go overboard.

“I don’t know her that well but I think she’s had a distinguished record on the bench and she should be entitled to fair hearings. Not – [it’s] like the senator John Cornyn said it,” [the elder former President Bush] told CNN. “He may vote for it, he may not. But he’s been backing away from these…backing off from those radical statements to describe her, to attribute things to her that may or may not be true.

“And she was called by somebody a racist once. That’s not right. I mean that’s not fair. It doesn’t help the process. You’re out there name-calling. So let them decide who they want to vote for and get on with it.”

* Kos analyzes party ID, empathy, and the generation gap.

* High-school student discovers plastic-eating microbe. We’re saved!

Monday Links

Getting everything together for the big roundtable this Friday is keeping me fairly busy, so it’s just links tonight.

* Sad news: Eve Sedgwick has died.

* Matt Yglesias luxuriates in the deliciousness of Richard Burr’s low approval ratings. So say we all.

* ‘Pentagon Prioritizes Pursuit Of Alternative Fuel Sources.’ With the military-industrial complex at our back, we can’t fail!

* St. Augustine vs. the pirates.

In the “City of God,” St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, “How dare you molest the seas?” To which the pirate replied, “How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor.” St. Augustine thought the pirate’s answer was “elegant and excellent.”

* The mutants walk among us: ‘Woman has developed an imaginary, but useful, third arm.’

* New fiction on the way from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut.

* 7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs. What could possibly go wrong?

* Can poetry save the Earth?

Tuesday Links

Tuesday!

* Cold fusion is back. More here. We’re saved!

* Radiology art. (Hat tip: Neil.)

* My pursuit of all Wes Anderson-flavored cultural ephemera has led me to this video from Company of Theives, as well as Tenenbaum Fail. Via Fimoculous.

* The first eleven episodes of Quantum Leap are up at NBC.com.

* Anarctica travel blog.

* Who was dead at your age?

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.

Secret’s Out

Toyota secretly developing solar-powered green car. We’re saved!

Here Comes Fusion

Here comes fusion: While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns at the heart of the sun. We’re saved!

‘Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes’

The headline reads, ‘Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes.’ What could possibly go wrong?

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

We’re saved!

Al Gore for Eco-Czar

The person I’d most like to see with a cabinet-level position in the new Obama administration is Al Gore, who should be made all-purpose Eco-Czar. Here he is in the New York Times laying out an energy agenda for the next ten years.

Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

What follows is a five-part plan to repower America with a commitment to producing 100 percent of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. It is a plan that would simultaneously move us toward solutions to the climate crisis and the economic crisis — and create millions of new jobs that cannot be outsourced.

With carbon in the “danger zone” and humanity increasingly running out of biocapacity to exploit, Obama comes into power at just about the last possible second to save us all from the eco-apocalypse—I hope.

We’re Saved!

We’re saved, part 2? Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered a new way of storing energy from sunlight that could lead to ‘unlimited’ solar power.

(Here, I suppose, was part 1.)

Wait, Are We Actually Saved This Time?

No joke, we may actually be saved this time:

Researchers at Ohio State University have accidentally discovered a new solar cell material capable of absorbing all of the sun’s visible light energy. The material is comprised of a hybrid of plastics, molybdenum and titanium. The team discovered it not only fluoresces (as most solar cells do), but also phosphoresces. Electrons in a phosphorescent state remain at a place where they can be “siphoned off” as electricity over 7 million times longer than those generated in a fluorescent state. This combination of materials also utilizes the entire visible spectrum of light energy, translating into a theoretical potential of almost 100% efficiency. Commercial products are still years away, but this foundational work may well pave the way for a truly renewable form of clean, global energy.