Links — October 14, 2009, 3:55 pm
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La Forge: “Captain, the tech is overteching.”
Picard: “Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge.”
La Forge: “No, Captain. Captain, I’ve tried to tech the tech, and it won’t
work.”Picard: “Well, then we’re doomed.”
–“Ron Moore calls Star Trek‘s tech ‘meaningless’,” Sci Fi Wire (via)
“X-ray glasses” could help cops see through walls;
RNC’s new website is awful;
review of The Myth of the Rational Market: A history of risk, reward, and delusion on Wall Street
James Ellroy’s brand of extreme writing is fun to read. At its best, it could be addictive. The stories are told in a uniform, crazed, modern American vernacular, and with such breakneck speed, hairpin plot turns, compression, and telescoping of events that the reader needs to stop and rest from time to time. The standard noir subject matter of killings, beatings, and acts of revenge is all here, but the incidents are so closely packed and described with such loving attention to the injuries suffered that it’s hard not to feel that some limit of what the reader can bear is being toyed with:
He shot them in the back at point-blank range. Small-bore exit wounds —the cleanup wouldn’t be that big a deal….
Fulo smashed their teeth to powder. Pete burned their fingerprints off on a hotplate.
Fulo dug the spent rounds out of the wall and flushed them down the toilet. Pete quick-scorched the floor stains—spectrograph tests would read negative.
Fulo pulled down the living-room drapes and wrapped them around the bodies. The exit wounds had congealed—no blood seeped through.
–“Fever Dreams of Your FBI,” Norman Rush, The New York Review of Books
Dyslexia in China different from letter-driven dyslexia,
and Mao’s grandson is blogging;
Tennessee woman faces pokey over poke
Forget everything you’ve read about vampires so far. The current bloodsucking trend, achieving maximum ferocity in November with the release of the sequel to Twilight, isn’t about outsiders or immigrants or religion or even AIDS, as critics and bloggers have argued ad nauseam these past few months. There’s a much better, simpler, more obvious explanation: Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because young straight women want to have sex with gay men. –“What’s Really Going on With All These Vampires?” by Stephen Marche, Esquire
Ratio of the number of cicada eggs per square mile of southern New Jersey to the number of stars in the Milky Way:
Jeffrey Lockwood, University of Wyoming (Laramie)/American Museum of Natural History (N.Y.C.)
A Singaporean company unveiled Kissenger, a pair of plastic lips mounted on a large plastic egg, which transmits real-time interactive kisses to a distant lover. “I am not interested in the sexual uses for it,” said the device’s inventor. “We’ve taken several steps to minimize the creepiness.”
The practice of sexualized eyeball licking was causing conjunctivitis in Japanese sixth graders.
