Links for 2009-10-09

  • “This is the real issue for a lot of old media. They used to be a habit, a tradition, a part of life. As such, you ignored what you didn’t use or like the same way you ignore a tear or a stain in a piece of furniture that you otherwise find comfortable and can’t afford to replace anyway. But now I think a lot of audiences have a much more active imaginative engagement with what they read, and much less patience for a publication that isn’t nimble in its response to the needs and desires of its readership. You go to old media for a kind of quality you can’t get in new media, but now we expect much more for our (relatively small) payment. “
  • “Q: Oh no! How many nuclear weapons does Iran already have?
    A: Counting warheads, ICBMs, mid- and long-range missiles, ABMs, tactical nukes, bunker-busters and submarine-based weaponry, the full nuclear arsenal of Iran at this moment is very rapidly just beginning to quite possibly approach a number just short of one!
    Q: That makes them almost as deadly as the rogue nation of Whoville or the Islamic Republic of Candyland!”
  • “When Imre Jánosi’s teenage daughter asked him how her new lava lamp worked, she probably expected a quick explanation. But her innocent question sent Jánosi, a physicist at Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest, on an experimental quest to plumb the physics of the popular novelty toy.

    “I wanted to find something, an easy explanation for what happens inside,” Jánosi explained. “So I started to check the web and the professional literature, and that was a real surprise. There was practically no useful information, nothing about the physics.””

  • “A Nova Scotia-based illustrator named Darwyn Cooke and an San Diego book editor named Scott Dunbier persuaded the aging author that the ideal visual medium for his terse, bare-knuckled tales of mayhem was the graphic novel. And, after Westlake saw Cooke’s spare and stylized artwork (think somewhere between the vintage-cool of “Mad Men” and the storytelling flair of Milton Caniff’s “Steve Canyon” comic strips), he enthusiastically agreed. The result hit shelves last week, the 144-page graphic novel “The Hunter” (IDW Publishing, $24.99 hardcover), a meticulously faithful adaptation of the 1962 novel of the same name that introduced the scowling Parker.”
  • “That is not to say “intellectual elitism” doesn’t exist. It surely does. But it’s caused by rather than being a reason for social detachment. The “elitism” you see, hear, and frequently criticize on this blog is not more than a forward defense that is amplified by exactly that criticism. It is a difficult job to work on basic research: non-profit, a very very long-term investment of your society, a job that brings a high risk that nothing of what you do will ever be good for anything.”