• Wes Anderson Bingo!
• The ‘New Yorker’ Is Going To Tweet Out An 8,500 Word Jennifer Egan Short Story, For Some Reason
• Brian Cox on the Heart of Science
• Physicists Build the First Quantum Interface
• Ex-POTUS Pic of the Day

• Carl Sagan on Mastering the Vital Balance of Skepticism & Openness
  

  Seven years ago this week, David Foster Wallace argued that “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.” Yet in an age of ceaseless sensationalism, pseudoscience, and a relentless race for shortcuts, quick answers, and silver bullets, knowing what to think seems increasingly challenging.

• ‘Are SF writers “slacking off” or is science fiction still the genre of “big ideas”?’
  

  Calls for more big ideas in SF are generally a political cri de coeur. We might equally imagine a similar essay in the context of mid-sixties Soviet fiction, calling for more fiction about tractors and breakthroughs in agricultural genomics.

• How Facebook Threatens the Legitimacy of the Stock Market
• The Perfection of the Paper Clip
• Could Angry Birds lead to mass murder?
• 2012 TV Body Count Study Results

• Cloak of invisibility: Engineers use plasmonics to create an invisible photodetector
• How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good
• Read Every Line of Dialogue Rihanna Says in Battleship
• Scarlett Johansson On The Ridiculous, Sexist Portrayals Of Superheroines
• The end of drug discovery?
• This INSANE Graphic Shows How Ludicrously Complicated Social Media Marketing Is Now
• SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully
• How do you cook a unicorn? Chef Anthony Bourdain’s got the recipe
• Andre the Giant: The Greatest Drunk on Earth

• Has the Art Market Lost its Mind?
  

  The week after The Scream sale, a sale of postwar and contemporary art took in $388.5 million at Christie’s and a sale of Impressionist and modern art garnered $266.6 million at Sotheby’s. Souren Melikian of The New York Times said it was a week of blockbuster art sale profits that “conclusively proved that the disconnect of the art market from the broader economy is now radical.”

• The Value of Facebook: A Time Capsule
• Is Fashion Ready for a New Aesthetic?
• Too Hot for TED: Income Inequality
• Andromeda’s majestic spray of billions of hot stars
• Dear Einstein, Do Scientists Pray?

• The Oatmeal: Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived
• Android Fragmentation: The many faces of a little green robot
• Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
• Facebook Unlike and Internet Schadenfreude
• How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit

• Why politicians don’t get the internet
• Somebody please, for the love of god, fix shipping/couriers (YES!)
• George Lucas Does Something Likeable For a Change: Revenge on Rich Neighbors
  

  George Lucas’ rich neighbors don’t want him building a movie studio in their backyard. His response is the best thing he’s done in years.

• The Original Piece of Wood I Left in Your Head
  

  Wildcat pop-culture critic Perkus Tooth and Being John Malkovich director Spike Jonze met, at Tooth’s insistence, at Yonah Schimmel’s knishery on Houston Street in New York City. A small digital tape recorder was placed between them.

• 23 incredible new technologies you’ll see by 2021
• Reset Firefox – easily fix most problems

Europe: A crisis of the centre
“There were two “moments” in the defeat of liberal centrist politics in Germany, Austria, Spain etc. in the 1930s: the first, where polite society realised the working classes were swinging to the right and left, but patronisingly reassured themselves that the world of Jazz, surrealist poetry and foreign holidays could never end. That is, they said to themselves: the workers are clinging to the past, but we, avatars of a more liberal and progressive future, have economic history with us, which points only in the direction of liberalism and economic co-operation.” [full article]

Movie Studios Are Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film. But the Consequences of Going Digital Are Vast, and Troubling
This year, for the first time in history, celluloid ceases to be the world’s prevailing movie-projector technology. By the end of 2012, according to IHS Screen Digest Cinema Intelligence Service, the majority of theaters will be showing movies digitally. By 2013, film will slip to niche status, shown in only a third of theaters. By 2015, used in a paltry 17 percent of global cinemas, venerable old 35 mm film will be mostly gone. [full article]

Cassini Sees Objects Blazing Trails in Saturn Ring
“I think the F ring is Saturn’s weirdest ring, and these latest Cassini results go to show how the F ring is even more dynamic than we ever thought,” said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member based at Queen Mary University of London, England. “These findings show us that the F ring region is like a bustling zoo of objects from a half mile [kilometer] in size to moons like Prometheus a hundred miles [kilometers] in size, creating a spectacular show.” [full article]

Does the Internet Make You Smarter?
These claims were, of course, correct. Print fueled the Protestant Reformation, which did indeed destroy the Church’s pan-European hold on intellectual life. What the 16th-century foes of print didn’t imagine—couldn’t imagine—was what followed: We built new norms around newly abundant and contemporary literature. Novels, newspapers, scientific journals, the separation of fiction and non-fiction, all of these innovations were created during the collapse of the scribal system, and all had the effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, the intellectual range and output of society. [full article]

The clerk, RIP
The clerk has been killed by the economy, Netflix, iTunes and Amazon. Computers might want your creative job next [full article]

Stephen Garrett on crafting a winning trailer
For a self-distributor, it can mean getting 100,000 hits on YouTube within a week. For indie filmmakers trying to make an impression, it’s a chance to have their no-budget D.I.Y. movies stand shoulder-to-shoulder with The Hobbit and Avatar 2 on iTunes… [full article]

The Milky Way’s black hole may spring to life in 2013
Astronomers have spotted a cloud of gas with three times the mass of the Earth on a near-collision course with the Milky Way’s central black hole. [full article]

Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane Oscar up for auction
The Oscar Orson Welles won for Citizen Kane 70 years ago will go up for auction online this month, a Los Angeles auction house announced Monday. [full article]

We all lose when ‘healers’ take everything from the sick
There is a legitimate role for a variety of complementary therapies such as yoga, meditation, mindfulness, a balanced diet and moderate exercise. The problem arises when the generic multivitamin tablet from the chemist morphs into weekly intravenous injections costing $1000 a shot. Or when the notion of cleansing the body of toxins is exploited with sham diets and enemas that land patients in the very hospitals they are determined to avoid. [full article]

The insanely weird quantum wave function might be “real” after all
Until now, we have taken comfort from the idea that, real or not, the results from the wave function would be the same. So no worries, right? Quite possibly wrong. In a paper posted on the arXiv, a trio of researchers has shown that you can’t have it both ways; a purely statistical wave function will not always give the same results as a wave function with real physical significance. [full article]

Should We Clone Neanderthals?
As the Neanderthal genome is painstakingly sequenced, the archaeologists and biologists who study it will be faced with an opportunity that seemed like science fiction just 10 years ago. They will be able to look at the genetic blueprint of humankind’s nearest relative and understand its biology as intimately as our own. [full article]

Will We Find Oceans On Pluto?
…After the impact, Pluto and Charon would have been extremely close together, and spinning rapidly. The strong gravitational tidal pull between the two should have produced enough heat to melt the interior turning Pluto into a giant Slush Puppie. Pluto could have been like Europa for hundreds of millions of years before completely re-freezing over. [full article]