Closing tabs

Best weekend viewing: Weekend of a Champion at the IFC. It is amazing - reminds me (I am laughing, I am the only person who would foreground this association I think!) of what I most like about the early novels of Dick Francis. Here's the trailer - see it if you get a chance.

Reread most of Dangerous Liaisons last night in partial preparation for Tuesday's seminar meeting. It really is the most incredible novel - I wish I could write something with that beautifully taut spring-like construction - it is almost as well-put-together as Oedipus Rex.

Miscellaneous links:

Imagining a future without antibiotics.

What do you do when you're a mathematician and you make a mistake?

At the FT, Pankaj Mishra on the problem with talking about the global novel (site registration required).

Light reading around the edges: Joshilyn Jackson, Someone Else's Love Story; Vidar Sundstol, The Land of Dreams.

Closing tabs

A conversation with Randall Munroe, including a fascinating description of the origin of the What If? series (via GeekPress):

It actually started with a class. MIT has a weekend program where volunteers can teach classes to groups of high school students on any subject you want. I had a friend who was doing it, and it sounded really cool -- so I signed up to teach a class about energy, which I always thought was interesting, but which is a slippery idea to define. I was really getting into the nuts and bolts of what energy is, and it was a lot of fun -- but when I started to get into the normal lecture part of the class, it felt kind of dry, and I could tell the kids weren't super into it. And then we got to a part where I brought up an example -- I think it was Yoda in Star Wars. And they got really excited about that. And then they started throwing out more questions about different movies -- like, "When the Eye of Sauron exploded at the end of The Lord of the Rings, and knocked people over from this far away, can we tell how big a blast that was?" They got really excited about that -- and I had a lot more fun doing it than I did just teaching the regular material.

So I spent the second half of the class just solving problems like that in front of them. And then I was like, "That was really fun. I want to keep doing it."

A journey into the opium underworld.

Miniature car models photographed (via Things).

Uganda's Royal Ascot goat races!  (Via Khakasa.)

CV

At the Scotsman, Ian Rankin considers Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark. Best detail: Spark "accepted a cat from Patricia Highsmith"! Other "nice vignettes" singled out by Rankin (who famously set out to write a thesis on Spark's fiction before turning to a Life of Crime):

At a signing at Fortnum's, she is mistaken for an assistant and happily wraps the customer's purchase. During a research trip to Mount Carmel her driver crashes into a market-stall and she returns to her hotel in a police van. If someone touched a pen she was using, she threw it away rather than write with it again.

Hauntings

From the NYT's report on the latest round of technical service bulletins from auto manufacturers:

INFINITI Is the G37 possessed? In T.S.B. 09-025 issued on May 12, Infiniti says the windows on 2008-9 models will lower an inch and then rise again when someone closes the glovebox. Apparently, a sensor wire is plugged in at the wrong spot. Putting this wire in the right place should purge “Christine.”

Related: I read Sarah Rees Brennan's absolutely wonderful The Demon's Lexicon. My only complaint is that I wished the book had been called Goblin Market instead - but it is really excellent, redolent of some of my favorites (Margaret Mahy, Diana Wynne Jones) but very fresh and original in its voice and world-building.