[LINK] Some Friday Links

• Amused Cynicism's Phil Hunt links to more examples of anti-Obama craziness.


• Matthew Hayles drops by some Tornoto's participants in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) to see why a representative sample are doing it.


• Edward Hugh raises the question of where, exactly, all the money necessary for bailouts of companies and countries is going to come from.


• Back in July, Centauri Dreams reported that, in the very close binary star system of Alpha Centauri, gravitational processes made it very unlikely for an Earth-type world to form at a proper, Earth-like distance from the large Sun-like A component. Now the same has been confirmed to be true about Alpha Centauri B. Sigh.


• Daniel Drezner suggests that conserative voters for Obama vote for Obama because he's prudent.


• Edward Lucas writes about an ongoing Estonian spy scandal.


• Far Outliers blogs about the Indian diasporas of the 19th century and afterwards.


• Gideon Rachman suggests that Medvedev runs a risk of challenging the Obama administration in the ongoing dispute over the deployment of anti-missile systems to Poland.


• Responding to the disappointing news on Proposition 8 on same-sex marriage in California, Joe. My. God quotes one major community leader who says, correctly, that this only delays things, that it doesn't alter the trajectory towards marriage equality.


• Thie rather implausible map of an alternate-historical Italy that--so the author says--remains fascist and breaks from Nazi Germany and manages to keep its various European conquests (!) is worth viewing nonetheless. How would you create an Italy with those borders?

[MUSIC] Róisín Murphy, "Slave to Love"

Bryan Ferry's 1985 "Slave to Love is a beautiful song, a love song sung with a dinner-jacket elegance.

"Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi - Kylie Minogue" (Watch on YouTube)

I was quite surprised to find out that Róisín Murphy, whose CD Overpowered I keep playing over and over again, has herself done a cover of the song for a fashion commercial featuring James Franco. The commercial is the first YouTube video below this text, and a fan video of the entire song is the second.

"FHRITP: Reporter confronts men who bombarded her with vulgarity" (Watch on YouTube)

"DIE ANTWOORD - BABY'S ON FIRE (OFFICIAL)" (Watch on YouTube)

She does interesting things with the song, problematizing it in much the same way that Tori Amos did with '97 Bonnie and Clyde" by introducing the female perspective. Certainly Ferry's lyrics sound newly ominous delivered with Murphy's throaty voice and the sketchy trip-hoppish background

Tell her i´ll be waiting
In the usual place
With the tired and weary
There´s no escape
To need a woman
You´ve got to know
How the strong get weak
And the rich get poor
You´re running with me
Don´t touch the ground
We´re restless hearted
Not the chained and bound
The sky is burning
A sea of flame
Though your world is changing
I will be the same

I think I like it, but I'm certain that I'm not sure that I can forgive her for doing that to the original beautiful song. I liked the uncomplicated dinner-jacket elegance of Ferry and his song.

[LINK] "The use and abuse of statistics"

Razib Khan's article at The Guardian's Comment Is Free is worth reading in its entirety.

It is an old trope that one can lie with statistics, but it might be more accurate to admit that selective use of numbers can easily mislead. Introductory biology students often learn that one bacterium in a petri dish will clone itself so that if it kept going at the same rate it would in short order fill up the universe. But common sense soon tells them this won't happen. Projecting from the first generations is folly.

Human societies are infinitely more complex in their structure than bacterial colonies, so one should be exceedingly cautious about games of prediction. Across the west the 1960s was a period of cultural change as church affiliation dropped precipitously. If one extends that decline out from the interval 1960-1970 Christianity should be extinct, and yet it is not. The decline in religiosity slowed by around 1980. Why? The will of God? A more plausible explanation is that social pressures which enforced religiosity before 1960 no longer operate, so those who were never particularly devout are more honest with themselves and society.

[. . .]

The universe of statistics is vast, so polemicists can choose congenial data to "prove" their trends. Labels often hide more information than they reveal. Prophecies of the extinction of religion, or its total ascendancy, inevitability fall prey to the weaknesses of linear extrapolation. The most important thing that science can tell us about most trends is that they will some day reverse.