Länkdump 10 januari
(överblivet julgodis och annat)
Old Soviet Christmas card collection
the nonist: Fa la la la la
Audiolemon: Santa Claus conquers The Martians
Guardian: The Locked Room Mystery mystery
Julnovell om ”The Locked Room Mystery mystery” av Jasper Fforde
Mind Hacks: Kids’ letters to Santa as advertising psychology study
”The Relationship Between Television Advertising, Children’s Viewing and Their Requests to Father Christmas.”
BLDGBLOG: Religion by satellite
”Australian artists The Glue Society have put together a series of altered satellite views showing what certain Biblical events would have looked like if seen via Google Earth.”
Reuters: Come to Jerusalem, see the messiah
”For some who come on a visit, the religious energy is enough to make them recite scriptures on the street or claim to be King David or Jesus.
The phenomenon is known as the Jerusalem Syndrome, though psychiatrists disagree whether it can affect otherwise healthy people, or causes only those predisposed to psychoses to believe they have seen the Messiah.”
New York Times: St. Nick in the Big City
”There may be more icons surviving for Nicholas alone than for all the other saints of Christendom put together. So what happened to him? Where’s the fourth-century Anatolian bishop who presided over gift-giving to poor children? And how did we get the new icon of mass consumerism in his place?”
Ars Technica: US and UK have become ”endemic” surveillance societies
Youtube: The BRAICIN
Do-it-yourself-dator-hjärn-interface, i några få enkla steg. (via Omnibrain)
Youtube: Richard III
”Peter Sellers doing his version of Laurence Olivier’s version of ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’ through The Beatles’ ”A hard day’s night” version.”
3QD: The Peace Process Delusion
”A serious pandemic of delusion is gripping the world. Ground Zero for the spread of this scourge was in Annapolis, Maryland in late November. Within hours, millions of otherwise intelligent people started exhibiting the symptoms of this horrible affliction: uncontrollable optimism, abrupt failure of reasoning, oblivious disregard of reality, and a deeply religious faith in a fictional ‘Peace Process’ that will be the New Messiah that will deliver the world from all evil.”
3QD: Kant Attack Ad
”Don’t blame me, I voted Nietzsche”
Guardian: Enemies of thought
”It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. ‘This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad,’ begins Colin McGinn’s review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. ‘It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.'”
FSM: FSM’s Second Annual ‘America’s Most Dangerous College Courses’
”The professor doesn’t use his course just to brainwash his students into the thrills of Socialism and Communism; he uses his course to routinely demean conservatives. Dreier orders students to read far Left publications like The American Prospect.”
10 Zen Monkeys: Miracles
”I can give you, as a 10-year veteran, my five counter-intuitive and probably immoral success secrets.
1. Self promote
2. Steal
3. Don’t Lie
4. Hate your enemies, but love your rivals.
5. Do less.”
New Yorker: Twilight of the books
”In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months.”
New Yorker: The Conciliator
Lång New Yorker-profil om Barack Obama.
London Review of Books: Cityphilia
”A well-run bank is a machine for making money. The basic principle of banking is to pay a low rate of interest to the people who lend money, and charge a higher rate of interest to the people who borrow money.”
Smashing Magazine: Innovative Designs and Devices
false messiah 
