Lawrence Miles gives Torchwood season 2 the kicking it so richly deserves:

[The only...] remotely surprising thing about the second series of Torchwood is its pig-headed refusal to do anything remotely surprising. Everybody had problems with the first series, and even those sci-fi geek-scum who'll watch anything with killer robots in it were left feeling vaguely dissatisfied, Mark sodding Braxton included. Which begs the question… why has nothing changed? Did the overall sense of gloom and disappointment really not make an impression on BBC Wales? A standard-issue TV critic would probably describe the programme as "slicker" these days, and it's certainly more confident in its ability to make the same mistakes over and over again, but none of its problems have actually been fixed.

[...]

8. "A Day in the Death". What baffles me is that anyone might consider "forty-five minutes of a corpse complaining about being dead" to be a workable basis for a drama programme. [...]

Upon reflection, I think that my initial burst of enthusiasm for season 2 was based more upon relief that the show had improved since the first run of episodes. The "Owen is dead" mini-arc was pretty awful, and none of the episodes since had grabbed me. I wouldn't be quite as hard on the show as Miles is, but I stopped watching after Adrift and I don't see myself returning for season 3.

[Via feeling listless]

One deeply disturbing teddy bear.

[Via FFFFOUND!]

Greeting cards for prisoners. All in the best possible taste:

Merry Christmas

Outside Message: Merry Christmas

Inside Message: You had the choice to be “naughty or nice.” And you chose …….

Oh well, now you have to do your time. But, Christmas won’t be the same without you here. Stay safe. Merry Christmas

[Via MetaFilter]

Use Only In Case of Sith.

I'd love a Spine Lamp. Creepy, yet cool.

[Via Monoscope]

Tonight's episode of House M.D. opened with a note-perfect homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. You don't see that sort of thing on E.R.

Also, it's good to see Anne Dudek, formerly of The Book Group,¹ getting another regular gig.

1. See previous comments here and here. ↩

Watch as a helicopter shakes itself to pieces.

[Via you're a kitty! posting at Ask MetaFilter, via web-goddess]

Caught in the act.

[Via Progressive Gold]

At Improbable Research, a call to action:

In October of the year 2000, we presented an Ig Nobel Prize to the authors of a study called "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Almost exactly a month later, in November 2000, the United States began an experiment — a very expensive experiment — that has been running now for seven years.

[...]

The data is there, right now, ripening and rotting. Let’s collect it, and study it, and see what we can learn from it. And let’s put it on display. Otherwise, our descendants will dismiss it as just myth and legend.

I've posted links to pictures from the Harbin Ice Festival before (here in 2004 and here last month), but this collection of photos at COLOURlovers is well worth a look too.

John H. Bradley's photographs of burning gas craters at Darvaza in Turkmenistan look as if they were taken on another planet, one much less hospitable to life as we know it.

[Via Fogonazos]

Saved to read later: this paper on MPs and money. [NB: Link is to 412KB PDF file.]

While the role of money in policymaking is a central question in political economy research, surprisingly little attention has been given to the rents politicians actually derive from politics. We use both matching and a regression discontinuity design to analyze an original dataset on the estates of recently deceased British politicians. We find that serving in Parliament roughly doubled the wealth at death of Conservative MPs but had no discernible effect on the wealth of Labour MPs. We argue that Conservative MPs profited from office in a lax regulatory environment by using their political positions to obtain outside work as directors, consultants, and lobbyists, both while in office and after retirement. Our results are consistent with anecdotal evidence on MPs’ outside financial dealings but suggest that the magnitude of Conservatives’ financial gains from office was larger than has been appreciated.

It'll be interesting to see whether the observed disparity in the fortunes of MPs from the two major parties holds up when the current crop of Labour MPs finds their party out of government and goes looking for places in boardrooms, setting up consultancies and the like.

[Via Crooked Timber]

Armstrong and Aldrin's moon walks mapped onto a football pitch.

(It turns out that they barely made it into the opposition's half.)

The Bedside Campanion is a neat bit of design, but who could do that to a poor, defenceless book?

(Also, as one MeFi poster observed, "who the hell reads only one book at a time?")

[Via pjern, posting at MetaFilter]

Jon Carroll on an inspired business idea:

According to a Reuters news story, pointed out to me by reader Dennis Courtney, there are at least three cat teahouses in greater Tokyo. One of them, the Cat Cafe Calicos, has 14 calico cats (no Siamese need apply) ready to serve customers who want to cuddle up with a cup of tea and a feline friend.

Here's how it works: For about $7 an hour, or $20 for the popular three-hour package, patrons can enter a large room where 14 calicos slumber and wander. Whether any particular cat cottons to a customer is up to the cat, naturally, but connections are certainly made. The litter boxes are out of sight, and six air fresheners keep the air odor free.

Apparently, in Tokyo, tight housing regulations prevent most people from owning cats. These heartbroken urban dwellers now have a place to seek comfort and love that's a whole lot cheaper than a strip club. Such a genius idea.

Four corners, two gaijin, one journey:

In spring 2008, two Australian writers are leaping into a very big and exceedingly ancient pond, walking the entire length of Japan, upright and erect (at least at the start), a journey of up to five months and 3,500km. Ian is hiking solo from ‘mainland’ Japan’s most easterly point (Cape Nosappu: 43, 22′ N; 145, 49′ E) to its most westerly (Kousakibana: 33, 13 N; 129, 33′ E) ; Chris is starting at the opposite end of the country, walking from the most southerly point (Cape Sata: 30, 59′ N; 130, 39′ E) to the most northerly (Cape Soya: 45, 31′N; 141, 56′ E). Though physically and psychologically demanding, our adventure will provide two intimate, ever-changing views of Japan.

[Via frangipani]

Karie Bookish on a traditional Danish Easter puzzle:

Today a gækkebrev arrived. Literally meaning “a riddling letter”, a gækkebrev is a letter in the shape of an elaborate paper cut-out with a riddle written in its middle. Sometimes a snowdrop is included with the letter, sometimes the riddle just alludes to the snowdrop.

The letter is commonly associated with Easter in Denmark and school children absolutely love making them. The reason? Quite apart from kids being creative and conjuring up gorgeous paper cut-outs, the letters bear a prize: an Easter egg. Above all other things, the gækkebrev is anonymous and the writer will leave a hint in the shape of dots (four dots if your name has four letters etc). If you can identify the sender, you win an Easter egg. If you are fooled by the riddler, you owe him or her an Easter egg.

Happy Easter?

This Schweppes advert features some exceptionally pretty slow-motion photography.

[Via Very Short List]

Titan's surface turns out to be even stranger than we'd imagined:

In a paper to be published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science, members of the Cassini RADAR team announce evidence that Saturn's moon Titan hides an ocean beneath its surface.  The presence of a global ocean means that the entire crust of Titan is "decoupled" from the moon's interior.  Outside forces acting on Titan's crust, most importantly the force of the global circulation of the atmosphere, can apparently slide the entire crust around on Titan's ocean, so that the crust does not rotate at exactly the same rate that the moon orbits Saturn.

[...]

What is making Titan's surface move?  It's the wind, says Ralph Lorenz, first author on the Science paper.  Lorenz explained that a pair of atmospheric scientists, Tetsuya Tokano and Fritz Neubauer, had predicted at an American Geophysical Union meeting in 2005 that if Titan had an ocean, the atmosphere could be capable of shoving surface landmarks around by distances of up to 100 kilometers compared with positions predicted from the assumption of a constant rotation rate.  "I thought, 'Hundreds of kilometers? You've got to be kidding,'" Lorenz remembers.  Since each individual RADAR image of Titan is a long "noodle" that is only approximately 200 kilometers wide at its center, employing the wrong assumptions about Titan's rotation would mean that features on Titan would be very noticeably offset in RADAR images of the same locations taken on different dates, which is exactly what the RADAR team found. [...]