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]