1. Warren Ellis:

The New DC comics stuff looks so much like stuff I would never read that it oddly fills me with hope that they are targetting the core audience they want. If a 43-year old man looks at most of this promo stuff and goes meh, then that’s very probably a good sign for them.

2. Clever advertising by Morton's steakhouse.



3. Fascinating article about the Ottoman Empire and Turkey's current political plans.

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1. Getting banned from Google+ not only leads to being banned from other Google services, but also apparently prevents you from even viewing other people's public Google+ pages.



2. Bill Simmons's latest podcast is an hour-long interview with David Stern about the state of the NBA lockout.



3. The Germanic conquest of England, circa 400 AD:

The massive movement of people was apparently triggered in 407 A.D., the year in which the ailing Roman Empire withdrew much of its army from Britain. Soon afterwards, it stopped paying its soldiers altogether. As a result, the last legionaries took off.



This left the island unprotected, an opportunity that the starving people on the continent couldn't pass up. Angles, Saxons and Jutes left their mound dwellings and broad bean fields in the wetlands of northern Europe in droves.



Entire family clans set out to sea, usually in the spring and summer when the water was calm. Their ships were bulging with household goods, cows and horses. According to an old chronicle, the land of the Angles was soon "abandoned."

Via.

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Wild vintage photos and postcards of oil wells in Los Angeles. Via.

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1. If you're going to rescue lobsters and return them to the ocean, don't publicize where you're dumping them.



2. Fascinating article about the last 200 years or so of Libyan history. (With a suggestion that the current war is as much as anything about France replacing Italy in purchasing Libya's oil.) Via.



3. Here's an article claiming that Mitt Romney's campaign manager is best friends with Matt Drudge, so you never hear anything about Romney on Drudge.



4. It's $6 off t-shirts at Zazzle with the code STYLEBTSTEES. I recommend Miskatonic University, Vonster, and my own store.

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1. How to remove yourself from various background check sites.

2. Good article about the history of DDT. For example:

The German army purposely triggered malaria epidemics, such as in Italy in 1944. Drainage pumps on the Roman marshes ordinarily pumped excess water out to sea, desiccating the land enough to make it malaria-free and thus habitable for thriving cities and towns. By stilling the pumps, the Germans could have flooded the region and effectively impeded the Allies' progress. But German malariologist Erich Martini had studied the habits of the local malaria vector, Anopheles labranchiae, in depth, and he knew that inundating the region with the Mediterranean's salty waters would allow A. labranchiae, which can thrive in brackish water, to flourish. And so rather than simply stopping the pumps, they reversed them, salinating some ninety-eight thousand acres. Then they confiscated local stockpiles of antimalarial drugs. As the German soldiers departed, they left behind "clever sketches," The New York Times reported in 1944, "of the plague of mosquitoes that would follow the flooding of the farmlands." More than 100,000 of the 245,000 locals sickened with malaria.

3. Today's economic news (aside from the stock market's freefall, and the continuing slow motion collapse of the Euro) was about protests in Israel. This was the most interesting analysis. (Hint, their economic problems don't really look anything like the USA's.)

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1. "However, the volatile situation in Syria means that activists' methods to get documentation off the streets and onto social media are rapidly changing. Unconfirmed reports claim pen phones and small camera phones are being smuggled into Syria by anti-government expatriates and both the Saudi Arabian and American governments."

2. Fascinating article about pirates. When I read about the Barbary pirates in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, I thought he was greatly exaggerating their exploits. But no:

Initially, the corsairs used galleys, which were fast and easily maneuverable, but the problem of supplying their rowing crews and soldiers, which could total some 184 men, limited their range. But European renegade sailors, such as John Ward, “without any doubt the greatest scoundrel that ever sailed from England,” as a courtier put it, and Danseker the Dutchman, known as the “Divil Captain,” were on hand to supply the expertise needed for a shift to sailing ships.

They could now raid along the British and the Irish Channels — they would even reach as far north as Iceland. Throughout the century, their raids caused havoc in coastal communities, with sailors and fishermen refusing to go to sea. In the Mediterranean, whole stretches of coast in Spain and Italy were deserted.

3. Useless, but a magical idea - - it looks like a camera, but when you press the shutter it doesn't take a picture. Instead, it pulls off from the net a random photo taken by someone else at that exact moment. Via these sites.

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Map explains countries' names.



Decaying castle.



Giving a koala a drink.



Two-headed turtle.



"The general's pet on my last deployment."

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1. "A 10,000 square kilometer (3,861 sq. mile) island sank beneath the waves long ago, in the frigid waters of the Atlantic north of Scotland."

2. Last chance to enter my iPad game giveaway. I'll pick a winner tonight.

3. Smog miniature-painting contest announced.

4. This is a positive review of Captain America: Super Soldier, and it's still only a 6.5 out of 10. You know, when I was a kid, we really didn't know any better. There was no internet, and Gamepro was brand new. Mostly, you bought a game based on the packaging and then realized your mistake almost as soon as you turned on the NES. But now, with games costing $60 each, and online reviews being so quick and easy to find, how do video game publishers keep getting away with selling garbage?

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1. Art box giveaway.

2. Really interesting article about the economy.

3. The new Captain America: Super Solider video game is apparently barely worth a day rental: "The game (which runs to a stingy six hours at best) is sparsely populated by instantly-forgettable enemies."

4. io9 reviews the Warren Ellis/Berg comic SVK ($32 for 40 lackluster pages).

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Wikipedia:

The Great Daylight 1972 Fireball was an Earth-grazing meteoroid which passed within 57 kilometres (35.4 miles) of the surface of the Earth at 20:29 UTC on August 10, 1972. It entered the Earth's atmosphere in daylight over Utah, United States (14:30 local time) and passed northwards leaving the atmosphere over Alberta, Canada. It was seen by many people and recorded on film and by space-borne sensors.

More at Astronomy Pic of the Day. Via.

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1. Fast Company:

In the latest installment of Butterfly Effect, we examine China's cheap knockoff cell phones. After being forced out of China and India, Chinese counterfeiters brought their product to the Middle East, where the sudden availability of information had unintended consequences for the region--and for China itself.

2. Ben Wilson paints chewing gum.

3. Map of undersea cables from 1901. Via.

*Buy vintage maps at Amazon.

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1. I certainly want to believe this is true:

Baseball was an important part of American life in 1887, though the rules were very different. "Batters" got their names from the wooden sticks they used to fend off rabid dogs while standing in the "batter's box."

2. And this sounds good, too:

One in four U.S. hackers is an FBI informer

3. "Battery made up of 144 potatoes powering 12 LED lights."

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Kate Beaton's latest strips feature Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph of Austria and Benito Juárez.

*Hark! A Vagrant is 37 percent off at Amazon.

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1. Here's a slideshow showing off the Find the Future book I've mentioned a few times before.

2. "In the Battlestar Galactica TV series, religious rituals often repeated the phrase, 'All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.' It was apparently comforting to imagine being part of a grand cycle of time. It seems less comforting to say 'Similar conflicts happen out there now in distant galaxies.' Why?"

3. "The parts of the South [of the USA] that were generally the richest in 1860 are today its poorest."

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1. Fascinating site I've never heard of:

At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.

Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider.

Via.

2. So did Urban Outfitters rip off an Etsy seller? Or was her design not remotely original?

3. And did Jack Kirby create all of the major Marvel characters? Or was it Stan Lee? Via.

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1. From an overview of Tyler Cowen's life:

In 2002 he published "Creative Destruction," which argues that globalization created much of the art and music we might consider "native." Reggae in Jamaica, for example, borrowed from commercial rhythm and blues broadcasts that drifted over the water from New Orleans and Miami. The fur trade and the metal knife helped create the totem poles of the Northwestern American Indians.

2. You've seen the flying military drones, now check out the ocean-going versions.

3. Charles Barkley says Nike asked him to stop being critical of LeBron James. Via.

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1. "Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt."

2. Age of Conan is the latest MMO game to go the freemium route.

3. Tips on haggling.

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1. Game of Thrones Monopoly board.

2. Photo of a lightning strike above a power plant. Via.

3. "Long before Russia’s femme fatale Anna Chapman fueled countless blog posts and male fantasies, Israel had a female spy whose success in her profession’s dark arts made her one of history’s most notorious honey-traps."

*Buy board games at eBay.

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1. Fascinating article about Stanley and Livingstone by Jess Nevins. (If you've enjoyed the various League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volumes, then you should definitely pick up his companion books.)

2. Steve Wing writing about comics:

And take the Hulk. The Hulk was this rampaging engine of destruction, sure, but still, deep down, he was basically a nice guy. That is, he was the reverse of how we actually were in seventh grade, me and Rick and Jerry: all too nerdishly nice on the surface, but underneath raging.

Via.

3. First 15 minutes of L.A. Noire.

4. First five minutes of Duke Nukem Forever.

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1. Yahtzee Croshow of Zero Punctuation participated in an ask me anything at Reddit. One notable comment:

Motion controls are a dead end and the industry has thankfully started to understand that. Nintendo's more recent first-party games have left the motion controller behind almost totally, or use it with no more depth than a token Sixaxis control.

Relatedly here's a great video where he responded to hate mail he received after panning Smash Bros. Brawl.

2. From a much longer article about politics in Italy:

When unification came, it was led not by the major city-states of the past but by the half-French region of Piedmont, an area peripheral to Italian history and with a long record of rounding up and executing Italian nationalists. Nor had Piedmont planned to annex the whole peninsula. Exploiting wars between France and Austria to acquire the rich northern part of the country, the Piedmontese king was faced with a startling fait accompli when the revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, initially leading an expedition of only a thousand men, quite unexpectedly conquered the whole of Sicily and southern Italy. Garibaldi then offered the territory as a gift to the now enlarged Piedmont, which, as much to avoid the spread of republicanism as for any other reason, sent its armies south to meet him. On March 17, 1861, Italy became a single state under the Piedmontese crown.

The new country’s prospects were not encouraging. The vast majority of Italians had not sought unity and many had fought against it; those who supported it were divided between republicans and monarchists, and some were not so much nationalist as internationalist, working toward a united socialist Europe. An estimated 97.5 per cent of the population didn’t speak the national language. (Most spoke one of scores of local dialects.) The Catholic Church, which before unification had governed territories in central Italy, remained implacably opposed to the new state and for decades instructed practicing Catholics not to vote in elections. Those in the north had little idea how to govern the economically backward south. In short, in Graziano’s view, it was a complete fluke that the country came into being at all. The fact that it survived, he argues, had far more to do with the fraught power games among France, England, and Austria than with any real will of the Italians to exist as a nation.

Via.

3. Funny 404 error page (ignore the instructions and scroll down).

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