Waldo Jaquith illustrates the size of our nuclear arsenal. Totally excessive. But it's great to see those numbers in a form that's more easy grok---like the links in my sense of scale category.

Alan Nelson links to a collection of Stephen Hawking's lectures and colloquia. Cool.

I'm prone to reading phases, veering off on thematic streaks. Do other people do this? For example, in the past year I read through the Edward Tufte corpus pretty much back-to-back (reviewed Beautiful Evidence and Envisioning Information), all but one of Steven Johnson's (reviewed The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good for You), the Scott McCloud comics trilogy (Understanding Comics, Making Comics, Reinventing Comics), etc. I've also had a religion/science kick and a language/grammar phase within the past year. So after wrapping up Michael Lewis' The Blind Side, this weekend I finished his earlier book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The question at hand: "What is the most efficient way to spend money on baseball players?"

The central character is the hands-on Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane. His story---that of the gifted athlete adored by scouts who crumbles in the majors---sours him on old-school baseball scouting and management. Beane discards baseball's long heritage of subjectivity and gut instinct (e.g. "the good face"), and tries the objective, stat-crunching approach.

Winding in and out of this story, Lewis explores the work of baseball writer Bill James, the roots of the Society for American Baseball Research, and touches on sabermetrics. If anything, I wish there were more numbers in this book. I would have loved to dig in to some tables and really follow the statistical arguments. But at its heart, Lewis' book is not a peer-reviewed research article, but a story. A pretty good one.

And as a tangential bonus, Lewis gives an little off-hand bit of writing wisdom: "If you write well enough about a single subject, even a subject seemingly as trivial as baseball statistics, you needn't write about anything else."

The Virginia Quarterly Review probably gets about 10 billion submissions every year. On the VQR blog recently, they listed the most common titles among submissions they receive:

1. Remember
2. Smoke
3. Revelation
4. Work
5. Grace
6. Waiting
7. Insomnia
8. Voyeur
9. Butterfly
10. Reunion

Remember, Grace, and Imsomnia are pretty standard (read:boring), I think, but the popularity of Voyeur and Butterfly took me by surprise. I wonder what percent of the total volume of submissions uses one of these titles, and I'm curious about the distribution curve for words per title. Is the one-word title really that popular? What's the fixation?

It's October, which means it's time for Atlanta Celebrates Photography. Of particular interest to me is the Alec Soth lecture at the High Museum and the film series.

An old commercial with the Flintstones advertising Winston cigarettes---"delivers flavor 20 times a pack!" Another good smokes commercial: more doctors smoke camel than any other cigarette.

An interview with Ridley Scott, who has finally created the be-all, end-all cut of Blade Runner.

Robert Jordan died a couple weeks ago, which confirmed suspicions that he never was going to wrap up the Wheel of Time saga. But apparently his family knows the details of the 12th and final book, A Memory of Light, so we just might get some posthumous closure one of these days.

Today's Layer Tennis match between Kevin Cornell and Shaun Inman has been a ton of fun. Volley 9 just went up, I'd say Kevin has the upper hand. Can't wait to see how it ends. And I wonder if Kevin and Shaun have had any offline trash-talking in the background...

Written on the back of a credit card slip:

"Oh universe which is the all of being---reverence to you---your rule be known---and acceded to in darkness as in light. Feed us by the truth of our need. Let us not be deluded that we may transgress or be transgressed upon. Deliver us from the violence of the false. Amen."

Sounds good to me.

"Last year, at dinner with a spitzer of art-history graduates, I suggested—perhaps that is too polite a word—that art-history, and in fact the rest of the humanities, were useless disciplines. (I was bored!)"

Emory University held a Flannery O'Connor celebration this week. The highlight was the first public exhibition of the nearly 300 letters between Flannery O'Connor and Betty Hester, which had been under seal for the past 20 years. Brenda Bynum gave a dramatic reading of O'Connor's letters. I was late for it, unfortunately, but what I saw was fantastic. In addition, lots of good material from her life is on display at Woodruff Library. Letters, notes, photographs, and things like her complaints about the cover chosen for A Good Man Is Hard to Find. I love it when schools do things well. Bonus: Georgia Public Broadcasting had a show about O'Connor in August. And earlier this year NPR talked with Steve Enniss, the director of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, about the O'Connor--Hester relationship.

I love me a good disco nap. [via 43folders]

Bonobos are in the news again. A while back there was a an article about bonobos in the New Yorker. And in the current issue of The Believer, an interview with primatologist Frans de Waal, who is gently criticized in the New Yorker article. It's a good read, aside from lousy economics in the third section. The best part of the interview touches on moral emotions, and what we misconceive about morality & Darwinism. De Waal makes the distinction:

We’ve been fed a bogus “Darwinian” position for thirty years, one that confuses the way evolution works with the things that evolution produces. Because the way evolution works, yes—it’s a nasty process. Evolution works by eliminating those who are not successful. Natural selection is a process that cares only about your own reproduction, or gene replication, and everything else is irrelevant. But then what natural selection produces is extremely variable. Natural selection can produce the social indifference you find in many solitary animals. But it can also produce extremely cooperative, friendly, and empathic characteristics.

A polar bear plays with a husky.

H.L. Mencken: "I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don’t want to meet them.”

We've got a new batch of MacArthur Fellows. I'd never heard of most of the fellows, which is great. But I am familiar with two of them. Stuart Dybek bowled me over with his short story that I've probably mentioned a million times, If I Vanished. Dawn Upshaw is a very good soprano. She sang in Atlanta last year in Ainadamar, an opera performed with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 2006. Alex Ross wrote a review of the 2003 premiere.

I'd never heard of Gustave Caillebotte until a couple days ago, when I was floored by The Floor Scrapers. That painting has some wonderful attention to light and texture.

Wikimindmap maps out the subtopics and links in Wikipedia articles. A little slow, but very cool. [via idw]

These bed sheets have markings to let couples know who is hogging.