Doc Searls talks about how to save newspapers. Nice tips there. The sad part is that readers (i.e. customers) have been complaining about many of these features for years [e.g. archive paywalls, complicated websites, lack of linking, etc.]

Some tribute/rip-off album covers from the world of hip-hop.

I'm glad that someone has called out Oprah Winfrey for featuring The Secret on her show. I was pretty stunned that she'd pick a crap book like that.

The Collective Type Project gets volunteers to write individual letters, then mashes them all together to create a united typeface. There's only a couple characters still open for contribution, so act fast.

So in Batman: Year 100 we have the typical gritty Gotham set in a climate of heavy-hand police state dystopia, etc etc. The year is 2039. Not too distant, but plenty of time for the world to go to crap. Enough time for the old Batman to die off and a new one to take his place. Or maybe it's the same man...? The mystery of the new Dark Knight is unfortunately one that never gets resolved. He just sort of is, and does the usual foiling of nefarious plots. On the upside, there's interesting artwork from Paul Pope and Jose Villarrubia, and I liked seeing Batman as a bit more of a ramshackle outsider, coming across as unexperienced and a bit clumsy and improvisational. One of the better surprises was the little mini-comic stashed in the back of the book: Berlin Batman. This one revolves around the (true) story of Ludwig von Mises, a brilliant and outspoken economist who fled the Nazis at the cost of having his home ransacked and all his papers confiscated. Batman tries to stop it. It's a cool little yarn, with a hilariously bourgeois/bohemian Bruce Wayne. It was great to see two of my personal thrills (Batman and Austrian economics) collide so unexpectedly.

I think the anthology of Missed Connection Comics could be pretty cool. The concept is to take a missed connection post from Craigslist and comic-ize it. You'll find some samples here.

Heroic secret service agent takes question intended for Bush.

I learned a lot from this book. But at this point, I have neither the time nor the brainpower to finish it off. The half that I read is quite good, though, so I'll share a bit from that. The title of Lee Smolin's book foretells much: The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science, and What Comes Next. Smolin starts off with a an overview of science---what it is and ought to be, the greatest remaining puzzles in physics, what it means to truly solve them, the nature and power of theory, and a history of the major advances in physics since around the Renaissance. Smolin does a great job here. He really takes his time, assumes little, and has a clever way with analogies. Next comes the early development of string theory in the 70s and 80s, its rapid progress in the following decades, and current stagnation. Which brought to the part where he starts talking about branes and M-theory and super-symmetry and... I realized I would never make it. I would need a bit more focus and fewer compelling distractions tapping their foot impatiently in my To-Read queue.

Anyway, here's a good riff from Smolin on the human side of science:

It seems to me more and more that career decisions hinge on character. Some people will happily jump on the next big thing, give it all they've got, and in this way make important contributions to fast-moving fields. Others just don't have the temperament to do this. Some people need to think through everything very carefully, and this takes time, as they get easily confused. It's not hard to feel superior to such people, until you remember that Einstein was one of them. In my experience, the truly shocking new ideas and innovations tend to come from such people. Still others---and I belong to this third group---just have to go their own way, and will flee fields for no better reason than that it offends them that people are joining in because it feels good to be on the winning side... Luckily for science, the contributions of the whole range of types are needed. Those who do good science, I've come to think, do so because they choose problems that are suited to them.

I'm pretty sure I'll come back to this book maybe a couples months down the road. See also my post from last September with some stringy links.

The Turk was a novelty chess-playing machine hoax. It first debuted in 1770 and toured for almost a century. I was surprised it had such a rich history.

The Knockoff Project tracks album cover spoofs, tributes, & rip-offs.

A list of male singers known for using the falsetto range.

An image of all the objects in our solar system larger than 200 miles in diameter. This is a nice addition to my other links about sense of scale and projects that try to make sense of Really Big Ideas. [via waxy]

A video of photos of circular things. Tires, letters, signs, holes, dials, etc. Great soundtrack to boot. [via krazydad]

A pretty cool collection of experimental thumb pianos. I always wanted to make an mbira (aka thumb piano aka kalimba) since I found out they existed. Just one of those projects I forgot about that I need to re-add to my list. I saw Bob Becker play one in concert at PASIC one year, I think back in 2001. Of course, because Bob Becker is who he is, it was amazing.

A few illustrations from early version of the Monopoly board game.

Justin wears the camera 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even in the bathroom. Even on a date.

An interview with Jonathan Lethem. He talks about copyright and some of the ideas in his Harper's article a couple months ago.

A0 magazine is a photojournal printed on 5 sheets of gigantic A0 paper, with stitching down the spine. I love it. [via typeforyou]

The Starfish & the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations is another book along the lines of Wikinomics. This book has the typical anecdotes punctuated with bullet points that you'll see in other business books. It's breezy and well-paced. It covers the principles of decentralization (e.g. "when attached, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized," or "it's easy to mistake starfish for spiders," and "an open system doesn't have central intelligence; the intelligence is spread throughout the system."), and their implications for the business world. While this one isn't nearly as tedious as Wikinomics, it's also not as wide-ranging or historical. In this case, I think that's a good thing.

A brief interview with Alex Ross. He's got a new book on the way this fall, which I predict that I will enjoy immensely.

What I want to do is to provide an intelligent introduction to this fabulous, labyrinthine world: not just the music itself, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky onward, but the entire cultural and social tumult around it: the Rite of Spring riot, the interaction of composers and jazz people in the twenties, the entanglement of composers in totalitarian regimes, the weird intersections of post-WWII avant-garde composers and Cold War politics, the origins of minimalism in the alternative philosophies of the West Coast. It’s not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century told through music.