"The graphic novel has been a 'legitimate' art form for a while now. Does that mean we can start calling them comics again?" Publisher's Weekly reviewers vote on their favorite comics from 2006. It was a very good year. I agree that Absolute DC: New Frontier was really good. I loved Scott McCloud's Making Comics (my review). I sort of panned The 9/11 Report: A Graphical Adaptation (my review), but it made the honorable mentions anyway. I just started Kevin Huizenga's Curses, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is definitely on the (ever-lengthening) to-read list.

Lifehacker collected their most popular posts from this year.

The Onion AV Club picks their top films for 2006, featuring a master list and a set of personal favorites for each writer.

A list of the Top Politically Incorrect Words for 2006.

Wow. Jodi Picoult is going to be writing for the Wonder Woman comics line.

Pentagram just completed a new identity/ packaging design for Saks Fifth Avenue.

Okay after all this mess, I'm almost a little embarrassed that I liked Michael Crichton's books so much when I was younger. Earlier this year, Michael Crowley wrote a critical article about Crichton's views on global warming. Well, what do you know... in Crichton's new novel, Next, he inserted a character named Mick Crowley, who turns out to be a child rapist. I'd call that an over-reaction. Crowley gives a surprisingly civil response. This is just insane.

What's the one sentence you would tell the future? Rebecca Blood picks up on Paul Kedrosky's prompt, and tags a couple of luminaries like Neil Gaiman, Alex Steffen, and Malcolm Gladwell to find out what they'd share from their own realm of expertise. Keep an eye out for their responses.

Ray Kurzweil and David Gelernter talk about machine consciousness.

Richard Dawkins has a video documentary that ties in with his new book, The God Delusion.

Coudal is selling pins with letters. You can spell whatever you like as a custom set, or just get a box full of letters. I love these little spin-off enterprises that Coudal does, like the sweet Jewelboxing products, the Chicago Bears victory t-shirts, and the multi-faceted live music packages. So cool.

I was just reading over the Wikipedia entry for Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. I really liked Asimov's I, Robot (the book! Let's leave Will Smith out of this), which is a nice set of stories based around the laws in hypothetical situations. An interesting alternative to "laws" comes in the form of friendliness theory, saying that we should program the 'bots to be basically nice in the first place.

In a great New Yorker article about Thomas Paine, there's this awesome comic book analogy of Founding Fathers qua Justice League: "Paine is Aquaman to Washington’s Superman and Jefferson’s Batman." And who new that John Adams once called Paine's Common Sense "a poor, ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass"?

Bill Gates has said, "…Search today is still kind of a hunt, where you get all these links, and as we teach software to understand the documents, really read them in the sense a human does, you'll get answers more directly…" And branching off of that, here are some predictions for where search engines are headed in the next year. While some are pretty wild, like when "a single query will bring a gallery of results equivalent to running multiple queries about the meaningful variations of the same topic," I'd be happy enough with evolution such that "a search engine will let users evaluate answers on the spot by displaying uninterrupted and coherent text snippets, often letting searchers forgo having to click through to links."

Swivel is a web service that lets you compare public statistics, as long as they share some dimension (e.g. time, demographic, etc). For example, here's a graph on coffee consumption and the rate of violent crime. Or accidental death, poisoning versus falls. And college student drug use. There's some cool data sharing and some correlation features there. Get your Chi-square on.

New York Times article on our hapless Transportation Security Agency: "The T.S.A. is much more talented in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems. This becomes all too clear when we see that the agency’s security procedures are unable to withstand the playful testing of a bored computer-science student." Ties in with the wild legal investigations of Chris Soghoian, who pointed out an embarrassing security weakness with the very clever Boarding Pass Generator. And it also features some nice comments from security whiz Bruce Schneier.

You absolutely must have tissues at hand before watching this video. It's from that classic episode of Fresh Prince where Will's father walks out on him for the second time. Seriously, get some tissues.

In another grand infringement of property rights, the U.S. Mint has announced a ban on melting pennies and nickels. The price of copper is up to $3 a pound, so you can potentially make more money by selling the coins as raw metal. Whose metal is it, really?

Some recordings of America's "Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century." What surprises me is that with the exception of Lou Gehrig's farewell (mp3) and very few others, almost all of the speeches are from politicians or activists. But what worries me is that I can't really think of others that could make the list. It's kind of sad that oratory is so tightly associated with politics.

Note to self: borrow the phrase "Short Term Personal Savior" and integrate into daily conversation.