Lost America features "night photography of the abandoned roadside west." Troy Paiva uses really long exposures so he can do "light painting" to customize all the atmospheric colors.

Reinventing Comics is the middle child in the McCloud comics trilogy. I found it to be the weakest and least interesting of the three. (see my reviews of Making Comics and Understanding Comics) Not bad, but nothing special. McCloud himself sums up nicely:

I believe that Reinventing Comics has genuine flaws. The two halves don't always work well together, the storytelling is frequently stiffer and less convincing, and my enthusiastic advocacy of online comics is rarely tempered by some of the bleaker, more pessimistic scenarios offered by other writers in recent years. It was a harder book to write than Understanding Comics and, from all reports, a harder book to read.

Reinventing Comics came about in the midst of the dot-com boom, and you can see the e-nthusiasm popping out every which way in this book. The book discusses the 12 "revolutions" that comics will have to go through to achieve maturity and (ideally) financial stability. One really cool thing is that McCloud seems to anticipate the arrival of Long Tail economics, with the web giving comics the ability to penetrate down to ever smaller niches.

I have to absolutely agree with McCloud's idea that "the digital delivery of comics has the potential to revolutionize the industry, and that the aesthetic opportunities of digital comics are enormous." Unfortunately, I think RC shortchanges itself. It's this business bias that caught me off-guard--RC is very much focused on the structure of the industry, rather than the art it delivers. That's a shame, because it's always been McCloud's thoughts on comics theory that caught my attention. And there are certainly more prescient business writers out there.

Perhaps his surface treatment of the artistic potential of web comics is a side effect of the medium. That is, it can be really difficult to talk about webspace ideas on the zero-interaction surface of a sheet of paper. I'd like to hear his thoughts on the aesthetics of digital delivery now that the technology has matured a bit, and after he's had more time to experiment.

Alex Ross has a great piece on Steve Reich in the New Yorker, as well as a nice little pile of Reich-related links on his blog.

Wikipedia article on fictional expletives, which have commonly been used "to add nuance to the fictional cultures in their work, and sometimes as a form of censorship (or getting around it)."

After a nail-biter of an election, the results are in: Politicians Sweep Midterm Elections.

Steven Johnson made an appearance on NPR yesterday, talking about his new book The Ghost Map, and epidemiology in general.

This is a hilariously unfortunate set of photos: "getting your hair cut by a sixth grader."

David Pogue offers a fairly 'blah' review of the Zune, Microsoft's rival for the iPod. Am I the only person that thinks the brown one is really hot?

This is interesting: Beyond Ballots or Bullets is a select "workshop to develop freedom strategies". The mission sets aside both the within-the-system electioneering approach of groups like the Libertarian Party, and also sensibly avoids the more antagonistic strategy of violent rebellion. The end result is the application of non-violent civil disobedience, rooted in the fundamental libertarian non-agression principle. Cool.

Documentary slides of a road trip from New York to San Francisco, with a photo taken every mile.

Flickr photographers have offered almost 24 million photos for use under Creative Commons licenses. That's just incredible. This is one of those things that makes you remember how cool the Internet is. The times, they are a-changin'.

Publisher's Weekly suggests the best books of 2006. I read Making Comics, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, Small Is the New Big, and flipped through The Bon App?©tit Cookbook. I really need some more fiction in my life. I can really enjoy fiction--I wonder why it doesn't catch my eye as easily? [via sgb]

A couple great photos from Rick Santorum's concession speech... I love Merlin Mann's perfect description of this one: "It looks like a promo shot from a local theater production." And then there's this one, with the ex-Senator's son, the "awkward pre-teen flipping off the nation".

The Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change has made a bit of a splash lately. Jason Kottke points to the recent New Yorker article:

At the launch presentation of his report, Stern pointed out that global warming is a textbook case of an “externality,” in which the prices people pay for gasoline, electric power, and other energy products don’t reflect their true costs, among them the impact of greenhouse gases. “Our emissions affect the lives of others,” he explained. “When people do not pay for the consequences of their actions, we have market failure. This is the greatest market failure the world has seen.”

Well, no, it's not a "market failure". The lack of consequences for unethical actions is a failure to enforce law and property rights, i.e. failure to govern. I have no objections to the science of climate change, as far as I understand it. If only our common grasp of political economics were as robust! And while we're talking about the "textbook case" of an externality--read up on why externalities are not a case of market failure [pdf]. See also the fallacy public goods [pdf]. End soapbox.

Bonus material: Here's the BBC article and summary of the Stern Report. And of course, the Wall Street Journal has a couple responses. Have a great day.

I love how the content on Design by Fire fades in and out as you scroll. Very cool.

The New York Times has a nice infographic for election results. John Gruber also points to the "programming as journalism" connection.

I was a bit underwhelmed with this latest book from Thomas DiLorenzo. In Lincoln Unmasked, you'll find a collection of criticism of one of the most-worshipped Presidents. DiLorenzo offers up a variety of evidence against the common coin Lincoln legacy: that he was a railroad lobbyist entrenched in big business politics; he was willing to compromise on the slavery issue; he first introduced the era of the President qua dictator; etc. Fair enough. I won't dispute those facts. Revealing and fleshing out those issues would have been plenty, and I think DiLorenzo is at his best when he's doing that kind of nut-and-bolts history. I really like this kind of counter-cultural, libertarian guerrilla criticism. But it's easy to get distracted while attacking the totem. In the course of his arguments, DiLorenzo also delivers a fair amount of invective against the "Cult of Lincoln," and much of the book is not really about Lincoln himself but about the ancillary politics of Lincoln study. At less than 200 pages, there's not a whole lot of room for both editorial and and for deep, nuanced research. I think this one comes up a little thin on both counts. In other words, I wanted more. I might check out his other books.

Bob Barker is retiring from Price is Right. Best Week Ever mentions the reasons we'll miss him. Man, I remember entire summers spent without missing an episode. And I always wanted one of those big price wheels in my house.

"A future society will very likely have the technological ability and the motivation to create large numbers of completely realistic historical simulations and be able to overcome any ethical and legal obstacles to doing so. It is thus highly probable that we are a form of artificial intelligence inhabiting one of these simulations. To avoid stacking (i.e. simulations within simulations), the termination of these simulations is likely to be the point in history when the technology to create them first became widely available, (estimated to be 2050). Long range planning beyond this date would therefore be futile." [via mises]

Blood costs more than oil, but less than ink for your printer.