Thursday Linkdump of Doom!

Well, no real doom here, but I like to pretend...

No offense meant to Colbert, but I prefer the name Serenity.

The New York Times now has "Graphic Books" Best Seller Lists.

Five Reasons to Check Out Captain Britain and MI13. It's a good book, and I agree with everything in this article. Ok, except for the vampires on the moon. Sheesh.

I'm getting pretty sick of The Watchman promos and talk and everything, but this is just wrong. It's wrong in every single way possible. If you haven't read the original material (or, I suppose, seen the movie) then you probably won't get how wrong it is. At least it intended to be wrong, and isn't that way accidentally.

Wil Wheaton put his new book for sale in non-DRMed PDF format. It quickly made him a lot of money. "Sometime overnight, the total PDF sales exceeded the total print sales. I've still earned more via print sales, though PDF is rapidly catching up. Here's something cool about the gap between them: whenever it looks like PDF is going to overtake it, a bunch of people (presumably because they read the PDF) buy the print copy, and it leaps ahead. I wish I could do an animated visualization of the sales, like a little horse race, because it sure would look awesome."

I can read a lot on-line, but even free, Red Mars is too much. I'd want a paper copy if I were to reread that book.

A mermaid.

Let's wipe out toilet paper. One man's quest to reduce waste.

Speaking of waste, more proof that Diebold shouldn't be making voting machines. And any voting precinct that has bought voting machines from them should get a full refund plus damages. This is just fraud on the taxpayers and fraud on the voters. Diebold/Premier should be sued out of existence.

More reasons to be nervous about drug testing: false positives are really common. Experiments with the D-L test described at the end of the report found that "patchouli, spearmint, and eucalyptus tested positive for marijuana, while lavender, cypress, and oregano (which previous studies showed produced false positives with the D-L test) gave inconclusive results." In tests using just the NarcoPouch KN Reagent kit, 33 of 42 substances—including vanilla, anise, chicory, and peppermint—tested positive for cannabis.