[science] List of scientists who became creationists after studying the evidence … ‘ * ‘

14 kinds of Facebook people you want to block, but you can’t because they’re sort of your friends … ‘That guy who posts way too much… Get a life! Note that “too much” is defined as “more than you”.’

[press] 2013 According To The Daily Express Front Page … ‘You only need to look at four topics – health breakthroughs, weather, immigration and Maddie McCann – before you’ve accounted for half of their lead stories for the entire year.’

[moore] A Moment Of Moore: My name’s Alan Moore. I write comics. … ‘Goodnight Children, and sweet dreams, wereever you are.’

[tv] Homeland – box set review… Why you should be watching Homeland … ‘Season one, aired in 2011, hinges on the question: has Gulf war hero Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), held in an Afghan hole for eight years, been “turned” by al-Qaida? Lewis won an Emmy for his portrayal of the traumatised marine; Danes won two for her role – hunter to Brody’s hunted. As a bipolar intelligence agent Carrie joins a clutch of intense, idiosyncratic female leads in current TV drama (Spiral, The Killing, The Bridge, The Fall). Her judgments are brilliantly unhinged: her CIA mentor, Saul Berenson, calls her “the smartest and the dumbest fucking person I’ve ever known”.’

[moore] Epic Small Talk Fail …

[learning] Lol My Thesis … years of academic research condensed into one sentence. Political Science: ‘Can’t we all just get along? Get along my way, that is, not everyone else’s wrong way.’ [via jwz]

[science] Scientists Tell Us Their Favourite Jokes … ‘Sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium Batman!’

[tv] 14 Ways Nathan Barley Predicted The Future … ‘1. Camera phones with MP3 decks.’

[comics] The Art of Bill Sienkiewicz … great collection of art showcasing the legendary comic artist.

[politics] The Michael Gove random policy generator … ‘More latin! More bibles! More bibles in Latin!’

[moore] Lego Alan Moore … ‘Your Argument Is Invalid.’

[tech] Source Code in TV and Films … an amusing look at where the Source Code displayed in TV and movies is really from … ‘In the film Terminator, the HUD shows a listing of 6502 assembly language which appears to have been taken from an Apple II.’

[comics] Wertham was right… Batman and Whitey share a tender moment …

[internet] Cicada 3301: I tried the hardest puzzle on the internet and failed spectacularly … more on the mysterious internet puzzle that restarted recently … ‘The image included text hidden with steganography, a technique which lets users bury information in seemingly innocuous files. To get the information out required me to use a program called OutGuess. To install OutGuess, I need to compile the program from source. To do that, I need to install Xcode, the Mac OS X developer tools, create a new command line project based on the source code I downloaded, reconfigure the program for Mac, deal with any dependency issues, build it, and then run it from the terminal. What I actually do is spend the better part of an hour clicking around in Xcode, desperately trying to find a magic button to click which will make everything work without requiring me to learn how to code in an afternoon. There is no such button. This may be harder than I thought.’

[comics] Last Alan Moore Interview? … Pádraig Ó Méalóid posts an epic Alan Moore interview – Alan covers criticisms about rape and racism in his comics and provides what is likely to be his final word on Grant Morrison … ‘As for the use of ‘problematic’ figures in the pages of The League, a great number of the literary figures which we’ve appropriated or re-imagined in the course of the book, have been to my mind every bit as problematic as the Galley-Wag. They just haven’t been black. As an example I remain somewhat unsure, in light of these current issues, as to why our use of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu in volume one seemed to have passed by without a murmur, given that here we have a character who was actually intended by his original author as a crude racial caricature of the most negative and xenophobic strain, and for whom our only act of rehabilitation was to suggest that Rohmer’s ‘Devil Doctor’ may have been motivated by a hatred of the British justifiably inculcated during his childhood in the years of the bestial and shameful Opium Wars. And yet, hardly a word said, as I recall.’

[funny] Dread Singles on Twitter … a Lovecraftian singles feed… ‘HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA, PEELING BACK THE SKIN OF THE INFINITE, PEERING INTO THE DYING HEART OF THE LAST TRUE MYSTIC, YOLO THEY HISS, YOLO’

[politics] Why do British prime ministers never wear wedding rings? … ‘The last married male occupant of 10 Downing Street to wear a wedding ring in public was Harold Wilson, who was PM from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976.’

[web] Have I Been Pwned? … a service that allows you to check if any of your usernames or passwords been compromised in recent website security breaches.

[text] Cthuvian Ipsum Generator … A lorem ipsum generator from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos … ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.’

[books] Tsundoku … the Japanese word for buying books, not reading them and leaving them to pile up.

[batman] City of Batmans … ‘I Batlove you.’ … via Forbidden Planet’s Blog.

[comics] Stan Lee, The Man And The Myth … Chris Sims on Stan Lee’s legacy… ‘Stan Lee’s greatest talent, for good or ill, was never writing comics, or even editing them. It was promotion. I touched on this in an earlier column, but the real magic of Stan Lee’s contribution to Marvel wasn’t just filling Kirby and Ditko’s panels with five-dollar words and screeds against the commies. It was that brash, aggressive style that put a face (not coincidentally, his own) behind the comics. From very early on, the letters pages were clear to let readers know that “Stan and Jack” were the ones behind the adventures of the Fantastic Four, and again, you can’t really overstate how revolutionary that was. This was a time when creators were rarely if ever credited, but Lee – ironically, given the reputation that would come out over the years for stealing credit and hogging attention – was part of the crowd putting their names right there on page one.’

[tv] How should Homeland ‘reset’ for season four? … Stuart Heritage’s ideas for Season four of Homeland … ‘The absolute worst thing that Homeland could do this year is keep Dana around to snarl up a third of every episode by accidentally running over a nun on a Segway or Snapchatting a picture of her pubes to the Queen or whatever.’

[books] 19 Book Cover Clichés … a look at the remarkable similarities between the cover images of modern books… ‘Woman holding a birdcage for some reason – Must be a spooky tale in the Woman in Black vein.’

[movies] Hans Zimmer: ‘Going for Gold? I’m not ashamed of it! It paid the rent.’ … Hans Zimmer interview from the Guardian … Going for Gold Theme on YouTube

…the chuckling man on the other end of the phone line is happily claiming the theme tune for British TV game show Going for Gold, during an interview wind-down conversation about British TV prompted by his (British) colleague Russell Emanuel.

“Going for Gold? I’m not ashamed of it! It paid the rent and opened up all sorts of doors. I will admit to it: we all have to have our guilty little somethings!” says Zimmer, in a conversation that also includes the unexpected phrase: “I know Les Dawson. Come on, I’m not completely ignorant.”

[Religion] God Admits He Rarely Forgives … ‘Speaking to reporters, God, who admitted that He is “generally motivated more by anger and spite than forgiveness,” reiterated that being forgiving is “not in [His] nature,” and on the whole constitutes a small part of what the Lord does every day and what He feels He should do every day.’

[health] How do vaccines cause autism? … a useful website for anti-vaxxers.

[wikipedia] 12 Spectacular Acts Of Wikipedia Vandalism … More from Buzzfeed but the vandalism of Spot the Dog’s wikipedia entry is worth a look … ‘Where’s Spot? Is he under the stairs? Is he in the box? No. He’s at the bar: Sipping whiskey. Sucking on cigarettes. Suffering.’

[life] Decoding Cancer-Addled Ramblings … a remarkable post on Ask Metafilter where the commenters partially decode the last messages of a Grandmother who died twenty years ago… ‘AGH, YES! Sorry for the double post, but: OFWAIHHBTNTKCTWBDOEAIIIHFUTDODBAFUOTAWFTWTAUALUNITBDUFEFTITKTPATGFAEA Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name… etc etc etc’

[comics] In The Comic-Book Pages Of 2001, Two Sorts Of Genius Collided … comparing and contrasting Stanley Kubrick and Jack Kirby’s versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey … ‘The 2001 comic also caught Kirby at a low creative ebb. He’d poured a lot of himself into his Fourth World saga for DC, without much to show for it, and by the time he returned to Marvel, Kirby was back to thinking of himself as a hired gun, sweating to fill as many pages as his bosses required, governed by the mentality of a boy who grew up in a ghetto during the Depression. Where Kubrick was a meticulous planner, taking years to develop a project and fussing over every detail, Kirby was a disorganized workaholic, who according to his wife Roz would accidentally throw away about half the good ideas he scrawled onto notepaper and napkins, and who felt like he was on the verge of destitution if he didn’t generate at least 20 pages a week.’