Links for 2010-05-11

“While the film naturally took some liberties with the details — sci-fi has the luxury of not having to pass peer review — Marvel Studios nonetheless cared enough about plausibility to ask the Science & Entertainment Exchange for a suitable scientist with whom they could consult.”

“In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archaeologists said. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost 10 hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 80 square miles, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terraces.

“We were blown away,” Dr. Diane Chase said recently, recalling their first examination of the images. “We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and ’90s.” “

“Writing a business résumé can be a challenge for one-time academics who are now seeking their first job in the business world. While the format for a C.V. is very different than the one used for a résumé, they are both designed to answer one question. But your answers to that question cannot be the same.

When recruiters and managers in the business world read your résumé, they have one overriding concern: What can you do for us? By explicitly answering that question in a single-page business résumé, you’ll entice recruiters to invite you for an interview.”

“It’s not quite that Kagan offers something for everybody. It’s more that she offers nothing, so there is something for everybody to wail about. “

“So, basically, Lovecraft was too batty to hold a day job and even too batty to really market his own creative work. That’s a large part of why he was poor–the rest is simply that he was an adult during the Great Depression. During his lifetime, Lovecraft published on slim volume (200 copies of The Shadow over Innsmouth) and a relative handful of stories–sixty-five over the course of twenty-one years. (By way of contrast, I published my first short story in 2000–the one I sold earlier this week will be my sixty-fourth. I am not especially prolific.)

Lovecraft wasn’t nearly as productive as Robert Howard and certainly wasn’t a prolific novelist like Edgar Rice Burroughs. To suggest that copyrights are “all that separates” HPL from ERB is sheer gibbering lunacy.”

Disproving quantum quackery with nothing more than iron filings.