[links] Link salad doesn't tell you where to go, baby

Staying in Touch with Your Writing — Jeff VanderMeer on the danger of emphasizing word counts, with some positive comments on how otherwise to approach writing. (Via Steve Buchheit.)

Reprint Recommendations: War and Space: Recent Combat — Editor Sean Wallace is looking for reprints of space war stories.

Distances among genres and authors — Some linguistic neepery on word corpuses etc. from Language Log.

Bad News for People With Hard-to-Pronounce Names — I think authors and publishers have known this for a long time.

Teller Reveals His Secrets — The smaller, quieter half of the magician duo Penn & Teller writes about how magicians manipulate the human mind. (Thanks to danjite.)

If You Feel O.K., Maybe You Are O.K. — An objection to early diagnosis. Speaking only for myself, neither of metastases so far had expressed themselves to me somatically before being found by imaging. If we'd waited for me to show symptoms, I would have been in a lot more trouble. Early diagnosis continues to save my life.

Oetzi the Iceman's nuclear genome gives new insights

Revolutionary vehicles that never caught on — Mmm. Dynasphere.

Flying Through a Crack in the Ice — A cool animation from NASA's Earth Observatory.

Why We'll Never Get a Cashless Society — The arguments against cash are rational, but our attachment to it isn't.

Shame on the Rich — Are the rich more dishonest? I believe the word you're looking for is "entitlement". (Via my aunt.)

Republicans' war on common sense

G.O.P. Greek Tragedy — In the old days, the Republican ego had control of the party’s id. The id, sometimes described as a galloping horse or crying baby, “the dark, inaccessible part of our personality ... chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations,” as Freud called it, was whipped up obliquely by candidates. Nixon had his Southern strategy of using race as a wedge, Bush Senior and Lee Atwater used the Willie Horton attack, and W. and Karl Rove conjured the gay marriage bogyman. Once elected, those presidents curbed the id with the ego, common sense and reason. But now the G.O.P.’s id is unbridled.

Erasing the History of the Bush Era — Conservatives don't like to recall the horrible, horrible costs of our country's last era of conservative government. Denial, thy name is GOP.

?otd: What if I ride? What if you walk?

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2/29/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.75 hours (0.75 hours of WRPA, 1.0 hours of Sunspin revisions)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.5 (solid)
Weight: 235.6
Currently reading: 1491 by Charles C. Mann