[links] Link salad goes under the knife tomorrow

The Acts of Whimsy cancer fundraiser and the Lakeside Kickstarter for the documentary about me, the_child, and cancer are still live. Both have made goal, but additional support is always welcome. Please check them out if you have not done so yet. Note that the next unlock goal at $44,000 is the_child's video, "How to Write Like My Dad". We're almost there!

PayPal: 'Aggressive changes' coming to frozen funds policy — CNNMoney covers the recent PayPal kerfuffle, with comments from me.

The 'quadruple helix' in the human genome that could lead to new drugs to fight cancer — Structure only seen in test tubes found in human cancer cells Really? I've had Stage IV multiply metastatic colon cancer since 2008, and no one's found any test tubes in my cancer cells yet.

Counting words — Language Log rants about Microsoft Word and word counts. Which as all writers know is a huge can of worms.

Icelandic Phallological Museum — Wow… (Via Elizabeth Bourne.)

Scientists find evidence of Martian lake

Crashing Through Dark Matter Walls — The Earth is "constantly crashing through huge walls of dark matter," New Scientist explains, "and we already have the tools to detect them." Whoa! Intensely strange and cool.

Separate And Unequal In The U.S. Military — Ta-Nehisi Coates (and the New York Times) on gay spouses in the military.

Dear Mr. President: Time to Deal with Climate Change — In a letter to President Obama, the editors of MIT Technology Review argue that addressing climate change must take top priority in the next four years. Unfortunately for the entire planet, Republican political ideology trumps reality every single time. An obstreperous and defiant American political minority is leading the entire globe further down the path to long-term ruin, all for the sake of a few votes and their campaign cash from the fossil fuel industry.

Agreeing on the problem (but not agreeing that it is a problem) — If you really believe that “unbounded” scholarship “poses a serious threat to ongoing scriptural fidelity,” then you have already conceded that you do not believe the scripture can withstand intellectual scrutiny. This “threat” only makes sense if you believe that the scriptures are a fraud, vulnerable to exposure. I've always said if your faith cannot stand up to the scrutiny of the wider world, it is a poor faith indeed. Which is why the religious conservative mania for controlling education never really made sense to me. That's a flat-out admission their faith is weak and false.

Officials: N.M. teen gunman kills 5 inside home — Did guns in the home keep these people safer? Without access to firearms, this child could not have killed so many people. We are taught the lie of "gun safety" every single day, but we never learn. Once again, the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of children, and the gun culture takes no responsibility for what it has wrought.

QotD?: Got surgery?

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1/21/2013
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours of WRPA (revisions to "Monsters in the Mountains at the Edge of the World")
Hours slept: 6.0 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: n/a (scale still out of batteries)
Number of FEMA troops on my block enforcing disability rights: 0
Currently reading: The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks