Linkfest

-- Top 10 greatest science fiction detective novels.

-- Top 10 Underrated Fantasy Stories Before 1937, that being the year The Hobbit was published. (I almost wrote, "the year The Hobbit came out", but thought that could be misinterpreted.)

-- Quantum teleportation achieved over ten miles of free space. "As we've explained before, "quantum teleportation" is quite different from how many people imagine teleportation to work. Rather than picking one thing up and placing it somewhere else, quantum teleportation involves entangling two things, like photons or ions, so their states are dependent on one another and each can be affected by the measurement of the other's state. When one of the items is sent a distance away, entanglement ensures that changing the state of one causes the other to change as well, allowing the teleportation of quantum information, if not matter." Eventually, it might be able to "span the distance between the surface of the earth and space." Kind of reminds me of Orson Scott Card's "philotics" from the first Ender series.

-- The Most Badass Alphabet Ever. Via Got Medieval.

-- Hubble catches planet being devoured by its star. It's only got about ten million years left. Tick, tick, tick ...

-- Here's an incredible essay about someone who stopped going to church years ago, and then found it again. Very inspiring.

-- Here's a website about philosopher Peter Wust, run by his granddaughter. He was a Christian existentialist in the first half of the 20th century, and being more of an analytic philosopher, I haven't read any of his stuff. She should put some of his books and essays online.

-- Here are some interesting political quotes. The fact that they're all from the political right is just an amazing coincidence. First, "A love of autocracy often lurks beneath the liberal veneer. There's this idea that the right answers are known and the people are just too deluded and distorted to see what they are and to vote for them."

-- Second, "Europeans are post-Christian in this sense, too: they have tried to "liberate" themselves from the curse of Adam by substituting borrowing for working, and from the curse of Eve by not having children. It was entirely foreseeable that neither of these efforts would end well."

-- Third, "Every murderous totalitarian government of the 20th century began with some insulated group of faux-intellectuals congratulating each other on how smart they are, and fantasizing about how, if they could just install a dictatorship-for-a-day, they could right all the wrongs in the world. It is the ultimate fantasy of the narcissist. And we’ve got whole generations of them, in control of our media and our government, all intent on “remaking America.”"

-- NASA to Test World’s Fastest Hypersonic ScramJet this Month, and hoping to break the several second barrier.