LIFE EXTENSION UPDATE: I’ve got a TCS Daily column following up on the 60 Minutes interview with Aubrey de Grey; it also responds, in passing, to something Mark Steyn has said about demography. Also check out this article by Henry Miller on the pharmaceutical industry’s problems and how that may harm older people.

MICROSOFT TAKES DOWN A CHINESE BLOGGER: Rebecca MacKinnon has the scoop. “Note, his blog was TAKEN DOWN by MSN people. Not blocked by the Chinese government.”

JOEL MILLER’S Size Matters: How Big Government Puts the Squeeze on America’s Families, Finances, and Freedom, is out today: As I say in the blurb, it ought to be a political call to arms. You can read a review here (“Although the subject matter in other hands can be depressing, Miller manages to keep his arguments lucid, smart and just light enough to be read at bedtime”) and Ralph Reiland, in The American Spectator, notes another observation on the book: “Size Matters, says Instapundit.com, ‘is a virtual manifesto for the PorkBusters movement.'”

JIM GERAGHTY has much more on the Ukrainian / Russian natural gas imbroglio. I agree that this only makes Gerhard Schroeder look worse.

STEVEN LANDSBURG: “Here, for the edification of bloggers everywhere, is an example of an economic consideration: If you ask people—and especially poor people—what their most dire needs are, you’ll find that ‘guaranteed ventilator support’ ranks pretty low on the list. . . . It’s one thing to say we should spend more to help the poor, but quite another to say that what we’re currently spending should be spent ineffectively.”

THE CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS IS UP: And so is law-blog carnival The Blawg Review. And there are lots more blog carnivals here.

MAN BITES DOG: “MSNBC’s Hardball show actually delivered some interesting news for once tonight.”

RON ROTUNDA ON GUANTANAMO.

PHIL BOWERMASTER writes on God and the Singularity. They’re not the same thing, he notes.

I’ve heard talk about the Singularity dismissed as “the rapture for nerds,” but I think that’s mere dismissal, and not very persuasive. It is, instead, an illustration of Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I wrote a song about that, too, once but it wasn’t a hymn!

UPDATE: Frank Tipler emails:

I beg to differ with:

“PHIL BOWERMASTER writes on God and the Singularity. They’re not the same thing, he notes.”

The word “singularity” has several distinct meanings. P.B. is referring to a sudden and radical change in technology. But “singularity” also has a precise mathematical meaning” “points” where quantities diverge to infinity (or are otherwise not defined). The laws of physics tell us that the universe began in a singularity in this precise mathematical sense 13.7 billion years ago. This initial singularity is the Uncaused First Cause. Maimonides and Aquinas defined “God” to be the Uncaused First Cause. Hence, by definition, the Cosmological Singularity is God!

Frank J. Tipler
Professor of Mathematical Physics
Tulane University

And yet when I note that most arguments come down to definitions, people accuse me of being too much of a lawyer . . . .

LEBANON THE MODEL: Writing over at the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal site, Michael Totten has thoughts on Arab democracy.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL has a new law blog. Among other things, we’re told that Article III Groupie will become the new Wonkette.

Current Wonkette Ana Marie Cox will, I guess, be busy promoting her new novel, Dog Days.

UPDATE: Janet Maslin reviews Dog Days in the Times.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a USA Today review, too.

THE ANSWER, OF COURSE, IS “BETTER-LOOKING.” With my brother, there’s room for dispute. Here, well, . . . not really. I don’t think that the matter is worthy of so much attention, though.

DIPTI VAIDYA picks up the white courtesy phone. She makes videoblogging look pretty appealing.

STUART BUCK on the novelization of the Narnia movie: “If you make a movie out of a classic and beloved children’s book that has sold millions of copies, why on earth would you want to have someone write a book based on the movie?”

I remember when they made the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula, they hired Fred Saberhagen to write the novelization of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which I had previously thought was, you know, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Silly me.

But at least they had the good taste to hire Saberhagen. However, his own Dracula novels — starting with The Dracula Tape — are undoubtedly better than the novelization of a bad movie based on Stoker’s novel.

UPDATE: Reader Mark Beadle writes that it’s not really a novelization: “[I]t is a 48-page story book featuring pictures from the movie. This changes the view entirely, I believe.” Yes, it does, and I stand corrected.

The Saberhagen / Dracula point still holds, though.

ACCORDING TO BLOGPULSE, this Instapundit flood aid post was #2 in the blogosphere for 2005. #1 was a LiveJournal post that was removed by its author. I don’t know what it was about, but I’m guessing it was something sexy; sex usually outsells charity.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Amazingly enough, the post has nothing to do with sex. It was a script that allowed a LJ user to see who’s reading their journal without commenting (can you imagine how many bloggers would kill for something like that). It was an online flash mob that Russian LJists are famous for.

Russian Internet is a phenomenon in its own right, with the LiveJournal being analogous to the blogosphere in English. I think the post’s #1 ranking is the biggest achievement of the Russian people since the cosmonauts (I mean, it beats Kournikova).

Ah. Well, ego often beats even sex.

AVIAN FLU UPDATE:

The U.S. is making fast progress in preparations for a bird flu pandemic, including measures to close down schools and quarantine the sick, but vaccine supplies remain inadequate, health officials said Sunday.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Julie Gerberding, director of the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing “bottlenecks” in vaccine production and the delivery of health care if there’s an outbreak.

“We’ve got to get more and better anti-viral drugs. And we’ve got to have every single link in our public health system as strong as it can be so it can detect this problem,” she said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

With luck, we’ll make it through this year without problems, though there’s evidence that regular flu is already overstressing some hospitals out west. If hospitals are having trouble handling ordinary flu, that’s a good sign that we’re not ready for a major epidemic of any kind.

DEATH PENALTY UPDATE:

With less than two weeks left in Gov. Mark R. Warner’s term, time is running out for him to arrange DNA testing that could determine whether Virginia sent an innocent man to the electric chair in 1992.

If the tests show Roger Keith Coleman did not rape and murder his sister-in-law in 1981, it will mark the first time in the United States an executed person has been scientifically proved innocent, say death penalty opponents, who are keenly aware that such a result could have a powerful effect on public opinion.

I’d be more interested, of course, in having states fund DNA testing before executions, instead of afterward.

UPDATE: Jon Henke has a related post that’s worth your time.

TIGERHAWK is (re)thinking about the ethics of journalism.

THEY GROW UP SO FAST: Ralph Luker contrasts these photos of my nephew William from just over a year ago with this one from last week. At almost 14 months, he’s three feet tall and weighs 42 pounds. NFL scouts will no doubt be appearing shortly.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE looks at terrorists in Iraq in 2005. Meanwhile, Gateway Pundit crunches some numbers and comes up with some interesting charts and graphs, here and here.

UPDATE: Gerard van der Leun is running some stats of his own.

PATRICK HYNES ON ABRAMOFF: “Time to throw bad Republicans under the bus.”

My earlier thoughts are here.

THE BLOGOSPHERIC ATKINS-DIET ENTHUSIASM seems to have faded from previous years, but here’s some post-holiday weight-loss advice. Of course, if you exercise and eat right year-round, you won’t need to worry about that. Here’s some CDC advice on exercise.

THIS WEEK’S DIGITAL CAMERA CARNIVAL is up. And, BTW, you can get double and triple rebates on Canon cameras and printers bought between 10/15/05 and 1/15/06, so if you’ve recently bought one, check it out.

Meanwhile, David Bernstein is grumbling about Kodak. “Your crappy camera gave out after 150 pictures, you won’t fix it even though it’s apparently a widespread flaw, and you’re offering me the opportunity to buy a reconditioned Kodak camera for $50 less than I could get a brand new one.”

LIFE EXTENSION UPDATE: Here’s a transcript of the 60 Minutes show with Aubrey de Grey. Highlights (and a roundup of some blog reactions) can be found here.

UPDATE: Ian Schwartz has the video.

MICKEY KAUS looks at Hillary vs. the blogs.