Kasper Hauser is a San Francisco sketch comedy group named for a feral child who was the subject of a 1974 film by MoFi favorite Werner Herzog. They're very funny live, but there's plenty to check out in the first link, such as Spicy Pony Head (mp3) (depicting a difficult interaction between waiter and restaurant patron) and Captain's Log (mp3) (which depicts Capt. Kirk on acid). more inside

10 recording bloopers that made the album.

Curious George: What're the last 5 books you've read? Please to be revealing the Tom Clancys as well as the Tom Pynchons, the Jackie Collinses as well as the Jack Kerouacs.

T.S. Eliot vs. Portishead.

Vladimir Putin, you're so dreamy!

Live From Congress: The Skull Fucking Bill Of 2007 a.k.a. the Ocular Penetration Restriction Act. NSFW.

AIDS denial in the Internet era. This denial was highlighted on an international level in 2000, when South African president Thabo Mbeki convened a group of panelists to discuss the cause of AIDS, acknowledging that he remained unconvinced that HIV was the cause...the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was for many years on the front lines of AIDS education and activism. But now a San Francisco chapter of the group has joined the denialist movement...Members of the group “The Foo Fighters” provided music for a soundtrack of the recent documentary, “The Other Side of AIDS”, which questions whether HIV is the cause of AIDS. The band has spread its message that HIV does not cause AIDS at concerts, and it lists the HIV denial group “Alive and Well” as a worthy cause on its Web site...

The Earth as art. Here you can view our planet through the beautiful images taken by the Landsat-7 satellite - and most recently, the Terra Satellite's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). From the USGS. Some really gorgeous images. Like this, and this, and this, and this...

Researchers design humorous "bot." University of Cincinnati researchers Julia Taylor and Larry Mazlack recently unveiled a "bot” — more accurately a software program — that recognizes jokes. They reported the development at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Vancouver, Canada. All bad jokes aside, their research represents a step forward in computers reaching the capability of a human mind.

Did climate change inspire FRANKENSTEIN? Or other famous literary works?

Drinkin' time!! It's 5 o'clock somewhere... more inside

In Silicon Valley, millionaires who don't feel rich. “You’re nobody here at $10 million,” Mr. Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar here.

On Philip K. Dick. What is moving in Dick’s madness is his insistence that the surest sign of the madness of the world outside him is the violence that we accept as normal. In “Clans of the Alphane Moon,” he had already glimpsed the possibility that normal governing might be the work of paranoids. This Nixon-era vision becomes, in the VALIS books, a metaphysical truth. “The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.”

The downside of diversity. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics. By Richard Hofstadter, Harper's, November 1964.

StoryCorps. "StoryCorps is modeled—in spirit and in scope—after the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, through which oral history interviews with everyday Americans across the country were recorded. These recordings remain the single most important collection of American voices gathered to date. We hope that StoryCorps will build and expand on that work, becoming a WPA for the 21st Century." Some great stuff here.

Poems from Guantanamo. THE JUST-released "Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak" is a collection of 22 poems by 17 detainees at the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay. Edited by Marc Falkoff, each poem had to be cleared by the Pentagon. The result offers a rare glimpse into the lives of the prisoners. The following is an excerpt.

The science of big waves. "The monster waves at Mavericks attract big wave surfers from around the world. But what exactly makes these Half Moon Bay waves so big?" From Quest, a production of KQED-TV, the San Francisco public television station.

Inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program.

Science and the Islamic world. Internal causes led to the decline of Islam's scientific greatness long before the era of mercantile imperialism. To contribute once again, Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong.