Ken Burns (The Civil War, Baseball) is working on a six-part, 12-hour miniseries on America’s National Parks, to be aired next year. I’ve been a yearly National Park Pass holder for 4 years now, so I’m looking forward to this one. (I’ve been to only 23 of the 58 National Parks – I still haven’t been to Nevada’s one park, yet somehow the Dry Tortugas got a visit!) (via ecoscraps)

This blog has been following Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler since it was announced, and now it’s just won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. I still have no idea what the tone of the film will be like, but it looks like Aronofsky is back on his feet after the critical failure of The Fountain.

A profile on Rachel Maddow, who just got her own show on MSNBC, and is one of my favorite news personalities. Watching her go head-to-head with Pat Buchanan on MSNBC has been the highlight of the Democratic convention for me.

Unlike Olbermann, Maddow plans to interview some conservative guests. But she is determined to avoid the left-right pairings that sustain much of cable news. “It creates fake balance,” she says. “I’m sorry – we’re going to have a debate about whether or not the Earth is flat? It doesn’t make sense to have a debate about whether offshore drilling is going to bring down gas prices. You know what? It’s not. The fact that it’s false ought to be reported, or you’re advancing a lie.”

Obama’s vice presidential selection is looming, so I’m going to throw this one out there: could Richard Clarke be his dark horse pick?

Update: It turns out it’s the more famous older white guy with foreign policy experience. Biden will be fun to watch in the VP debate.

On the eve of the publication of Anathem , Wired just posted the first profile I’ve seen in a long while on author Neal Stephenson. Highlights: the steel helmet he’s constructing in his basement, his extracurricular research on brain surgery tools, and the influence of the Long Now Foundation on his new novel:

“I could never get that idea, the notion that society in general is becoming aliterate, out of my head,” [Stephenson] says. “People who write books, people who work in universities, who work on big projects for a long time, are on a diverging course from the rest of society. Slowly, the two cultures just get further and further apart.”

On the eve of the publication of Anathem, Wired just posted the first profile I’ve seen in a long while on author Neal Stephenson. Highlights: the steel helmet he’s constructing in his basement, his extracurricular research on brain surgery tools, and the influence of the Long Now Foundation on his new novel:

“I could never get that idea, the notion that society in general is becoming aliterate, out of my head,” [Stephenson] says. “People who write books, people who work in universities, who work on big projects for a long time, are on a diverging course from the rest of society. Slowly, the two cultures just get further and further apart.”

David Byrne and Brian Eno’s second collaborative album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today , has just been released digitally. You can purchase the downloads for $8.99, or an assortment of other digital + physical options, or just listen to the live stream of the whole album.

If you’ve never seen Godfrey Reggio’s incredible Koyaanisqatsi, here’s your chance: the entire film is watchable for free on Hulu. (via fimoculous)

Willam Vollmann’s next book, Imperial, is a 1,300 page nonfiction account of California’s Imperial County, and a history of the US/Mexican border. I’m almost done with the 3,500 page Rising Up and Rising Down (which I’ve been reading off and on since late 2003), but I might have to take a Vollmann breather before even considering this one. (thx, mark b.)

Jordan Ellenberg on the mathematics of Olympic scoring, particularly the new gymnastics scoring system that has replaced the “perfect 10.”

Gymnastics… isn’t constrained by simple applications of Newtonian mechanics. Gymnasts can perform moves that no one’s carried out before—that no one ever thought of carrying out before. Now, the sport has a scoring system that’s built to reward that. In theory, yes, there’s still an upper limit. There are only so many different possible elements in a routine and only so many possible connections between them, and each one, at least for now, is worth at most 0.7 points. But this new upper boundary is less like a perfect SAT score than a 1.000 batting average: a limit so far out of reach it might as well be no limit at all.

An unmapped waterfall – although known and kept secret by locals – has been “discovered” in the Amazonas region of northern Peru, and is believed by the explorer who located it to be one of the three tallest in the world. An expedition, which includes local representatives, has already been sent out to measure it.

Barack Roll.

«< Edwards: A Brief Editorial    Unmapped waterfall in Peru may be one of the tallest »>

The making of Darren Aronofsky’s next film, The Wrestler , keeps getting more interesting, to the point where I can’t imagine what to expect: Aronofsky blogs that Slash participated in the recording of Clint Mansell’s score. (Mansell did the music for Pi , Requiem for a Dream , and The Fountain , the last of which with Mogwai.)

The making of Darren Aronofsky’s next film, The Wrestler, keeps getting more interesting, to the point where I can’t imagine what to expect: Aronofsky blogs that Slash participated in the recording of Clint Mansell’s score. (Mansell did the music for Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Fountain, the last of which with Mogwai.)

Terrible: On May 28th, thirty two nonhuman primates died in a “heating accident” in Sparks (the city next to Reno), and the only news coverage so far is a blog post more than two months after the fact. As far as I am concerned, this should have been a major news story on May 29th.

Nevada picture of the week: