My latest “Grace Notes” column for Christ and Pop Culture takes a look at My Bloody Valentine in light of the recent reissued albums.

Wired interviews physicist Brian Greene about discovering and traveling to parallel and multiple universes, teleportation, and whether or not you and I — and everything around us — aren’t essentially just holographic projections.

…over the course of many years, they developed an idea that when an object falls into a black hole, yes indeed, it falls in, but a copy of all of its information content gets in some sense “smeared out” on the surface of the black hole, on the horizon of the black hole. Smeared out in some sense like a series of 0’s and 1’s, the way information is stored in a typical computer. And that idea would suggest that a three-dimensional object inside the black hole can be described by information on a two-dimensional surface that surrounds the black hole.

And it was a few years ago that string theory — the field that I work on — gave really strong evidence to many of us that this idea really might be correct. Now, the reason why that’s particularly interesting is because the space inside a black hole is not really fundamentally different — it isn’t governed by different laws than space outside a black hole, or space anywhere else, for that matter. So if we learn, as we seem to have, that a 3-D object inside a black hole can be described by 2-D information on a surface that surrounds it, that lesson should be quite general. Which means that 3-D objects, even the ones that we’re familiar with — you and me and everything around us — these 3-D objects may indeed be describable by information on a 2-D surface that surrounds us, a surface that in some sense is at the edge of the universe. Now, this starts to sound like a hologram; a hologram is a thin 2-D piece of plastic which, when illuminated correctly, yields a realistic three-dimensional image. The idea is we may be that three-dimensional image of this more fundamental information on the 2-D surface that surrounds us.

A pretty damning and caustic Gizmodo piece by Mat Honan that explores the various ways that Yahoo ruined Flickr.

The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.

It is a case study of what can go wrong when a nimble, innovative startup gets gobbled up by a behemoth that doesn’t share its values. What happened to Flickr? The same thing that happened to so many other nimble, innovative startups who sold out for dollars and bandwidth: Yahoo.

Here’s how it all went bad.

[…]

Flickr is still pretty wonderful. But it’s lovely in the same way a box of old photos you’ve stashed under the bed is. It’s an archive of nostalgia that you love dearly, on the rare occasion you stumble across it. You pull them out, and hold them up to the light, and remember a time when you were younger, and the Web was a more optimistic place, and it really was almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.

And then you close the box.

And you click over to Facebook, to see what’s new.

Ouch. I used to be a pretty active Flickr user, until I let my pro account languish and my Flickr account somehow got detached from the Yahoo account that I never use but had to create in order to access my Flickr account.

The first of Phil Elverum’s releases for 2012 is now streaming in its entirety on NPR. So far, I’d say it’s even more “out there” than Wind's Poem. Not sure yet if that’s a good thing, though…

M. Leary with a fun little essay on some of my favorite scenes in The Avengers.

The first set of references to divinity happens in a scene immensely gratifying to my inner Thor geek. Several of the Avengers are transporting Loki via plane to their invisible sky fortress. Dark clouds begin to amass, thunder rumbles, and we hear a dramatic thump. Yes, Thor is now part of the film, which just raised the level of awesome by about 28%. But, as Thor drags Loki from the fuselage and they tumble into sky, Iron Man soars after them. Not one to sit on his duff when justice can be served, Captain America begins preparing to do his thing. “Wait,” Black Widow says. “You might wanna sit this one out, Cap. These guys are basically gods.” To which, the Captain replies, “There’s only one God, ma’am. And I don’t think he dresses like that.” And out of the plane Captain leaps, his fall to earth surely cushioned by his ideological purity.

This is a telling moment, an opportunity the film takes to nod toward the paradox in the Marvel universe between science-based origins and myth- or religion-based origins. The latter set of origins is hard to capture with one hyphenated term, as “myth” is a pretty loaded category. Regardless, it is a moment of conflict between a mythical polytheism and a sloganeering patriotic monotheism that raises two questions: What is Captain America actually saying? Who wins?