Links of interest

Of course, just after I did the last one, I ended up finding a bunch of seasonally relevant ones, so here, bonus.

Seasonal:

• Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy does a nice overview of axial tilt and the solstice. (Also, I agree with him about it being midwinter, not the start of winter.)
• Did you watch The Middleman? If not, you should: it was a one season show on ABC that is hard to explain, but delightful. Smart, witty, riffing on superhero tropes and mad science (among other things). Anyway, the creator of the show wrote a crossover fanfic that manages to be canon for the Middleman and fanfic for Star Trek. Which is a really sort of awesome thing. Here’s the fic and here’s the guide to the pop culture references. (And here’s last year‘s which crosses over with Doctor Who and the guide to pop culture for that.)

Libraries and related topics:

• There’s two really lovely library research comics from Lehman College I just came across.
• The UK is considering a bunch of exceptions to copyright law to make it easier to do things with copyrighted materials.
• What is metadata? A Christmas themed exploration is a really lovely and clear explanation of metadata.

Science:

• The Discovery Channel has announced footage of live giant squid! (The link comes from Deep Sea News, and the author talks about whether one can trust the announcement – apparently, yes.) 
• Bad Astronomy also explains the awesome Cassini photo of Saturn I linked last post.