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Penn State Fined $60M, Banned From Bowls, Wins From 1998 On Vacated

Penn State’s total operating budget for 2012-13 is about $4.3 billion, so a 60 million dollar fine, while attention-getting, won't destroy the place.

Now that I look at it, PSU's budget is not too far off the UN's regular budget of about five billion*.

* Does not cover peace keeping costs, among other things.

Nicked from the Publishers Weekly Blog

Knate Myers View from the ISS at Night

View from the ISS at Night from Knate Myers on Vimeo.

Haikasoru's Third Anniversary Giveaway Contest

Three years ago this week, Haikasoru launched with the publication of All You Need Is Kill and The Lord of the Sands of Time. Since then we’ve brought you the best in Japanese science fiction, fantasy, and horror, have experimented with hardcover releases and magical realism, brought you videogame tie-in novels for Ico and Metal Gear Solid and have even won a few awards. Heck, Good Luck, Yukikaze just received second place at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards over the weekend! And with our anthology The Future Is Japanese, we’ve started introducing original content!

To celebrate, we’re doing one of our famed giveaway essay contests! Just write a comment, in the comments section of this post, on the Haikasoru title you’ve enjoyed the most, and you’ll be five lucky and talented winners will be able to select any Haikasoru title they want as their prize. We ship anywhere, and we read English, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Greek, and Chinese. (And if you have all the Haikasoru titles already, I’ll flip you a copy of Genocidal Organ, which nobody has yet. We pick the winners on noon Friday, so get to typin’!

Brace yourselves for the grim future of Two! Thousand! TWELVE!

Bumped up from comments:

From Paleofuture, Orson Scott Card's vision in 1987 of what 2012 might look like.

We must count ourselves lucky if anyone has leisure enough in 2012 to open this time capsule and care what is inside. ( Read more... )

Sally Kristen Ride (1951 – 2012)

Sally Ride died peacefully on July 23rd, 2012 after a courageous 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer. Sally lived her life to the fullest, with boundless energy, curiosity, intelligence, passion, joy, and love. Her integrity was absolute; her spirit was immeasurable; her approach to life was fearless.