Thursday Links

• The above is an amazing National Geographic documentary, Chasing Ice, about photographer James Balog's quest to take multi-year time lapse photographs of receding glaciers.  It will take 1hr 12min of your life, but will likely profoundly affect you, at least it did me.  Some breathtakingly beautiful images, and an amazing story.  And of course, the always sobering facts of what climate change is doing to ice everywhere.  It's really well done.
• Fairly serious sectarian conflict in Iraq.  If Iraq were to go the way of Syria, it would likely cause a noticeable oil shock to the global economy.
• Sounds like BP, during the Gulf disaster, knowingly exposed its cleanup workers to highly toxic dispersants, lied to them about the toxicity, and fired them if they complained.  While human affairs are always highly vulnerable to corruption, it does seem like oil companies are particularly prone to it.  It would be interesting to know more systematically what factors predispose an industry/company to corruption.
• Fisker is pretty much dead.  Sometimes start-ups work out, sometimes they don't.  C'est la vie.  "If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same".  
• Congress is actually holding hearings on the use of drones.
• New era of American innovation never gonna happen. (Onion humor).