[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster notes that the WISE–Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer–has produced data suggesting that the brown dwarf population of nearby space is much less than expected, a fraction of the number of actual stars as opposed to a multiple of said number.
• Crooked Timber’s Chris Bertram is–I think rightly–unhappy with new immigration provisions proposed in the United Kingdom, based on financial and language requirements that the majority of Britons wouldn’t meet.
• At Gideon Rachman’s blog, Tony Barber points out that the ongoing meltdown in Greece will have serious repercussions in Cyprus. (What kind? The bad, obviously. The Cypriot banking system is screwed.)
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Erik Loomis makes half a point when he argues that American liberals who assume all their conservative opponents are ultimately reasonable people. Half a point, because the argument advanced by commenters that no American conservative is reasonable strikes me as problematic.
• A Language Hat discussion starting from the complaints of some Swiss Francophones that they’re not taught the dialects of their German-speaking counterparts, instead using a standard German that’s not really spoken on the ground, goes on to explore dialectology in the Francophone and Germanophone worlds.
• New APPS Blog’s Helen De Cruz wonders whether players of recreated musical instruments, like the lutes, really play the instruments in the way of old if they import modern concepts of what it is to play music to their fields.
• Norm Geras doesn’t think that English national identity is uniquely mysterious.
• At Registan, Casey Michel points out that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is pretty far from being a new menacing Warsaw Pact, not least because of the problematic Russo-Chinese relationship.
• Savage Minds’ Ryan Anderson is inspired by the death of Ray Bradbury, a writer whose stories dealt with the minutiae of culture and people’s ways, to wonder why anthropology doesn’t have more resonance.
• Reacting to the recent fatal Eaton Centre shootings, Torontoist’s Bronwyn Kienapple makes the point that a city like Toronto with serious socioeconomic divides is going to see more crime.