[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Centauri Dreams notes, taking a look past more than a century of images of the famous star J1407 including its planet with massive ring system, the power of big data to reveal important things about the universe.
• D-Brief takes a look at the discoveries of the Hayabusa2 probe at asteroid Ryugu.
• Gizmodo notes that the planned landing of the Hayabusa2 probe on Ryugu has been postponed until 2019 in order to find a safe landing point on the rocky asteroid’s surface.
• Livia Gershon at JSTOR Daily takes a look at how modern Hallowe’en derives from the Celtic day of Samhain.
• Joe. My. God. reports on a Gavin McInnes speech to the Young Republicans Club of New York City in which he says, despite his Proud Boys’ crudity and violence, the two groups have much in common, that they need the Proud Boys even.
• Anne Curzon at Lingua Franca takes a look at the changing definition of “fun” in recent decades.
• The LRB Blog takes a look at the storied destruction by fire of the Soviet steamship Pobeda in the Black Sea in 1948.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution suggests</a. that a strategy for African economic development, with a big push to build basic infrastructure, has not been working in a test site in northern Ghana.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw sees the alt-right being fed by the radicalism of the far left.
• Brittney Cooper at the Planetary Society Blog shares some images of heiligenschein from throughout the solar system.
• Drew Rowsome looks at a recent horror novel by Douglas Clegg, The Infinite.
• Window on Eurasia argues the ethnic distinction confirmed by Stalin between Tatars and Bashkirs has weakened both groups versus wider Russia.
• Arnold Zwicky plays with the idea of the piñata, at multiple levels.