A Bit More Detail

Assorted Personal Notations, Essays, and Other Jottings

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

  • Anthro{dendum} considers ways to simulate urgency in simulations of climate change.
  • Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers what could possibly have led to a Mars crater near Biblis Patera, on Tharsis, having such a flat bottom.
  • Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog gives readers some tips as to what they should see in New York City.
  • Centauri Dreams notes some of the early returns sent back by the OSIRIS-REx probe from asteroid Bennu.
  • The Crux notes the limits of genetic determinism in explaining human behaviour, given the huge influence of the environment on the expression of genes and more.
  • D-Brief suggests that the rapid global dispersion of the domestic chicken, a bird visibly distinct from its wild counterparts, might make an excellent marker of the Anthropocene millions of years hence.
  • Bruce Dorminey notes that Comet 46 P/Wirtanen is set to come within a bit more than eleven million kilometres of the Earth next week, and that astronomers are ready.
  • L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing suggests that the Internet, by exposing everything, makes actual innovation difficult.
  • JSTOR Daily takes a look at the innovative art of early 20th century Expressionist Charlotte Salomon, a person not only groundbreaking with her autobiographical painting series but linked to a murder mystery, too.
  • Anne Curzan writes at Lingua Franca about what she has learned in six years about blogging there abut language.
  • Sara Jayyousi writes at the LRB Blog about her experiences over time with a father imprisoned for nearly a decade and a half on false charges of supporting terrorism.
  • Marginal Revolution shares Tyler Cowen’s argument that Macron’s main problem is that he lacks new ideas, something to appeal to the masses.
  • Sylvain Cypel at the NYR Daily argues that Macron, arguably never that popular, is facing a Marie Antoinette moment, the Yellow Jackets filling the place of the sans culottes.
  • Drew Rowsome rightly laments the extent to which social media, including not just Facebook but even Tumblr, are currently waging a war against any visible sex in any context.
  • Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how, in 2019, astronomers will finally have imaged the event horizon around the black hole Sagittarius A* at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy.
  • Window on Eurasia reports on polls which suggest that young Belarusians are decidedly apolitical.