[BLOG] Some Saturday links
- Centauri Dreams considers, in the light of potential climate change extinction, the definitions of habitable exoplanets. Do we assume life to be too flexible?
- D-Brief notes that the Dawn probe found evidence of organic compounds, amorphous carbon, on the surface of Ceres.
- Lauren Madden at the Everyday Sociology Blog urges people to resist the impulse to misclassify the causes of mass shootings as senseless randomness.
- Hornet Stories takes a look at Jobriath, the man who for a brief time in the mid-1970s was an out queer rock god, on what would have been his birthday.
- Imageo notes that anthropogenic climate change risks plunging the global climate back to the heat and high sea levels of 50 million years ago, to the Eocene.
- JSTOR Daily notes how the fairy tale stereotype of the passive female character was created by moral reformers following the Protestant Reformation.
- Language Hat notes the Ao language, created by utopian early 20th century dreamers from Lithuania’s Jewish community as a universal method of communication.
- Mark Liberman at Language Log notes the emergence and evolution of the word “biomarker” over the past half-century.
- Simon Balto at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes about a frightening encounter on a night out with his partner with an aggressive person who kept calling him a “snowflake”. What does this, the embrace of this word as a supposed critique, say about racism and conservatism in the United States now?
- The LRB Blog notes the prosecution of the Stansted 15 for blocking a deportation of refugees on terrorism. What does this say about the administration of justice and borders in the United Kingdom now?
- Marginal Revolution notes that, in China, scientists convicted of fraud will face serious hits to their social credit ratings.
- The NYR Daily takes a look at the “toxic femininity” of women on the American far right.
- Roads and Kingdoms looks at the struggle of Mayan peoples in Guatemala to secure their land claims in the face of commercial agriculture.
- Daniel Little at Understanding Society takes a look at how government enacts policy, not doing so as a unified whole at all.
- Window on Eurasia notes the deep hostility of Lukashenko in Belarus to any talk of deep integration with Russia, something he sees as tantamount to Belarus’ annexation into Russia.
- Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the remarkable steel-banded sculpture of Fernando Suárez Reguera, and of sculptors like him.
Written by Randy McDonald
December 15, 2018 at 6:15 pm
Posted in Assorted, Economics, History, Politics, Popular Culture, Science, Social Sciences
Tagged with anthropology, ao language, asteroids, astronomy, belarus, blogs, borders, ceres, china, clash of ideologies, crime, dawn, dwarf planets, earth, english, environment, extraterrestrial life, fairy tales, feminism, first nations, former soviet union, gender, glbt issues, global warming, guatemala, jobriath, language, latin america, links, maya, migration, popular culture, popular music, public art, refugees, russia, science, sculpture, snowflake, social sciences, sociology, space science, terrorism, united kingdom, united states, writing