A Bit More Detail

Assorted Personal Notations, Essays, and Other Jottings

[BLOG] Some Friday links

  • Centauri Dreams notes the astounding precision of the new Habitable Planet Finder telescope.
  • D-Brief notes that the lack of small craters on Pluto and Charon suggests there are not many small bodies in the Kuiper Belt.
  • Far Outliers notes the many and widely varying transliterations of Bengali to English.
  • JSTOR Daily notes the extent to which border walls represent, ultimately, a failure of politics.
  • Language Log examines the emergence of the Germanic languages in the depths of prehistory.
  • Anna Aslanyan at the LRB Blog considers the eternal search for a universal language.
  • Noah Smith shareshis Alternative Green New Deal Plan at his blog, one that depends more on technology and market forces than the original.
  • Mitchell Abidor at the NYR Daily writes about the incisive leftism of journalist Victor Sorge.
  • Out There notes the reality that the worlds of our solar system, and almost certainly other systems, are united by a constant stream of incoming rocks.
  • At the Planetary Society Blog, Emily Lakdawalla examines the data transmitted back by OSIRIS-REx from that probe’s Earth flyby.
  • Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel examines cosmic conditions at the time the solar system formed 4.56 billion or so years ago.
  • Towleroad notes the censorship of many explicitly gay scenes from Bohemian Rhapsody in its Chinese release.
  • Window on Eurasia looks at the many ways in which the social norms of North Caucasian men are converging with those of the average Russian.
  • On St. David’s Day, Arnold Zwicky pays tribute to the daffodil and to the Welsh.