A Bit More Detail

Assorted Personal Notations, Essays, and Other Jottings

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

  • Architectuul reports on its Forgotten Masterpieces campaign, aiming to promote overlooked and endangered works of 20th century architecture.
  • Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reports on how the mass of the Milky Way Galaxy has just now been calculated at 1.54 trillion solar masses.
  • blogTO reports that three thousand students at the University of Toronto apparently fund their education through sugar daddies.
  • The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly writes about how she found a new tribe at a journalism conference.
  • Centauri Dreams notes that black hole starship engines count as a detectable technosignature for SETI searches.
  • John Holbo at Crooked Timber considers the emotionalism of Peterson and Shapiro versus facts in the light of Plato.
  • The Crux notes how, before settling the Moon, we have to first develop the techniques necessary for mining the Moon.
  • D-Brief notes the threats posed by humanity to the ecosystems of Antarctica.
  • Bruce Dorminey notes a proposal before NASA to dispatch a smallsat probe to asteroid Pallas.
  • Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina takes a look at the first test flights, in the 1960s, of the reusable space plane the X-15.
  • Far Outliers looks at the separation of Muslims from Hindus in Calcutta, and the subordination of the former to the latter.
  • Gizmodo reports on an exciting new display of the Tyrannosaurus Rex at the American Museum of Natural History that features, finally, feathers.
  • Keiran Healy crunches the numbers to notes how the hierarchy of academic institutions in the United States has scarcely changed over the previous century.
  • Joe. My. God. notes that the 1971 marriage in Minnesota of Michael McConnell and Jack Baker has been officially recognized.
  • JSTOR Daily takes a look at the overlooked radical politics of Frida Kahlo.
  • Language Hat looks at the mysterious choice in names for the pre-Columbian Adena culture of North America. Why “Adena”?
  • At Language Log, Victor Mair shares a post by a Chinese father who calls for a liberation of Chinese languages from their traditional script.
  • Steve Attewell writes at Lawyers, Guns and Money about the history of the Marvel Universe’s Hellfire Club, memorably created by Chris Claremont.
  • Marginal Revolution shares a paper supporting the thesis of Jared Diamond about the importance of the axes of continents in explaining biological and cultural diffusion.
  • The New APPS Blog reports on the complicated trajectory from Marx to Foucault.
  • Rachel Aspden writes at the NYR Daily about the political economy of safari tours.
  • Casey Dreier at the Planetary Society Blog notes a fiscal year 2020 proposal before NASA for a sample return mission to Mars.
  • The Russian Demographics Blog notes that the Global Data Lab has just had a paper published in Nature on their database of subnational entities’ rankings on the Human Development Index.
  • Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel argues that the new Trump budget for FY2020 would cause terrible damage to NASA.
  • Window on Eurasia suggests that the Putin government’s policies are driving more rural-to-urban migration in Russia.
  • Frances Woolley writes at Worthwhile Canad8ian Initiative about the relationship, under the Ford government of Ontario, of age limits for professors with tenure.
  • Arnold Zwicky considers the lovely clematis.