[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait argues that the new American plan to put people on the Moon in 2024 is unlikely to succeed in that timeframe.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly considers whether or not women should travel alone, for safety reasons. (That choice is one I’ve not had to make myself, thanks to my male privilege; I’m very sorry others have to consider this.)
• Centauri Dreams shares the thinking of Gregory Benford on Lurkers, self-replicating probes produced by another civilization not signaling their existence to Earth.
• Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber argues that policy-making these days is often fundamentally ill-conceived, closing off possibilities for the future.
• The Crux notes the remarkable powers of beet juice, as a tonic for athletes for instance.
• D-Brief looks at the slot canyons of Titan, bearing similarities in structure and perhaps origin to like structures in Utah.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina, celebrating five years of blogging, links to his ten most popular posts.
• Gizmodo notes the creation for a list of nearly two thousand nearby stars that the TESS planet-hunter might target for a search for Earth-like worlds.
• Joe. My. God. notes that the Austrian president has confirmed the New Zealand shooter has made a financial donation to a far-right group in Austria.
• JSTOR Daily looks at Inge Lehmann, the scientist who determined the nature of the inner core of the Earth.
• Language Hat reports on a new scholarly publication, hundreds of pages long, gathering together the curses and profanities of the Middle East and North Africa.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money does not seem impressed by the argument of Mike Lee that pronatalism is a good response to global warming.
• The Map Room Blog notes the impressive maps of Priscilla Spencer, created for fantasy books.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper that examines the positions of Jews in the economies of eastern Europe, as a “rural service minority”.
• The Russian Demographics Blog links to a paper noting the ways in which increased human development has, and has not, led to convergence in family structures around the world.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how, despite the expanding universe, we can still see very distant points.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps reports on the recent mistakes made by Google Maps in Japan.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell explains why the United Kingdom, after Brexit, does not automatically become a member of the European Economic Area.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the different factors, often unrecognized, going onto the formation of nonsense names, like those of the characters from Lilo and Stitch.