A Bit More Detail

Assorted Personal Notations, Essays, and Other Jottings

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

  • Centauri Dreams links to a paper noting that the interiors of planets play a critical role in determining planetary habitability.
  • Belle Waring writes at Crooked Timber about imaginative dream worlds, criticized by some as a sort of maladaptive daydreaming I don’t buy that; I am interested in what she says about hers.
  • D-Brief notes the very recent discovery of a small tyrannosaur.
  • Dead Things considers the possibility that a new South African hominin, Australopithecus sediba, might actually be the ancestor of Homo sapiens.
  • JSTOR Daily looks at how one negative side-effect of the renewable energy boom is the mass mining of rare earth elements.
  • Erik Loomis writes at Lawyers, Guns and Money about the way in which not just history but history fandoms are gendered, the interests of women being neglected or downplayed.
  • Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen reports on how a new US-Chinese trade deal will not do much to deal with underlying issues.
  • The New APPS Blog notes the great profits made by the gun industry in the United States and the great death toll, too, associated with the guns produced.
  • The NYR Daily visits the Northern Ireland town of Carrickfergus, home to Louis MacNeice and made famous by violence as the whole province sits on the edge of something.
  • Drew Rowsome takes a look at the queer horror film The Skin of The Teeth.
  • Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains what the technical limits of the Hubble Space Telescope are, and why it needs a replacement.
  • Window on Eurasia notes changing patters of population change in the different regions of Russia.
  • Arnold Zwicky shares some photos of notable public art in Switzerland, starting with The Caring Hand in his ancestral canton of Glarus.