[CAT] Five #caturday links: Newfoundland, Australia, tracking, body language, bodies

• The rescue of cats from the Newfoundland outport of Little Bay Islands, now abandoned, was a success. Global News reports.
• Cats in Australia may be in a position to ravage vulnerable survivors of the wildfires. Wired reports.
• The Purrsong Pendant is a new fitness tracker for cats. CNET reports.
• Humans do need to be able to read the body language of cats, and not only to figure out when they are in pain. CP24 reports.
• Is anyone surprised cats might eat human corpses? Newsweek reports.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bad Astronomer considers the boundaries of decades, of the 2010s and the 2020s, here.
• Jamie Bradburn takes a look at the transition between 1919 and 1920, here.
• Bruce Dorminey makes five astrobiology predictions for 2020, here.
• Dangerous Minds shares the “cataclysmic” artwork of Hungarian painter Gábor Urbán, here.
• Myron Strong writes at the Everyday Sociology Blog about the great potential of Afrofuturism, here.
• Far Outliers shares some fanciful names for a baseball league in Shikoku, here.
• Gizmodo asks an interesting question: Why is there no male birth control yet?
• In A State of Migration’s Lyman Stone tells how he and his family circumnavigated Taiwan in the space of a long weekend, here.
• io9 notes how Garfield cartoonist Jim Davis is putting up decades of art for auction, here.
• JSTOR Daily looks how the dissolution of the monasteries led to the invention of the archive, to preserve vulnerable perishable documents, here.
• Language Hat is skeptical of the idea that different language families are subtly different in their concepts of (for instance) emotions.
• Language Log looks at an unusual restaurant sign in New York City’s Chinatown, here.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the catastrophe of the fires of Australia, here.
• The LRB Blog writes about the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, an ancient factory in London that might yet find new life, here.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen is still relatively optimistic about Modi, based in part on his assessment of the net failures of his predecessors, here.
• Sean Marshall takes issue with the GO Transit fares on the Highway 407 corridor, here.
• Roberta Brandes Gratz argues at the NYR Daily that upzoning is undermining the human-scale urban fabric of New York City, here.
• Personal Reflection’s Jim Belshaw reports on how, in a time of drought and fire in Australia, he keeps his garden going. Cultiver notre jardin, indeed.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer looks at who voted where for Macri in Argentina, here.
• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at the changing lists over time of the most populous countries in the world, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why quantum entanglement cannot be used for faster-than-light communications.
• Strange Company takes a look at how, in 1920, Harry Houdini detected an unusual fraud of a spirit lover.
• Transit Toronto shares a video taken this Christmas at the Halton County Radial Railway, here
• Understanding Society looks at studies of cases of non-action in the face of crisis.
• John Scalzi at Whatever celebrates the 15th anniversary of his famous novel Old Man’s War, here.
• Window on Eurasia notes that, in the 2020s, Russia is set to fall economically further behind its peers and neighbours.
• Arnold Zwicky reports again on the electronic music of Swiss André Zwicky, part of his regular tracing down different Zwickys.

[BLOG] Five Starts With A Bang links (@startswithabang)

• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the question of Betelgeuse going supernova, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers how black holes might, or might not, spit matter back out, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes a report suggesting the local excess of positrons is product not of dark matter but of nearby pulsar Geminga, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel lists some of the most distant astronomical objects so far charted in our universe, here.
• The question of whether or not a god did create the universe, Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang suggests, remains open.

[BLOG] Five JSTOR Daily links (@jstor_daily)

• JSTOR Daily provides advice for users of Zotero and Scrivener, here.
• JSTOR Daily looks at instances where product placement in pop culture went badly, here.
• JSTOR Daily considers the import of a pioneering study of vulgar language in the context of popular culture studies, here.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the–frankly terrible–policies of managing rival heirs in the Ottoman dynasty, here.
• JSTOR Daily looks at generational divides on religion in the England of the early Protestant Reformation, here.

[BLOG] Five Marginal Revolution links (@margrev)

• Marginal Revolution features a critical if friendly review of the new Emmanuel Todd book, Lineages of Modernity.
• Marginal Revolution considers the problems of excessive consumer activism, here.
• Marginal Revolution notes a new book looking at natural gas economics in Europe, here.
• Marginal Revolution notes new evidence that YouTube algorithms do not tend to radicalize users, here.
• Marginal Revolution notes the few countries where the average person was richer in 2009 than in 2019, notably Greece and Venezuela.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Architectuul looks back at some highlights from 2019.
• Bad Astronomy looks at the gas cloud, red and green, of RCW 120.
• Crooked Timber looks at the dynamics of identity politics, here.
• Bruce Dorminey notes a NASA statement about the importance of understanding dust dynamics in other solar systems to find Earth analogues.
• Far Outliers looks at the problems pacifying the Chesapeake Bay area in 1813, here.
• Gizmodo looks at the most popular Wikipedia articles for the year 2019.
• io9 shares a video of images from a 1995 Akira cyberpunk computer game that never got finished.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how the United States tried to “civilize” the Inupiat of Alaska by giving them reindeer herds.
• Language Hat links to an online atlas of Scots dialects.
• Language Log reports on a 12th century Sanskrit inscription that testifies to the presence of Muslims in Bengal at that point.
• Marginal Revolution notes how much Tuvalu depends on revenue from its .tv Internet domain.
• Drew Rowsome looks at the Duncan Ralston horror novel Salvage, set in small-town Canada.
• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at the strong relationship between wealth and life expectancy in France.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that, in a hypothetical supernova, all life on an Earth-like planet would be boiled alive by neutrinos.
• Strange Maps links to a graphic interface that translates a word into all the languages of Europe.
• Understanding Society looks at the structures of high-reliability organizations.
• Window on Eurasia shares a suggestion that Homer Simpson is actually the US’ version of Russia’s Ivan the Fool.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that Betelgeuse is very likely not on the verge of a supernova, here.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the mapping of asteroid Bennu.
• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber reposted, after the election, a 2013 essay looking at the changes in British society from the 1970s on.
• The Dragon’s Tales shares a collection of links about the Precambrian Earth, here.
• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog writes about fear in the context of natural disasters, here.
• Far Outliers reports on the problems of privateers versus regular naval units.
• Gizmodo looks at galaxy MAMBO-9, which formed a billion years after the Big Bang.
• io9 writes about the alternate history space race show For All Mankind.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the posters used in Ghana in the 1980s to help promote Hollywood movies.
• Language Hat links to a new book that examines obscenity and gender in 1920s Britain.
• Language Log looks at the terms used for the national language in Xinjiang.
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money takes issue with Jeff Jacoby’s lack of sympathy towards people who suffer from growing inequality.
• Marginal Revolution suggests that urbanists should have an appreciation for Robert Moses.
• Sean Marshall writes, with photos, about his experiences riding a new Bolton bus.
• Caryl Philips at the NYR Daily writes about Rachmanism, a term wrongly applied to the idea of avaricious landlords like Peter Rachman, an immigrant who was a victim of the Profumo scandal.
• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a paper looking at the experience of aging among people without families.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why the empty space in an atom can never be removed.
• Strange Maps shares a festive map of London, a reindeer, biked by a cyclist.
• Window on Eurasia notes how Mongolia twice tried to become a Soviet republic.
• Arnold Zwicky considers different birds with names starting with x.