[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait shares a stunning photo taken by a friend of the Pleiades star cluster.
• The Buzz, at the Toronto Public Library, shares a collection of books suitable for World Vegan Month, here.
• Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber considers, with an eye towards China and the Uighurs, how panopticon attempts can stray badly on account of–among other things–false assumptions.
• Gizmodo considers how antimatter could end up providing interesting information about the unseen universe.
• Joe. My. God. reports from New York City, where new HIV cases are dropping sharply on account of PrEP.
• JSTOR Daily shares a vintage early review of Darwin’s Origin of Species.
• Language Hat examines the origins of the semicolon, in Venice in 1494.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money shares a critical report of the new Jill Lepore book These Truths.
• The LRB Blog reports from the Museum of Corruption in Kyiv, devoted to the corruption of the ancient regime in Ukraine.
• Marginal Revolution shares a new history of the Lakota.
• The NYR Daily looks at the photography of Duane Michals.
• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at population trends in Russia, still below 1991 totals in current frontiers.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why some of the lightest elements, like lithium, are so rare.
• Window on Eurasia shares the opinion of a Russian historian that Eastern Europe is back as a geopolitical zone.
• Arnold Zwicky considers Jacques Transue in the light of other pop culture figures and trends.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomy identifies the most distant globular cluster known to exist around the Milky Way Galaxy, PSO J174.0675-10.8774 some 470 thousand light-years away.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the strange ring of the Kuiper Belt dwarf planet Haumea.
• Crooked Timber looks at an ill-constructed biography of Eric Hobsbawm.
• D-Brief notes an experiment that proves antimatter obeys the same laws of quantum mechanics as regular matter, at least insofar as the double-slit experiment is concerned.
• Earther notes that life in Antarctica depends critically on the presence of penguin feces.
• Imageo looks at awesome satellite imagery of spring storms in North America.
• The Island Review interviews Irene de la Torre, a translator born on the Spanish island of Mallorca, about her experiences and thoughts on her insular experiences.
• Joe. My. God. notes a new deal between Gilead Pharmaceuticals and the American government to make low-cost PrEP available to two hundred thousand people.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the many ways in which The Great Gatsby reflects the norms of the Jazz Age.
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money is rightly critical of the Sam Harris suggestion that white supremacism is not an ideology of special concern, being only a fringe belief.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution solicits questions for an upcoming interview with demographer of religion Eric Kaufmann.
• Russell Darnley at Maximos62 shares cute video of otters frolicking on the Singapore River.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel asks when the universe became transparent to light.
• Arnold Zwicky shares photos of his blooming flower gardens.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the import of the discovery of asteroid 2019 AQ3, a rare near-Venus asteroid.
• Centauri Dreams notes the how the choice of language used by SETI researchers, like the eye-catching “technosignatures”, may reflect the vulnerability of the field to criticism on Earth.
• John Holbo at Crooked Timber considers what is to be done about Virginia, given the compromising of so many of its top leaders by secrets from the past.
• The Crux notes how the imminent recovery of ancient human DNA from Africa is likely to lead to a revolution in our understanding of human histories there.
• D-Brief notes how astronomers were able to use the light echoes in the accretion disk surrounding stellar-mass black hole MAXI J1820+070 to map its environment.
• JSTOR Daily considers the snow day as a sort of modern festival.
• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money links to his consideration of the plans of the German Empire to build superdreadnoughts, aborted only by defeat. Had Germany won the First World War, there surely would have been a major naval arms race.
• The NYR Daily looks at two exhibitions of different photographers, Brassaï and Louis Stettner.
• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog shares an evocative crescent profile of Ultima Thule taken by New Horizons, and crescent profiles of other worlds, too.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the mystery of why there is so little antimatter in the observable universe.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shares a map exploring the dates and locations of first contact with aliens in the United States as shown in film.
• Window on Eurasia notes a new push by Circassian activists for the Circassian identity to be represented in the 2020 census.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• D-Brief notes that CRISPR is being used to edit the genes of pigs, the better to protect them against disease.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing argues that silence on social networks is often not an option, that membership might compel one to speak. I wonder: That was not my experience with E-mail lists.
• Joe. My. God. notes that social network Gab, favoured by the alt-right, disclaims any responsibility for giving the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh a platform.
• JSTOR Daily notes the massive, unprecedented, and environmentally disruptive growth of great mats of sargassum seaweed in the Caribbean.
• Language Hat notes the poster’s problems grappling with Dosteyevsky’s complex novel The Devils, a messy novel product of messy times.
• Language Log notes the use of pinyin on Wikipedia to annotate Chinese words.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper noting that data mining is not all-powerful if one is only mining noise.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that, finally, we are making enough antimatter to be able to figure out whether antimatter is governed by gravity or antigravity.
• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin talks about how he was threatened on Facebook by mail bomber Cesar Sayoc.
• Window on Eurasia notes the 1947 deportation of more than a hundred thousand Ukrainians from the west of their country to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
• Arnold Zwicky ruminates about late October holidays and their food, Hallowe’en not being the only one.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that new astrometric data from Gaia has confirmed that Albiero, Beta Cygni, is only a visual binary, its two components being separated by perhaps dozens of light-years.
• Centauri Dreams notes the details of a new study suggesting the stars at the heart of globular cluster Omega Centauri are too closely packed to be able to support possibly life-bearing planets with stable orbits.
• The Crux examines the question of whether or not astronauts can remain psychologically healthy in deep space.
• D-Brief notes that the shallow stripes of the atmosphere of Jupiter might be explained by the planet’s strong magnetic field.
• Cody Delistraty shares an essay of his on V.S. Naipaul and the difficulties many writers face returning home.
• Hornet Stories notes that some conservative Republicans in Texas would like to deal with same-sex marriage by stripping marriage benefits away from all couples.
• Language Hat notes some appearances of Eurasianism in Russian linguistics.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes an Elizabeth Warren plan for corporate reform in the US.
• The LRB Blog notes a pop-up theatre being maintained by Good Chance Paris for refugees on the fringes of the French capital.
• The NYR Daily looks at the strength, and possible future attenuation, of anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic.
• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog shares some gorgeous Juno photos of Jupiter.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers what happened in the early universe when antimatter was destroyed.
• Window on Eurasia notes the argument of one Russian journalist that Putin’s maneuvering has made good relations with the West, and the United States, next to impossible for the foreseeable future.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly talks about her rules for life.
• The Crux explores the development of robots that can learn from each other.
• JSTOR Daily explores the legal and environmental reasons why commercial supersonic flight never took off.
• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money imagines what might have been had the F-14 Tomcat never escaped development hell.
• Peter Watts wonders if, with de-extinction becoming possible, future generations might become even less careful with the environment, knowing they can fix things and never bothering to do so.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw argues that, with MOOCs and multiple careers in a working lifespan, autodidacticism is bound to return.
• The Planetary Society Blog’s Marc Rayman looks at the final orbits of the Dawn probe over Ceres and the expected scientific returns.
• Roads and Kingdoms explores the New Jersey sandwich known, alternatively, as the Taylor ham and the pork roll.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers what led to the early universe having an excess of matter over antimatter.
• Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy explores why the California Supreme Court took the trifurcation of California off referendum papers.
• Window on Eurasia notes how some in independent Azerbaijan fears that Iranian ethnic Azeris might try to subvert the independent country’s secularism.