[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes new research on where the sun is located within the Milky Way Galaxy.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly considers the value of slow fashion.
• Centauri Dreams notes the different gas giants that our early methods have yet to pick up.
• Crooked Timber shares a lovely photo looking back at Venice from across its lagoon.
• D-Brief notes that upcoming space telescopes might find hundreds of rogue planets thanks to microlensing.
• io9 notes that Marvel will soon be producing Warhammer40K comics.
• The Island Review shares some poetry and photography by Ken Cockburn inspired by the Isle of Jura.
• JSTOR Daily notes that different humpback whale groups have different songs, different cultures.
• Language Hat tries to find the meaning of the odd Soviet Yiddish word “kolvirt”.
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the history of Elizabeth Warren as a law teacher.
• Map Room Blog shares information from Google Maps about its use of data.
• Marginal Revolution notes that in 2016, not a single child born in the United Kingdom was given the name Nigel.
• Peter Watts talks about AI and what else he is doing.
• The NYR Daily marked the centennial of a horrible massacre of African-Americans centered on the Arkansas community of Elaine.
• Emily Margolis at the Planetary Society Blog looks at how the Apollo moon missions helped galvanize tourism in Florida.
• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money looks at the constitutional crisis in Peru.
• Drew Rowsome takes a look at A Streetcar Named Desire.
• Peter Rukavina looks at a spreadsheet revealing the distribution of PEI public servants.
• Spacing reviews a book imagining how small communities can rebuild themselves in neoliberalism.
• Towleroad shares the criticism of Christine and the Queens of the allegedly opportunistic use of queer culture by Taylor Swift.
• Understanding Society considers, sociologically, the way artifacts work.
• The Volokh Conspiracy argues that the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China should be a day of mourning, on account of the high human toll of the PRC.
• Window on Eurasia suggests the Russian generation of the 1970s was too small to create lasting change.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at how underwear ads can be quite sexualized.

[NEWS] Five sci-tech links: ISS internet, Maritimes, CRISPR, machine translation, Trabants

• Universe Today looks at the impressive Internet speed of the ISS, 600 megabits a second, here.
• The National Observer reports on how the infrastructure of the Maritimes will need to be able to handle climate change, here.
• Wired reports on the partially successful effort in China to use CRISPR to cure HIV, here.
• Technology Review looks at how machine learning can be used to translate lost languages and unknown scripts, like Linear A, here.
• Atlas Obscura reports on how the Trabant car of East Germany keeps its fanbase, here.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes how variable gravity is on irregular asteroid Bennu.
• Bruce Dorminey reports on how the European Southern Observatory has charted the Magellanic Clouds in unprecedented detail.
• The Dragon’s Tales shares a collection of links looking at the Precambrian Earth.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina reports on the late 1950s race to send probes to the Moon.
• Gizmodo shares some stunning astronomy photos.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the saltwater roads, the routes that slaves in Florida used to escape to the free Bahamas.
• Language Log looks at some examples of bad English from Japan. How did they come about?
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money rejects the idea of honouring people like Condoleezza Rice.
• Marginal Revolution considers the idea of free will in light of neurology.
• Corey S Powell at Out There interviews James Lovelock on his new book Novacene, in which Lovelock imagines the future world and Gaia taken over by AI.
• Window on Eurasia notes the water shortages faced by downstream countries in Central Asia.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Architectuul looks at some architecturally innovative pools.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait looks at Wolf 359, a star made famous in Star Trek for the Starfleet battle there against the Borg but also a noteworthy red dwarf star in its own right.
• Centauri Dreams looks at how the NASA Deep Space Atomic Clock will play a vital role in interplanetary navigation.
• The Crux considers the “drunken monkey” thesis, the idea that drinking alcohol might have been an evolutionary asset for early hominids.
• D-Brief reports on what may be the next step for genetic engineering beyond CRISPR.
• Bruce Dorminey looks at how artificial intelligence may play a key role in searching for threat asteroids.
• The Island Review shares some poetry from Roseanne Watt, inspired by the Shetlands and using its dialect.
• Livia Gershon writes at JSTOR Daily about how YouTube, by promising to make work fun, actually also makes fun work in psychologically problematic ways.
• Marginal Revolution notes how the relatively small Taiwan has become a financial superpower.
• Janine di Giovanni at the NYR Daily looks back at the 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone. Why did it work?
• Jamais Cascio at Open the Future looks back at a 2004 futurological exercise, the rather accurate Participatory Panopticon. What did he anticipate correctly? How? What does it suggest for us now to our world?
• The Planetary Society Blog notes that LightSail 2 will launch before the end of June.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at how the discovery of gas between galaxies helps solve a dark matter question.
• Strange Company shares a broad collection of links.
• Window on Eurasia makes the obvious observation that the West prefers a North Caucasus controlled by Russia to one controlled by Islamists.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at American diner culture, including American Chinese food.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• In an extended meditation, Antipope’s Charlie Stross considers what the domestic architecture of the future will look like. What different technologies, with different uses of space, will come into play?
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the new SPECULOOS exoplanet hunting telescope, specializing in the search for planets around the coolest stars.
• The Crux looks at the evolutionary origins of hominins and chimpanzees in an upright walking ape several million years ago.
• D-Brief notes the multiple detections of gravitational waves made by LIGO.
• The Dragon’s Tales looks at the development of laser weapons by China.
• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the gap between social theory and field research.
• Gizmodo shares an interesting discussion with paleontologists and other dinosaur experts: What would the dinosaurs have become if not for the Chixculub impact?
• Hornet Stories notes the ways in which the policies of the Satanic Temple would be good for queer students.
• io9 notes how the Deep Space 9 documentary What We Leave Behind imagines what a Season 8 would have looked like.
• Joe. My. God. reports that activist Jacob Wohl is apparently behind allegations of a sexual assault by Pete Buttigieg against a subordinate.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the uses of the yellow ribbon in American popular culture.
• Language Hat shares an account of the life experiences of an Israeli taxi driver, spread across languages and borders.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money makes deserved fun of Bret Easton Ellis for his claims to having been marginalized.
• Marginal Revolution considers, briefly, the idea that artificial intelligence might not be harmful to humans. (Why would it necessarily have to be?)
• The NYR Daily considers a British exhibition of artworks by artists from the former Czechoslovakia.
• Peter Rukavina looks at gender representation in party caucuses in PEI from the early 1990s on, noting the huge surge in female representation in the Greens now.
• The Signal looks at how the Library of Congress is preserving Latin American monographs.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how Einstein knew that gravity must bend light.
• Window on Eurasia explains the sharp drop in the ethnic Russian population of Tuva in the 1990s.

[NEWS] Five tech links: Apple, AI, Beresheet 2, agricultural robots, gene editing

• Wired notes that Apple is transforming itself into a luxury brand. Is this an unsustainable niche?
• Wired examines how Google’s human AI experts are trying to train artificial intelligences to do their work.
• Universe Today notes that SpaceIL is planning to return to the Moon with a Beresheet 2 probe.
• The New Yorker looks at the progress made towards the roboticization of agriculture, looking at strawberry harvesting in particular. Can it be done?
• Stephen Buranyi writes at the NYR Daily about the impact of gene editing technologies on humanity. How will we manage them? Can we?

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Centauri Dreams notes the discovery of rocky debris indicative of destroyed planets in orbit of the white dwarf SDSS J122859.93+104032.9, 400 light-years away.
• JSTOR Daily shows how the Columbine massacre led to a resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US.
• Language Log notes an example of digraphia, two scripts, in use in Taiwan.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money identifies the presidential run of Howard Schultz in ways unflattering to him yet accurate.
• The LRB Blog takes a look at the current, unsettling, stage of artificial intelligence research.
• At the NYR Daily, Boyd Tonkin writes about an exhibition of the works of Van Gogh at the Tate Britain highlighting his ties with England and with his Europeanness.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel reports on the ultimate fate of the Earth, a cinder orbiting a black dwarf.
• Strange Company tells the strange, sad story of 19th century California writer Yda Hillis Addis.
• At Vintage Space, Amy Shira Teitel explains why the Apollo missions made use of a dangerous pure-oxygen environment.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, 41 years ago, protests in Georgia forced the Soviet Union to let the Georgian republic keep Georgian as its official language.
• Arnold Zwicky starts with peeps and goes on to look at dragons.