[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.

[CAT] Five #caturday links: maps, Grumpy Cat, Bangladesh, Swiss cat ladders, video

• I have no idea how accurate this r/mapporn map charting the changing ratio of cats to dogs across the United States is, but I love it anyway.
• This Wired obituary for Grumpy Cat, tracing in that feline’s death not only the death of a cute cat but the death of hope for the Internet as a source of fun, rings true to me.
• Atlas Obscura notes how Bangladesh has successfully reduced the poaching of tigers.
• Atlas Obscura takes a look at the many cat ladders of the Swiss city of Bern.
• David Grimm at Science Magazine reports on an innovative research project that attached video cameras to cats to see what they actually did.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Windsor, Calgary, Mulhouse, Naples, Dhaka

• This Shane Mitchell op-ed at Spacing warns about how plans for a new hospital in Windsor can threaten to promote sprawl.
• Debates over bike traffic laws are ongoing in Calgary. Global News reports.
• Guardian Cities looks at how the downtown of the French city of Mulhouse has been successfully regenerated.
• Guardian Cities looks at how the infamous housing estate of Scampia outside of Naples, famously derelict and a nexus for crime, is finally being torn down.
• Atlas Obscura notes an Armenian church in Dhaka, last remnant of a once-vast Armenian trading diaspora that extended out to Bengal.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomy notes how the occultation of distant stars by nearby asteroids can help astronomers determine stars’ size.
• D-Brief notes the remarkable achievements of some scientists in reviving the brains of pigs hours after their death.
• Dangerous Minds takes a look at how David Bowie got involved in The Man Who Fell To Earth.
• Dead Things looks at the recent identification of the late Cretaceous dinosaur Gobihadros.
• Bruce Dorminey notes that astronomers have determined an interstellar meteorite likely hit the Earth in 2014.
• Gizmodo reports on a very dim L-dwarf star 250 light-years away, ULAS J224940.13−011236.9, that experienced a massive flare. How did it do it?
• Hornet Stories shares some vintage photos of same-sex couples from generations ago being physically affectionate.
• At The Island Review, Nancy Forde writes about motherhood and her experience on Greenland, in the coastal community of Ilulissat.
• JSTOR Daily notes how Paris’ Notre-Dame has always been in a process of recreation.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, and Money notes the continuing oppression of workers in Bangladesh.
• The LRB Blog notes the flaws in the defense, and in the political thinking, of Julian Assange. (Transparency is not enough.)
• The NYR Daily reports on how photographer Claudia Andujar has regarded the Yanomami as they face existential challenges.
• The Planetary Society Blog traces the crash of Beresheet on the Moon to a software conflict.
• Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy warns against the idea of inevitable moral progress.
• Window on Eurasia notes the desires of some Russian conservatives to see Russia included in a European Union dominated by neo-traditionalists.

[AH] Five #alternatehistory maps from r/imaginarymaps: Balkans, Ethiopia, Europe, Australia, Bengal

• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a Balkans where Muslims remain in larger numbers throughout the peninsula, leading to border changes in the south, particularly.
• An Ethiopia that has conquered most of the Horn of Africa by the mid-19th century, even going into Yemen, is the subject of this r/imaginarymaps map. Could this ever have happened?
• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines, here, a unified European Confederation descending from a conquest of Europe by Napoleon. Would this have been stable, I wonder?
• Was the unification of Australia inevitable, or, as this r/imaginarymaps post suggests, was a failure to unify or even a later split imaginable?
• Was a unified and independent Bengal possible, something like what this r/imaginarymaps post depicts?

[URBAN NOTE] Seven city links: Montréal, Camden, Derry, Rome, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Dhaka & Calcutta

• La Presse notes that the Bixi bike-sharing service in Montréal is celebrating its 11th anniversary.
• Marginal Revolution notes how better policing cut into crime in Camden, New Jersey.
• The NYR Daily looks at how Brexit and a hardened border will hit the Northern Ireland city of Derry.
• Guardian Cities reports on the gang that goes around Rome at night making illegal repairs to crumbling infrastructure.
• CityLab reports on how Cape Town is coping, one year after it nearly ran out of water.
• Roads and Kingdoms shares tips for travellers visiting Hong Kong.
• Guardian Cities reports on the families made refugees by Partition who tried to swap homes in Dhaka and Calcutta.

[NEWS] Five LG&M links: Free Tibet, lynching, Beto, Ilham Omar, Bangladesh and globalization

• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the decline of the Free Tibet movement from a recent 1990s apogee.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the extent to which lynching in the United States is broadly dispersed throughout the country, is not only a method of African-American suppression.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money takes a look at Beto O’Rourke as a Democratic nominee for the American presidency.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money takes issue, rightfully, with the Islamophobic criticism of Ilham Omar by even her supposed allies.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the people who recently died in Bangladesh at one end of a global supply chain, and asks about our responsibility at the other end.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams notes the astounding precision of the new Habitable Planet Finder telescope.
• D-Brief notes that the lack of small craters on Pluto and Charon suggests there are not many small bodies in the Kuiper Belt.
• Far Outliers notes the many and widely varying transliterations of Bengali to English.
• JSTOR Daily notes the extent to which border walls represent, ultimately, a failure of politics.
• Language Log examines the emergence of the Germanic languages in the depths of prehistory.
• Anna Aslanyan at the LRB Blog considers the eternal search for a universal language.
• Noah Smith shareshis Alternative Green New Deal Plan at his blog, one that depends more on technology and market forces than the original.
• Mitchell Abidor at the NYR Daily writes about the incisive leftism of journalist Victor Sorge.
• Out There notes the reality that the worlds of our solar system, and almost certainly other systems, are united by a constant stream of incoming rocks.
• At the Planetary Society Blog, Emily Lakdawalla examines the data transmitted back by OSIRIS-REx from that probe’s Earth flyby.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel examines cosmic conditions at the time the solar system formed 4.56 billion or so years ago.
• Towleroad notes the censorship of many explicitly gay scenes from Bohemian Rhapsody in its Chinese release.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the many ways in which the social norms of North Caucasian men are converging with those of the average Russian.
• On St. David’s Day, Arnold Zwicky pays tribute to the daffodil and to the Welsh.

[URBAN NOTE] Six city links: Detroit, Oslo, Cox’s Bazar, Ho Chi Minh City, Shenzhen, Tokyo

• CityLab notes a new black-owned food coop in Detroit.
• CityLab notes the cool new designs of a new Oslo subway station.
• Al Jazeera notes the vulnerability of Cox’s Bazar, the Bangladesh city that is the heart of the Rohingya refugee settlements, to climate change.
• Guardian Cities notes how rapid redevelopment is devastating the architectural heritage of Ho Chi Minh City.
• This Culture Trip article looks at how, among other things, copying foreign technology helped make Shenzhen a global tech hub.
• Tokyo is offering subway users free food if they opt to travel on the subway outside of peak times, CityLab notes.

[NEWS] Five divides: New Brunswick, Rohingya Hindus, Chinese censors, Iranian internet, Brexit

• The Conversation notes how New Brunswick, with its economic challenges and its language divide, represents in microcosm the problems of wider Canada.
• This Los Angeles Times article notes how Rohingya Hindus see themselves, rightly, as sharing a different fate from their Muslim coethnics.
• This New York Times article looks at how the Internet censors of China are trained, by letting them know about the actual history of their country first.
• Bloomberg reports how on the Iranian government tries to engage selectively with the social networking platforms, like Instagram and Telegram, used by the outside world.
• Bloomberg notes that the concern of Japan that the United Kingdom, Japanese companies’ chosen platform for export to the EU, might engage in a hard Brexit is pressing.