[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Architectuul talks about the remarkable and distinctive housing estates of south London, like Alexandra Road, currently under pressure from developers and unsympathetic governments.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait takes a look at Bennu, set to be visited by the OSIRIS-REx probe.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly talks about meeting people you’ve met online via social networks, making friends even. Myself, I’ve done this all the time: Why not use these networks to their fullest in a fragmented vast world?
• Centauri Dreams celebrates the now-completed mission of the exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope.
• D-Brief looks at the distinctive seasons of Triton, and the still-open questions surrounding Neptune’s largest moon.
• At JSTOR Daily, Nancy Bilyeau writes about the import of the famous Gunpowder Plot of 1605, something often underplayed despite its potential for huge change and its connection to wider conflicts.
• Language Hat notes the name of God in the Hebrew tradition, Yahweh. Where did it come from?
• Language Log shares an interesting idea for helping to preserve marginalized languages: Why not throw a language party celebrating the language?
• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the question of what historical general or military leader would do best leading the armies of the living dead.
• The NYR Daily looks at the problems with Erdogan’s big investments in public infrastructure in Turkey, starting with the new Istanbul airport.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers the possibility of life in the very early universe. Earth-like life could have started within a billion years of the Big Bang; Earth life might even have begun earlier, for that matter.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shows a map of Europe identifying which countries are the more chauvinistic in the continent.
• Window on Eurasia notes the strength of the relatively recent division between Tatars and Bashkirs, two closely related people with separate identities grown strong in the Soviet era.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Centauri Dreams notes, taking a look past more than a century of images of the famous star J1407 including its planet with massive ring system, the power of big data to reveal important things about the universe.
• D-Brief takes a look at the discoveries of the Hayabusa2 probe at asteroid Ryugu.
• Gizmodo notes that the planned landing of the Hayabusa2 probe on Ryugu has been postponed until 2019 in order to find a safe landing point on the rocky asteroid’s surface.
• Livia Gershon at JSTOR Daily takes a look at how modern Hallowe’en derives from the Celtic day of Samhain.
• Joe. My. God. reports on a Gavin McInnes speech to the Young Republicans Club of New York City in which he says, despite his Proud Boys’ crudity and violence, the two groups have much in common, that they need the Proud Boys even.
• Anne Curzon at Lingua Franca takes a look at the changing definition of “fun” in recent decades.
• The LRB Blog takes a look at the storied destruction by fire of the Soviet steamship Pobeda in the Black Sea in 1948.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution suggests</a. that a strategy for African economic development, with a big push to build basic infrastructure, has not been working in a test site in northern Ghana.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw sees the alt-right being fed by the radicalism of the far left.
• Brittney Cooper at the Planetary Society Blog shares some images of heiligenschein from throughout the solar system.
• Drew Rowsome looks at a recent horror novel by Douglas Clegg, The Infinite.
• Window on Eurasia argues the ethnic distinction confirmed by Stalin between Tatars and Bashkirs has weakened both groups versus wider Russia.
• Arnold Zwicky plays with the idea of the piñata, at multiple levels.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait confirms the discovery of water ice on the Moon.
• Centauri Dreams reports on the latest discoveries regarding Beta Pictoris b, notably new evidence that it is a superjovian massing between 9 and 13 Jupiters.
• D-Brief notes how oil rigs can support coral reefs.
• Far Outliers takes a grim look at the Chinese market in servants and serfs and slaves.
• Hornet Stories looks at opinion polling on minorities in Germany. (Gay people do much better than Muslims.)
• JSTOR Daily looks at how makeup, at the start of the 20th century highly stigmatized, ended up going mainstream.
• Geoffrey Pullum at Lingua Franca considers if Crazy Rich Asians, and other like pop culture successes, might get more Westerners to learn Chinese.
• The Map Room Blog shares pictures from space of the smoke produced by the British Columbia wildfires.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer takes a look at the way, in federal Mexico, state-level political machines continue to work.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at how, in the very early universe, the first elements formed.
• Window on Eurasia notes that in Bashkortostan, two-thirds of students opted for Russian-medium education, a proportion considerably above the proportion of ethnic Russians in that republic.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes J0045, once thought to be a star in Andromeda and but recognized as a binary black hole a thousand times further away.
• Centauri Dreams notes the longevity of the Voyager mission.
• D-Brief notes that some worms can thrive in a simulacrum of Mars soil.
• The Dragon’s Gaze notes an ambitious effort to try to detect a transit of Proxima Centauri b. Did the researchers pick something up?
• Hornet Stories links to a report suggesting HIV denialism is worryingly common in parts of Russia.
• Language Log reports on an apparently oddly bilingual Chinese/Vietnamese poster. Where did it come from?
• The LRB Blog reports on how Tunisian Anouar Brahem fused jazz with Arabic music on his new album Blue Maqems.
• The Map Room Blog links to a lecture by John Cloud on indigenous contributions to mapmaking in Alaska.
• The NYR Daily looks at the grim position of Theresa May in Brexit negotiations.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer considers what would have happened if the Americas had not been populated in 1492. How would imperialism and settlement differ?
• Roads and Kingdoms notes some of the architectural legacies–houses, for instance–of Basque settlement in the American West.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes three conundrums that neutrinos might be able to solve.
• Window on Eurasia notes why Russia is hostile, despite its program of merging federal units, to the idea of uniting Tatarstan with Bashkortostan.
• Using an interwar map of Imperial Airways routes, Alex Harrowell illustrates how the construction of globalized networks can make relatively marginal areas quite central.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO notes a photo series celebrating the corner stores of Toronto and reports on massive condo towers planned for Yonge and College.
• Centauri Dreams notes the antimatter sail as a potential future propulsion technology.
• D-Brief notes the beginning of a search for an Earth-like planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A or B.
• Joe. My. God. notes that it is Ecuador that disrupted Assange’s Internet connection.
• Language Hat looks at distinctions between fiction and non-fiction in different literatures.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how Republicans are concerned for the future of the US Supreme Court and links to Matt Taibbi’s article suggesting that Trump might reinforce the existing American system.
• Maximos62 links to his new audiobook of tales from Asia and the Pacific.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at the relationship between rapidly rotating regular satellite and their tides.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that language shift among the Kalmyks to Russia has not weakened their ethnic identity, and shares arguments that Tatarstan and Bashkortostan must be brought back into line in with Russia’s national government.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO notes the mess on College Street.
• D-Brief notes that the crater of Chixculub was hot enough to sustain a subsurface ecology for two million years.
• Language Hat notes “brother” and some of its variations.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the United States’ 1964 presidential election.
• The Map Room Blog notes how Google does not map green spaces.
• Peter Rukavina shares his family’s trip to the beach on the Island.
• Window on Eurasia looks at how Bashkortostan has been subjected to centralization.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• The Big Picture shares pictures of the devastating flooding in the Balkans.
• Crooked Timber discusses the ethics of immigration, with particular emphasis on the United Kingdom.
• The Dragon’s Gaze notes the discovery of a Neptune-mass planet orbiting nearby brown dwarf Gliese 687.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that increased soot and rising temperatures have been responsible for the shrinkage of the Greenland ice cap since the late 19th century.
• Far Outliers notes that hundreds of British prisoners of war taken in Singapore were used as forced labourers in the Solomon Islands.
• A Fistful of Euros’ Edward Hugh notes the pressures on the Eurozone for changing policies.
• Geocurrents’ Martin Lewis notes the recent election in India shows the BJP dominating most of India save for the southeast where regionalist parties reign.
• Peter Rukavina shares a map of his movements around Charlottetown, tracked by social media apps.
• Steve Munro uses traffic data to suggest that the new articulated buses haven’t improved things on the Bathurst Street route.
• Torontoist reacts to the recent arrest of a driver of Rob Ford’s Escalade.
• Transit Toronto examines the various TTC-related locations open for Doors Open this year, including a new streetcar.
• Window on Eurasia notes that some Tatars in the adjoining republic of Bashkortostan want their territory to secede to Tatarstan.