[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At anthro{dendum}, Amarilys Estrella writes about the aftermath of a car accident she experienced while doing fieldwork.
• Architectuul notes at a tour of Berlin looking at highlights from an innovative year for architecture in West Berlin back in 1987.
• Bad Astronomer notes that interstellar comet 2/Borisov is behaving surprisingly normally.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly writes briefly about the difficulty, and the importance, of being authentic.
• Centauri Dreams shares some of the recent findings of Voyager 2 from the edge of interstellar space.
• Crooked Timber shares a photo of a courtyard in Montpellier.
• D-Brief notes a study of the genetics of ancient Rome revealing that the city once was quite cosmopolitan, but that this cosmopolitanism passed, too.
• Dangerous Minds notes a 1972 single where Marvin Gaye played the Moog.
• Cody Delistraty looks at Degas and the opera.
• Bruce Dorminey makes a case, scientific and otherwise, against sending animals into space.
• Far Outliers looks at a 1801 clash between the American navy and Tripoli pirates.
• Gizmodo notes a theory that ancient primates learned to walk upright in trees.
• Joe. My. God. notes that the Cayman Islands overturned a court ruling calling for marriage equality.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the experience of women under Reconstruction.
• Language Hat notes the exceptional multilingualism of the Qing empire.
• Language Log looks at circumstances where the Roman alphabet is used in contemporary China.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the forced resignation of Evo Morales in Bolivia, and calls for readers to take care with their readings on the crisis and the country.
• Marginal Revolution considers a new sociological theory suggesting that the medieval Christian church enacted policy which made the nuclear family, not the extended family, the main structure in Europe and its offshoots.
• Sean Marshall takes a look at GO Transit fare structures, noting how users of the Kitchener line may pay more than their share.
• Neuroskeptic takes a look at the contradictions between self-reported brain activity and what brain scanners record.
• Alex Hutchinson writes at the NYR Daily about human beings and their relationship with wilderness.
• Jim Belshaw at Personal Reflections considers the impact of drought in Australia’s New England, and about the need for balances.
• The Planetary Society Blog offers advice for people interested in seeing today’s transit of Mercury across the Sun.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer suggests Argentines may not have cared about their national elections as much as polls suggested.
• Peter Rukavina shares an image of an ancient Charlottetown traffic light, at Prince and King.
• The Russian Demographics Blog notes the significant convergence, and remaining differences, between East and West Germany.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at some of the backstory to the Big Bang.
• The Volokh Conspiracy suggests the Paris Accords were never a good way to deal with climate change.
• Window on Eurasia shares someone arguing the policies of Putin are simple unoriginal Bonapartism.
• Worthwhile Canadian Economy makes the case that slow economic recoveries are deep economic recoveries.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell looks at how the failure of the media to serve as effective critics of politics has helped lead, in the UK of Brexit, to substantial political change.
• Arnold Zwicky considers the idea, first expressed in comics, of Russian sardines.

[NEWS] Five Universe Today (@universetoday) links: colours, panspermia, Venus, superhabitable worlds

• Brian Koberlein at Universe Today considers the question of what was the first colour in the universe. (Is it orange?)
• Matt Williams at Universe Today considers how comets and other bodies could be exporting life from Earth to the wider galaxy.
• Matt Williams at Universe Today explores one study suggesting Venus could have remained broadly Earth-like for billions of years.
• Matt Williams at Universe Today also notes another story suggesting, based on the nature of the lava of the volcanic highlands of Venus, that world was never warm and wet.
• Fraser Cain at Universe Today took a look at the idea of superhabitable worlds, of worlds better suited to supporting life than Earth.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the dusty spiral of galaxy M81, here.
• Crooked Timber reacts positively to the Astra Taylor short film What Is Democracy?
• D-Brief notes that, in the South Atlantic, one humpback whale population has grown from 440 individuals to 25 thousand, nearly completing its recovery from whaling-era lows.
• Dangerous Minds looks at The Iguanas, first band of Iggy Pop.
• The Dragon’s Tales looks at consideration in South Korea at building an aircraft carrier.
• Todd Schoepflin at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the division of labour within his family.
• Far Outliers looks at 17th century clashes between England and Barbary Pirates.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how antibiotics are getting everywhere, contaminating food chains worldwide.
• Victor Mair at Language Log looks at the evidence not only for an ancient Greek presence in Central Asia, but for these Greeks’ contact with China.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that the attempt by Trump to get Ukraine to spy on his enemies was driven by what Russia and Hungary alleged about corruption in Ukraine.
• The LRB Blog looks at the transnational criminal network of the Hernandez brothers in Honduras, a source of a refugee diaspora.
• Marginal Revolution shares an argument suggesting that marriage is useful for, among other things, encouraging integration between genders.
• Sean Marshall looks at how the death of the Shoppers World in Brampton heralds a new urbanist push in that city.
• At the NYR Daily, Helen Joyce talks of her therapeutic experiences with psychedelic drugs.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the Toronto play The Particulars.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers if inflation came before, or after, the Big Bang.
• John Scalzi at Whatever has a short discussion about Marvel films that concludes they are perfectly valid.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that central Ukraine has emerged as a political force in post-1914 Ukraine.
• Arnold Zwicky considers the Indian pickle.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes that far-orbiting body 2015 TC387 offers more indirect evidence for Planet Nine, as does D-Brief.
• Centauri Dreams notes that data from the Gaia astrometrics satellite finds traces of past collisions between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy.
• The Crux takes a look at the long history of human observation of the Crab Nebula.
• Sujata Gupta at JSTOR Daily writes about the struggle of modern agriculture with the pig, balancing off concerns for animal welfare with productivity.
• Language Hat shares a defensive of an apparently legendarily awful novel, Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling.
• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle, takes a look at the controversy over the name of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, going up to the recent referendum on North Macedonia.
• The LRB Blog reports on the high rate of fatal car accidents in the unrecognized republic of Abkhazia.
• Reddit’s mapporn shares an interesting effort to try to determine the boundaries between different regions of Europe, stacking maps from different sources on top of each other.
• Justin Petrone at North! writes about how the northern wilderness of Estonia sits uncomfortably with his Mediterranean Catholic background.
• Peter Watts reports from a book fair he recently attended in Lviv, in the west of Ukraine.
• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog notes the new effort being put in by NASA into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
• Roads and Kingdoms reports on some beer in a very obscure bar in Shanghai.
• Drew Rowsome reports on the performance artist Lukas Avendano, staging a performance in Toronto inspired by the Zapotech concept of the muxe gender.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps examines the ocean-centric Spielhaus map projection that has recently gone viral.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers the question of whether or not the Big Rip could lead to another Big Bang.
• Window on Eurasia notes the harm that global warming will inflict on the infrastructures of northern Siberia.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell considers the ecological fallacy in connection with electoral politics. Sometimes there really are not niches for new groups.
• Arnold Zwicky takes part in the #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob meme, this time looking at images of linguists.

[LINK] On cosmic inflation, the Big Bang, and Andrei Linde

CBC’s article

The new results were announced by a collaboration that includes researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The team plans to submit its results to a scientific journal this week, said its leader, John Kovac of Harvard.

For their research, astronomers scanned about 2 percent of the sky for three years with a telescope at the South Pole, chosen for its very dry air to aid in the observations.

They were looking for a specific pattern in light waves within the faint microwave glow left over from the Big Bang. The pattern has long been considered evidence of the rapid growth spurt, known as inflation. Kovac called it “the smoking gun signature of inflation.”

The scientists say the light-wave pattern was caused by gravitational waves, which are ripples in the interweaving of space and time that sprawls through the universe. If confirmed, the new work would be the first detection of such waves from the birth of the universe, which have been called the first tremors of the Big Bang.

Arizona State’s Krauss cautioned that it’s possible that the light-wave pattern is not a sign of inflation, although he stressed that it’s “extremely likely” that it is. It’s “our best hope” for a direct test of whether the rapid growth spurt happened, he said.

The New Yorkergoes into more detail, here too.

What went viral about all this is the video of physicist Andrei Linde, the man who suggested the theory of cosmic inflation in the first place, being informed at his door of the news of his theory’s confirmation.

This joyous video has just under 1.6 million views as of this posting.