[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.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait shares images of Jupiter, imaged in infrared by ALMA.
• Centauri Dreams looks at ocean upwelling on one class of super-habitable exoplanet.
• D-Brief looks at how the Komodo dragon survived the threat of extinction.
• Far Outliers reports on a mid-19th century slave raid in the Sahel.
• Gizmodo notes that the secret US Air Force spaceplane, the X-37B, has spent two years in orbit. (Doing what?)
• JSTOR Daily looks at the economic underpinnings of medieval convents.
• Dave Brockington writes at Lawyers, Guns and Money about the continuing meltdown of the British political system in the era of Brexit, perhaps even of British democracy.
• The LRB Blog looks at the impact of Brexit on the Common Travel Area.
• Marginal Revolution reports on how Poland has tried to deter emigration by removing income taxes on young workers.
• Carole Naggar writes at the NYR Daily about the photography of women photographers working for LIFE, sharing examples of their work.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why time has to be a dimension of the universe, alongside the three of space.
• Frank Jacobs of Strange Maps shares NASA images of the forest fires of Amazonia.
• Window on Eurasia notes that many Russophones of Ukraine are actually strongly opposed to Russia, contrary Russian stereotypes of language determining politics.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Architectuul writes</u about the pioneering women architects of the United Kingdom.
• Bad Astronomy reports on a marvelous mosaic assembled by amateur astronomers of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
• Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog notes how college debts in the United States hinder social mobility.
• The Crux considers how the antibiotic-resistant fungus C. auris can be treated.
• D-Brief looks at the archaeological studies of graves in the forest islands of Bolivia that have revealed remarkable things about the settlement of ancient Amazonia.
• Far Outliers looks at how U.S. Grant built a pontoon bridge across the James River in Virginia.
• Gizmodo notes the big crater created by Hayabusa 2 in the surface of Ryugu, suggesting that body’s loose composition.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how the plan of Denmark to build a border fence to protect its pig populations against wild boars might be flawed.
• Language Hat looks at the South Arabian languages, non-Arabic Semitic languages spoken in the south of the Arabian peninsula.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the growing role of women in the American labour movement.
• James Butler at the LRB Blog writes about the new urgency of the Extinction Rebellion in this era of climate change and threatened apocalypse.
• Marginal Revolution considers a paper claiming that intergenerational social mobility in much of Canada is no higher than in most of the neighbouring United States.
• The NYR Daily examines the democracy of Indonesia.
• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money looks at how a particular reading of international law was used in Bolivia to justify a violation of the national constitution.
• Peter Rukavina shares an insightful map looking at the election results from PEI. One thing brought out by the map is the strength of the Greens across the Island.
• The Speed River Journal’s Van Waffle looks at the useful Ontario shrub of leatherwood.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes the discovery of carbon-60 buckyballs in the far reaches of our galaxy by Hubble.
• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that the president and the prime minister of Ukraine are both Jews.
• Towleroad notes the new video by Willie Tay, a Singapore music star who was dropped by his label for being gay and has responded by coming out and releasing a video for his song “Open Up Babe”.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the Ingermanlanders, also known as Ingrians or Ingrian Finns, a Finnic people in the hinterland of St. Petersburg who suffered horrifically under Communism.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell looks at how computers, originally imagined to function in certain specific ways, are being reimagined and reused in ways which do not quite suit them (and us).
• Arnold Zwicky finds a stock photo used to represent art stolen by the Nazis and uses it to explore issues of recovery and loss and mistake.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Architectuul looks back at its work over 2018.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait reflects on an odd photo of the odd galaxy NGC 3981.
• The Crux tells the story of how the moons of Jupiter, currently enumerated at 79 and including many oddly-shaped objects in odd orbits, have been found.
• Gizmodo notes how some astronomers have begun to use the precise rotations of neutron stars to calibrate atomic clocks on Earth.
• Keiran Healy shares a literally beautiful chart depicting mortality rates in France over two centuries.
• Hornet Stories notes that, two years after his death, the estate of George Michael is still making donations to the singer’s favoured charities.
• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox celebrates the Ramones song “I Wanna Be Sedated”.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how unauthorized migrants detained by the United States are being absorbed into the captive workforces of prisons.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution approves of the Museum of the Bible, in Washington D.C., as a tourist destination.
• The NYR Daily looks at soccer (or football) in Morocco, as a badge of identity and as a vehicle for the political discussions otherwise repressed by the Moroccan state.
• Roads and Kingdoms reports on the paiche, a fish that is endangered in Peru but is invasively successful in Bolivia.
• Peter Rukavina makes a good point about the joys of unexpected fun.
• The Signal reports on how the American Folklife Centre processes its audio recordings in archiving them.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel debunks some myths about black holes, notably that their gravity is any more irresistible than that of any other object of comparable mass.
• Strange Company shares the contemporary news report from 1878 of a British man who binge-drank himself across the Atlantic to the United States.
• Window on Eurasia reports on a proposal in the fast-depopulating Magadan oblast of Russia to extend to all long-term residents the subsidies extended to native peoples.
• Arnold Zwicky reports on another Switzerland-like landscape, this one the shoreline around Lake Sevan in Armenia.

[NEWS] Five indigenous links: Innu, Kahnawake, Cree, genetics, Andes

• CTV News reports on how Kahnawake, a Mohawk reserve near Montréal, is trying to learn from mistakes with tobacco in legalizing marijuana sales.
• La Presse reports on a case lodged before the Surpeme Court of Canada by an Innu group regarding their homeland on the Québec-Labrador border.
• CBC reports on efforts to preserve the Cree language as a vibrant community language in northern Québec.
• Enlisting indigenous groups in studies of their genetic history is becoming imperative for scientists active in the field. CBC reports.
• Scienceblog reports on a study of DNA from indigenous populations in the Andes that reveals not only how they adapted to the extreme environments of the area but resisted Eurasian diseases better than other groups in South America.

[NEWS] Ten links, from human evolution through cultural diversity to the Toronto Islands

• The Atlantic‘s Ed Yong notes the discovery of dated Homo sapiens fossils 300k years old in Morocco. (!)
• The Atlantic reports on Twitter-driven science that has highlighted the remarkable visual acuity of the spider.
• The Economist notes that multilingual societies can encounter more difficulties prospering than unilingual ones.
• Torontoist notes a Thunder Bay park devoted to the idea of First Nations reconciliation.
• The Inter Press Service reports on how gardens grown under solar tents in Bolivia can improve nutrition in poor highland villages.
• The Toronto Star‘s Christopher Hume trolls Rob Ford’s supporters over the new, well-designed, Etobicoke Civic Centre.
• Metro Toronto calculates just how many avocado toasts would go into a mortgage in the GTA.
• MacLean’s hosts a collection of twenty photos from gritty Niagara Falls, New York.
• The National Post shows remarkable, heartbreaking photos from the flooded Toronto Islands.
• Edward Keenan argues that the Toronto Islands’ flooding should help prompt a local discussion on climate change.

[NEWS] Some Friday links

• Bloomberg notes Venezuela is considering dollarization in order to save its auto industry, and looks at the possibility of an OAS intervention.
• Bloomberg View looks at the anti-immigrant mindset.
• The Inter Press Service notes political crisis in Nicaragua and examines the plundering of African fisheries by foreign fleets.
• MacLean’s notes Conrad Black’s seeking an emergency hearing to let him sell his home.
• National Geographic investigates the origins of the stars which produced the first detected gravitational wave.
• The National Post notes Bolivia’s interest in a new chronology.
• Open Democracy examines the British Chinese perspective on Brexit and looks at the tremendous alienation in British society.

[LINK] “How indigenous wealth is changing Bolivian architecture”

At Al Jazeera, Michele Bertelli and Felix Lill describe, with abundant photos, the architecture of the homes of Bolivia’s rising upper class, of indigenous cultural background. The usage of colour evokes South Africa’s Cape, somehow.

From the fifth floor of El Alto’s tallest building, the city looks like a flat red carpet, with thousands of low brick houses lining up towards the horizon.

Originally an indigenous slum built at 4,000 metres above sea level on the outskirts of La Paz, the country’s administrative capital, El Alto has swollen over recent years as people have migrated from rural areas. The change is evident in its panorama, as unusual buildings have started to pierce the otherwise even red expanse.

“In 30 years, La Paz will become a suburb of El Alto,” Freddy Mamani, 43, tells Al Jazeera as he observes the city’s skyline.

Mamani is the architect behind many of these new “chalets”, which with their irregular forms and playful windows stand out from their earth-coloured surroundings. “I want to give this city an identity,” he says, “like an eternal exposition.”

He quotes the local Aymara indigenous culture as his main source of inspiration: the circles, the Andean cross and the designs reminiscent of butterflies, snakes and frogs featured on the facades are taken from the ponchos usually worn in the High Andean plateau region.

“The Aymara culture has finally reclaimed its role in this country,” he says.

[LINK] On the disappearance of Lake Poopo, second-largest lake of Bolivia

The Toronto Star features Carlos Valdez’s Associated Press article looking at the alarming scale of the catastrophe in Bolivia.

Overturned fishing skiffs lie abandoned on the shores of what was Bolivia’s second-largest lake. Beetles dine on bird carcasses and gulls fight for scraps under a glaring sun in what marshes remain.

Lake Poopo was officially declared evaporated last month. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people have lost their livelihoods and gone.

High on Bolivia’s semi-arid Andean plains at 3,700 metres and long subject to climatic whims, the shallow saline lake has essentially dried up before only to rebound to twice the area of Los Angeles.

But recovery may no longer be possible, scientists say.

“This is a picture of the future of climate change,” says Dirk Hoffman, a German glaciologist who studies how rising temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels has accelerated glacial melting in Bolivia.

As Andean glaciers disappear so do the sources of Poopo’s water. But other factors are in play in the demise of Bolivia’s second-largest body of water behind Lake Titicaca.

Drought caused by the recurrent El Nino meteorological phenomenon is considered the main driver. Authorities say another factor is the diversion of water from Poopo’s tributaries, mostly for mining but also for agriculture.

National Geographic has more.

Lake Poopó gets most of its water from the Desaguadero River, which flows from Lake Titicaca (Bolivia’s largest lake). According to the published management plan, water managers are supposed to allow flow down the river into Poopó, but they have recently allowed that to slow to a trickle.

Titicaca has plenty of water in it, so that’s not the problem, Borre says. Officials just aren’t opening control gates often enough to send water down the river. Some of the water is being diverted for agriculture and mining. And even when water is available, the river is often clogged with sedimentation, due to the runoff from development and mining in the area.

Poopó is high, at 12,000 feet (3,680 meters), and the area has warmed an estimated one degree Celsius over the past century, leading to an increase in the rate of evaporation from the lake. And the lack of rain over the past year has sped the process even further. But these factors weren’t surprises, Borre says, they were foreseeable changes that scientists anticipated.

What happened to Lake Poopó is not unlike the drying of the vast Aral Sea in Central Asia, says Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project and a National Geographic Explorer. In both cases, a closed water system was overdrawn, with more water going out than coming in.

[LINK] “Refugees: That Time Everyone Said ‘No’ And Bolivia Said ‘Yes'”

At NPR, Jasmine Garsd notes how, in an increasingly closed South America in the 1930s, Bolivia stood out for its continued welcome of refugees.

Consulates were under orders to stop giving visas. Ships carrying refugees were turned away. The most famous case is the St. Louis in May 1939. It was carrying 937 refugees. In Cuba, where the ship first attempted to dock, political infighting, economic crisis and right-wing xenophobia kept the passengers on board. The U.S denied the ship too, as did Canada. The St. Louis turned back to Europe.

All in all, Latin American governments officially permitted only about 84,000 Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1945. That’s less than half the number admitted during the previous 15 years.

There were exceptions — again, often in countries that were far from well-off. The Dominican Republic issued several thousand visas. In the ’40s El Salvador gave 20,000 passports to Jews under Nazi occupation. Former Mexican Consul to France Gilberto Bosques Saldivar is known as the “Mexican Schindler.” Working in France from 1939 to 1943, he issued visas to around 40,000 people, mostly Jews and Spaniards.

In South America, Bolivia was the anomaly. The government admitted more than 20,000 Jewish refugees between 1938 and 1941. The brains behind the operation was Mauricio Hochschild, a German Jew. He was a mining baron who had Bolivian President Germán Busch’s ear (and who wanted to help his fellow Jews for humanitarian reasons).

This was a time of economic crisis and uncertainty for the whole world, but Bolivia was in particularly bad shape. The Chaco War, fought against Paraguay until 1935, had just ended. Ironically, Bolivia’s weakness was why the government agreed to open those doors wide open. Even though Busch flirted with Nazi ideology, he hoped that that immigrants would help revitalize the economy.