[BLOG] Five Marginal Revolution links

• Marginal Revolution considers if the CFA franc system is dying out, here.
• Marginal Revolution shares a link to a paper quantifying the effects of the old boys club, here.
• Marginal Revolution contrasts and compares the old NAFTA and the new USMCA, here.
• Marginal Revolution notes how Germany has access to nuclear weapons, here.
• Marginal Revolution looks at the high rate of consainguineous marriage in Saudi Arabia, here.

[NEWS] Five Window on Eurasia links: Estonia, eugenics, empire, demographics, Old Believers

• Window on Eurasia notes how Russia continues to oppose the recognition of the 1920 Treaty of Tartu as the basis for Russia-Estonia relations, here.
• Window on Eurasia reports on how, and why, Stalin cracked down on eugenics as a permissible theory in the Soviet Union, here.
• Window on Eurasia reports on polling suggesting Russians are more interested in their country acting as a great power than as an empire, here.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, in the space of the former Soviet Union, population growth in the six Muslim-majority republics more than compensates in absolute numbers for declines elsewhere.
• Window on Eurasia notes the resettlement of a couple hundred Old Believers, part of a diaspora of perhaps seven thousand, in the Far East of Russia.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait looks at the strange galaxy NGC 5866.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly looks at some of her prep work when she covers a news story.
• Centauri Dreams considers the idea of using the Earth itself for gravitational lensing.
• D-Brief notes a newly-discovered fossil parrot from New Zealand, a bird nearly one metre in size.
• Far Outliers looks at the values of cowrie shells in 19th century central Africa. What could they buy?
• Gizmodo notes the limited circumstances in which IMDb will allow transgender people to remove their birth names from their records.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the abortive American state of Franklin.
• Language Hat notes a 19th century Russian exile’s experience with the differences between Norwegian and Swedish.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes, after Epstein, the incompetence that too often characterizes American prisons.
• Marginal Revolution notes the importance of slavery in the history of Venice.
• The NYR Daily notes how W.H. Auden was decidedly unimpressed by the Apollo moon landing, and why.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes the import of astronomers’ discovery of an ancient early black hole.
• Strange Maps’ Frank Jacobs shares a vertical world map from China.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little considers how competent the Nuclear Regulatory Commission actually is.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the internal divides of Russia.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait shares Johannes Kroeger’s image of the median Earth.
• The Crux considers when human societies began to accumulate large numbers of aged people. Would there have been octogenarians in any Stone Age cultures, for instance?
• The Dragon’s Tales considers Russia’s strategy in Southeast Asia.
• Alexandra Samuel at JSTOR Daily notes that one way to fight against fake news is for people to broaden their friends networks beyond their ideological sympathizers.
• Language Log, noting a television clip from Algeria in which a person defend their native dialect versus standard Arabic, compares the language situation in the Arab world to that of China.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen explains how the Tervuren Central African museum in Brussels has not been decolonized.
• The Planetary Society Blog explores the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why, in current physics, the multiverse must exist.
• Strange Company explores the strange disappearance, in the Arizona desert in 1952, of a young couple. Their plane was found and in perfect condition, but what happened to them?
• Strange Maps reports on the tragic migration of six Californian raptors, only one of which managed to make it to its destination.
• Towleroad reports on the appearance of actor and singer Ben Platt on The Ellen Show, talking about his career and coming out.
• Window on Eurasia notes the apparently widespread mutual dislike of Chechens and Muscovites.
• Arnold Zwicky considers the French Impressionist artists Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Suzanne Valadon, with images of their art.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Crux notes the discovery of a second impact crater in Greenland, hidden under the ice.
• D-Brief notes new evidence that ancient Celts did, in fact, decapitate their enemies and preserve their heads.
• Far Outliers notes how Pakhtun soldier Ayub Khan, in 1914-1915, engaged in some cunning espionage for the British Empire on the Western Front.
• Kashmir Hill at Gizmodo notes how cutting out the big five tech giants for one week–Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft–made it almost impossible for her to carry on her life.
• Hornet Stories notes that, unsurprisingly, LGBTQ couples are much more likely to have met online that their heterosexual counterparts.
• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox imagines Elizabeth Warren giving a speech that touches sensitively and intelligently on her former beliefs in her Cherokee ancestry.
• Mónica Belevan at the Island Review writes, directly and allegorically, about the Galapagos Islands and her family and Darwin.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the economics of the romance novel.
• Language Hat notes the Mandombe script creating by the Kimbanguist movement in Congo.
• Harry Stopes at the LRB Blog notes the problem with Greater Manchester Police making homeless people a subject of concern.
• Ferguson activists, the NYR Daily notes, are being worn down by their protests.
• Roads and Kingdoms lists some things visitors to the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent should keep in mind.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel makes a case for supersymmetry being a failed prediction.
• Towleroad notes the near-complete exclusion of LGBTQ subjects and themes from schools ordered by Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro.
• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the Kurds, their history, and his complicated sympathy for their concerns.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares a lovely photo of the Earth peeking out from behind the far side of the Moon.
• At the Broadside Blog, Caitlin Kelly shares lovely photos of delicate ice and water taken on a winter’s walk.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the study by Chinese astronomers who, looking at the distribution of Cepheids, figured out that our galaxy’s disk is an S-shaped warp.
• D-Brief notes new evidence that melting of the Greenland ice sheet will disrupt the Gulf Stream.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing takes issue with the uncritical idealization of the present, as opposed to the critical examination of whatever time period we are engaging with.
• Gizmodo notes that an intensive series of brain scans is coming closer to highlighting the areas of the human brain responsible for consciousness.
• Mark Graham links to new work of his, done in collaboration, looking at ways to make the sharing economy work more fairly in low- and middle-income countries.
• JSTOR Daily notes how the mystic Catholicism of the African kingdom of Kongo may have gone on to inspire slave-led revolutions in 18th century North America and Haiti.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at an exhibition examining the ambitious architecture of Yugoslavia.
• The Map Room Blog links to a cartographer’s argument about the continuing importance of paper maps.
• Marginal Revolution shares one commenter’s perception of causes or the real estate boom in New Zealand.
• Neuroskeptic considers the role of the mysterious silent neurons in the human brain.
• At NYR Daily, Guadeloupe writer Maryse Condé talks about her career as a writer and the challenges of identity for her native island.
• Roads and Kingdoms shares a list of ten dishes reflecting the history of the city of Lisbon.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel takes a look at the promise of likely mini-Neptune Barnard’s Star b as a target for observation, perhaps even life.
• Window on Eurasia shares the perfectly plausible argument that, just as the shift of the Irish to the English language did not end Irish identity and nationalism, so might a shift to Russian among Tatars not end Tatar identity.

[NEWS] Five links about populations: Franco-Ontarians, Acadians, American whites, Brexit, Belgium

• CBC reports from a Franco-Ontarian youth gathering, in Ontario’s easternmost and Francophone-majority Prescott-Russell, where young Francophones are responding with defiance.
• This Acadie Nouvelle opinion piece suggests that, to deal with the problems of the Acadians of the Maritimes, they should collectively seek some sort of autonomy across provincial frontiers.
• This New York Times article noting the questionable nature of the census estimate that white Americans were bound to be a minority soon, and this projection’s political consequences, is worth reading.
• Brexit is incompatible with a liberalized immigration policy in the United Kingdom; left-wing Brexiters should know better. Politics.co.uk has it.
• CBC notes how Belgium, dealing with the election of its first black mayor and a revamping of a museum devoted to Central Africa, is starting to deal with its racist past.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net notes that lidar scanning has revealed that the pre-Columbian city of Angamuco, in western Mexico, is much bigger than previously thought.
• James Bow makes an excellent case for the revitalization of VIA Rail as a passenger service for longer-haul trips around Ontario.
• D-Brief notes neurological evidence suggesting why people react so badly to perceived injustices.
• The Dragon’s Tales takes a look at the list of countries embracing thorough roboticization.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina takes a look at the most powerful launch vehicles, both Soviet and American, to date.
• Far Outliers considers Safavid Iran as an imperfect gunpowder empire.
• Despite the explanation, I fail to see how LGBTQ people could benefit from a cryptocurrency all our own. What would be the point, especially in homophobic environments where spending it would involve outing ourselves? Hornet Stories shares the idea.
• Imageo notes that sea ice off Alaska has actually begun contracting this winter, not started growing.
• JSTOR Daily notes how the production and consumption of lace, and lace products, was highly politicized for the Victorians.
• Language Hat makes a case for the importance of translation as a political act, bridging boundaries.
• Language Log takes a look at the pronunciation and mispronunciation of city names, starting with PyeongChang.
• This critical Erik Loomis obituary of Billy Graham, noting the preacher’s many faults, is what Graham deserves. From Lawyers, Guns and Money, here.
• Bernard Porter at the LRB Blog is critical of the easy claims that Corbyn was a knowing agent of Communist Czechoslovakia.
• The Map Room Blog shares this map from r/mapporn, imagining a United States organized into states as proportionally imbalanced in population as the provinces of Canada?
• Marginal Revolution rightly fears a possible restart to the civil war in Congo.
• Neuroskeptic reports on a controversial psychological study in Ghana that saw the investigation of “prayer camps”, where mentally ill are kept chain, as a form of treatment.
• The NYR Daily makes the case that the Congolese should be allowed to enjoy some measure of peace from foreign interference, whether from the West or from African neighbous (Rwanda, particularly).
• At the Planetary Society Blog, Emily Lakdawalla looks at the many things that can go wrong with sample return missions.
• Rocky Planet notes that the eruption of Indonesian volcano Sinabung can be easily seen from space.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes how the New Horizons Pluto photos show a world marked by its subsurface oceans.
• Window on Eurasia notes that, although fertility rates among non-Russians have generally fallen to the level of Russians, demographic momentum and Russian emigration drive continue demographic shifts.
• Livio Di Matteo at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative charts the balance of federal versus provincial government expenditure in Canada, finding a notable shift towards the provinces in recent decades.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell makes the case, through the example of the fire standards that led to Grenfell Tower, that John Major was more radical than Margaret Thatcher in allowing core functions of the state to be privatized.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at some alcoholic drinks with outré names.

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: London play, Cameroon refugee, leather, Transnistria, Indonesia

• The school boards of London, it turns out, will now fund a play that features a gay student’s struggle to bring his date to a prom. CBC reports.
• A woman from Cameroon claims–credibly, I think–that she will face persecution on the grounds of her sexual orientation if she is deported back to her homeland from British Columbia. Global News reports.
• VICE reports on how one man is now finding acceptance and even welcome for people of colour in the leather scene, looking at his experiences in the recent Mid-Atlantic Leather weekend.
• Katya Myachina reports on one documentary photographer’s efforts to document LGBTQ life in the Russian-dominated exclave of Transnistria, and the effect these photos and their display have had, over at Open Democracy.
• The Jakarta Post notes that, while Indonesians are willing to accept their LGBTQ fellow citizens as citizens, they are strongly opposed to their exercise of civil and human rights.

[NEWS] Five links about a changing world: Beyak, Congo, creative cities, 1990s Russia, queer

• Tory Senator Lynn Beyak’s latest ignorant statements about First Nations have to disqualify her from public office. Global News reports.
• Is the rebirth of Congo’s palm oil exports sign of a return to normality? Can it occur? Will it last? Bloomberg examines.
• Oli Mould is critical of the idea promoting the arts and public culture will do much for poorer urbanites, over at Open Democracy.
• Tom Rowley profiles a book, drawn from a VKontakte group, examining the experiences of the former USSR in the 1990s, also at Open Democracy.
• This VICE discussion about what “queer” means is fascinating.