[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes how variable gravity is on irregular asteroid Bennu.
• Bruce Dorminey reports on how the European Southern Observatory has charted the Magellanic Clouds in unprecedented detail.
• The Dragon’s Tales shares a collection of links looking at the Precambrian Earth.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina reports on the late 1950s race to send probes to the Moon.
• Gizmodo shares some stunning astronomy photos.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the saltwater roads, the routes that slaves in Florida used to escape to the free Bahamas.
• Language Log looks at some examples of bad English from Japan. How did they come about?
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money rejects the idea of honouring people like Condoleezza Rice.
• Marginal Revolution considers the idea of free will in light of neurology.
• Corey S Powell at Out There interviews James Lovelock on his new book Novacene, in which Lovelock imagines the future world and Gaia taken over by AI.
• Window on Eurasia notes the water shortages faced by downstream countries in Central Asia.

[AH] Five #alternatehistory maps from r/imaginarymaps: Germany, Britain, Africa, Japan, Iran

• r/imaginarymaps imagines a Germany united along religious lines, Protestant areas falling under Prussia and Catholic ones under Austria.
• Reddit’s imaginarymaps imagines a republican Great Britain. When could republicanism have taken off in the British Isles as a whole?
• Reddit’s imaginarymaps shares a map of a former Portuguese colony of Zambezia, a Lusophone nation stretching from the Atlantic at Namibia east through to Mozambique.
• This r/imaginarymaps map, imagining a Japan (and northeast Asia generally) split into sheres of influence by rival European powers, treaty ports and all, surely describes a worst-case scenario for 19th century Japan. How likely was this?
• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines an Iran that, following a 9/11-style attack by Lebanese terrorists in Moscow, ends up partitioned between Soviet and US-Arab spheres of influence.

[AH] Five #alternatehistory maps from r/imaginarymaps: France, Austria, Slovenia, Japanese Empire

• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines an early medieval France that became not a notional kingdom but rather a decentralized empire, a Holy Roman Empire of the French Nation.
• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a greater Austria that includes Slovenia.
• A Greater Slovenia, encompassing lands from Austria, Italy, and even Hungary, is the subject of this r/imaginarymaps map.
• Could an Austria divided in the Cold War be divided like this r/imaginarymaps map?
• This r/imaginarymaps map shows a Japanese Empire that survived until 1956, encompassing much of the Russian Far East as well as Manchuria and Korea.

[AH] Five alternate history maps from r/imaginarymaps (#alternatehistory)

Reddit’s imaginarymaps forum has a lot of great alternate history maps.

• This r/imaginarymaps map depicts a Dutch Formosa crica 1900.
• This creation imagines a joint German-Polish invasion of the Soviet Union.
• this map imagines a different Cold War, with a largely Communist Germany opposed by a Franco-British Union.
• This map of an alternate Cold War circa 1960 that actually made it into a history book as our timeline
• This map shows the remarkably fragmented Central America of Marvel Comics’s famous Earth-616.

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: gay and Catholic, 1970s Moscow, Australia beaches, Paradise Garage, bars

• The Conversation notes the dangers facing LGBTQ students and staff in Catholic schools in Canada.
• Deutsche Welle shares the story of how the Soviet Union in the 1970s hosted a delegation of visiting gay activists from Berlin.
• The Guardian reports on how LGBTQ people in Australia have found it difficult, even unsafe, to enjoy that country’s beach culture.
• VICE shares photos from New York City’s Paradise Garage, taken in the 1970s.
• Hornet Stories takes an extended look at the reasons, good and bad, for the decline of gay bars.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomy shares a photo taken by the H-ATLAS satellite of deep space, a sea of pale dusty dots each one a galaxy.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly shares, in photos and in prose, 11 views of New York City. (What a fantastic metropolis!)
• Centauri Dreams hosts an essay from Alex Tolley suggesting that most life in the universe is lithophilic, living in the stable warm interiors of planets.
• Cody Delistraty links to an essay of his looking at the tensions, creative and personal, between Renoir father and son.
• Gizmodo links to a paper suggesting the mysterious ASASSN-14li event can be explained by a star falling into a supermassive galactic black hole, the analysis suggesting the black hole was rotating at half the speed of light.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the mysterious dancing plagues of medieval Europe.
• The LRB Blog looks at casual anti-Semitism in British sports.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that the legacies of Confucian state-building in China may have depressed long-term economic growth in particularly Confucian areas.
• The Planetary Society Blog reports on the success of the Chang’e-4 probe, complete with photos and videos sent from the far side of the Moon.
• Roads to Kingdoms shares the photography of a changing Vietnam by Simone Sapienza.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the ongoing Toronto comedy show Unsafe Space, and enjoys it.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the achievements of the TESS planet-hunting satellites, looking for nearby planets, emphasizing its achievements in the Pi Mensae system.
• Window on Eurasia considers a fascinating alternate history. Could Beria, had he survived Stalin, have overseen a radical liberalization of the Soviet Union in the early Cold War?

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Ryan Anderson at Anthrodendum takes a look at how the threat posed to coastal properties by sea level rise reveals much about how human beings assign value.
• A BCer in Toronto’s Jeff Jedras writes about the food at a Newfoundlander party in Ottawa.
• D-Brief considers how past ice ages might have been caused by the shifting poles.
• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog takes a look at the work of Michelle Pannor Silver, looking at how retirement can influence the identities of individuals.
• Far Outliers notes that, in its first major wars, Japan treated prisoners of war well.
• JSTOR Daily examines a paper that takes a look at how the X-Men have achieved such resonance in pop culture, such power as symbols of minorities’ persecution and survival.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money is critical of the effusive press coverage of Mitt Romney, new Republican senator.
• Geoffrey Pullum at Lingua Franca shares, for other English speakers, a lexicon of specialized words from the United Kingdom regarding Brexit.
• At the LRB Blog, Hyo Yoon Kang takes a look at a series of legal hearings investigating the possibility of assigning legal responsibility for global warming to “carbon majors” like big oil.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution shares his argument that the history of the 21st century United States might look like that of the 19th century, with progress despite political disarray.
• The NYR Daily shares the arguments of scholar of populism, Jan-Werner Müller, looking at what Cold War liberalism has to say now.
• Peter Rukavina shares the story of his two visits to relatives around the Croatian city of Kutina, with photos.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at how astronomers solved the mystery of the “Zone of Avoidance”, the portions of space blotted out by the dense plane of our galaxy.
• Window on Eurasia reports from a conference on minority languages where speakers complain about Russian government pressures against their languages.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at tea, starting with tea-time aphorisms and going further afield.

[MUSIC] Five music links: The Music Man, Raine Maida, David Bowie, 70s, Erland Cooper

• JSTOR Daily reports on how the 1962 movie The Music Man, based on the earlier musical, became a major Cold War export of the US even as small-town America was changing.
• This Global News interview with Raine Maida, lead singer of Our Lady Peace, makes me positive-nostalgic for the 1990s.
• NPR reported on the discovery of David Bowie’s first demo, from 1963, some time ago, but this still amazes me.
• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox took a look at the 1970s song “Hot Child in the City”.
• The Island Review interviewed multi-instrumentalist Erland Cooper and shared some of his music, inspired by the culture and the sound of the Orkneys.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Adam Fish at Anthro{dendum} takes a look at the roles of drones in capitalism, here.
• Bad Astronomy talks about the discovery of a nascent planet in orbit of young star PDS 70.
• Centauri Dreams notes what the discovery of a Charon eclipsing its partner Pluto meant, for those worlds and for astronomy generally.
• D-Brief notes a demographic study of Italian centenarians suggesting that, after reaching the age of 105, human mortality rates seem to plateau. Does this indicate the potential for further life expectancy increases?
• Dead Things shares the result of a genetics study of silkworms. Where did these anchors of the Silk Road come from?
• Jonathan Wynn at the Everyday Sociology Blog considers the role of the side hustle in creative professions.
• Far Outliers reports on the time, in the 1930s, when some people in Second Republic Poland thought that the country should acquire overseas colonies.
• Hornet Stories reports on how, in earlier centuries, the English word “pinke” meant a shade of yellow.
• JSTOR Daily reports on how, nearly two decades later, Sex and the City is still an influential and important piece of pop culture.
• Language Hat links to Keith Gessen’s account, in The New Yorker, about how he came to teach his young son Russian.
• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle of Higher Education, reports on the decent and strongly Cuban Spanish spoken by Ernest Hemingway.
• The NYR Daily looks at the mystique surrounding testosterone, the powerful masculinizing hormone.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer shares his thoughts on the election, in Mexico, of left-leaning populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Worst-case scenarios aren’t likely to materialize in the short and medium terms, at least.
• Vintage Space notes how, at the height of the Cold War, some hoped to demonstrate American strength by nuking the Moon. (Really.)
• Window on Eurasia links to an essayist who suggests that Russia should look to America as much as to Europe for models of society.

[ISL] Five notes about islands: Greenland, South China Sea, Bangladesh, Caribbean, Puerto Rico

• The slow melt of the Greenland icecap will eventually release a Cold War American military base into the open air. VICE reports.
• Robert Farley suggests at The National Interest that China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea would not be of much use in an actual conflict.
• Reuters notes that a mud island in the Bay of Bengal lucky not to be overwhelmed by high tides is being expanded into a compound to hold Rohingya refugees.
• A new study suggests that there was some genetic continuing between pre- and post-Columbian populations in the Caribbean, that as family and local histories suggest at least some Taino did survive the catastrophes of colonialism. National Geographic reports.
• This account from NACLA of Puerto Rico’s perennial problems with the American mainland and the history of migration, culminating in an ongoing disastrous mass emigration after Maria, is pro-independence. Might this viewpoint become more common among Puerto Ricans?