[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer notes the latest news on interstellar comet 2/Borisov.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly emphasizes how every writer does need an editor.
• Centauri Dreams notes how the gas giant GJ 3512 b, half the mass of Jupiter orbiting a red dwarf star closely, is an oddly massive exoplanet.
• Gina Schouten at Crooked Timber looks at inter-generational clashes on parenting styles.
• D-Brief looks at the methods of agriculture that could conceivably sustain a populous human colony on Mars.
• Bruce Dorminey argues that we on Earth need something like Starfleet Academy, to help us advance into space.
• Colby King at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at how the socio-spatial perspective helps us understand the development of cities.
• Russell Arben Fox at In Media Res listens to the Paul McCartney album Flaming Pie.
• io9 looks at Proxima, a contemporary spaceflight film starring Eva Green.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how the intense relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia began in, and reflected, the era of Jim Crow.
• Language Hat notes a report suggesting that multilingualism helps ward off dementia.
• Language Log takes issue with the names of the mascots of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the emergence of a ninth woman complaining about being harassed by Al Franken.
• Marginal Revolution links to a new paper arguing that the Washington Consensus worked.
• The NYR Daily shares an Aubrey Nolan cartoon illustrating the evacuation of war children in the United Kingdom during the Second World War.
• At Out of Ambit, Diane Duane shares a nice collection of links for digital mapmakers.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at how the European Space Agency supports the cause of planetary defense.
• Roads and Kingdoms interviews Kenyan writer Kevin Mwachiro at length.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel reports on how a mysterious fast radio burst helped illuminate an equally mysterious galactic halo.
• Strange Company reports on the mysterious and unsolved death in 1936 of Canadian student Thomas Moss in an Oxfordshire hayrick.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps notes how Mount Etna is a surpassingly rare decipoint.
• Understanding Society considers the thought of Kojève, after Hegel, on freedom.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the falling numbers of Russians, and of state support for Russian language and culture, in independent Central Asia.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell looks at how individual consumer responses are much less effective than concerted collective action in triggering change.
• Arnold Zwicky reports on some transgender fashion models.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that the galaxy’s stores of star-forming gas are running low, here.
• Centauri Dreams notes the next generation of gravitational wave detectors could detect exoplanets, massive worlds orbiting binary white dwarfs.
• The Crux reports on what is known about Homo naledi.
• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog takes a look at the risks of social isolation.
• Far Outliers reports on three enclaves of Arab culture encountered by early Western explorers in 19th century East Africa.
• Gizmodo notes the steady progress made by LightSail 2 in its travel around the world.
• The Island Review shares the Phillip Miller poem “Biennale”, inspired by Venice.
• Marginal Revolution looks at how the Norwegian Arctic island of Svalbard works without border controls.
• The NYR Daily notes that while America is not Rome, it thinks it is.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains some oddities of Higgs bosons.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little looks at how the Kyshtym nuclear disaster occurred.
• Window on Eurasia notes that 5% of Russian Orthodox parishes in Ukraine have defected so far to the Ukrainian church.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell applies information and management theory to Brexit.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the evidence for the massive collision that left exoplanet Kepler 107c an astoundingly dense body.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly tells her readers the secrets of the success of her relationship with her husband, Jose.
• Centauri Dreams notes what the New Horizons probe has found out, of Ultima Thule and of Pluto, by looking back.
• The Crux shares the obituaries of scientists from NASA for the Opportunity rover.
• D-Brief reports that NASA has declared the Opportunity rover’s mission officially complete.
• Dead Things introduces its readers to Mnyamawamtuka, a titanosaur from Tanzania a hundred million years ago.
• Drew Ex Machina shares a stunning photo of Tropical Cyclone Gita, taken from the ISS in 2018.
• Far Outliers notes how the Indian Army helped save the British army’s positions from collapse in the fall of 1914.
• Joe. My. God. notes a Christian group in the United States trying to encourage a boycott of supposedly leftist candy manufacturers like Hershey’s.
• JSTOR Daily looks at why covenant marriage failed to become popular.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money explains the hatred for new Congressperson Ilham Omar.
• The Planetary Society Blog links to ten interesting podcasts relating to exploration, of Earth and of space.
• Drew Rowsome interviews Tobias Herzberg about Feygele, his show in the Rhubarb festival at Buddies in Bad Times.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps looks at the evidence, presented by (among others) Geneviève von Petzinger, suggesting that forty thousand years ago cave artists around the world may have shared a common language of symbols.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that the policies of Putin are contributing to a growing sense of nationalism in Belarus.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Brooklyn and Queens, Calgary, El Paso, Sheffield, Nairobi

• Curbed looks at what is happening with the proposed new streetcar route connecting Brooklyn and Queens.
• Urban farm Grow Calgary has found a new home in the southeast of that city. Global News reports.
• The claim of Donald Trump that Texas border city El Paso was a criminalized disaster spinning out of control is, of course, provably wrong. VICE has it.
• This Guardian feature shares the responses of readers to an article looking at the decline of the high street of the English city of Sheffield.
• CityLab looks</u at the impact of terrorism on Nairobi, at the growing presence of elements of security theatre on the street and at the targeting of ethnic Somalis in Eastleigh.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Hamilton, Halifax, Sydney, Kiruna, Kigali

• CBC Hamilton reports on patterns of misconduct by members of armed forces units in the Hamilton, Ontario, area.
• That the Cape Breton Post, main newspaper of that island, may now be printed in Halifax says much about that city’s growing dominance of Nova Scotia (and, too, of Cape Breton’s decline). CBC reports.
• Building a new library on the waterfront of Sydney, in Cape Breton, might well anchor a wider revitalization of that city. CBC reports.
• Guardian Cities shares the story of how the Swedish iron ore-mining town of Kiruna, facing subsidence, is literally moving kilometres away.
• The Inter Press Services notes that the Rwandan capital of Kigali will have a downtown ecotourism park.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Centauri Dreams notes new findings suggesting that low metallicity in stars is linked to the formation of multi-planet systems, including systems with multiple small planets perhaps not unlike Earth.
• D-Brief notes that the potentially detectable S1 dark matter stream is heading past the Earth.
• Far Outliers reports on a visit of samurai to San Francisco in 1860.
• JSTOR Daily notes the wollemi pine of Australia, an ancient tree around in the era of the (non-avian) dinosaurs.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes yet another instance of the decidedly unimpressive leadership of Donald Trump in office.
• Lingua Franca looks at the emergence of an interesting linguistic tic in English, “regular” as in “like a regular William Safire”.
• Marginal Revolution looks at how government propaganda in Rwanda aimed to minimize ethnic tensions and the salience of ethnic identity seems to have actually worked.
• The NYR Daily looks how at the English nationalism that has inspired Brexit is indifferent to the loss of Northern Ireland.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shows how crop data from the United States and Europe can be transformed into abstract art.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russia is responding to the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s recognition of a Ukrainian church by trying to organize a Russian church in its territory of Turkey.
• Arnold Zwicky explores the word “teknonymy”, “the practice of referring to parents by the names of their children”.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Centauri Dreams looks at the latest images of asteroid Bennu provided by the OSIRIS-REx probe.
• The Crux notes the impact of genetic research on theories of language among the Neanderthals. If they were, as seems very likely, users of language, did their language use differ from that of homo sapiens sapiens?
• D-Brief notes that climate change leads to changes in the microbiology of soils. (What effect would this have on the environment? Unknown, as of yet.)
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that the Indian aircraft Vikramaditya has just had its second refit completed.
• Jonathan Wynn at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the social construction of geography. How are categories created, for instance?
• Far Outliers looks at efforts to educate prisoners of war in the Second World War-era United States, to use them even as test-beds for a wider reeducation of their societies.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing, considering the idea of the society of the spectacle of Debord after the thoughts of Foucault, notes the early prediction of a fusion between surveillance and spectacle, of a fusion between the two.
• Hornet Stories notes the anti-gay policies of the government of Tanzania government, arguing that country cannot be allowed to be a second Chechnya.
• JSTOR Daily notes how the rhetoric of Richard Nixon helped pave the way for Donald Trump.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money argues that even if the Democratic Party loses today’s elections in the United States, Americans should still have hope, should still work for a better future. I wish you all luck, myself.
• The Map Room Blog looks at Stanford University’s archive of the Maps of the Office of Strategic Studies.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper examining immigrant success in Sweden, noting the complicating picture of general success: Children of more deprived refugees do better than more favoured ones.
• The NYR Daily looks at early feminist Ernestine Rose.
• Roads and Kingdoms looks at the work of Cambodian architect Dy Preoung, who during the Khmer Rouge era managed to preserve his work on Angkor Wat.
• Drew Rowsome looks at the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, focusing on its queer elements.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel examines how black holes actually do evaporate.
• Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy notes the signal flaws with the argument that migrants should stay at home and fix their country. (What if they have no chance to, for instance?)
• Window on Eurasia notes that the West has a vested interest in the survival of Lukashenka in Belarus, if only because a sudden liberalization could well lead to a Russian invasion.
• Nick Rowe at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative takes a look at “bicycle disequilibrium theory”.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• In a long and frighteningly compelling article, Charlie Stross at Autopope warns that a Britain that heads for a hard Brexit might be lucky only to go through the worst of the 1970s.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait explores the fact that an asteroid the size of a car burned up in the atmosphere above Greenland on the 25th of July, 2018.
• Centauri Dreams shares an essay by Ramses Ramirez looking at efforts to redefine the classical “habitable zone” in more useful ways, keeping different planetary and stellar environments in mind.
• Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin takes a look at the failures of a journalism relying on anonymous interview given the prospects of a hard Brexit.
• The Crux considers how the decision of flight-controllers to direct Voyager 1 towards a close flyby of Titan closed off the possibility of that spacecraft visiting Pluto in 1986.
• D-Brief looks at the exchange of microbes among subway passengers.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at just how codified societies of the pirates of the early modern North Atlantic could be, of necessity.
• Language Log takes a look at why Matti, a character from the Finnish Nightmares webcomic, has become so massively popular in China.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Dan Nexon continues his analysis of American hegemony, looking at instances of past hegemonies undermined not by foreign opposition but by non-state actors and by domestic opponents.
• Neuroskeptic notes a study suggesting the data sets collected by psychologists are actually not broadly accessible at all.
• Francis Wade a href=”https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/06/ngugi-wa-thiongo-and-the-tyranny-of-language/”&gt;writes for the NYR Daily about Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan writer whose work–first writing in English, then shifting to Gikuyu–reflects a deep awareness of the intimate links between language and colonization, even in a post-colonial world.
• Corey S. Powell at Out There asks an important question: What is a habitable planet? Can we even speculate given how little we know?
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the prospect of sending orbiters like Galileo and Cassini, to Uranus and Neptune. The technology is there, the ODINUS mission has been sketched out, and there is a tempting launch window in 2034.
• Towleroad shares an excerpt from Omarosa Manigault’s new book on Donald Trump and his administration, talking about the cognitive decline she witnessed.
• Window on Eurasia notes that Russia is strengthening its Interior Ministry forces opposing the Donbas republics in eastern Ukraine, ostensibly to prevent smuggling.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at some homoerotic art from Brazil with an accompanying Marilyn Frye text confusingly translated to Portuguese and back again.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Anthro{dendum}, Daniel Miller writes about how some of the food he cooks evokes his history in Cuba-influenced Tampa.
• Bad Astronomer notes an astonishingly high-resolution image of protoplanet Vesta taken from the Earth.
• The Big Picture shares photos of the Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya.
• Centauri Dreams notes one proposal to help extend the life of a Type III civilization in the Milky Way Galaxy by importing stars from outside of the local group.
• Crooked Timber’s Corey Robin talks about changing minds in politics, inspired by the success of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
• Dangerous Minds shares the 1978 BBC documentary on surrealism, Europe After the Rain.
• Far Outliers shares the third part of a summary of an article on African and Japanese mercenaries in Asia.
• Hornet Stories reports on the regret of Buffy showrunner Martin Noxon that her show killed off Tara. (I agree: I liked her.)
• At In Medias Res, Russell Arben Fox wonders what American farmers–by extension, perhaps, other farmers in other high-income societies–want. With their entire culture being undermine, what can they hope for?
• Joe. My. God. notes how far-right groups in Europe are increasingly welcoming lesbian, gay, and bisexual members. (Not so much trans people, it seems.)
• JSTOR Daily reports on the obvious utility of the humble beaver (in its North American homelands, at least).
• Language Log considers the politics of the national language policy of China.
• This Language Hat articlereporting on a conference on xenolinguistics, and the discussion in the comments, is fascinating. What can we hope to learn about non-human language? What will it have, and have not, in common?
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer considers the slow corruption of independent institutions in Mexico that may occur under the presidency of AMLO.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that, while we have not found life on Enceladus, we have found indicators of a world that could support life.
• Window on Eurasia wonders if Russia is increasingly at risk of being displaced in Central Asia by a dynamic Kazakhstan.

[NEWS] Three links on Canada and globalization: Harper on NAFTA, Miniso, used clothing exports

• MacLean’s takes apart the very bad advice of Stephen Harper to Canada over NAFTA and trade negotiations.
• MacLean’s notes that Japanese discount retailer Miniso may undermine the local hegemony of Dollarama.
• East Africa is starting to clamp down on North American exports of used clothes, to promote their industry. CBC reports.