[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 sci-tech links: ISS internet, Maritimes, CRISPR, machine translation, Trabants

• Universe Today looks at the impressive Internet speed of the ISS, 600 megabits a second, here.
• The National Observer reports on how the infrastructure of the Maritimes will need to be able to handle climate change, here.
• Wired reports on the partially successful effort in China to use CRISPR to cure HIV, here.
• Technology Review looks at how machine learning can be used to translate lost languages and unknown scripts, like Linear A, here.
• Atlas Obscura reports on how the Trabant car of East Germany keeps its fanbase, here.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Ryan Anderson at anthro{dendum} looks at the unnatural history of the beach in California, here.
• Architectuul looks at the architectural imaginings of Iraqi Shero Bahradar, here.
• Bad Astronomy looks at gas-rich galaxy NGC 3242.
• James Bow announces his new novel The Night Girl, an urban fantasy set in an alternate Toronto with an author panel discussion scheduled for the Lillian H. Smith Library on the 28th.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the indirect evidence for an exomoon orbiting WASP-49b, a possible Io analogue detected through its ejected sodium.
• Crooked Timber considers the plight of holders of foreign passports in the UK after Brexit.
• The Crux notes that astronomers are still debating the nature of galaxy GC1052-DF2, oddly lacking in dark matter.
• D-Brief notes how, in different scientific fields, the deaths of prominent scientists can help progress.
• Bruce Dorminey notes how NASA and the ESA are considering sample-return missions to Ceres.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina looks at the first test flights of the NASA Mercury program.
• The Dragon’s Tales looks at how Japan is considering building ASAT weapons.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina looks at the first test flights of the NASA Mercury program.
• Far Outliers looks how the anti-malarial drug quinine played a key role in allowing Europeans to survive Africa.
• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox considers grace and climate change.
• io9 reports on how Jonathan Frakes had anxiety attacks over his return as Riker on Star Trek: Picard.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the threatened banana.
• Language Log looks at the language of Hong Kong protesters.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how a new version of The Last of the Mohicans perpetuates Native American erasure.
• Marginal Revolution notes how East Germany remains alienated.
• Neuroskeptic looks at the participant-observer effect in fMRI subjects.
• The NYR Daily reports on a documentary looking at the India of Modi.
• Corey S. Powell writes at Out There about Neptune.
• The Planetary Society Blog examines the atmosphere of Venus, something almost literally oceanic in its nature.
• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money considers how Greenland might be incorporated into the United States.
• Rocky Planet notes how Earth is unique down to the level of its component minerals.
• The Russian Demographics Blog considers biopolitical conservatism in Poland and Russia.
• Starts With a Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers if LIGO has made a detection that might reveal the nonexistence of the theorized mass gap between neutron stars and black holes.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps looks at Marchetti’s constant: People in cities, it seems, simply do not want to commute for a time longer than half an hour.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little looks at how the US Chemical Safety Board works.
• Window on Eurasia reports on how Muslims in the Russian Far North fare.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at cannons and canons.

[NEWS] Five sci-fi links: cyberpunk zombies, Alita: Battle Angel, women, W40K, The Silent Star

• Jesse Scott in The Guardian of Charlottetown considers the idea the cyberpunk might be in a process of being zombified.
• McKenna Gray at On The A Side suggests that James Cameron’s decision to wait until the technology caught up to his vision helps make Alita: Battle Angel a success.
• Wired notes the research of Lisa Yaszek, who argues the belief that early science fiction was lacking women writers is false, that it was instead a matter of misogynistic anthologists hiding women writers’ work.
• This delightful Alex Hern article in The Guardian takes a look at how Warhammer40K has become such a huge hit.
• Eric Schewe at JSTOR Daily looks at the 1960 East German SF film The Silent Star, a remarkably inclusive utopian vision of the future that–conceivably–did set a precedent for Star Trek.

[MUSIC] Five music links: Pete Shelley, Kate Bush, Joy Division, P.M. Dawn, East German punk

• Pete Shelley, of the Buzzcocks and a star in his own right, has died at 63, BBC reports. The 1981 Pete Shelley song “Homosapien” is one of my favourite overlooked post-punk songs. (The queer visibility is also nice.)
• The Economist makes</u a case for the historical importance of Kate Bush.
• Dangerous Minds asks a question, mostly rhetorically: Was Peter Sutcliffe a Joy Division fan? If nothing else, the overlap does show interesting things about patterns in northern England’s cities.
• This Anil Dash essay at Medium about P.M. Dawn, a hip-hop musician so big in the 1990s and so overlooked now, provides a really useful perspective on this artist.
• Rolling Stone interviews Tim Mohr on the subject of the punk scene in East Germany, a cultural alternative that he argues helped undermine the dictatorship.

[NEWS] Five links about identity: Durkheim, working-class, Petra Köpping, Dominican Republic, space

• Galen Watts at The Conversation takes a look at our world in the light of Émile Durkheim’s sociology, arguing that the decline of the sacred in public life has opened the world up to new forces. What next?
• This Justin Quarry essay, republished at The Guardian, arguing that it can be more difficult for people like him to come out as working-class than as gay is provocative.
• Christine Keilholz has written a widely-syndicated article about Petra Kôpping, the integration minister of Saxony, who finds herself dealing as much with older East Germans who lost from reunification as with new immigrants to her state.
• This VICE article takes a look at the humanitarian disaster created by the Dominican Republic’s destruction of birthright citizenship, displacing hundreds of thousands of people from their country on account of their foreign (Haitian) origin.
• Nadia Drake at National Geographic argues that the language used to describe space settlement has to be chosen carefully, that avoiding the rhetoric of past imperial conquests is a must.

[NEWS] Five notes about migration: Albania, Venezuela, Latvia, Namibia and East Germany, Yunnan

• This report from the Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso noting the sheer scale of emigration in parts of rural Albania, proceeding to the point of depopulating entire territories, tells a remarkable story.
• This opinion suggesting that, due to the breakdown of the economy of Venezuela, we will soon see a refugee crisis rivaling Syria’s seems frighteningly plausible.
• Politico Europe notes that, in the case of Latvia, where emigration has helped bring the country’s population down below two million, there are serious concerns.
• OZY tells the unexpected story of hundreds of young Namibian children who, during apartheid, were raised in safety in Communist East Germany.
• Many Chinese are fleeing the pollution of Beijing and other major cities for new lives in the cleaner environments in the southern province of Yunnan. The Guardian reports.

[NEWS] Seven population links: Germany, climate, Brexit, overpopulation, Amazon, whales, parrots

• DW reports on the profound and apparently irreversible depopulation of rural areas of the former East Germany.
• Stephen Leahy at VICE’s Motherboard notes that pronounced global cooling may be responsible for the emigration of Donald Trump’s grandfather to the United States, that he was a climate refugee.
• Christian Odendahl at politico.eu suggests that Brexit, by encouraging skilled immigrants (and others) to leave the United Kingdom, might work to the benefit of a Germany experiencing labour shortages.
• David Roberts at Vox talks about the many reasons why, as an environmental journalist, he does not talk about overpopulation as a problem.
• National Geographic reports on another massacre of indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon by goldminers.
• Phys.org warns that, at the current rate of deaths, the right whales of the North Atlantic might face extinction. Gack. (Sometimes I think we deserve a visit from the whale probe.)
• This heartbreaking story co-authored by Ted Chiang takes the Arecibo radio telescope and the Puerto Rican parrot, the iguaca, and does something terribly beautiful and sad with the confluence of the two. Go, read.

[NEWS] Some Wednesday links

• The Associated Press notes the hostility in many American communities to Muslim cemeteries.
• Bloomberg explores the revival of watchmaking in East Germany’s Saxony, and touches on the new two-day public work week in Venezuela.
• Bloomberg View notes Japan’s rising levels of poverty, looks at the politicization of the Brazilian education system, and examines potential consequences of Pakistan-China nuclear collaboration.
• The CBC reports on the difficulties of the Canada-European Union trade pact, reports on the conviction of an Alberta couple for not taking their meningitis-afflicted child to medical attention until it was too late, and notes that an American-Spanish gay couple was able to retrieve their child from a Thai surrogate mother.
• MacLean’s examines how Karla Homolka ending up shifting towards French Canada.
• The National Post‘s Michael den Tandt is critical of the idea of a new Bombardier bailout.
• Universe Today notes a paper arguing that, with only one example of life, we can say little with assuredness about extraterrestrial life’s frequency.
• Vice‘s Noisey notes how Prince and Kate Bush ended up collaborating on “Why Should I Love You?”.
• The Washington Post reports on a study suggesting that root crops like the potato were less suited to supporting complex civilizations than grains.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Alpha Sources, although Claus Vistesen is rightly gloomy about the prospects for the Italian economy, he thinks there may be a cyclical upturn coming.
• The Dragon’s Gaze notes the warping of the protoplanetary disk of AA Tauri.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes exciting ancient archeological finds in Indonesia possibly belonging to Homo floresiensis.
• Geocurrents notes the controversy over an India-Africa summit.
• Language Log notes an instance of tardy students being forced to draw a Chinese character.
• Languages of the World examines the genetics of Napoleon Bonaparte.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the history wars of South Korea.
• Marginal Revolution notes an East German village whose inhabitants will soon be far outnumbered by Syrian refugees.
• Personal Reflections reacts to the Turkish election and Chinese demographics.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes the vast data gathered from Ceres.
• Registan suggests Russia’s elites are operating according to frightening theories of geopolitics.
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands shares photos of a trip to the Southwest.
• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at the demographics of the Donbas in 1926.
• Whatever’s John Scalzi thinks the 50 dollar Amazon Fire tablet is worth it.
• Window on Eurasia suggests Russian nationalists will be a lasting threat to Ukraine and suggests non-Donbas Ukrainians will soon be deported from Russia.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes a remarkable sort of organizational artifact.