[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomy notes a new detailed study suggesting that asteroid Hygeia is round. Does this mean it is a dwarf planet?
• The Buzz notes that the Toronto Public Library has a free booklet on the birds of Toronto available at its branches.
• Crooked Timber looks forward to a future, thanks to Trump, without the World Trade Organization.
• D-Brief notes how the kelp forests off California were hurt by unseasonal heat and disease.
• Bruce Dorminey notes an impending collision of supergalactic clusters.
• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at how judgement can complicate collective action.
• Language Hat looks at the different definitions of the word “mobile”.

Language Log looks at the deep influence of the Persian language upon Marathi.

Marathi and Persian

• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how, if anything, climate scientists make conservative claims about their predictions.
• Marginal Revolution wonders if planned power outages are a good way to deal with the threat of wildfires in California.
• The NYR Daily looks at the ethnic cleansing being enabled by Turkey in Kurdish Syria.
• Corey S. Powell at Out There interviews archeologist Arthur Lin about his use of space-based technologies to discovery traces of the past.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer looks at the staggering inequality in Chile, driver of the recent protests.
• At Roads and Kingdoms, Anthony Elghossain reports from the scene of the mass protests in Lebanon.
• Drew Rowsome tells how his balcony garden fared this year.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at stellar generations in the universe. (Our sun is a third-generation star.)
• Strange Company looks at the murder of a girl five years old in Indiana in 1898. Was the neighbor boy twelve years old accused of the crime the culprit?
• Denis Colombi at Une heure de peine takes a look at social mobility in France.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little considers economic historians and their study of capitalism.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the pro-Russian policies of the Moldova enclave of Gagauzia, and draws recommendations for Ukraine re: the Donbas.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes new research on where the sun is located within the Milky Way Galaxy.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly considers the value of slow fashion.
• Centauri Dreams notes the different gas giants that our early methods have yet to pick up.
• Crooked Timber shares a lovely photo looking back at Venice from across its lagoon.
• D-Brief notes that upcoming space telescopes might find hundreds of rogue planets thanks to microlensing.
• io9 notes that Marvel will soon be producing Warhammer40K comics.
• The Island Review shares some poetry and photography by Ken Cockburn inspired by the Isle of Jura.
• JSTOR Daily notes that different humpback whale groups have different songs, different cultures.
• Language Hat tries to find the meaning of the odd Soviet Yiddish word “kolvirt”.
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the history of Elizabeth Warren as a law teacher.
• Map Room Blog shares information from Google Maps about its use of data.
• Marginal Revolution notes that in 2016, not a single child born in the United Kingdom was given the name Nigel.
• Peter Watts talks about AI and what else he is doing.
• The NYR Daily marked the centennial of a horrible massacre of African-Americans centered on the Arkansas community of Elaine.
• Emily Margolis at the Planetary Society Blog looks at how the Apollo moon missions helped galvanize tourism in Florida.
• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money looks at the constitutional crisis in Peru.
• Drew Rowsome takes a look at A Streetcar Named Desire.
• Peter Rukavina looks at a spreadsheet revealing the distribution of PEI public servants.
• Spacing reviews a book imagining how small communities can rebuild themselves in neoliberalism.
• Towleroad shares the criticism of Christine and the Queens of the allegedly opportunistic use of queer culture by Taylor Swift.
• Understanding Society considers, sociologically, the way artifacts work.
• The Volokh Conspiracy argues that the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China should be a day of mourning, on account of the high human toll of the PRC.
• Window on Eurasia suggests the Russian generation of the 1970s was too small to create lasting change.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at how underwear ads can be quite sexualized.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• D-Brief considers the possibility that human food when eaten by bears, by shortening their hibernation periods, might contribute to their premature aging.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers the political power of sports and of music.
• Far Outliers notes the rising bourgeoisie of Calcutta in the 1990s.
• Steve Roby at The Fifteenth makes the case for Discovery as worthy of being considered Star Trek, not least because it is doing something new.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing notes how our tendency to track our lives through data can become dystopian.
• JSTOR Daily notes that Illinois is starting to become home to resident populations of bald eagles.
• Language Log takes a look at Ubykh.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes a Trumpist Canadian border guard.
• The New APPS Blog notes how helicopter parenting is linked to rising levels of inequality.
• The NYR Daily considers Jasper Johns.
• At Out of Ambit, Diane Duane considers the rhythms and cycles of life generally and of being a writer specifically.
• Otto Pohl looks at how people from the different German communities of southeast Europe were, at the end of the Second World War, taken to the Soviet Union as forced labourers.
• Steve Maynard writes at Spacing, in the aftermath of the death of Jackie Shane, about the erasure and recovery of non-white queer history in Toronto.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains what would happen if someone fell into a blackhole.
• Window on Eurasia notes that the number of immigrants to Russia are falling, with Ukrainians diminishing particularly in number while Central Asian numbers remain more resistant to the trend.
• Arnold Zwicky notes the telling omission of sexual orientation as a protected category re: hate crimes.

[NEWS] Five futurish links: Quadriga, Brexit, Facebook and Rohingya, basic income, friendship

• This CBC feature on the apparent loss of a quarter-billion dollars via the Quadriga cryptocurrency makes the whole business look incredibly sketchy to me. Why would anyone rational take such risks?
• At Open Democracy, Christine Berry suggests that after the Grenfell Tower catastrophe the idea of using Brexit to deregulate has become impossible. Is this a wedge issue?
• Vox notes the effort of Facebook to try to hold itself accountable for providing a platform for the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.
• Inverse has a positive account of the guaranteed minimum income experiment in Finland, emphasizing the improved psychological state of recipients.
• The Atlantic notes that one major impact of Facebook is that, through its medium, friendships can never quite completely die.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• D-Brief notes that CRISPR is being used to edit the genes of pigs, the better to protect them against disease.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing argues that silence on social networks is often not an option, that membership might compel one to speak. I wonder: That was not my experience with E-mail lists.
• Joe. My. God. notes that social network Gab, favoured by the alt-right, disclaims any responsibility for giving the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh a platform.
• JSTOR Daily notes the massive, unprecedented, and environmentally disruptive growth of great mats of sargassum seaweed in the Caribbean.
• Language Hat notes the poster’s problems grappling with Dosteyevsky’s complex novel The Devils, a messy novel product of messy times.
• Language Log notes the use of pinyin on Wikipedia to annotate Chinese words.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper noting that data mining is not all-powerful if one is only mining noise.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that, finally, we are making enough antimatter to be able to figure out whether antimatter is governed by gravity or antigravity.
• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin talks about how he was threatened on Facebook by mail bomber Cesar Sayoc.
• Window on Eurasia notes the 1947 deportation of more than a hundred thousand Ukrainians from the west of their country to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
• Arnold Zwicky ruminates about late October holidays and their food, Hallowe’en not being the only one.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Larisa Kurtović writes at anthro{dendum} about her experiences, as an anthropologist studying Bosnia and a native Sarajevan, at the time of the trial of Ratko Mladić. Representation in this circumstance was fraught.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the remarkable claim that extragalactic planets have been discovered 3.5 billion light-years away through gravitational lensing and does not find it intrinsically implausible. Centauri Dreams also looks at the background behind the claimed detection of two thousand rogue planets, ranging in mass from the Moon to Jupiter, in a distant galaxy.
• Dangerous Minds reviews a fantastic-sounding book reviewing girl gangs and bikers in the pulp fiction of mid-20th century English-language literature.
• Hornet Stories links to the Mattachine Podcast, a new podcast looking at pre-Stonwall LGBTQ history including that relating to the pioneering Mattachine Society.
• JSTOR Daily notes the substantial evidence that fish can actually be quite smart, certainly smarter than popular stereotypes have them being.
• Language Hat reports on the existence of a thriving population of speakers of Aramaic now in existence in New Jersey.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the many ways in which the privatization of state businesses have gone astray in the United Kingdom, and suggests that there is conflict between short-term capitalist desires and long-term needs. Renationalization a solution?
• At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen argues that the prospect of the future financial insolvency of Chicago helps limit the large-scale settlement of wealthy people there, keeping the metropolis relatively affordable.
• Stephen Baker of The Numerati reflected, on the eve of the Superbowl, on the origins of his fandom with the Philadelphia Eagles in 1963 just before the assassination of JFK.
• The NYR Daily shares a rational proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian confederation that, alas, will never fly given irrational reality.
• Seriously Science notes a paper suggesting that Norway rats do, in fact, the reciprocal trade of goods and services.
• Strange Company notes an unfortunate picnic in Indiana in 1931, where the Simmons family was unexpectedly poisoned by strychnine capsules? Who did it?
• Window on Eurasia notes a demographers’ observation that, given the age structure and fertility of the Russian population, even with plausible numbers of immigrants the country’s population may never again grow.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at enormous, explosive Wolf-Rayet stars, and at WR 124 in particular.
• The Big Picture shares heart-rending photos of Rohingya refugees fleeing Burma.
• Centauri Dreams considers the potential of near-future robotic asteroid mining.
• D-Brief notes the discovery of vast cave systems on the Moon, potential homes for settlers.
• Hornet Stories exposes young children to Madonna’s hit songs and videos of the 1980s. She still has it.
• Inkfish notes that a beluga raised in captivity among dolphins has picked up elements of their speech.
• Language Hat notes a dubious claim that a stelae containing Luwian hieroglyphic script, from ancient Anatolia, has been translated.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the question of preserving brutalist buildings.
• The LRB Blog considers how Brexit, intended to enhance British sovereignty and power, will weaken both.
• The Map Room Blog notes that the moons and planets of the solar system have been added to Google Maps.
• The NYR Daily considers how the Burmese government is carefully creating a case for Rohingya genocide.
• The Power and Money’s Noel Maurer concludes, regretfully, that the market for suborbital travel is just not there.
• Visiting a shrimp festival in Louisiana, Roads and Kingdoms considers how the fisheries work with the oil industry (or not).
• Towleroad reports on the apparent abduction in Chechnya of singer Zelimkhan Bakayev, part of the anti-gay pogrom there.
• Window on Eurasia notes that rebuilding Kaliningrad as a Russian military outpost will be expensive.

[NEWS] Three links from eastern Europe: Bulgaria and Macedonia, Moldova, Georgia and Abkhazia

• Bulgaria and Macedonia have at last signed a treaty trying to put their contentious past behind them. Greece next?
• The legacies of Stalinist deportations in Moldova continue to trouble this poor country.
• The plight of the ethnic Georgians apparently permanently displaced from Georgia has been only muted by time.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• blogTO lists some interesting things to do and see in Toronto’s American neighbour, Buffalo.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly strongly defends contemporary journalism as essential for understanding the world.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money rightly takes issue with the claim identity politics hinders the US left. Remember New Deal coalitions?
• Marginal Revolution notes just how expensive it is to run Harvard.
• Otto Pohl notes the upcoming 76th anniversary of the Soviet deportation of the Volga Germans.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer reports on the remarkably fluent code-switching between English and French of some Washington D.C. subway riders.
• Strange Maps notes rival food and fabric maps of India and Pakistan.
• Tricia Wood at Torontoist argues that, for environmental and economic reasons, Ontario needs high-speed rail.
• Window on Eurasia suggests Tatarstan has done a poor job of defending its sovereignty from the Russian government.

[ISL] “Graves hidden for decades could hold key to peace in Cyprus”

CBC News’ Nil Köksal reports on the continuing, sad, and politically necessary search in Cyprus for the graves of the many Cypriots killed in that island’s recent history of ethnic war.

There were 84 skeletons, all in one place.

It wasn’t the first, or the last, mass grave Ceren Ceraloglu would search, but the feeling of standing over that particular pit, with its staggering number of victims, has stayed with her.

A field archaeologist with the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) in Cyprus, Ceraloglu has been sifting through the most painful parts of her island’s past.

It’s not the kind of work this mother of triplets imagined she’d be doing when she was studying archaeology in university. But it’s become a calling.

Not just because the excavations aim to return the remains of those killed in the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots to their families, but because scientists from both communities work side by side, every day.

There is no room for conflict here.