[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Centauri Dreams considers the recent study of near-Earth asteroid 1999 KW4, looking at it from the perspective of defending the Earth and building a civilization in space.
• Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber continues a debate on universal basic income.
• The Dragon’s Tales considers if India does need its own military space force.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how foster care in the United States (Canada, too, I’d add) was also synonymous with sending children off as unpaid farm labourers.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money shares a proposal, linking immigration to high-income countries to the idea of immigration as reparation for colonialism.
• The LRB Blog considers the ever-growing presence of the dead on networks like Facebook.
• Muhammad Idrees Ahmad at the NYR Daily looks at how Bellingcat and other online agencies have transformed investigative journalism.
• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a speech by the head of the Bank of Japan talking about the interactions of demographic change and economic growth.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes the mystery behind the great mass of early black hole J1342+0928.
• Strange Company looks at the unsolved Christmas 1928 disappearance of young Melvin Horst from Orrville, Ohio. What happened?
• Window on Eurasia notes that Uzbekistan is moving the Latin script for Uzbek into closer conformity with its Turkish model.

[NEWS] 15 links about Canada and Canadian politics (#cdnpoli)

• Scott Gilmore at MacLean’s notes how, in the United States, Canada as a model is a common idea among Democrats.
• David Camfield argues at The Conversation that the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike offers lessons for Canadians now.
• Le Devoir notes the recent argument of now-Québec premier François Legault that a Québec that was, like Ontario, a relatively wealthy province would be a Québec that would have fewer tensions with the rest of Canada. Is this plausible?
• Éric Grenier notes at CBC that, in Ontario, Andrew Scheer’s federal conservatives will need to draw voters from beyond Ford Nation.
• MacLean’s hosts the arguments of Frank Graves and Michael Valpy that Canadian politicians are not paying nearly the amount of attention to economic inequality that Canadians think they should.
• MacLean’s makes the point that Conrad Black seems to see much to like in Donald Trump.
• Ontario and the Canadian government are fighting over funding for the proposed Ontario Line, the Canadian government insisting it needs more information about the route. The Toronto Star reports.
• Facebook, it turns out, chose not to pay proper attention to sending officials to testify at a Canada government inquiry into fake news. Maclean’s reports.
• Justin Trudeau, speaking recently in Toronto, credited immigration for the success of the tech sector of Canada. CBC reports.
• Foreign workers turn out to play a critical role in staffing the lobster plants in the Acadian fishing village of Meteghan, in Nova Scotia. CBC reports.
• Canada and the United States are again disputing the claims of Canada to sovereignty over the Northwest Passage. Global News reports.
• MacLean’s interviews Northwest Territories premier Bob McLeod, who dreams of a massive development of Arctic Canada, including a goal of a million residents for his territory.
• Enzo DiMatteo suggests at NOW Toronto that the growing unpopularity of Doing Ford in Ontario might hurt the federal Conservatives badly.
• Could the Green Party go mainstream across Canada? The Conversation considers.
• The Conversation reports on what the national fervour over the Toronto Raptors represents, including the growing diversity of the population of Canada and the global spread of basketball.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Charlie Stross hosts at Antipope another discussion thread examining Brexit.
• Architectuul takes a look at five overlooked mid-20th century architects.
• Bad Astronomy shares a satellite photo of auroras at night over the city lights of the Great Lakes basin and something else, too.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly writes about the directions love has taken her, and wonders where it might have taken her readers.
• Centauri Dreams reports on the Hayabusa 2 impactor on asteroid Ryugu.
• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber takes issue with the claims of Steven Pinker about nuclear power.
• D-Brief notes the detection, in remarkable detail, of a brilliant exocomet at Beta Pictoris.
• The Dragon’s Tales considers the possibility that China might be building a military base in Cambodia.
• Karen Sternheimer writes at the Everyday Sociology Blog about the importance of small social cues, easily overlookable tough they are.
• Far Outliers notes the role of Japan’s imperial couple, Akihito and Michiko, in post-war Japan.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing writes about the potential inadequacy of talking about values.
• Gizmodo notes a new study suggesting the surprising and potentially dangerous diversity of bacteria present on the International Space Station.
• Mark Graham shares a link to a paper, and its abstract, examining what might come of the creation of a planetary labour market through the gig economy.
• Hornet Stories takes a look at Red Ribbon Blues, a 1995 AIDS-themed film starring RuPaul.
• io9 notes that Guillermo del Toro and Cornelia Funke are co-writing a Pan’s Labyrinth novel scheduled for release later this year.
• Joe. My. God. notes a new study suggesting 20% of LGBTQ Americans live in rural areas.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the Bluestockings, the grouping of 18th century women in England who were noteworthy scholars and writers.
• Language Hat notes an ambitious new historical dictionary of the Arabic language being created by the emirate of Sharjah.
• Language Log examines, in the aftermath of a discussion of trolls, different cultures’ terms for different sorts of arguments.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how early forestry in the United States was inspired by socialist ideals.
• The Map Room Blog links to a map showing the different national parks of the United Kingdom.
• Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, noting the new findings from the Chixculub impact, notes how monitoring asteroids to prevent like catastrophes in the future has to be a high priority.
• The New APPS Blog explains how data, by its very nature, is so easily made into a commodity.
• The NYR Daily considers the future of the humanities in a world where higher education is becoming preoccupied by STEM.
• Corey S. Powell at Out There interviews Bear Grylls about the making of his new documentary series Hostile Planet.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw considers the pleasures of birds and of birdwatching.
• Jason C. Davis at the Planetary Society Blog noted the arrival of the Beresheet probe in lunar orbit.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the new amazing-sounding play Angelique at the Factory Theatre.
• The Russian Demographics Blog notes a paper that makes the point of there being no automatic relationship between greater gender equality and increases in fertility.
• The Signal looks at how the Library of Congress has made use of the BagIt programming language in its archiving of data.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel comes up with questions to ask plausible visitors from other universes.
• Strange Company notes the mysterious deaths visited on three members of a British family in the early 20th century. Who was the murderer? Was there even a crime?
• Towleroad notes the activists, including Canadian-born playwright Jordan Tannahill, who disrupted a high tea at the Dorchester Hotel in London over the homophobic law passed by its owner, the Sultan of Brunei.
• Window on Eurasia notes rising instability in Ingushetia.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes that the British surveillance of Huawei is revealing the sorts of problems that must be present in scrutiny-less Facebook, too.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Ryan Anderson writes at anthro{dendum} about how the counterhistory of Vine Deloria transformed his thinking.
• Architectuul notes some interesting architectural experiments from the post-WW2 United Kingdom.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes the distinctive dustiness of Large Magellanic Cloud globular cluster NGC 1898.
• The Big Picture shares photos from the worldwide student walkout on climate change.
• Corey Robin writes at Crooked Timber about ethics in economics.
• The Crux points its readers to the space art of Chesley Bonestell.
• D-Brief considers the possibility that the distinction between the sounds “f” and “v” might be a product of the soft food produced by the agricultural revolution.
• Bruce Dorminey notes a new study suggesting there might be fifty billion free-floating planets in the Milky Way Galaxy.
• Gizmodo considers the self-appointed archivists of obscure information on the Internet.
• Information is Beautiful shares an informative infographic analyzing the factors that go into extending one’s life expectancy.
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that the American system simply cannot be expected to contain the fascist impulses of Donald Trump indefinitely.
• Marginal Revolution considers the future evolution of a more privacy-conscious Facebook.
• The Planetary Society Blog considers the nature of the skies of mini-Neptunes.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the Kirsten McKenzie horror novel Painted.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers the possibility that the Milky Way Galaxy, despite having fewer stars than Andromeda, might be more massive.

[NON BLOG] Me and mustaches and social media

Yesterday morning, I had a bit of fun. While I was shaving, I decided to play with a mustache for a bit. I’ve almost always fluctuated directly between having a full beard and having no facial hair at all. On a couple of times, I’ve played with a goatee. But a mustache is something I’ve never done, at least partly because of the intense reactions it has gotten from others. I wondered: What would happen if I did that now? So, I took a selfie of myself with a mustache, went to shave it off, and then took a selfie of me without.

I posted the two photos, with and without, on Instagram. I’d also taken care to crosspost them to Facebook, with and without. The photos also made it to Flickr, too, with and without. (They made it to Twitter and Tumblr, too.)

The reactions I got were very interesting. The reactions, as I noted, were intense; I got not a few GIF responses. On Facebook, a notable majority of people seemed to be hostile to the mustache, even intensely so. On Instagram, as one friend pointed out, the reactions went the other way; my mustache photo got nearly twice as many likes as my non-mustache photo, and the comments were accordingly more enthusiastic.

What was going on? I might speculate that my Facebook friends tend to be people I know relatively well, even having real-life relationships with them, while many of my Instagram friends are more random additions. Was it a matter of people with relatively little attachment to me being interested to see what I might do? I wonder.

[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 Monday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares stunning photos of the Triangulum galaxy.
• The Crux notes how innovative planning and recovery missions helped many NASA missions, like the Hubble and Kepler telescopes, improve over time.
• Sea stars on the Pacific coast of North America, D-Brief notes, are starting to die out en masse.
• David Finger at the Finger Post shows his readers his recent visit to the Incan ruins at Ollantaytambo, in Peru.
• Gizmodo notes how astronomers accidentally found the dwarf spheroidal galaxy Bedin I a mere 30 million light years away.
• JSTOR Daily notes the new evidence supporting the arguments of W.E.B. Dubois that black resistance under slavery helped the Confederacy lose the US Civil War.
• Language Hat notes the discovery of a new trilingual inscription in Iran, one combining the Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian languages.
• Language Log notes the impending death of the Arabic dialect of old Mosul, and notes what its speakers are said to talk like birds.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money thinks that if Cary Booker does not win the Democratic nomination for 2020, he will at least push the discourse leftwards.
• Marginal Revolution notes new evidence that the post-1492 depopulation of the Americas led directly to the global cooling of the Little Ice Age.
• Neuroskeptic considers the ways in which emergence, at different levels, could be a property of the human brain.
• The NYR Daily features an excerpt from the new Édouard Louis book, Who Killed My Father, talking about the evolution relationship with his father over time.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw muses on the potential for a revival of print journalism in Australia.
• Roads and Kingdoms interviews journalist Jason Rezaian on the subject of his new book about his long imprisonment in Iran.
• Drew Rowsome writes about how censorship, on Facebook and on Blogspot, harms his writing and his ability to contribute to his communities.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel writes</a about how galaxy clusters lead to the premature death of stellar formation in their component galaxies.
• Window on Eurasia notes a new poll from Ukraine suggesting most Orthodox Christians there identify with the new Ukrainian national church, not the Russian one.
• Arnold Zwicky talks about language, editing, and error.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Centauri Dreams considers the possible roles and threats posed by artificial intelligence for interstellar missions.
• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber makes the point that blaming Facebook for the propagation of fake news misses entirely the motives of the people who spread these rumours, online or otherwise.
• The Crux looks at the factors which led to the human species’ diversity of skin colours.
• Dangerous Minds reports on a new collection of early North American electronica.
• Far Outliers reports on the salt extraction industry of Sichuan.
• JSTOR Daily notes how inbreeding can be a threat to endangered populations, like gorillas.
• Language Log examines the connection of the Thai word for soul with Old Sinitic.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at divisions on the American left, including pro-Trump left radicals.
• Caitlin Chandler at the NYR Daily reports on the plight of undocumented immigrants in Rome, forced from their squats under the pressure of the new populist government of Italy.
• Spacing takes a look at the work of Acton Ostry Architects.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the ten largest non-planetary bodies in the solar system.
• Strange Company looks at the very strange 1997 disappearance of Judy Smith from Philadelphia and her latest discovery in the North Carolina wilderness. What happened to her?
• Strange Maps looks at the worrisome polarization globally between supporters and opponents of the current government in Venezuela. Is this a 1914 moment?
• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russia and Venezuela share a common oil-fueled authoritarian fragility.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at the camelids of Peru, stuffed toys and llamas and more.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Anthrodendum reviews the book Fistula Politics, the latest from the field of medical anthropology.
• Architectuul takes a look at post-war architecture in Germany, a country where the devastation of the war left clean slates for ambitious new designers and architects.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at newly discovered Kuiper Belt object 2008 VG 18.
• Laura Agustín at Border Thinking takes a look at the figure of the migrant sex worker.
• Centauri Dreams features an essay by Al Jackson celebrating the Apollo 8 moon mission.
• D-Brief notes how physicists manufactured a quark soup in a collider to study the early universe.
• Dangerous Minds shares some photos of a young David Bowie.
• Angelique Harris at the Everyday Sociology Blog takes a look at what the social sciences have to say about sexuality and dating among millennial Americans.
• Gizmodo notes the odd apparent smoothness of Ultima Thule, target of a very close flyby by New Horizons on New Year’s Day.
• Hornet Stories notes the censorship-challenging art by Slava Mogutin available from the Tom of Finland store.
• Imageo shares orbital imagery of the eruption of Anak Krakatau in Indonesia, trigger of a devastating volcanic tsunami.
• Nick Stewart at The Island Review writes beautifully about his experience crossing the Irish Sea on a ferry, from Liverpool to Belfast.
• Lyman Stone at In A State of Migration shares the story, with photos, of his recent whirlwind trip to Vietnam.
• JSTOR Daily considers whether or not fan fiction might be a useful tool to promote student literacy.
• Language Hat notes a contentious reconstruction of the sound system of obscure but fascinating Tocharian, an extinct Indo-European language from modern XInjiang.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the irreversible damage being caused by the Trump Administration to the United States’ foreign policy.
• Marginal Revolution notes a paper suggesting users of Facebook would need a payment of at least one thousand dollars to abandon Facebook.
• Lisa Nandy at the NYR Daily argues that the citizens of the United Kingdom need desperately to engage with Brexit, to take back control, in order to escape catastrophic consequences from ill-thought policies.
• Marc Rayman at the Planetary Society Blog celebrates the life and achievements of the Dawn probe.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer notes that so many Venezuelans are fleeing their country because food is literally unavailable, what with a collapsing agricultural sector.
• The Russian Demographics Blog breaks down polling of nostalgia for the Soviet Union among Russians.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that simply finding oxygen in the atmosphere of an exoplanet is not by itself proof of life.
• Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy reports on how the United States is making progress towards ending exclusionary zoning.
• Whatever’s John Scalzi shares an interview with the lawyer of Santa Claus.
• Window on Eurasia reports on a fascinating paper, examining how some Russian immigrants in Germany use Udmurt as a family language.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the lives of two notable members of the Swiss diaspora in Paris’ Montmartre.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Anthro{dendum} considers ways to simulate urgency in simulations of climate change.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers what could possibly have led to a Mars crater near Biblis Patera, on Tharsis, having such a flat bottom.
• Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog gives readers some tips as to what they should see in New York City.
• Centauri Dreams notes some of the early returns sent back by the OSIRIS-REx probe from asteroid Bennu.
• The Crux notes the limits of genetic determinism in explaining human behaviour, given the huge influence of the environment on the expression of genes and more.
• D-Brief suggests that the rapid global dispersion of the domestic chicken, a bird visibly distinct from its wild counterparts, might make an excellent marker of the Anthropocene millions of years hence.
• Bruce Dorminey notes that Comet 46 P/Wirtanen is set to come within a bit more than eleven million kilometres of the Earth next week, and that astronomers are ready.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing suggests that the Internet, by exposing everything, makes actual innovation difficult.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the innovative art of early 20th century Expressionist Charlotte Salomon, a person not only groundbreaking with her autobiographical painting series but linked to a murder mystery, too.
• Anne Curzan writes at Lingua Franca about what she has learned in six years about blogging there abut language.
• Sara Jayyousi writes at the LRB Blog about her experiences over time with a father imprisoned for nearly a decade and a half on false charges of supporting terrorism.
• Marginal Revolution shares Tyler Cowen’s argument that Macron’s main problem is that he lacks new ideas, something to appeal to the masses.
• Sylvain Cypel at the NYR Daily argues that Macron, arguably never that popular, is facing a Marie Antoinette moment, the Yellow Jackets filling the place of the sans culottes.
• Drew Rowsome rightly laments the extent to which social media, including not just Facebook but even Tumblr, are currently waging a war against any visible sex in any context.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how, in 2019, astronomers will finally have imaged the event horizon around the black hole Sagittarius A* at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy.
• Window on Eurasia reports on polls which suggest that young Belarusians are decidedly apolitical.