[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Architectuul looks at the history of brutalism in late 20th century Turkey.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the evidence for the Milky Way Galaxy having seen a great period of starburst two billion years ago, and notes how crowded the Milky Way Galaxy is in the direction of Sagittarius.
• Centauri Dreams considers if astrometry might start to become useful as a method for detecting planets, and considers what the New Horizons data, to Pluto and to Ultima Thule, will be known for.
• Belle Waring at Crooked Timber considers if talk of forgiveness is, among other things, sound.
• D-Brief considers the possibility that the differing natures of the faces of the Moon can be explained by an ancient dwarf planet impact, and shares images of dust-ringed galaxy NGC 4485.
• Dead Things notes the discovery of fossil fungi one billion years old in Nunavut.
• Far Outliers looks at how, over 1990, Russia became increasingly independent from the Soviet Union, and looks at the final day in office of Gorbachev.
• Gizmodo notes the discovery of literally frozen oceans of water beneath the north polar region of Mars, and looks at an unusual supernova, J005311 ten thousand light-years away in Cassiopeia, product of a collision between two white dwarfs.
• JSTOR Daily notes how the colour of navy blue is a direct consequence of slavery and militarism, and observes the historical influence, or lack thereof, of Chinese peasant agriculture on organic farming in the US.
• Language Log considers a Chinese-language text from San Francisco combining elements of Mandarin and Cantonese.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the terrible environmental consequences of the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia, and Shakezula at Lawyers, Guns and Money takes a look at how, and perhaps why, Sam Harris identifies milkshake-throwing at far-right people as a form of “mock assassination”.
• The Map Room Blog shares a personal take on mapmaking on the Moon during the Apollo era.
• Marginal Revolution observes a paper suggesting members of the Chinese communist party are more liberal than the general Chinese population. The blog also notes how Soviet quotas led to a senseless and useless mass slaughter of whales.
• Russell Darnley writes about the complex and tense relationship between Indonesia and Australia, each with their own preoccupations.
• Martin Filler writes at the NYR Daily about I.M. Pei as an architect specializing in an “establishment modernism”. The site also takes a look at Orientalism, as a phenomenon, as it exists in the post-9/11 era.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw reflects on the meaning of Australia’s New England.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes how Hayabusa 2 is having problems recovering a marker from asteroid Ryugu.
• Peter Rukavina reports on an outstanding Jane Siberry concert on the Island.
• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a map of homophobia in Europe.
• The Signal looks at how the Library of Congress makes use of wikidata.
• The Speed River Journal’s Van Waffle reports, with photos, from his latest walks this spring.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers what the Earth looked like when hominids emerged, and explains how amateur astronomers can capture remarkable images.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shares a controversial map depicting the shift away from CNN towards Fox News across the United States.
• Daniel Little at Understanding Society examines the Boeing 737 MAX disaster as an organizational failure.
• Window on Eurasia looks why Turkey is backing away from supporting the Circassians, and suggests that the use of the Russian Orthodox Church by the Russian state as a tool of its rule might hurt the church badly.
• Arnold Zwicky takes apart, linguistically and otherwise, a comic playing on the trope of Lassie warning about something happening to Timmy. He also
  reports on a far-removed branch of the Zwicky family hailing from Belarus, as the Tsvikis.

[NEWS] Five sci-tech links: Precambrian fossils, CO2 and trees, mountains, Uranus and Neptune, Mars

• Have fossils of the movements of ancient animals 2.1 billion years ago been found? CBC reports.
• Increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, it turns out, will not accelerate tree growth. CBC reports.
• Motherboard reports that vast “mountains” may exist, hidden deep inside the molten interior of the Earth.
• Universe Today reports on Hubble observations of the atmospheres of outer-system ice giants Uranus and Neptune.
• Universe Today reports on the startling assertion of Elon Musk that, in the foreseeable future, a round-trip ticket to Mars might cost only $US 100 thousand.

[PHOTO] Three photos of dinosaur fossils at the AMNH (@amnh)

My interest in dinosaurs is a late-developing one. I don’t remember being particularly caught up in dinosaurs when I was younger–I read about them, yes, but I read about everything. It’s my interest in birds, I think, those dinosaurs which have made it to the contemporary world, that have got me interested in their ancestors.

[ISL] “Canada’s 1st dimetrodon solves P.E.I. fossil mystery”

CBC News’ Emily Chung reports on how, after a century and a half, what is by far the most prominent fossil found on Prince Edward Island has finally been identified.

A fossil dug up in P.E.I. in 1854 has finally been identified.

The fossil turns out to be that of a dimetrodon — the first and only one ever found in Canada, reported a team of Canadian scientists this week in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

Dimetrodons are well-known huge, ancient reptiles related to modern mammals that had giant spiny “sails” on their backs. They were top predators that stalked and ate giant salamanders in the steamy, swampy forests of the early Permian period, around 290 million years ago, before the age of dinosaurs. Their fossils have previously been found in Germany and the United States.

The P.E.I. fossil — part of an upper jaw, including several sharp, curved teeth — was discovered by a farmer as he was digging a well in the French River district south of Cape Tryon, near the island’s north coast, 166 years ago.

The farmer sold it to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia so it could be studied by Joseph Leidy, one of the only paleontologists studying animal fossils in North America at the time. Leidy thought the fossil was the lower jaw of a dinosaur and named the species Bathygnathus borealis. (Bathygnathus means “deep jaw” and borealis means “of the north.”)

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster notes the theories that planets orbiting younger stars, on account of their greater abundances of heavy elements, will be warmer than older planets like Earth, extending habitable zones deeper into planetary systems than previously believed.
• Daniel Drezner is unimpressed by American skills at empire-building; even the surfeit of Americans involved in the reconstruction of Kosovo arguably plays to the Kosovars’ benefit more than to the United States.
• Will Baird at The Dragon’s Tale notes that a recent Australian study of fossils of multicellular fossils from more than a half-billion years ago, the Ediacaran age, aren’t ancestral to modern land-dwellers.
• The Global Sociology Blog notes the ways in which privilege can couch itself as neutrality, i.e. heterosexuality as normal and queerness as not.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money broke for me the news that the Syrian government is using Scud missiles against rebels, inaccurate though they may be. Is this a sign of desperation?
• Marginal Revolution notes that educated East Asian women tend not to marry, perhaps reflecting the choice forced on them between careers and traditional families.
• At Open the Future, Jamais Cascio considers the ethical questions connected with sexbots.
• The Population Reference Blog notes the changing American population: aging, slower-growing, more diverse.
• Torontoist reports on a forum in Toronto on the need to repair high-rise apartment towers.
• The Volokh Conspiracy shares the old argument that the commercial exploitation of resources in space requires private property rights, first.
• Window on Eurasia notes that at least economically, China is replacing Russia as a partner for post-Soviet Central Asia.