[BLOG] Five Window on Eurasia links

• Window on Eurasia notes the post-Soviet collapse of the numbers of learners of the Russian language, here.
• Window on Eurasia reports the claim of a Russian politician that in 1991, securing the nuclear arsenal of Ukraine was a bigger priority than trying for borders changes, here.
• Window on Eurasia notes how Belarus cannot protect itself from Russia, here.
• Window on Eurasia explains why the Soviet Union let the Armenians and Georgians keep their alphabets, here.
• Window on Eurasia explains how Russia’s naval and marine power is not doing well, here.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Hamilton, Halifax, London, Helsinki, Rustavi

• Some new high-rise housing developments in Hamilton are lacking in permits. Global News reports.
• Halifax is currently undergoing public consultations to see what is to be done with a statue of controversial British governor Cornwallis. Global News reports.
• Guardian Cities looks at how the ring-tailed parakeet has come to thrive in its adopted home of London.
• Guardian Cities reports on how the city of Helsinki has solved its problem with homelessness by automatically giving people in need housing.
• Open Democracy looks at the Georgian city of Rustavi, during the Soviet era dependent on a single industry like many others and left to cope with the collapse of this economy in the post-Soviet era.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Centauri Dreams notes the discovery of rocky debris indicative of destroyed planets in orbit of the white dwarf SDSS J122859.93+104032.9, 400 light-years away.
• JSTOR Daily shows how the Columbine massacre led to a resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US.
• Language Log notes an example of digraphia, two scripts, in use in Taiwan.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money identifies the presidential run of Howard Schultz in ways unflattering to him yet accurate.
• The LRB Blog takes a look at the current, unsettling, stage of artificial intelligence research.
• At the NYR Daily, Boyd Tonkin writes about an exhibition of the works of Van Gogh at the Tate Britain highlighting his ties with England and with his Europeanness.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel reports on the ultimate fate of the Earth, a cinder orbiting a black dwarf.
• Strange Company tells the strange, sad story of 19th century California writer Yda Hillis Addis.
• At Vintage Space, Amy Shira Teitel explains why the Apollo missions made use of a dangerous pure-oxygen environment.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, 41 years ago, protests in Georgia forced the Soviet Union to let the Georgian republic keep Georgian as its official language.
• Arnold Zwicky starts with peeps and goes on to look at dragons.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, New York City, Atlanta, Barcelona, Copenhagen

• Montréal may yet get a new park to commemorate victims of the Irish famine of the 1840s. CTV reports.
• CityLab reports on the new spectacular Hudson Yards development in Manhattan.
• The nightclubs of Atlanta in the 1990s played a critical role in that decade’s hip-hop. VICE reports.
• CityLab reports that, dealing with a housing crisis, city authorities in Barcelona have taken to finding the owners of empty buildings.
• Guardian Cities reports on how civic authorities in Copenhagen hope to create an offshore archipelago, a sort of floating Silicon Valley.

[NEWS] Five space links: Mars, Titan, Kepler-107, Eta Carinae, SDSS J1206+4332

• Smithsonian Magazine notes that the country of Georgia has embarked on research to try to find a grape vine capable of surviving and producing wine in the Martian environment.
• The dense nitrogen-methane atmosphere of Titan may be a process of the hot core’s impact on Titan’s organic compounds. Science News reports.
• Space notes how the odd densities of two of the planets in the Kepler-107 system may indicate some massive impact on the past.
• Universe Today notes that a dust cloud obscuring the brilliant Eta Carinae is moving away from our field of view, making Eta Carinae brighter and easier to study.
• Universe Today notes that double quasars like SDSS J1206+4332 can help reveal the speed of the expansion of the universe.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Queens, Edmonton, San Francisco, Manizales, Tbilisi

• VICE considers how mass transit issues in Queens will be changed by the Amazon HQ2 relocation there.
• The Edmonton alternate paper Vue Weekly will be closing down this month, Global News reports.
• The ongoing disastrous fires in California have left San Francisco with the worst recorded air quality of any city in the world, Global News reports.
• Guardian Cities looks at how the disaster-prone city of Manizales, in Colombia, prepares for catastrophes.
• Guardian Cities looks at how, after years of unregulated construction and growth, the Georgian capital of Tbilisi is trying to prepare for smarter growth.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city notes: Churchill, New York City, Stockbridge, Ponce, Ramallah

• MacLean’s looks at the long and sorry neglect of the Manitoba Arctic port of Churchill in its time of need by the Canadian federal government.
• Wired looks at the “pink tax” in New York City, the extra costs imposed on women who need to take private transit in order to avoid harassment in public spaces.
• Eater profiles the efforts of white neighborhoods in the Georgia city of Stockbridge to secede, something ostensibly presented as a desire to attract Cheesecake Factory and other restaurants to these areas.
• CityLab reports on a sensitive effort to restore an art deco building in the Puerto Rican city of Ponce.
• The Palestinian city of Ramallah, Guardian Cities reports, has its architectural heritage threatened by an unregulated construction boom.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, Atlanta, Greenville, Sutera, Hong Kong

• Québec premier François Legault might well be convinced to support the Pink Line subway route favoured by Montréal mayor Valérie Plante. Global News reports.
• Guardian Cities reports on the popularity of the new soccer team of Atlanta in this perhaps unlikely locale.
• The North Carolina city of Greenville is trying to work towards settling its racist past with a new park, CityLab reports.
• Lorenzo Tondo at The Guardian reports on how new immigrants might save his father’s native village of Sutera in Sicily, but only if they are allowed to.
• Bloomberg View notes that a bridge alone will not be enough to bind Hong Kong to the emergent Pearl River megalopolis.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Brampton, Milton and Markham, New York City, Atlanta, London, Lisbon

• The Ontario government’s cancellation of new post-secondary campuses years in the planning for booming Brampton, Milton, and Markham hurts these centres needlessly. Global News reports.
• Guardian Cities notes how the scale of voter repression in Georgia may not be enough to prevent the election of Stacey Abrams, given the scale of black migration to Atlanta.
• Feargus O’Sullivan at CityLab takes a look at a new report noting both the importance of venues for experimental music in New York City (and other cities) and these venues’ vulnerability to gentrification.
• A long-abandoned street of Victorian London has been remade, CityLab reports, into a component of London Bridge Station.
• CityLab reports on the beautiful, but dangerous, tiled sidewalks of Lisbon. Is it worth keeping them?

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes that far-orbiting body 2015 TC387 offers more indirect evidence for Planet Nine, as does D-Brief.
• Centauri Dreams notes that data from the Gaia astrometrics satellite finds traces of past collisions between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy.
• The Crux takes a look at the long history of human observation of the Crab Nebula.
• Sujata Gupta at JSTOR Daily writes about the struggle of modern agriculture with the pig, balancing off concerns for animal welfare with productivity.
• Language Hat shares a defensive of an apparently legendarily awful novel, Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling.
• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle, takes a look at the controversy over the name of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, going up to the recent referendum on North Macedonia.
• The LRB Blog reports on the high rate of fatal car accidents in the unrecognized republic of Abkhazia.
• Reddit’s mapporn shares an interesting effort to try to determine the boundaries between different regions of Europe, stacking maps from different sources on top of each other.
• Justin Petrone at North! writes about how the northern wilderness of Estonia sits uncomfortably with his Mediterranean Catholic background.
• Peter Watts reports from a book fair he recently attended in Lviv, in the west of Ukraine.
• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog notes the new effort being put in by NASA into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
• Roads and Kingdoms reports on some beer in a very obscure bar in Shanghai.
• Drew Rowsome reports on the performance artist Lukas Avendano, staging a performance in Toronto inspired by the Zapotech concept of the muxe gender.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps examines the ocean-centric Spielhaus map projection that has recently gone viral.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers the question of whether or not the Big Rip could lead to another Big Bang.
• Window on Eurasia notes the harm that global warming will inflict on the infrastructures of northern Siberia.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell considers the ecological fallacy in connection with electoral politics. Sometimes there really are not niches for new groups.
• Arnold Zwicky takes part in the #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob meme, this time looking at images of linguists.