[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Architectuul profiles architectural photographer Lorenzo Zandri, here.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes a new study suggesting red dwarf stars, by far the most common stars in the universe, have plenty of planets.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly shares 11 tips for interviewers, reminding me of what I did for anthropology fieldwork.
• Centauri Dreams notes how water ice ejected from Enceladus makes the inner moons of Saturn brilliant.
• The Crux looks at the increasingly complicated question of when the first humans reached North America.
• D-Brief notes a new discovery suggesting the hearts of humans, unlike the hearts of other closely related primates, evolved to require endurance activities to remain healthy.
• Dangerous Minds shares with its readers the overlooked 1969 satire Putney Swope.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that the WFIRST infrared telescope has passed its first design review.
• Gizmodo notes how drought in Spain has revealed the megalithic Dolmen of Guadalperal for the first time in six decades.
• io9 looks at the amazing Jonathan Hickman run on the X-Men so far, one that has established the mutants as eye-catching and deeply alien.
• Joe. My. God. notes that the Pentagon has admitted that 2017 UFO videos do, in fact, depict some unidentified objects in the air.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the origin of the equestrian horseback statue in ancient Rome.
• Language Log shares a bilingual English/German pun from Berlin.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money reflects on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson at Jefferson’s grave.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution looks at a new book arguing, contra Pinker perhaps, that the modern era is one of heightened violence.
• The New APPS Blog seeks to reconcile the philosophy of Hobbes with that of Foucault on biopower.
• Strange Company shares news clippings from 1970s Ohio about a pesky UFO.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why the idea of shooting garbage from Earth into the sun does not work.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps explains the appearance of Brasilia on a 1920s German map: It turns out the capital was nearly realized then.
• Towleroad notes that Pete Buttigieg has taken to avoiding reading LGBTQ media because he dislikes their criticism of his gayness.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at diners and changing menus and slavery.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Anthropology.net reports on the discovery of footprints of a Neanderthal band in Le Rozel, Normandy, revealing much about that group’s social structure.
• Bad Astronomer’s Phil Plait explains why standing at the foot of a cliff on Mars during local spring can be dangerous.
• Centauri Dreams shares a suggestion that the lakes of Titan might be product of subterranean explosions.
• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber considers how, and when, anger should be considered and legitimated in discussions of politics.
• The Crux looks at the cement mixed successfully in microgravity on the ISS, as a construction material of the future.
• D-Brief looks at what steps space agencies are considering to avoid causing harm to extraterrestrial life.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes new evidence that the Anthropocene, properly understood, actually began four thousand years ago.
• Jonathan Wynn writes at the Everyday Sociology Blog about how many American universities have become as much lifestyle centres as educational communities.
• Far Outliers reports on how, in the 13th century, the cultural differences of Wales from the English–including the Welsh tradition of partible inheritance–caused great instability.
• This io9 interview with the creators of the brilliant series The Wicked and the Divine is a must-read.
• JSTOR Daily looks at a paper considering how teachers of German should engage with the concept of Oktoberfest.
• Language Hat looks at a new study examining the idea of different languages being more efficient than others. (They are not, it turns out.)
• Language Log looks at the history of translating classics of Chinese literature into Manchu and Mongolian.
• Erik Loomis considers the problems the collapse of local journalism now will cause for later historians trying to do research in the foreseeable future.
• Marginal Revolution reports on research suggesting that markets do not corrupt human morality.
• Neuroskeptic looks in more detail at the interesting, and disturbing, organized patterns emitted by organoids built using human brain cells.
• Stephen Baker at The Numerati writes, with photos, about what he saw in China while doing book research. (Shenzhen looks cool.)
• The NYR Daily notes the import of the working trip of Susan Sontag to Sarajevo in 1993, while that city was under siege.
• Robert Picardo at the Planetary Society Blog shares a vintage letter from Roddenberry encouraging Star Trek fans to engage with the Society.
• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money looks at the economy of Argentina in a pre-election panic.
• Strange Company looks at the life of Molly Morgan, a British convict who prospered in her exile to Australia.
• Window on Eurasia notes that, in 1939, many Soviet citizens recognized the import of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; they knew their empire would expand.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at the treatment of cavemen, as subjects and providers of education, in pop culture.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the many galaxies in the night sky caught mid-collision.
• Centauri Dreams reports on the plan of China to send a probe to explore near-Earth co-orbital asteroid 2016 HO3 and comet 133P.
• Gizmodo reports, with photos, on the progress of the Chang’e 4 and the Yutu 2 rover, on the far side of the Moon.
• Joe. My. God. notes that Bill de Blasio hopes to ban new steel-and-glass skyscrapers in New York City, part of his plan to make the metropolis carbon-neutral.
• JSTOR Daily notes a critique of the BBC documentary Planet Earth, arguing the series was less concerned with representing the environment and more with displaying HD television technology.
• Language Hat notes the oddities of the name of St. Marx Cemetery in Vienna. How did “Mark” get so amusingly changed?
• Language Log looks at how terms for horse-riding might be shared among Indo-European languages and in ancient Chinese.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the grounds for the workers of New York’s Tenement Museum to unionize.
• The NYR Daily notes the efforts of Barnard College Ancient Drama, at Columbia University, to revive Greek drama in its full with music and dance, starting with a Euripedes performance.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel shares some iconic images of the Earth from space for Earth Day.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes evidence that white dwarf Gaia J1738–0826 is eating its planets.
• Crux takes a look at the stars closely orbiting Sagittarius A* at the heart of the galaxy like relativity-proving S2.
• D-Brief notes a recent proposal for an unmanned probe to Uranus and Neptune.
• Dangerous Minds shows the eerily decomposing sculptures of Yuichi Ikehata.
• Bruce Dorminey explores the provocative idea of era in the early Moon where it was briefly habitable.
• Far Outliers explores the reasons why George Orwell has become so popular lately.
• Hornet Stories notes that Tom Daley has recently posed nude for a painting by the celebrated David Hockney.
• JSTOR Daily explores the reality behind the imminent arrival of the laser gun into militaries worldwide.
• Language Hat notes that the Austrian state of Vorarlberg sponsors an interesting contest, of performances of songs–including pop songs–in local dialect.
• The LRB Blog notes the severity of the forest fires in Greece, aggravated by climate change, systematic corruption, and recent austerity.
• The Planetary Society Blog shares photos of asteroid Ryugu taken by the Hayabusa2 probe.
• Roads and Kingdoms reports on a T-bone steak heavy breakfast lasting twenty hours in Bilbao.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps notes a joke political party in Hungary that wants to make the country smaller.
• Window on Eurasia notes how the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Moscow is caught between its Ukrainian goals and its Russian links.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Architectuul considers the humanizing potential of brutalism in the context of a London filled with impersonal skyscrapers.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the ways the habitable-zone super-Earths of K2-18 reveal our solar system to be exceptional.
• Centauri Dreams notes evidence for active plate tectonics in the ice crust of Europa, suggesting an ocean being replenished with nutrients and possibly suitable for life.
• D-Brief notes the sourcing of the iron in the artifacts of the Bronze Act in meteorites.
• Daily JSTOR reports on how Hollywood coped during the Red Scare of the 1950s.
• Dangerous Minds notes the exciting discovery of tapes recording Devo jamming with David Bowie and Brian Eno.
• Cody Delistraty considers if the restitution of artworks looted from once-colonized territories might not be a cheap substitute for deeper changes.
• Language Hat shares a student essay comparing, during the First World War, the United States’ campaign against German and the German campaign against French.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money argues against a British nostalgia for monarchy and empire that overlooks the real injustices perpetrated at Britain’s imperial peak.
• Lingua Franca notes the remarkable power of the #metoo movement.
• The LRB Blog notes the exceptional complexity of the issue of Jerusalem, especially after Trump’s actions.
• The Map Room Blog shares links to a variety of maps of the Halifax Explosion and its effects.
• The NYR Daily looks at some of the legacies of the Salvadoran civil war.
• Peter Watts makes an argument in favour of the dystopia in contemporary science fiction.
• The Planetary Society Blog’s Emily Lakdawalla reports that South Korea is planning its first Moon expedition for 2020.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer notes that Argentina, at its peak, offered as good or even better chances for social mobility for immigrants than the United States.
• Peter Rukavina shares a photograph showing the electronic system used by defunct Charlottetown nightclub Myron’s for dispensing drinks.
• Towleroad reports on one consequence of Australia’s acceptance of gay marriage: Will Calvin Harris remix the Spice Girls song “2 Become 1”, as he promised?
• Window on Eurasia shares a list of eight reasons explaining why Finland was unique in the former Russian Empire in maintaining its independence from Moscow.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams notes the latest on fast radio burst FRB 121102.
• D-Brief makes a good case for the human diet to expand to include insects. I’d like to try an insect burger myself.
• Dangerous Minds shares some wonderful photos of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis.
• The Dragon’s Gaze links to a paper suggesting up to 1% of stars could capture, at least temporarily, rogue planets.
• Hornet Stories–the new name for Unicorn Booty–notes the latest shake-up in German-language LGBTQ media.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money shares a thoughtful essay by Christa Blackmon, drawing from her experiences as a survivor of Hurricane Andrew. How do you best take care of child survivors?
• The Map Room Blog links to a fascinating-sounding book, Alastair Bonnett’s new Beyond the Map.
• The NYR Daily reviews a documentary about the Venerable W, a Buddhist monk in Burma who has led anti-Muslim violence.
• The Planetary Society Blog considers the way forward for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.
• Roads and Kingdoms reports on the search for Texas barbecue in Mexico City.

[URBAN NOTE] “One hundred years after disappearing, Berlin (Ontario) shows signs of revival”

In last Saturday’s The Globe and Mail, John Allemang wrote about the death of Canada’s old German Berlin in the First World War, its replacement by Kitchener, and both the rebirth of Berlin and the story’s meaning in a multicultural Canada.

One hundred years ago, a thriving Canadian city disappeared from the map.

As of Sept. 1, 1916, the southwestern Ontario community of Berlin ceased to be. On a grim day in the middle of a war fought to assert Canada’s best values, bullies and xenophobes won a battle for control of our national identity. A city of 19,000 people rooted in its century-old Germanic heritage was forced to deny its own existence, succumbing to the acts of intimidation and accusations of disloyalty perpetrated by small-minded patriots who resisted the truth that Canada could be other than anglo.

The historical reality of Berlin was wiped away from memory, and the city we call Kitchener came into being. This wasn’t just a simple, innocent adjustment of municipal nomenclature like York turning into Toronto or Bytown becoming Ottawa. It was a contrived and calculated switch that served the propaganda needs of Canada’s imperialist leaders: A subversive reference to the capital of the hated Hun could be annihilated from the pristine Ontario landscape and replaced with a tribute to Britain’s recently deceased Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener.

A century later, when it is not all that clear that Canadians have much appetite for remembering the finer details of the so-called Great War, a name-change on an Ontario map may seem like little more than a colonial-era fait accompli. Internecine hatred on the home front just doesn’t fit the well-meaning version of Canada’s war that history’s image-builders have manufactured – all those belated feel-good stories of a courageous young nation coming of age and forging its independence through the sweat and sacrifice of Vimy.

But in a country of immigrants and refugees where arguments about loyalty are noisier and more venomous than ever, it’s worth remembering that these fights over national identity have been fought before – and lost by those who wrongly believed their Canada to be an open and tolerant and welcoming place.

That’s certainly what Canada’s Berlin was meant to be in the beginning. Long before this country came into official existence, the Berlin area was a haven for immigrants escaping the ancient enmities and disruptive compulsions of narrow-minded nationalism. The earliest settlers in the late 1700s were German-speaking Swiss Mennonites, a pacifist and much-persecuted Christian group who moved north from Pennsylvania seeking cheaper farmland, religious tolerance under the generally hands-off British rulers and peaceful relief from the intrusive government control they’d experienced in the wake of the American Revolution.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Anthropology notes the latest archeological findings suggesting that Easter Island was not destroyed by war.
• Beyond the Beyond’s Bruce Sterling notes that Wired will now no longer be allowing people with ad blockers to access the site.
• The Dragon’s Gaze notes the likely existence of a substantial gas giant in the disk of TW Hydrae and describes a Neptune-type world found through microlensing.
• The Dragon’s Gaze links to a paper suggesting, on the basis of the geology of Mars, that the early atmosphere was dominated by carbon dioxide with little oxygen.
• Joe. My. God. links to the audio track of the new Pet Shop Boys single, “The Pop Kids”.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes opposition to the TPP in Indonesia.
• Language Log notes a poster from the Second World War era United States propagandizing against the use of German, Italian, and Japanese.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw contrasts Australia’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis with Canada’s.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer notes that Mexico’s PEMEX may be in bad shape.
• Spacing Toronto shares John Lorinc’s skeptical essay about transit in Toronto. Grand schemes are great, but what about implementation?
• Strange Maps maps Brexit, in various dimensions.
• Torontoist suggests this city can learn from Detroit when it comes to repurposing vacant lots.
• Window on Eurasia notes the growth of separate Muslim and Christian neighbourhoods in many cities.

[LINK] On crowdsourcing a dialect map of Swiss German

The Map Room Blog linked to a paper, “Crowdsourcing Language Change with Smartphone Applications”.

Crowdsourcing linguistic phenomena with smartphone applications is relatively new. In linguistics, apps have predominantly been developed to create pronunciation dictionaries, to train acoustic models, and to archive endangered languages. This paper presents the first account of how apps can be used to collect data suitable for documenting language change: we created an app, Dialäkt Äpp (DÄ), which predicts users’ dialects. For 16 linguistic variables, users select a dialectal variant from a drop-down menu. DÄ then geographically locates the user’s dialect by suggesting a list of communes where dialect variants most similar to their choices are used. Underlying this prediction are 16 maps from the historical Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland, which documents the linguistic situation around 1950. Where users disagree with the prediction, they can indicate what they consider to be their dialect’s location. With this information, the 16 variables can be assessed for language change. Thanks to the playfulness of its functionality, DÄ has reached many users; our linguistic analyses are based on data from nearly 60,000 speakers. Results reveal a relative stability for phonetic variables, while lexical and morphological variables seem more prone to change. Crowdsourcing large amounts of dialect data with smartphone apps has the potential to complement existing data collection techniques and to provide evidence that traditional methods cannot, with normal resources, hope to gather. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize a range of methodological caveats, including sparse knowledge of users’ linguistic backgrounds (users only indicate age, sex) and users’ self-declaration of their dialect. These are discussed and evaluated in detail here. Findings remain intriguing nevertheless: as a means of quality control, we report that traditional dialectological methods have revealed trends similar to those found by the app. This underlines the validity of the crowdsourcing method. We are presently extending DÄ architecture to other languages.

The paper is fun!

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Anthropology.net notes the study of ice man Otzi’s gut flora.
• blogTO shares photos of different Toronto intersections a century ago.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly considers the virtues of rest.
• Centauri Dreams considers how we date stars.
• The Dragon’s Gaze considers the fates of exoplanets in untable circumbinary orbits.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes China’s construction of a second, indigenous, aircraft carrier.
• Geocurrents maps real estate prices in California.
• Kieran Healy notes an odd checkerboard of land ownership in Nevada.
• Languages of the World notes a study suggesting that one never truly completely forgets one’s first language.
• Language Log notes the snark directed at the Oregon militiamen.
• The Map Room maps thawing in the global Arctic.
• Marginal Revolution suggests one way in which religion is good for the poor.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes an exciting proposal for a Europa lander.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer does not think the 2016 American presidential election will necessarily change much, not compared to 2012.
• Peter Rukavina shares the results of his family’s use of a water metre.
• The Russian Demographics Blog maps the distribution of Germans in Soviet Ukraine circa 1926.
• Towleroad looks at syphilis in the male gay/bi community.
• Window on Eurasia notes the alienation of Donbas, looks at the decline of Russia-linked churches in Ukraine and a proposal to shift the date of Christmas, and wonders about Tatarstan.