[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the dusty spiral of galaxy M81, here.
• Crooked Timber reacts positively to the Astra Taylor short film What Is Democracy?
• D-Brief notes that, in the South Atlantic, one humpback whale population has grown from 440 individuals to 25 thousand, nearly completing its recovery from whaling-era lows.
• Dangerous Minds looks at The Iguanas, first band of Iggy Pop.
• The Dragon’s Tales looks at consideration in South Korea at building an aircraft carrier.
• Todd Schoepflin at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the division of labour within his family.
• Far Outliers looks at 17th century clashes between England and Barbary Pirates.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how antibiotics are getting everywhere, contaminating food chains worldwide.
• Victor Mair at Language Log looks at the evidence not only for an ancient Greek presence in Central Asia, but for these Greeks’ contact with China.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that the attempt by Trump to get Ukraine to spy on his enemies was driven by what Russia and Hungary alleged about corruption in Ukraine.
• The LRB Blog looks at the transnational criminal network of the Hernandez brothers in Honduras, a source of a refugee diaspora.
• Marginal Revolution shares an argument suggesting that marriage is useful for, among other things, encouraging integration between genders.
• Sean Marshall looks at how the death of the Shoppers World in Brampton heralds a new urbanist push in that city.
• At the NYR Daily, Helen Joyce talks of her therapeutic experiences with psychedelic drugs.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the Toronto play The Particulars.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers if inflation came before, or after, the Big Bang.
• John Scalzi at Whatever has a short discussion about Marvel films that concludes they are perfectly valid.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that central Ukraine has emerged as a political force in post-1914 Ukraine.
• Arnold Zwicky considers the Indian pickle.

[AH] Seven #alternatehistory r/imaginarymaps maps: Vinland, Mali, Korea, Poland, Balkans …

• This r/imaginarymaps map traces a slow diffusion of Christianity westwards from a Vinland colony.
• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a transatlantic empire based in Africa, with the late 15th century Mali Empire extending its rule to Brazil and elsewhere.
• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a Joseon Korea that becomes the seat of a transpacific empire.
• What if, this r/imaginarymaps map imagines, instead of turning east to Lithuania Poland turned west towards Czechia?
• What if, this r/imaginarymaps map imagines, the Balkans retained a substantially larger Muslim population?
• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a Greater Denmark, expanding east and south.
• Could Scotland ever have become, as this r/imaginarymaps map imagines, a maritime mercantile power?

[MUSIC] Twelve music links: Beatles, Annie Lennox, Shakespears Sister, Céline Dion …

• There is now a play expanding on the urban legend–is it?–that the Beatles came close to being reunited in a meeting in an Eastern Townships library divided by the Canadian-American border. CTV reports.
• The Annie Lennox-curated exhibit “Now I let You Go …” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art sounds amazing. The New York Times reports.
• This Guardian feature on the reunification, after two and a half decades, of Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit in Shakespears Sister made me very happy.
• Céline Dion seems to be in the middle of an interesting sort of renaissance. Why not a headlining appearance on Carpool Karaoke? VICE reports.
• CTV News profiles the Summerside-born and Montréal-based electropop fiddler Denique, gaining praise for his innovative music and videos.
• Noisey recently reported on an interestingly different early version of the Beyoncé song “Sorry”.
• Dangerous Minds shares footage of a 1977 Bryan Ferry concert in Japan.
• Vice provides readers with an introduction and overview to the best songs of Elton John.
• Vice did readers the service of providing readers with an entry point into the discography of PJ Harvey.
• Le Devoir looks at the phenomenon of K-Pop.
• Josh Terry at Noisey makes the accurate point that the decision of the Chicago White Sox to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Disco Sucks riot, given the racism and homophobia of that movement, is a bad misstep.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Koreans, Italians, Irish, Albino Carreira, #threetorontos

• This 2013 Toronto Guardian article explains how the Korean community in Toronto can trace its origins to early 20th century missionaries from Canada.
• At Spacing, Daniel Panneton writes about the rise of fascism in Italian Toronto and the very different reactions to this ideology’s rise.
• CBC Toronto reports on the popular new app Irish App-roved, aimed at helping new immigrants from Ireland get oriented in Toronto.
• Jacob Lorinc at the Toronto Star tells the story of Albino Carreira, a Portuguese-Canadian construction worker disabled by a construction incident in the 1990s who went on to whimsically decorate his Clinton Street home and his bug-covered van.
• The growing racialization of poverty in Toronto is a huge ongoing concern. The Toronto Star reports.

[AH] Five #alternatehistory maps from r/imaginarymaps: Germany, Britain, Africa, Japan, Iran

• r/imaginarymaps imagines a Germany united along religious lines, Protestant areas falling under Prussia and Catholic ones under Austria.
• Reddit’s imaginarymaps imagines a republican Great Britain. When could republicanism have taken off in the British Isles as a whole?
• Reddit’s imaginarymaps shares a map of a former Portuguese colony of Zambezia, a Lusophone nation stretching from the Atlantic at Namibia east through to Mozambique.
• This r/imaginarymaps map, imagining a Japan (and northeast Asia generally) split into sheres of influence by rival European powers, treaty ports and all, surely describes a worst-case scenario for 19th century Japan. How likely was this?
• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines an Iran that, following a 9/11-style attack by Lebanese terrorists in Moscow, ends up partitioned between Soviet and US-Arab spheres of influence.

[DM] Ten links on migration (#demographics, #demographymatters)

• CBC Kitchener-Waterloo notes how farmers in southwestern Ontario are trying to plan the transfer of their lands to new migrants.
• HuffPost Québec notes how the labour market of Gaspésie is starting to attract workers.
• The Guardian looks at how many New Zealanders are moving away from cities to less expensive and stressed rural areas.
• The murder of an maid from Indonesia in Malaysia is straining relations between the two neighbouring countries. The National Post reports
• Ozy looks how entrepreneurs from China, moving to Africa, are transforming that continent.
• Open Democracy examines the background behind an outbreak of anti-immigrant sentiment in Yakutsk.
• Doug Bock Clark writes at GQ about the underground networks smuggling North Koreans out of their country.
• Eater reports on the early 20th century migration of Punjabis to California that ended up creating a hybrid Punjabi-Mexican cuisine.
• Open Democracy tells the story of a woman who migrated from Thailand to Denmark for a marriage partner. Why is her migration less legitimate than others’?
• The Inter Press Service warns against treating migrants as human commodities.

[DM] Some links: immigration, cities, small towns, French Canada, Eurasia, China, Brexit, music

Another links post is up over at Demography Matters!

• Skepticism about immigration in many traditional receiving countries appeared. Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative took issue with the argument of Andray Domise after an EKOS poll, that Canadians would not know much about the nature of migration flows. The Conversation observed how the rise of Vox in Spain means that country’s language on immigration is set to change towards greater skepticism. Elsewhere, the SCMP called on South Korea, facing pronounced population aging and workforce shrinkages, to become more open to immigrants and minorities.
• Cities facing challenges were a recurring theme. This Irish Examiner article, part of a series, considers how the Republic of Ireland’s second city of Cork can best break free from the dominance of Dublin to develop its own potential. Also on Ireland, the NYR Daily looked at how Brexit and a hardened border will hit the Northern Ireland city of Derry, with its Catholic majority and its location neighbouring the Republic. CityLab reported on black migration patterns in different American cities, noting gains in the South, is fascinating. As for the threat of Donald Trump to send undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities in the United States has widely noted., at least one observer noted that sending undocumented immigrants to cities where they could connect with fellow diasporids and build secure lives might actually be a good solution.
• Declining rural settlements featured, too. The Guardian reported from the Castilian town of Sayatón, a disappearing town that has become a symbol of depopulating rural Spain. Global News, similarly, noted that the loss by the small Nova Scotia community of Blacks Harbour of its only grocery store presaged perhaps a future of decline. VICE, meanwhile, reported on the very relevant story about how resettled refugees helped revive the Italian town of Sutera, on the island of Sicily. (The Guardian, to its credit, mentioned how immigration played a role in keeping up numbers in Sayatón, though the second generation did not stay.)
• The position of Francophone minorities in Canada, meanwhile, also popped up at me.
• This TVO article about the forces facing the École secondaire Confédération in the southern Ontario city of Welland is a fascinating study of minority dynamics. A brief article touches on efforts in the Franco-Manitoban community of Winnipeg to provide temporary shelter for new Francophone immigrants. CBC reported, meanwhile, that Francophones in New Brunswick continue to face pressure, with their numbers despite overall population growth and with Francophones being much more likely to be bilingual than Anglophones. This last fact is a particularly notable issue inasmuch as New Brunswick’s Francophones constitute the second-largest Francophone community outside of Québec, and have traditionally been more resistant to language shift and assimilation than the more numerous Franco-Ontarians.
• The Eurasia-focused links blog Window on Eurasia pointed to some issues. It considered if the new Russian policy of handing out passports to residents of the Donbas republics is related to a policy of trying to bolster the population of Russia, whether fictively or actually. (I’m skeptical there will be much change, myself: There has already been quite a lot of emigration from the Donbas republics to various destinations, and I suspect that more would see the sort of wholesale migration of entire families, even communities, that would add to Russian numbers but not necessarily alter population pyramids.) Migration within Russia was also touched upon, whether on in an attempt to explain the sharp drop in the ethnic Russian population of Tuva in the 1990s or in the argument of one Muslim community leader in the northern boomtown of Norilsk that a quarter of that city’s population is of Muslim background.
• Eurasian concerns also featured. The Russian Demographics Blog observed, correctly, that one reason why Ukrainians are more prone to emigration to Europe and points beyond than Russians is that Ukraine has long been included, in whole or in part, in various European states. As well, Marginal Revolution linked to a paper that examines the positions of Jews in the economies of eastern Europe as a “rural service minority”, and observed the substantial demographic shifts occurring in Kazakhstan since independence, with Kazakh majorities appearing throughout the country.
• JSTOR Daily considered if, between the drop in fertility that developing China was likely to undergo anyway and the continuing resentments of the Chinese, the one-child policy was worth it. I’m inclined to say no, based not least on the evidence of the rapid fall in East Asian fertility outside of China.
• What will Britons living in the EU-27 do, faced with Brexit? Bloomberg noted the challenge of British immigrant workers in Luxembourg faced with Brexit, as Politico Europe did their counterparts living in Brussels.
• Finally, at the Inter Press Service, A.D. Mackenzie wrote about an interesting exhibit at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris on the contributions made by immigrants to popular music in Britain and France from the 1960s to the 1980s.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes how the warp in space-time made by the black hole in V404 Cygni has been detected.
• The Crux reports on the discovery of the remains of a chicha brewery in pre-Columbian Peru.
• D-Brief notes a new model for the creation of the Moon by impact with primordial Earth that would explain oddities with the Earth still being molten, having a magma ocean.
• Bruce Dorminey shares the idea that extraterrestrial civilizations might share messages with posterity through DNA encoded in bacteria set adrift in space.
• The Dragon’s Tales reports on progress in drones and UAVs made worldwide.
• Gizmodo notes some of the privacy issues involved with Alexa.
• JSTOR Daily explains how some non-mammals, including birds and fish, nurse their young.
• Language Hat reports on the latest studies in the ancient linguistic history of East Asia, with suggestions that Old Japanese has connections to the languages of the early Korean states of Silla and Paekche but not to that of Koguryo.
• Language Log considers the issues involved with the digitization of specialized dictionaries.
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money remembers the start of the Spanish Civil War.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points towards his recent interview with Margaret Atwood.
• The NYR Daily reports on a remarkable new play, Heidi Schreck’s What The Constitution Means To Me.
• Towleroad reports on what Hunter Kelly, one of the men who operatives tried to recruit to spread slander against Pete Buttigieg, has to say about the affair.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that a Russian annexation of Belarus would not be an easy affair.
• Arnold Zwicky reports on the latest signs of language change, this time in the New Yorker.

[NEWS] Five sci-tech links: Pojang, LIGO, Mars, extraterrestrial life, DM Tauri

• The 2017 Pojang earthquake in South Korea was caused by an experimental geothermal power plant, water injected into the ground creating new instabilities. VICE reports.
• Universe Today notes that, newly upgraded, LIGO will begin searching for gravitational waves anew on 1 April.
• Universe Today examines the factors which making landing large masses on Mars so technically challenging.
• Universe Today considers which sorts of circumstellar habitable zone are the best to search for seekers of extraterrestrial life.
• Motherboard notes astronomers’ study of the relatively Sun-like pre-main sequence star of DM Tauri, which may now be forming a solar system like our own.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: GTA, Montréal, Portland, Berlin, Seoul

• Sean Marshall at TVO notes the limited, if real, potential of a new ride-sharing app to bridge the transit gap between Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph, and Hamilton in the west of the Golden Horseshoe.
• CBC Montreal notes delays in the renovation of the Biodôme.
• CityLab notes that in Portland, Maine, volunteering can help one get access to affordable housing, literally.
• CityLab notes how the government of Berlin is set to intervene directly in the housing market to ensure affordability.
• Guardian Cities looks at how Seoul is set to redevelop the districts once at the heart of the South Korean economic miracle.