[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomy notes a new detailed study suggesting that asteroid Hygeia is round. Does this mean it is a dwarf planet?
• The Buzz notes that the Toronto Public Library has a free booklet on the birds of Toronto available at its branches.
• Crooked Timber looks forward to a future, thanks to Trump, without the World Trade Organization.
• D-Brief notes how the kelp forests off California were hurt by unseasonal heat and disease.
• Bruce Dorminey notes an impending collision of supergalactic clusters.
• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at how judgement can complicate collective action.
• Language Hat looks at the different definitions of the word “mobile”.

Language Log looks at the deep influence of the Persian language upon Marathi.

Marathi and Persian

• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how, if anything, climate scientists make conservative claims about their predictions.
• Marginal Revolution wonders if planned power outages are a good way to deal with the threat of wildfires in California.
• The NYR Daily looks at the ethnic cleansing being enabled by Turkey in Kurdish Syria.
• Corey S. Powell at Out There interviews archeologist Arthur Lin about his use of space-based technologies to discovery traces of the past.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer looks at the staggering inequality in Chile, driver of the recent protests.
• At Roads and Kingdoms, Anthony Elghossain reports from the scene of the mass protests in Lebanon.
• Drew Rowsome tells how his balcony garden fared this year.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at stellar generations in the universe. (Our sun is a third-generation star.)
• Strange Company looks at the murder of a girl five years old in Indiana in 1898. Was the neighbor boy twelve years old accused of the crime the culprit?
• Denis Colombi at Une heure de peine takes a look at social mobility in France.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little considers economic historians and their study of capitalism.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the pro-Russian policies of the Moldova enclave of Gagauzia, and draws recommendations for Ukraine re: the Donbas.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes a study suggesting the Milky Way Galaxy took many of its current satellite galaxies from another, smaller one.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly talks of the importance of having dreams.
• Centauri Dreams shares a study explaining how the debris polluting the atmospheres of white dwarfs reveals much about exoplanet chemistry.
• D-Brief notes that the intense radiation of Jupiter would not destroy potential traces of subsurface life on the surface of Europa.
• Dangerous Minds looks at the strange musical career of Vader Abraham, fan of the Smurfs and of the Weepuls.
• Aneesa Bodiat at JSTOR Daily writes about how the early Muslim woman of Haajar inspires her as a Muslim.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how an influx of American guns destabilizes Mexico.
• The LRB Blog looks at the American abandonment of the Kurds of Syria.
• Marginal Revolution notes how many mass protests are driven by consumer complaints.
• The NYR Daily has an interview with EU chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt, on the future of sovereignty.
• Strange Company looks at the Dead Pig War between the US and the UK on San Juan Island in 1859.
• Towleroad features the defense of Frank Ocean of his PrEP+ club night and the release of his new music.
• Understanding Society looks at the sociology of norms.
• Window on Eurasia suggests Russia and Ukraine each have an interest in the Donbass being a frozen conflict.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at the weird masculinity of the pink jock.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reports on the massive cloud of material detected around the active galaxy Cygnus A.
• The Crux suggests our contemporary problems with wisdom teeth represent not a failure of evolution but rather a failure on our post-Neolithic parts to eat hard foods which stimulate the jaw growth capable of supporting wisdom teeth.
• D-Brief notes how the astronomers involved in a planetary effort to image a black hole are preparing to make an announcement next week.
• Gizmodo notes how the debris field created in orbit by India testing an anti-satellite weapon threatens the ISS.
• Joe. My. God. notes that at least some hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei are deleting their social media profiles following protests over Brunei’s violent anti-gay laws.
• JSTOR Daily considers 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.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money uses a recent New York Times profile to note the sheer influence of Rupert Murdoch worldwide.
• The Map Room Blog notes a new exhibition, at the shop of a Manhattan rare book dealer, of a collection of vintage maps of New York City from its foundation, sharing some photos, even.
• Marginal Revolution remarks on the rapid growth of Native American numbers in the United States over the past century.
• The NYR Daily shares a report from Debbie Bookchin in North Syria arguing that the West needs to help Rojava.
• Roads and Kingdoms provides some tips for first-time visitors to the capital of Uruguay, Montevideo.
• The Russian Demographics Blog notes the continuing growth in numbers of dead from HIV infection in Russia, with Siberia being a new hotspot.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how the Event Horizon Telescope project will image a black hole’s event horizon, and what questions exist around the project.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shares an Anish Kapoor map demonstrating the Brexit divides in the United Kingdom.
• Daniel Little at Understanding Society considers the study of ethical disasters in capitalism, looking at OxyContin as an example.
• Window on Eurasia notes continued threats, and continued protests to these threats, surrounding Lake Baikal in Siberia.
• Arnold Zwicky has fun with a cartoon that plays on a pun between the words chants and chance.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Crux notes the discovery of a second impact crater in Greenland, hidden under the ice.
• D-Brief notes new evidence that ancient Celts did, in fact, decapitate their enemies and preserve their heads.
• Far Outliers notes how Pakhtun soldier Ayub Khan, in 1914-1915, engaged in some cunning espionage for the British Empire on the Western Front.
• Kashmir Hill at Gizmodo notes how cutting out the big five tech giants for one week–Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft–made it almost impossible for her to carry on her life.
• Hornet Stories notes that, unsurprisingly, LGBTQ couples are much more likely to have met online that their heterosexual counterparts.
• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox imagines Elizabeth Warren giving a speech that touches sensitively and intelligently on her former beliefs in her Cherokee ancestry.
• Mónica Belevan at the Island Review writes, directly and allegorically, about the Galapagos Islands and her family and Darwin.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the economics of the romance novel.
• Language Hat notes the Mandombe script creating by the Kimbanguist movement in Congo.
• Harry Stopes at the LRB Blog notes the problem with Greater Manchester Police making homeless people a subject of concern.
• Ferguson activists, the NYR Daily notes, are being worn down by their protests.
• Roads and Kingdoms lists some things visitors to the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent should keep in mind.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel makes a case for supersymmetry being a failed prediction.
• Towleroad notes the near-complete exclusion of LGBTQ subjects and themes from schools ordered by Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro.
• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the Kurds, their history, and his complicated sympathy for their concerns.

[PHOTO] Eight photos of the Kurdish march on Yonge, Toronto, against Turkey in Afrin (#defendafrin)

The ongoing Turkish invasion of Afrin, westernmost of the three cantons of the autonomous Kurdish area in Syria commonly known as Rojava, just produced visible results in Toronto. As I got out at Wellesley station a bit before 6 o’clock, I heard a crowd marching down Yonge. I crossed the street, and prepared to photograph.

I was given a handout with the letterhead of the Democratic Kurdish Federation of Canada denouncing the inaction of outside powers–the West and Russia, specifically–in doing nothing to undermine the Turkish invasion of a self-governing Kurdish area. I accepted the handout, and kept it. I agree almost entirely with the sentiment, sharing the anger of people frustrated with yet another Turkish invasion of a self-governing Kurdish area outside its frontiers, feeling frustrated that a Turkish-Kurdish alliance once might think the most natural one possible in the MIddle East is being thwarted by Turkey run by people who betrayed their government’s liberal promise at the century’s beginning. I stood, and watched, because there was nothing else I could do but witness justified anger and share it.

(Certainly this group has links with radical Kurdish groups internationally. The last photo in this series shows a yellow flag flapped into a blur by the wind. When unfurled, the flag had on it a clear portrait of Abdullah Öcalan above a slogan demanding his release.)

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• James Bow shares his photos from Airport Road.
• Centauri Dreams reports on a SETI candi9date signal form a nearby star in Hercules.
• Far Outliers reports on how the Japanese named ships.
• Joe. My. God. quotes one Trump backer, Roger Stone, about his desire to move to Costa Rica to escape Muslims if Hillary wins.
• Noel Maurer debunks the Maine governor’s provably false claims about the race and ethnicity of people arrested in his state on drug charges.
• Otto Pohl considers the relationships of the Kurds to the wider world.
• Language Hat notes the discovery of a new, different Etruscan-language text.
• Window on Eurasia argues that the Russian war in Ukraine is setting the stage for a second round of the Russian empire’s dissolution, and argues that Muscovy’s sack of Novgorod set the stage for Western-Russian suspicions.

[NEWS] Some Saturday links

• Bloomberg notes the escalating costs of construction in San Francisco, reports that a half-Taiwanese woman is competing for the leadership of Japan’s main opposition, notes the impending abdication of the Japanese emperor, and looks at the role of batteries in Australia’s electricity grid.
• Bloomberg View looks at how Brexit hurt Britain’s soft power and describes why Republican Party defections matter.
• The CBC examines the rise of Brazilian Protestantism.
• The Globe and Mail looks at Canada’s options now that prospects of new free trade agreements in the Pacific and with the European Union has been wrecked.
• National Geographic reports on the mapping of Greenland’s hidden world beneath its ice caps.
• The National Post looks at evidence for an ancient flood in China that led to the first Chinese state, and describes how Amish children have low rates of asthma.
• Open Democracy notes the new Turkish-Kurdish conflict.
• The Toronto Star remembers Mel Hurtig and describes the drought in parts of eastern Ontario.
• Wired notes a journalist who has been tracking ISIS on social media.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO notes this weekend is going to be warm.
• Centauri Dreams looks at moons of the dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt.
• Dangerous Minds looks at some photos of American malls taken in the late 1980s.
• The Dragon’s Gaze notes a white dwarf that stole so much matter from its stellar partner to make it a brown dwarf.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes Greenland may not have been particularly warm when the Vikings came.
• Language Hat tells the story of one solitary person who decided to learn Korean.
• Language Log writes about Sinitic languages written in phonetic scripts.
• The Map Room Blog shares a map showing how New Orleans is sinking.
• Marginal Revolution suggests Brexit is not a good strategy, even in the hypothetical case of a collapsing EU. Why not just wait for the collapse?
• The New APPS Blog notes with concern the expansion of Elsevier.
• The NYRB Daily notes the perennial divisions among the Kurds.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer wonders what’s wrong with Bernie Sanders.
• Towleroad looks at the impending decriminalization of gay sex in the Seychelles.
• Understanding Society looks at the work of Brankovich in understanding global inequality.
• Window on Eurasia notes that Crimean Tatars are no longer alone in remembering 1944, and looks at the unhappiness of Tuva’s shrinking Russophone minority.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO notes that Toronto’s old City Hall may yet become a shopping mall once the courts move out.
• The Dragon’s Gaze notes that worlds without plate tectonics are doomed to stop being habitable, and looks at different kinds of cosmic ray environments.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes the Iranian buildup in Syria.
• A Fistful of Euros has a reading list for Jeremy Corbyn.
• Otto Pohl talks about the historic role of German minorities in Africa and Asia.
• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a map of the Middle East’s Kurdish populations.
• Spacing Toronto looks at campus safety in the age of threatening tweets.
• Towleroad notes Michael Sam stating he could have had a better NFL career had he not come out.
• Transit Toronto notes the TTC has taken its tenth new streetcar into service.
• The Volokh Conspiracy looks at intersections between assisted suicide and religious liberty.
• Window on Eurasia notes controversy in Belarus over a Russian military base and looks at Circassians in Syria.

[LINK] “Family of children found on Turkish beach were trying to come to Canada”

Terry Glavin’s Ottawa Citizen article was heartbreaking. More will come from me later tonight.

The two small boys whose bodies washed up on a Turkish beach Wednesday were Kurdish refugees from Kobane, Syria, whose family had been desperately trying to emigrate to Canada.

Galib Kurdi, five, and his three-year-old brother Alan died along with their mother Rehan and eight other refugees when their boat overturned in a desperate flight from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos.

The boys’ father, Abdullah, survived. His family says his only wish now is to return to Kobane with his dead wife and children, bury them, and be buried alongside them.

“I heard the news at five o’clock in this morning,” Tima Kurdi, Abdullah’s sister, said Wednesday. The telephone call came from Ghuson Kurdi, the wife of another brother, Mohammad. “She had got a call from Abdullah, and all he said was, my wife and two boys are dead.”

Tima, a Vancouver hairdresser who emigrated to Canada more than 20 years ago, said Abdullah and Rehan Kurdi and their two boys were the subject of a “G5” privately sponsored refugee application that was rejected by Citizenship and Immigration in June, owing to the complexities involved in refugee applications from Turkey.