[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that mysterious Boyajian’s Star has nearly two dozen identified analogues, like HD 139139.
• James Bow reports from his con trip to Portland.
• Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog notes the particular pleasure of having old friends, people with long baselines on us.
• Centauri Dreams describes a proposed mission to interstellar comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov).
• The Crux notes how feeding cows seaweed could sharply reduce their methane production.
• D-Brief notes that comet C/2019 Q4 is decidedly red.
• Bruce Dorminey notes a claim that water-rich exoplanet K2-18b might well have more water than Earth.
• Gizmodo reports on a claim that Loki, biggest volcano on Io, is set to explode in a massive eruption.
• io9 notes that Warner Brothers is planning a Funko Pop movie.
• Joe. My. God. notes the claim of Donald Trump that he is ready for war with Iran.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how people in early modern Europe thought they could treat wounds with magic.
• Language Hat considers how “I tip my hat” might, translated, sound funny to a speaker of Canadian French.
• Language Log considers how speakers of Korean, and other languages, can find word spacing a challenge.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the partisan politics of the US Supreme Court.
• At the NYR Daily, Naomi Klein makes a case for the political and environmental necessity of a Green New Deal.
• Peter Watts takes apart a recent argument proclaiming the existence of free will.
• Peter Rukavina tells how travelling by rail or air from Prince Edward Island to points of the mainland can not only be terribly inconvenient, but environmentally worse than car travel. PEI does need better rail connections.
• The Russian Demographics Blog examines how different countries in Europe will conduct their census in 2020.
• Window on Eurasia shares the arguments of a geographer who makes the point that China has a larger effective territory than Russia (or Canada).
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell looks at a 1971 prediction by J.G. Ballard about demagoguery and guilt, something that now looks reasonably accurate.
• Arnold Zwicky considers models of segregation of cartoon characters from normal ones in comics.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Colby King writes at the Everyday Sociology Blog about furnace, kiln, and oven operators as recorded in the American Community Survey. What experiences do they have in common, and which separate them?
• Far Outliers reports on the work of the Indian Labourer Corps on the Western Front, collecting and recycling raw materials from the front.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing makes the case that the seeming neutrality of modern digital technologies are dissolving the established political order.
• Joe. My. God. notes a report from Andrew McCabe suggesting that Trump did not believe his own intelligence services’ reports about the range of North Korean missiles, instead believing Putin.
• JSTOR Daily notes how the interracial marriages of serving members of the US military led to the liberalization of immigration law in the United States in the 1960s.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on the connections of the police in Portland, Oregon, to the alt-right.
• Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution shares a report of the discovery of English-speaking unicorns in South America that actually reveals the remarkable language skills of a new AI. Fake news, indeed.
• The NYR Daily shares a short story by Panashe Chigumadzi, “You Can’t Eat Beauty”.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw welcomes a new fluidity in Australian politics that makes the elections debatable.
• Drew Rowsome looks at the horror fiction of Justin Cronin.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel shares some of the key historical images of Pluto, from its discovery to the present.
• Window on Eurasia takes a look at the only church of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church operating in Russia, in the Moscow area city of Noginsk.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell makes the point that counting on opinion pieces in journalism as a source of unbiased information is a categorical mistake.
• Arnold Zwicky looks back, on President’s Day at Berkeley, at his experiences and those of others around him at that university and in its community.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Oshawa and Sault Ste Marie, Québec City, Vancouver, Edinburgh, Sydney

• Sault Sainte-Marie hopes to recruit former GM workers from Oshawa to live in that less expensive city, Global News reports.
• Robert Vandenwinkel at HuffPost Quebec makes the case for Québec City not developing a tramway but rather a subway.
• Daily Hive notes that the British Columbia government has increased its funding into research into a high-speed rail link connecting Vancouver to points south.
• CityLab notes that Edinburgh is imposing a tourist tax.
• The Guardian shares images of some of the rejected designs for the famous Sydney Opera House.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Crux takes a look at some of the lost moons of the early solar system, including those of Jupiter, Saturn inward of Titan, and Neptune before its encounter with Triton.
• D-Brief notes that, in its relatively warm and watery youth, the Moon could conceivably have supported life.
• Dangerous Minds shares photos, and a precise, of the ball–the Diner de Têtes Surrealistes–thrown in 1972 by the Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and her husband Guy at the Château de Ferrières outside of Paris.
• Jonathan Wynn at the Everyday Sociology Blog takes a look at how students’ race can complicate the act of studying abroad. http://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2018/07/race-and-studying-abroad.html
• Imageo notes the heat wave aggravating forest fires in California and Oregon.
• JSTOR Daily considers if, perhaps, the Ford Pinto received an undeservedly negative reputation from its contemporaries.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money links to a Matthew Yglesias analysis about the usability of swing voters in the American context.
• At the LRB Blog, Anne Orford draws from the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki the argument that international politics is much too important to be decided by two men alone and their translators.
• The Map Room Blog shares some remarkable infrared images of Titan, looking beneath that world’s clouds.
• Marginal Revolution notes one report suggesting that oil revenues could lead to a tripling of the size of the GDP of Guyana in five years.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel illustrates the discovery of an ancient galaxy almost entirely absorbed into the Andromeda Galaxy, M32p.
• Towleroad reviews the new Broadway play Straight White Men, which has an interesting take on this hitherto-dominant portion of North American society.

[NEWS] Five links on cities: Vancouver, Edmonton, Portland, Hull, central and eastern Europe

• A new housing policy in Vancouver will focus, among other things, on underused and housing in well-off neighbourhoods. Global News reports.
• Can Edmonton’s Accidental Beach survive? Maybe, if federal regulation and the ever-shifting waters of the North Saskatchewan River permit. Global News reports.
• Daily JSTOR links to a collection of articles explaining just how the Oregon city of Portland became a hipster mecca, here.
• Alec Charles’ examination of the English city of Hull, a British City of Culture that is not only marginalized from mainstream Britain but at odds with the world (strongly pro-Brexit and all), is provocative. The article is here.
• Politico.eu notes how the failure of central and eastern European cities to pick up new EU agencies after Brexit underlines, for many, their continuing marginalization in Europe.

[LINK] “B.C. supports feasibility study of high-speed rail line from Portland to Vancouver”

The Globe and Mail‘s Dominika Lirette reports on the support of the British Columbian government for funding a study looking into the feasibility of a high-speed rail route connecting Vancouver with Oregon’s Portland.

British Columbia’s Transportation Minister says the province supports Washington State’s decision to study the feasibility of a high-speed rail line from Portland to Vancouver.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee has allotted $1-million (U.S.) from his 2017-19 state budget to examine the costs and benefits of building a system to carry travellers 400 kilometres an hour with stops in Seattle and Bellingham. A report is due in December.

Transportation Minister Todd Stone said it’s “far too premature” to talk about a potential financial commitment to a high-speed rail line, but he said the province is interested in the idea.

“The Premier sent a letter to Governor Inslee recently, extending provincial support for the state of Washington’s decision to actually do some due diligence, some analysis on this proposed high-speed rail link, and we certainly support them doing that,” Mr. Stone said.

He noted that that an agreement signed last year between British Columbia and Washington State, known as the Cascadia Innovation Corridor, highlights transportation as a key priority.

The study will examine the design and cost of a high-speed rail system, the potential demand and whether it would be economically viable. A budget document outlining the study says the high-speed rail system, if built, could connect with east-west routes in the state, as well as a similar system, in California.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Acts of Minor Treason’s Andrew Barton profiles the light rail mass transit system of Oregon’s city of Portland. Promising, the MAX seems to be.
• blogTo shows its readers where to find abandoned TTC buses and subway cares (near the Wilson Subway Yard in east-end Toronto, it turns out). Photos!
• Centauri Dreams takes another look at the prospect of Earth-like worlds orbiting post-main sequence white dwarfs. They may be rare, but they may also be easy enough to detect.
• Daniel Drezner rounds up academic responses to Mitt Romney’s claim that Israeli wealth and Palestinian poverty can be explained by “cultural” differences. Fail, yes.
• Eastern Approaches takes a look at the Czech heritage of Madeleine Albright in the context of her new biography.
• Marginal Revolution examines the consequence of the trade-off in Japan to maintain a strong currency to support its graying population at the expense of domestic industries.
• This Savage Minds post taking a look at the failings of Mark Regnerus’ post on same-sex parenting is worth reading.