[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait shares a stunning photo taken by a friend of the Pleiades star cluster.
• The Buzz, at the Toronto Public Library, shares a collection of books suitable for World Vegan Month, here.
• Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber considers, with an eye towards China and the Uighurs, how panopticon attempts can stray badly on account of–among other things–false assumptions.
• Gizmodo considers how antimatter could end up providing interesting information about the unseen universe.
• Joe. My. God. reports from New York City, where new HIV cases are dropping sharply on account of PrEP.
• JSTOR Daily shares a vintage early review of Darwin’s Origin of Species.
• Language Hat examines the origins of the semicolon, in Venice in 1494.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money shares a critical report of the new Jill Lepore book These Truths.
• The LRB Blog reports from the Museum of Corruption in Kyiv, devoted to the corruption of the ancient regime in Ukraine.
• Marginal Revolution shares a new history of the Lakota.
• The NYR Daily looks at the photography of Duane Michals.
• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at population trends in Russia, still below 1991 totals in current frontiers.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why some of the lightest elements, like lithium, are so rare.
• Window on Eurasia shares the opinion of a Russian historian that Eastern Europe is back as a geopolitical zone.
• Arnold Zwicky considers Jacques Transue in the light of other pop culture figures and trends.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait takes a look at the question of how far, exactly, the Pleiades star cluster is from Earth. It turns out this question breaks down into a lot of interesting secondary issues.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly starts an interesting discussion around the observation that so many people are uncomfortable with the details of their body.
• Centauri Dreams reports on the exciting evidence of cryovolcanism at Ceres.
• The Crux reports on new suggestions that, although Neanderthals had bigger brains than Homo sapiens, Neanderthal brains were not thereby better brains.
• D-Brief notes evidence that the ability of bats and dolphins to echolocate may ultimate derive from a shared gene governing their muscles.
• Bruce Dorminey notes that astronomers have used data on the trajectory of ‘Oumuamua to suggest it may have come from one of four stars.
• Far Outliers explores the Appalachian timber boom of the 1870s that created the economic preconditions for the famed feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.
• Language Hat notes the unique whistling language prevailing among the Khasi people living in some isolated villages in the Indian state of Meghalaya.
• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicles, notes that the fastest-growing language in the United States is the Indian language of Telugu.
• Jeremy Harding at the LRB Blog writes about the import of the recognition, by Macron, of the French state’s involvement in the murder of pro-Algerian independence activist Maurice Audin in 1958.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution praises the diaries of Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian Jewish intellectual alive during the Second World War
• The New APPS Blog takes a look at the concept of the carnival from Bakhtin.
• Gabrielle Bellot at NYR Daily considers the life of Elizabeth Bishop and Bishop’s relationship to loneliness.
• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog describes how CubeSats were paired with solar sails to create a Mars probe, Mars Cube One.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer considers some possible responses from the left to a conservative Supreme Court in the US.
• Roads and Kingdoms takes a look at the challenges facing the street food of Xi’an.
• Rocky Planet examines why, for decades, geologists mistakenly believed that the California ground was bulging pre-earthquake in Palmdale.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel examines how some objects called stars, like neutron stars and white dwarfs and brown dwarfs, actually are not stars.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps notes how China and Europe stand out as being particularly irreligious on a world map of atheism.
• Window on Eurasia notes the instability that might be created in the North Caucasus by a border change between Chechnya and Ingushetia.
• Arnold Zwicky shares some beautiful pictures of flowers from a garden in Palo Alto.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• blogTO notes how expensive Toronto’s rental market is.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanet system.
• Crooked Timber engages with the complexities of racism.
• The Crux shares some oral history about the detection of the first gravitational wave.
• The Dragon’s Gaze reports about the difficulties involved with detecting exoplanets around red dwarfs and describes the discovery of a super-Earth orbiting an orange dwarf in the Pleiades.
• Joe. My. God. notes that New York City ended free web browsing at browsing stations because people kept looking up porn.
• Language Log notes that a partially shared script does not make Chinese readable by speakers of Japanese, and vice versa.
• Marginal Revolution cautions against the idea that Brexit is over.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer talks about the usefulness of counterfactuals, especially good counterfactuals.
• Torontoist argues that the TTC needs more cats. Why not?
• The Volokh Conspiracy links to a comparative global study of settlements in occupied territories.
• Window on Eurasia reports that Google has displaced television as a primary source of news for Russians.