[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Matt Thompson at anthro{dendum} writes about the complex, often anthropological, satire in the comics of Charles Addams.
• Architectuul looks at the photography of Roberto Conte.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes a new computer model suggesting a supernova can be triggered by throwing a white dwarf into close orbit of a black hole.
• D-Brief notes how ammonia on the surface of Pluto hints at the existence of a subsurface ocean.
• Bruce Dorminey notes how the bombardment of Earth by debris from a nearby supernova might have prompted early hominids to become bipedal.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that NASA has awarded its first contract for its plans in lunar space.
• Far Outliers notes the reactions, within and without the Soviet Union, to the 1991 Soviet coup attempt.
• Matt Novak at Gizmodo’s Paleofuture notes how, in 1995, Terry Pratchett predicted the rise of online Nazis.
• io9 notes the impending physical release this summer of DVDs of the Deep Space Nine documentary What We Left Behind.
• JSTOR Daily suggests some ways to start gardening in your apartment.
• Victor Mair at Language Log claims that learning Literary Chinese is a uniquely difficult experience. Thoughts?
• The NYR Daily features a wide-ranging interview with EU official Michel Barnier focused particularly, but not exclusively, on Brexit.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes that an Internet vote has produced a majority in favour of naming outer system body 2007 OR10 Gonggang.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer considers the possibility that foreign investors in Mexico might be at risk, at least feel themselves at risk, from the government of AMLO.
• The Signal looks at how the Library of Congress archives spreadsheets.
• Van Waffle at the Speed River Journal looks at magenta spreen, a colourful green that he grows in his garden.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes how we on Earth are carelessly wasting irreplaceable helium.
• Window on Eurasia refers to reports claiming that a third of the population of Turkmenistan has fled that Central Asian state. Could this be accurate?

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Architectuul looks at the history of brutalism in late 20th century Turkey.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the evidence for the Milky Way Galaxy having seen a great period of starburst two billion years ago, and notes how crowded the Milky Way Galaxy is in the direction of Sagittarius.
• Centauri Dreams considers if astrometry might start to become useful as a method for detecting planets, and considers what the New Horizons data, to Pluto and to Ultima Thule, will be known for.
• Belle Waring at Crooked Timber considers if talk of forgiveness is, among other things, sound.
• D-Brief considers the possibility that the differing natures of the faces of the Moon can be explained by an ancient dwarf planet impact, and shares images of dust-ringed galaxy NGC 4485.
• Dead Things notes the discovery of fossil fungi one billion years old in Nunavut.
• Far Outliers looks at how, over 1990, Russia became increasingly independent from the Soviet Union, and looks at the final day in office of Gorbachev.
• Gizmodo notes the discovery of literally frozen oceans of water beneath the north polar region of Mars, and looks at an unusual supernova, J005311 ten thousand light-years away in Cassiopeia, product of a collision between two white dwarfs.
• JSTOR Daily notes how the colour of navy blue is a direct consequence of slavery and militarism, and observes the historical influence, or lack thereof, of Chinese peasant agriculture on organic farming in the US.
• Language Log considers a Chinese-language text from San Francisco combining elements of Mandarin and Cantonese.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the terrible environmental consequences of the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia, and Shakezula at Lawyers, Guns and Money takes a look at how, and perhaps why, Sam Harris identifies milkshake-throwing at far-right people as a form of “mock assassination”.
• The Map Room Blog shares a personal take on mapmaking on the Moon during the Apollo era.
• Marginal Revolution observes a paper suggesting members of the Chinese communist party are more liberal than the general Chinese population. The blog also notes how Soviet quotas led to a senseless and useless mass slaughter of whales.
• Russell Darnley writes about the complex and tense relationship between Indonesia and Australia, each with their own preoccupations.
• Martin Filler writes at the NYR Daily about I.M. Pei as an architect specializing in an “establishment modernism”. The site also takes a look at Orientalism, as a phenomenon, as it exists in the post-9/11 era.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw reflects on the meaning of Australia’s New England.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes how Hayabusa 2 is having problems recovering a marker from asteroid Ryugu.
• Peter Rukavina reports on an outstanding Jane Siberry concert on the Island.
• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a map of homophobia in Europe.
• The Signal looks at how the Library of Congress makes use of wikidata.
• The Speed River Journal’s Van Waffle reports, with photos, from his latest walks this spring.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers what the Earth looked like when hominids emerged, and explains how amateur astronomers can capture remarkable images.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shares a controversial map depicting the shift away from CNN towards Fox News across the United States.
• Daniel Little at Understanding Society examines the Boeing 737 MAX disaster as an organizational failure.
• Window on Eurasia looks why Turkey is backing away from supporting the Circassians, and suggests that the use of the Russian Orthodox Church by the Russian state as a tool of its rule might hurt the church badly.
• Arnold Zwicky takes apart, linguistically and otherwise, a comic playing on the trope of Lassie warning about something happening to Timmy. He also
  reports on a far-removed branch of the Zwicky family hailing from Belarus, as the Tsvikis.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Architectuul notes the recent death of I.M. Pei.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes what, exactly, rubble-pile asteroids are.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly writes about definitions of home.
• Centauri Dreams considers white dwarf planets.
• The Crux notes how ultra-processed foods are liked closely to weight gain.
• D-Brief observes that a thin layer of insulating ice might be saving the subsurface oceans of Pluto from freezing out.
• Bruce Dorminey notes the critical role played by Apollo 10 in getting NASA ready for the Moon landings.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes the American government’s expectation that China will seek to set up its own global network of military bases.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina reports on the Soviet Union’s Venera 5 and 6 missions to Venus.
• Far Outliers looks at the visit of U.S. Grant to Japan and China.
• Gizmodo notes a recent analysis of Neanderthal teeth suggesting that they split with Homo sapiens at a date substantially earlier than commonly believed.
• io9 notes the sheer scale of the Jonathan Hickman reboots for the X-Men comics of Marvel.
• Joe. My. God. shares the argument of Ted Cruz that people should stop making fun of his “space pirate” suggestion.I am inclined to think Cruz more right than not, actually.
• JSTOR Daily notes the wave of anti-black violence that hit the United States in 1919, often driven by returned veterans.
• Language Hat shares a recognizable complaint, written in ancient Akkadian, of bad customers.
• Language Log shares a report of a village in Brittany seeking people to decipher a mysterious etching.
• This Scott Lemieux report at Lawyers, Guns and Money about how British conservatives received Ben Shapiro is a must-read summary.
• Benjamin Markovits at the LRB Blog shares the reasons why he left his immigrant-heavy basketball team in Germany.
• Marginal Revolution looks at one effort in Brazil to separate people from their street gangs.
• The NYR Daily looks at how ISIS, deprived of its proto-state, has managed to thrive as a decentralized network.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw tells of his experiences and perceptions of his native region of New England, in southeastern Australia.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes how the Chang’e 4 rover may have found lunar mantle on the surface of the Moon.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer notes that while Argentine president Mauricio Macri is polling badly, his opponents are not polling well.
• Roads and Kingdoms shares a list of things to do in see in the Peru capital of Lima.
• The Signal examines how the Library of Congress engages in photodocumentation.
• Van Waffle at the Speed River Journal explains how he is helping native insects by planting native plants in his garden.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes how scientific illiteracy should never be seen as cool.
• Towleroad notes the questions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as to why Truvada costs so much in the United States.
• Window on Eurasia notes how family structures in the North Caucasus are at once modernizing and becoming more conservative.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes how the distribution of US carriers and their fleets at present does not support the idea of a planned impending war with Iran.
• Arnold Zwicky examines the tent caterpillar of California.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams notes the astounding precision of the new Habitable Planet Finder telescope.
• D-Brief notes that the lack of small craters on Pluto and Charon suggests there are not many small bodies in the Kuiper Belt.
• Far Outliers notes the many and widely varying transliterations of Bengali to English.
• JSTOR Daily notes the extent to which border walls represent, ultimately, a failure of politics.
• Language Log examines the emergence of the Germanic languages in the depths of prehistory.
• Anna Aslanyan at the LRB Blog considers the eternal search for a universal language.
• Noah Smith shareshis Alternative Green New Deal Plan at his blog, one that depends more on technology and market forces than the original.
• Mitchell Abidor at the NYR Daily writes about the incisive leftism of journalist Victor Sorge.
• Out There notes the reality that the worlds of our solar system, and almost certainly other systems, are united by a constant stream of incoming rocks.
• At the Planetary Society Blog, Emily Lakdawalla examines the data transmitted back by OSIRIS-REx from that probe’s Earth flyby.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel examines cosmic conditions at the time the solar system formed 4.56 billion or so years ago.
• Towleroad notes the censorship of many explicitly gay scenes from Bohemian Rhapsody in its Chinese release.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the many ways in which the social norms of North Caucasian men are converging with those of the average Russian.
• On St. David’s Day, Arnold Zwicky pays tribute to the daffodil and to the Welsh.

[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.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the evidence for the massive collision that left exoplanet Kepler 107c an astoundingly dense body.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly tells her readers the secrets of the success of her relationship with her husband, Jose.
• Centauri Dreams notes what the New Horizons probe has found out, of Ultima Thule and of Pluto, by looking back.
• The Crux shares the obituaries of scientists from NASA for the Opportunity rover.
• D-Brief reports that NASA has declared the Opportunity rover’s mission officially complete.
• Dead Things introduces its readers to Mnyamawamtuka, a titanosaur from Tanzania a hundred million years ago.
• Drew Ex Machina shares a stunning photo of Tropical Cyclone Gita, taken from the ISS in 2018.
• Far Outliers notes how the Indian Army helped save the British army’s positions from collapse in the fall of 1914.
• Joe. My. God. notes a Christian group in the United States trying to encourage a boycott of supposedly leftist candy manufacturers like Hershey’s.
• JSTOR Daily looks at why covenant marriage failed to become popular.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money explains the hatred for new Congressperson Ilham Omar.
• The Planetary Society Blog links to ten interesting podcasts relating to exploration, of Earth and of space.
• Drew Rowsome interviews Tobias Herzberg about Feygele, his show in the Rhubarb festival at Buddies in Bad Times.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps looks at the evidence, presented by (among others) Geneviève von Petzinger, suggesting that forty thousand years ago cave artists around the world may have shared a common language of symbols.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that the policies of Putin are contributing to a growing sense of nationalism in Belarus.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Centauri Dreams considers the magnetic fields of super-Earths, and the impact of these on potential life.
• D-Brief reports on the corporate partners selected to accompany NASA on its return to the Moon.
• Bruce Dorminey reports on the claim of astronomers to have identified four extrasolar objects already in the solar system.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog pays tribute to long-time contributor Peter Kaufman, now departed.
• JSTOR Daily asks why Americans, and others, eat three meals a day.
• The LRB Blog reports on the underlying factors behind the gilets jaunes protests in France against higher fuel taxes.
• Language Hat links to a fascinating essay about the persistence of individuals’ first languages.
• Neuroskeptic takes a look at possible hacks to the human mind, in the light of a recent announcement of human genetic engineering. What will become possible? What will be done?
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that Triton, not Pluto or Eris, is the largest world of the Kuiper Belt.

Strange Maps shares a remarkable map of Lake Michigan made solely with a typewriter.

• Daniel Little at Understanding Society ruminates on the thought of Scott Page regarding social modeling.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the history of the letter “Ё” in the Russian language.
• Arnold Zwicky starts from the idea of green flowers to take a look at unusual greenery generally.

[NEWS] Five D-Brief links: Small Magellanic Cloud, Pluto, Neanderthals, Atacama, rogues

• D-Brief notes that the Small Magellanic Cloud is losing gas, diminishing its future capacity for starbirth.
• D-Brief notes evidence that the strange ridges of Pluto are legacies of glaciers.
• Neanderthals, a new analysis shared by D-Brief suggests, suffered from head trauma at rates similar to that of Homo sapiens.
• D-Brief notes how recent heavy rain in the Atacama Desert of Chile killed many of the local extremophile microbes adapted to desert conditions, with obvious implications for life on Mars.
• D-Brief notes the discovery of two rogue planets, OGLE-2012-BLG-1323 and OGLE-2017-BLG-0560.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the frequency with which young red dwarf stars flare, massively, with negative implications for potential life on these stars’ planets.
• Centauri Dreams shares a proposal for probe expeditions to Pluto and Charon, and to the wider Kuiper belt beyond.
• D-Brief explains just how elephants manage to eat with their trunks.
• JSTOR Daily answers the question of just why so many American states–other subnational polities too, I bet–have straight-line borders.
• Language Hat links to a recent blog post examining the very specific forms of language used by the Roman emperor Justinian.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos looks at where the whole concept of “political correctness” came from, and why. (Hint: It was not anti-racists who did this.)
• Geoffrey K. Pullum at Lingua Franca describes the circumstances behind his new book, _Linguistics: Why It Matters.
• At the LRB Blog, Caroline Eden writes about the shipwrecks of the Black Sea, preserved for centuries or even millennia by the sea’s oxygen-poor waters.
• Gabrielle Bellot writes at the NYR Daily about how she refuses to be made into an invisible trans woman.
• At the Speed River Journal, Van Waffle describes–with photos!–how he was lucky enough to find a wild growth of chicken of the woods, an edible bracket mushroom of the Ontario forests.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that the loss of Ukraine by the Russian Orthodox Church will contribute to that church being increasingly seen as a national one, limited by borders.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• In a long and frighteningly compelling article, Charlie Stross at Autopope warns that a Britain that heads for a hard Brexit might be lucky only to go through the worst of the 1970s.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait explores the fact that an asteroid the size of a car burned up in the atmosphere above Greenland on the 25th of July, 2018.
• Centauri Dreams shares an essay by Ramses Ramirez looking at efforts to redefine the classical “habitable zone” in more useful ways, keeping different planetary and stellar environments in mind.
• Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin takes a look at the failures of a journalism relying on anonymous interview given the prospects of a hard Brexit.
• The Crux considers how the decision of flight-controllers to direct Voyager 1 towards a close flyby of Titan closed off the possibility of that spacecraft visiting Pluto in 1986.
• D-Brief looks at the exchange of microbes among subway passengers.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at just how codified societies of the pirates of the early modern North Atlantic could be, of necessity.
• Language Log takes a look at why Matti, a character from the Finnish Nightmares webcomic, has become so massively popular in China.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Dan Nexon continues his analysis of American hegemony, looking at instances of past hegemonies undermined not by foreign opposition but by non-state actors and by domestic opponents.
• Neuroskeptic notes a study suggesting the data sets collected by psychologists are actually not broadly accessible at all.
• Francis Wade a href=”https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/06/ngugi-wa-thiongo-and-the-tyranny-of-language/”>writes for the NYR Daily about Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan writer whose work–first writing in English, then shifting to Gikuyu–reflects a deep awareness of the intimate links between language and colonization, even in a post-colonial world.
• Corey S. Powell at Out There asks an important question: What is a habitable planet? Can we even speculate given how little we know?
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the prospect of sending orbiters like Galileo and Cassini, to Uranus and Neptune. The technology is there, the ODINUS mission has been sketched out, and there is a tempting launch window in 2034.
• Towleroad shares an excerpt from Omarosa Manigault’s new book on Donald Trump and his administration, talking about the cognitive decline she witnessed.
• Window on Eurasia notes that Russia is strengthening its Interior Ministry forces opposing the Donbas republics in eastern Ukraine, ostensibly to prevent smuggling.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at some homoerotic art from Brazil with an accompanying Marilyn Frye text confusingly translated to Portuguese and back again.