[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Anthro{dendum} features an essay examining trauma and resiliency as encountered in ethnographic fieldwork.
• Architectuul highlights a new project seeking to promote historic churches built in the United Kingdom in the 20th century.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait examines Ahuna Mons, a muddy and icy volcano on Ceres, and looks at the nebula Westerhout 40.
• Centauri Dreams notes the recent mass release of data from a SETI project, and notes the discovery of two vaguely Earth-like worlds orbiting the very dim Teegarden’s Star, just 12 light-years away.
• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber notes that having universities as a safe space for trans people does not infringe upon academic freedom.
• The Crux looks at the phenomenon of microsleep.
• D-Brief notes evidence that the Milky Way Galaxy was warped a billion years ago by a collision with dark matter-heavy dwarf galaxy Antlia 2, and notes a robotic fish powered by a blood analogue.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that India plans on building its own space station.
• Earther notes the recording of the song of the endangered North Pacific right whale.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the role of emotional labour in leisure activities.
• Far Outliers looks at how Japan prepared for the Battle of the Leyte Gulf in 1944.
• Gizmodo looks at astronomers’ analysis of B14-65666, an ancient galactic collision thirteen billion light-years away, and notes that the European Space Agency has a planned comet interception mission.
• io9 notes how the plan for Star Trek in the near future is to not only have more Star Trek, but to have many different kinds of Star Trek for different audiences.
• Joe. My. God. notes the observation of Pete Buttigieg that the US has probably already had a gay president.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the many ways in which the rhetoric of Celtic identity has been used, and notes that the archerfish uses water ejected from its eyes to hunt.
• Language Hat looks at why Chinese is such a hard language to learn for second-language learners, and looks at the Suso monastery in Spain, which played a key role in the coalescence of the Spanish language.
• Language Log looks at the complexities of katakana.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the death of deposed Egypt president Mohammed Morsi looks like a slow-motion assassination, and notes collapse of industrial jobs in the Ohio town of Lordstown, as indicative of broader trends.
• The LRB Blog looks at the death of Mohamed Morsi.
• The Map Rom Blog shares a new British Antarctic Survey map of Greenland and the European Arctic.
• Marginal Revolution notes how non-religious people are becoming much more common in the Middle East, and makes the point that the laying of cable for the transatlantic telegraph is noteworthy technologically.
• Noah Smith at Noahpionion takes the idea of the Middle East going through its own version of the Thirty Years War seriously. What does this imply?
• The NYR Daily takes a look at a Lebanon balanced somehow on the edge, and looks at the concentration camp system of the United States.
• The Planetary Society Blog explains what people should expect from LightSail 2, noting that the LightSail 2 has launched.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw points readers to his stories on Australian spy Harry Freame.
• Rocky Planet explains, in the year of the Apollo 50th anniversary, why the Moon matters.
• Drew Rowsome reviews, and praises, South African film Kanarie, a gay romp in the apartheid era.
• The Russian Demographics Blog links to a paper examining the relationship between childcare and fertility in Belgium, and looks at the nature of statistical data from Turkmenistan.
• The Strange Maps Blog shares a map highlighting different famous people in the United States.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why different galaxies have different amounts of dark matter, and shares proof that the Apollo moon landings actually did happen.
• Towleroad notes the new evidence that poppers, in fact, are not addictive.
• Window on Eurasia warns about the parlous state of the Volga River.
• Arnold Zwicky takes an extended look at the mid-20th century gay poet Frank O’Hara.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy notes how, in galaxy 3XMM J150052.0+015452 1.8 billion light-years away, a black hole has been busily eating a star for a decade.
• Centauri Dreams considers how relativistic probes might conduct astronomy. How would their measurements be changed by these high speeds?
• The Crux reports on how scientists are trying to save the platypus in its native rivers of Australia.
• D-Brief reports on the quiet past of Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule.
• The Dragon’s Tales reports on UAV news from around the world.
• Joe. My. God. reports a statement by a Trump biography suggesting that the American president believes in not following laws because of his belief in his own “genetic superiority”.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the importance of the longleaf pine in the history of the United States.
• Language Hat considers, in the case of Australia, the benefits of reviving indigenous languages.
• Abigail Nussbaum at Lawyers, Guns and Money considers how the success of Israel in hosting Eurovision is a blow against the Netanyahu government.
• James Butler at the LRB Blog looks at the peculiar position of private schools in the UK, and their intersection with public life.
• Marginal Revolution looks at a paper analyzing two centuries of British writers noting that productivity was boosted for the least productive if they lived in London.
• The NYR Daily notes the end of famed French periodical Les temps modernes.
• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog notes the expected crash of Chinese smallsat Longjiang-2 from its lunar orbit at the end of July.
• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money notes how ex-president of Argentina Cristina Fernández, running for election this year, was lucky in having the economic crash occur after the end of her presidency.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains the different reasons behind the blues of the sky and the ocean.
• Window on Eurasia notes that three hundred thousand Russians have died of HIV/AIDS since the virus manifested on Soviet territory in the late 1980s, with more deaths to come thanks to mismanagement of the epidemic.

[NEWS] Five tech links: Marion Stokes TV, data caps, Hydro-Québec, batteries, Anki

• Atlas Obscura remarks on the remarkable decades-long archive of taped television made by Marion Stokes.
• Motherboard notes, rightfully, that Americans will have good reason to be upset with data caps.
• Hydro-Québec is set to continue expanding its energy exports, with New York being the latest consumer. CBC reports.
• The National Observer comments on the game-changing improvements of batteries.
• Wired notes that home robotics company Anki is winding down, though not without leaving a good legacy for the future.

[NEWS] Five tech links: Apple, AI, Beresheet 2, agricultural robots, gene editing

• Wired notes that Apple is transforming itself into a luxury brand. Is this an unsustainable niche?
• Wired examines how Google’s human AI experts are trying to train artificial intelligences to do their work.
• Universe Today notes that SpaceIL is planning to return to the Moon with a Beresheet 2 probe.
• The New Yorker looks at the progress made towards the roboticization of agriculture, looking at strawberry harvesting in particular. Can it be done?
• Stephen Buranyi writes at the NYR Daily about the impact of gene editing technologies on humanity. How will we manage them? Can we?

[NEWS] Five sci-tech links: Southeast Asian hominins, dinosaurs, robots

• National Geographic reports on the discovery of animals slaughtered by mysterious hominins present in the Philippines some 700 thousand years ago. Who were they?
• National Geographic notes a new study suggesting that, before the Chixculub impact, the dinosaurs were doing fine as a group of animals, that they were not on the verge of dying out. The dinosaurs simply had bad luck.
• CityLab notes how the jobs typically filled by women, particularly, are especially vulnerable to roboticization.
• CBC recently reported from a conference in Las Vegas, where robots demonstrated their ability to fill any number of jobs, displacing human workers.
• Matt Simon at WIRED wrote about the potential for robot and human workers to co-exist, each with their own strengths.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Dangerous Minds takes note of a robot that grows marijuana.
• The Dragon’s Tales has a nice links roundup looking at what is happening with robots.
• Far Outliers notes the differences between the African and Indian experiences in the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing recovers a Paul Goodman essay from 1969 talking about making technology a domain not of science but of philosophy.
• JSTOR Daily notes the mid-19th century origins of the United States National Weather Service in the American military.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the extent to which Jared Kushner is not an amazingly good politician.
• The Map Room Blog notes artist Jake Berman’s maps of vintage transit systems in the United States.
• The NYR Daily examines The Price of Everything, a documentary about the international trade in artworks.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw wonders how long the centre will hold in a world that seems to be screaming out of control. (I wish to be hopeful, myself.)
• Drew Rowsome reports on a Toronto production of Hair, 50 years young.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shows maps depicting the very high levels of air pollution prevailing in parts of London.
• Window on Eurasia remembers Black January in Baku, a Soviet occupation of the Azerbaijani capital in 1990 that hastened Soviet dissolution.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber praises Candice Delmas’ new book on the duty of resistance to injustice.
• D-Brief looks at how the designers of robots took lessons from wasps in designing a new robotic swarm that can pull relatively massive objects in flight.
• Dead Things notes new evidence that the now-extinct elephant birds of Madagascar were nocturnal.
• Far Outliers notes how the reeducation of Japanese prisoners of war by Chinese Communists helped influence American policy towards Japan, imagining a Japan that could be reformed away from imperialism.
• At the Island Review, Alex Ingram profiles–with photos–some of the many different people who are the lone guardians of different small isolated islands removed from the British mainland.
• JSTOR Daily notes how asteroids can preserve records of the distant past of the solar system.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money has contempt for Pence’s use of Messianic Jews to stand in for the wider, non-Christian, Jewish community.
• At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen considers the consequence that a decline of art galleries might have on the wider field of modern art.
• The NYR Daily considers the lessons that Thucydides, writing about Athens, might have for the United States now.
• Anjali Kumar at Roads and Kingdoms writes about a meal of technically illegal craft beer served with raw shrimp in Bangkok.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel illustrates the six different ways a start can end up in a supernova.
• Window on Eurasia notes that official Russian efforts to reach out to the Russian diaspora do not extend to non-Russian minorities’ own diasporas, like that of the Circassians of the North Caucasus.
• Arnold Zwicky, starting by noting the passing of Dorcas, she who invented green bean casserole, looks at different pre-prepared foodstuffs.

[NEWS] Five future links: oceans, robots and jobs, mechanical telepathy, Africa, starships

• This Wired article suggests that judicious use of the oceans, including taking care of shorelines and using alternative energy but not including iron fertilization, could help save us all.
• Robots may take jobs, but Ramona Pringle suggests robots will also create jobs, too. It’s just a matter of planning adequately for upskilling. CBC has it.
• Technology Review reports that scientists have developed a system allowing three different people to exchange thoughts, a sort of primitive mechanical telepathy.
• The West, this Bloomberg View article suggests, would be much better suited trying to join China in investing in Africa than in complaining about this Chinese investment. I agree.
• I approve entirely of the Robert Forward-inspired proposal to holographically encode data on interstellar probes launched via laser-launched light sails, as described at VICE’s Motherboard here.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly talks about her rules for life.
• The Crux explores the development of robots that can learn from each other.
• JSTOR Daily explores the legal and environmental reasons why commercial supersonic flight never took off.
• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money imagines what might have been had the F-14 Tomcat never escaped development hell.
• Peter Watts wonders if, with de-extinction becoming possible, future generations might become even less careful with the environment, knowing they can fix things and never bothering to do so.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw argues that, with MOOCs and multiple careers in a working lifespan, autodidacticism is bound to return.
• The Planetary Society Blog’s Marc Rayman looks at the final orbits of the Dawn probe over Ceres and the expected scientific returns.
• Roads and Kingdoms explores the New Jersey sandwich known, alternatively, as the Taylor ham and the pork roll.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers what led to the early universe having an excess of matter over antimatter.
• Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy explores why the California Supreme Court took the trifurcation of California off referendum papers.
• Window on Eurasia notes how some in independent Azerbaijan fears that Iranian ethnic Azeris might try to subvert the independent country’s secularism.

[NEWS] Five links about space travel: cheap rockets, robots, and war

• Small, inexpensive rockets like the sort we are now starting to see could have a transformative effect on space travel and the global economy. Bloomberg View reports.
• The roboticization of space would leave less to do for astronauts, but potentially more fun stuff. Bloomberg View reports.
• Gizmodo notes that the American military wants more money for a potential armed conflict in space, as does VICE.
• Universe Today notes that, likewise, Russia and China are developing space-based military capabilities.