[NEWS] Five futurish links: Quadriga, Brexit, Facebook and Rohingya, basic income, friendship

• This CBC feature on the apparent loss of a quarter-billion dollars via the Quadriga cryptocurrency makes the whole business look incredibly sketchy to me. Why would anyone rational take such risks?
• At Open Democracy, Christine Berry suggests that after the Grenfell Tower catastrophe the idea of using Brexit to deregulate has become impossible. Is this a wedge issue?
• Vox notes the effort of Facebook to try to hold itself accountable for providing a platform for the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.
• Inverse has a positive account of the guaranteed minimum income experiment in Finland, emphasizing the improved psychological state of recipients.
• The Atlantic notes that one major impact of Facebook is that, through its medium, friendships can never quite completely die.

[URBAN NOTE] Six city links: Detroit, Oslo, Cox’s Bazar, Ho Chi Minh City, Shenzhen, Tokyo

• CityLab notes a new black-owned food coop in Detroit.
• CityLab notes the cool new designs of a new Oslo subway station.
• Al Jazeera notes the vulnerability of Cox’s Bazar, the Bangladesh city that is the heart of the Rohingya refugee settlements, to climate change.
• Guardian Cities notes how rapid redevelopment is devastating the architectural heritage of Ho Chi Minh City.
• This Culture Trip article looks at how, among other things, copying foreign technology helped make Shenzhen a global tech hub.
• Tokyo is offering subway users free food if they opt to travel on the subway outside of peak times, CityLab notes.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Raccoon City, Hamilton, Chicago, Milwaukee, Paris

• Mark Clapham at CityMetric takes</u. an insightful look at the terrifying, dehumanizing, ways in which the fictional Raccoon City was designed.
• Alex Bozikovic writes in The Globe and Mail about the goals of the new chief planner of Hamilton, Jason Thorne, to help grow a dynamic and livable city.
• Guardian Cities looks at how many of the major streets of Chicago trace their ancestry to the trails of indigenous peoples.
• WUWM notes how Milwaukee has the largest concentration of Rohingya refugees in the United States.
• Mira Kamdar at the NYR Daily looks at the agricultural past–and potential future–of the Paris periphery, particularly but not only Seine-Saint-Denis.

[NEWS] Five divides: New Brunswick, Rohingya Hindus, Chinese censors, Iranian internet, Brexit

• The Conversation notes how New Brunswick, with its economic challenges and its language divide, represents in microcosm the problems of wider Canada.
• This Los Angeles Times article notes how Rohingya Hindus see themselves, rightly, as sharing a different fate from their Muslim coethnics.
• This New York Times article looks at how the Internet censors of China are trained, by letting them know about the actual history of their country first.
• Bloomberg reports how on the Iranian government tries to engage selectively with the social networking platforms, like Instagram and Telegram, used by the outside world.
• Bloomberg notes that the concern of Japan that the United Kingdom, Japanese companies’ chosen platform for export to the EU, might engage in a hard Brexit is pressing.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Anthro{dendum} links to a roundup of anthropology-relevant posts and news items.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shows how the impending collision of galaxies NGC 4490 and NGC 4485 has created spectacular scenes of starbirth.
• Centauri Dreams notes the upcoming stream of new observatories and satellites that will enable better charting of exoplanets.
• Kieran Healy shares a cool infographic depicting the scope of the British baby boom.
• Hornet Stories shares the amazing video for the fantastic new song by Janelle Monáe, “Pynk.”
• JSTOR Daily notes what happens when you send Frog and Toad to a philosophy class.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money makes the obvious point that abandoning civil rights of minorities is a foolish strategy for American liberals.
• The LRB Blog shares a reflection on Winnie Mandela, and the forces she led and represents.
• The Map Room Blog links to detailed maps of the Rohingya refugee camps.
• Marginal Revolution takes issue with a proposal by Zeynep Tufekci for a thorough regulation of Facebook.
• The NYR Daily notes how Israel is making full use of the law to enable its colonization of the West Bank.
• The Planetary Society Blog’s Emily Lakdawalla reports from inside a NASA clean room where the new InSight Mars rover is being prepared.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer talks about what is really wrong with a Trump Organization letter to the president of Panama regarding a real estate development there.
• Strange Company looks at the life of 19th century fraudster and murdering John Birchall.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• ‘Nathan Burgoine at Apostrophen links to a giveaway of paranormal LGBT fiction.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares some stunning photos of Jupiter provided by Juno.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly looks at the desperate, multi-state strike of teachers in the United States. American education deserves to have its needs, and its practitioners’ needs, met.
• Centauri Dreams looks at PROCSIMA, a strategy for improving beamed propulsion techniques.
• Crooked Timber looks at the history of the concept of the uncanny valley. How did the concept get translated in the 1970s from Japan to the wider world?
• Dangerous Minds shares a 1980s BBC interview with William Burroughs.
• The Dragon’s Tales links to a paper tracing the origin of the Dravidian language family to a point in time 4500 years ago.
• JSTOR Daily notes Phyllis Wheatley, a freed slave who became the first African-American author in the 18th century but who died in poverty.
• Language Hat notes the exceptional importance of the Persian language in early modern South Asia.
• Language Log looks at the forms used by Chinese to express the concepts of NIMBY and NIMBYism.
• Language Hat notes the exceptional importance of the Persian language in early modern South Asia.
• The NYR Daily notes that, if the United States junks the nuclear deal with Iran, nothing external to Iran could realistically prevent the country’s nuclearization.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at the latest findings from the Jupiter system, from that planet’s planet-sized moons.
• Roads and Kingdoms notes that many Rohingya, driven from their homeland, have been forced to work as mules in the illegal drug trade.
• Starts With A Bang considers how early, based on elemental abundances, life could have arisen after the Big Bang. A date only 1 to 1.5 billion years after the formation of the universe is surprisingly early.
• Strange Maps’ Frank Jacobs notes how the centre of population of different tree populations in the United States has been shifting west as the climate has changed.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little takes a look at mechanisms and causal explanations.
• Worthwhile Canadian Initiative’s Frances Woolley takes a look at an ECON 1000 test from the 1950s. What biases, what gaps in knowledge, are revealed by it?

[ISL] Five notes about islands: Greenland, South China Sea, Bangladesh, Caribbean, Puerto Rico

• The slow melt of the Greenland icecap will eventually release a Cold War American military base into the open air. VICE reports.
• Robert Farley suggests at The National Interest that China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea would not be of much use in an actual conflict.
• Reuters notes that a mud island in the Bay of Bengal lucky not to be overwhelmed by high tides is being expanded into a compound to hold Rohingya refugees.
• A new study suggests that there was some genetic continuing between pre- and post-Columbian populations in the Caribbean, that as family and local histories suggest at least some Taino did survive the catastrophes of colonialism. National Geographic reports.
• This account from NACLA of Puerto Rico’s perennial problems with the American mainland and the history of migration, culminating in an ongoing disastrous mass emigration after Maria, is pro-independence. Might this viewpoint become more common among Puerto Ricans?