[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes how variable gravity is on irregular asteroid Bennu.
• Bruce Dorminey reports on how the European Southern Observatory has charted the Magellanic Clouds in unprecedented detail.
• The Dragon’s Tales shares a collection of links looking at the Precambrian Earth.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina reports on the late 1950s race to send probes to the Moon.
• Gizmodo shares some stunning astronomy photos.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the saltwater roads, the routes that slaves in Florida used to escape to the free Bahamas.
• Language Log looks at some examples of bad English from Japan. How did they come about?
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money rejects the idea of honouring people like Condoleezza Rice.
• Marginal Revolution considers the idea of free will in light of neurology.
• Corey S Powell at Out There interviews James Lovelock on his new book Novacene, in which Lovelock imagines the future world and Gaia taken over by AI.
• Window on Eurasia notes the water shortages faced by downstream countries in Central Asia.

[NEWS] Five D-Brief links: T-rex, hallucinations, LIGO, bacteria, Magellanic Clouds

• D-Brief notes new evidence that the biggest Tyrannosaurus was the oldest one.
• D-Brief notes a new study suggesting that hallucinations are the responses of the body to a lack of sensory stimulation.
• D-Brief notes that LIGO has resumed its hunt for gravitational wave sources.
• D-Brief notes that antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be found in abundance at wastewater treatment plants.
• D-Brief notes a new effort to enlist human eyes to detect stellar clusters in the Magellanic Clouds.

[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 Wednesday links

• Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net notes that the more Neanderthal DNA gets sequenced, the more we know of this population’s history.
• Anthro{dendum} takes a look at anthropologists who use their knowledge and their access to other cultures for purposes of espionage.
• Crooked Timber tackles the question of immigration from another angle: do states have the authority to control it, for starters?
• Dangerous Minds shares a fun video imagining Netflix as it might have existed in 1995.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers how the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico is an instance of American state failure.
• The Frailest Thing’s L.M. Sacasas considers is vows to abandon Facebook are akin to a modern-day vow of poverty.
• JSTOR Daily looks at Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and why it still matters.
• Language Log considers the naming practices of new elements like Nihonium.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money suggests that, based on the stagnation of average incomes in the US as GDP has growth, capitalism can be said to have failed.
• Lingua Franca considers the origin of the phrase “bad actor.”
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that the American opioid epidemic is not simply driven by economic factors.
• The NYR Daily considers how Poland’s new history laws do poor service to a very complicated past.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw has an interesting post examining the settlement of Australisa’s inland “Channel Country” by cattle stations, chains to allow herds to migrate following the weather.
• The Planetary Science Blog’s Emily Lakdawalla takes a look at the latest science on famously volcanic Io.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel examines how the Milky Way Galaxy is slowly consuming its neighbours, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

Anand Pandian at anthro{dendum} considers Ursula K Le Guin from the perspective of an anthropology doing fieldwork in cultures very different from their own.

Anthropology.net notes the discovery, in India, of Levallois stone tools dating 385 thousand years, long before the entry of Homo sapiens into the area.

Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares video, assembled by an amateur astronomer, of the ongoing expansion of debris around the Crab Pulsar.

Centauri Dreams reports on the discovery of organic molecules in the Magellanic Clouds.

D-Brief describes the orca Wikie, who learned six words, while Language Log is skeptical of the idea that Wikie’s ability demonstrates anything about the orca capacity for language.

Cody Delistraty links</a. to an essay of his considering the extent to which we can separate the works of artists from the artists themselves.

Drew Ex Machina describes the politics and technology that went into the launch of Explorer 1, the United States’ first satellite.

JSTOR Daily examines the question of why children and teens in the United States convicted of crimes can face such long periods of imprisonment in jail.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money argues that, sometimes, dialogue is not enough to reach one’s opponents.

The LRB Blog considers the apocalyptic imagery tied up in the flooding of the Seine, in Paris.

The Planetary Society Blog celebrates the 14 years of operation of the Mars rover Opportunity, and the science that has come from it.

At Speed River Journal, Van Waffle celebrates the many things that we can learn from trees.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Andrew Barton remarks on the fact that not only are the dominant newspapers of British Columbia part of a commercial monopoly, they’re all going up behind paywalls, too.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster notes that galaxies like our Milky Way, which has two relatively large satellite galaxies (the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds), are actually quite rare in the universe.
• In his ongoing False Steps blog, describes a proposed American spacecraft designed in 1946 that could have sent an astronaut into space a decade ahead of time.
• Geocurrents describes the peculiar situation of the booming Somalian city of Galkayo, divided between two state-like entities.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan is very critical of the recently-voiced argument that Indo-European languages evolved in Anatolia, not the Pontic steppes.
• Marginal Revolution takes note of Mexico’s heavy investment in the United States, one data point illustrating that Mexico is actually something of a global economic power.
• New APPS Blog’s Mohan Matthen revisits the question of Gandhi criticism.
• Savage Minds links to an anthropologist’s posting describing how, given the terrible economic prospects for students in the field, the only future for anthropology truly is outside of academia. More later.
• Torontoist takes note of the commemoration of the one-year anniversary of Jack Layton’s death at Toronto City Hall.
• Towleroad’s Andrew Belonsky points out that the ongoing trend in the United States towards acceptance of same-sex marriage is likely to influence eventual Supreme Court decisions.
• At The Way the Future Blogs, Frederik Pohl is right to note that one major element behind the decline of Mexican emigration to the United States is the sharp fall in the Mexican fertility rate. This is not the only factor at play, however, as he implies.