[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes the first time that an exoplanet, HR 8799e, has been directly observed using optical interferometry.
• Centauri Dreams notes the possibility, demonstrated by the glimpsing of a circumplanetary disc around exoplanet PDS 70b, that we might be seeing a moon system in formation.
• The Citizen Science Salon looks what observers in Antarctica are contributing to our wealth of scientific knowledge.
• The Dragon’s Tales shares links to articles looking at the latest findings on the Precambrian Earth.
• The Frailest Thing’s L.M. Sacasas writes about his ambivalent response to a Twitter that, by its popularity, undermines the open web.
• Gizmodo notes that NASA is going to open up the International Space Station to tourists.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how croquet, upon its introduction in the 19th century United States, was seen as scandalous for the way it allowed men and women to mix freely.
• Shakezula at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the unaccountable fondness of at least two Maine Republican legislators for the Confederacy.
• Marginal Revolution suggests that the economic success of Israel in recent decades is a triumph of neoliberalism.
• Stephen Ellis at the NYR Daily writes about the gymnastics of Willem de Kooning.
• Drew Rowsome profiles out comic Brendan D’Souza.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the still strange galaxy NGC 1052-DF2, apparently devoid of dark matter.
• John Scalzi at Whatever shares his theory about a fixed quantity of flavor in strawberries of different sizes.
• Window on Eurasia looks at a contentious plan for a territorial swap between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Centauri Dreams notes the discovery of rocky debris indicative of destroyed planets in orbit of the white dwarf SDSS J122859.93+104032.9, 400 light-years away.
• JSTOR Daily shows how the Columbine massacre led to a resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US.
• Language Log notes an example of digraphia, two scripts, in use in Taiwan.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money identifies the presidential run of Howard Schultz in ways unflattering to him yet accurate.
• The LRB Blog takes a look at the current, unsettling, stage of artificial intelligence research.
• At the NYR Daily, Boyd Tonkin writes about an exhibition of the works of Van Gogh at the Tate Britain highlighting his ties with England and with his Europeanness.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel reports on the ultimate fate of the Earth, a cinder orbiting a black dwarf.
• Strange Company tells the strange, sad story of 19th century California writer Yda Hillis Addis.
• At Vintage Space, Amy Shira Teitel explains why the Apollo missions made use of a dangerous pure-oxygen environment.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, 41 years ago, protests in Georgia forced the Soviet Union to let the Georgian republic keep Georgian as its official language.
• Arnold Zwicky starts with peeps and goes on to look at dragons.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Centauri Dreams considers the possibility of carbon dioxide being a biosignature in the atmospheres of exoplanets.
• D-Brief notes the discoveries of Hayabusa2 at asteroid Ryugu, including the possibility it was part of a larger body.
• Gizmodo links to a new analysis suggesting the behaviour of ‘Oumuamua was not so unprecedented after all, that it was a simple exocomet.
• JSTOR Daily looks at Agnes Chase, an early 20th century biologist who did remarkable things, both with science and with getting women into her field.
• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money links to a new article of his analyzing the new aircraft carriers of Japan, noting not just their power but the effective lack of limits on Japanese military strength.
• Marginal Revolution notes the substantial demographic shifts occurring in Kazakhstan since independence, with Kazakh majorities appearing throughout the country.
• Neuroskeptic considers if independent discussion sections for online papers would make sense.
• The NYR Daily shares a photo essay by Louis Witter reporting on Moroccan boys seeking to migrate to Europe through Ceuta.
• Roads and Kingdoms has an interview with photographer Brett Gundlock about his images of Latin American migrants in Mexico seeking the US.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explores the mass extinction and extended ice age following the development of photosynthesis and appearance of atmospheric oxygen on Earth two billion years ago.
• Window on Eurasia notes that, in Karabakh, Jehovah’s Witnesses now constitute the biggest religious minority.

[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

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes that far-orbiting body 2015 TC387 offers more indirect evidence for Planet Nine, as does D-Brief.
• Centauri Dreams notes that data from the Gaia astrometrics satellite finds traces of past collisions between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy.
• The Crux takes a look at the long history of human observation of the Crab Nebula.
• Sujata Gupta at JSTOR Daily writes about the struggle of modern agriculture with the pig, balancing off concerns for animal welfare with productivity.
• Language Hat shares a defensive of an apparently legendarily awful novel, Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling.
• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle, takes a look at the controversy over the name of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, going up to the recent referendum on North Macedonia.
• The LRB Blog reports on the high rate of fatal car accidents in the unrecognized republic of Abkhazia.
• Reddit’s mapporn shares an interesting effort to try to determine the boundaries between different regions of Europe, stacking maps from different sources on top of each other.
• Justin Petrone at North! writes about how the northern wilderness of Estonia sits uncomfortably with his Mediterranean Catholic background.
• Peter Watts reports from a book fair he recently attended in Lviv, in the west of Ukraine.
• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog notes the new effort being put in by NASA into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
• Roads and Kingdoms reports on some beer in a very obscure bar in Shanghai.
• Drew Rowsome reports on the performance artist Lukas Avendano, staging a performance in Toronto inspired by the Zapotech concept of the muxe gender.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps examines the ocean-centric Spielhaus map projection that has recently gone viral.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers the question of whether or not the Big Rip could lead to another Big Bang.
• Window on Eurasia notes the harm that global warming will inflict on the infrastructures of northern Siberia.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell considers the ecological fallacy in connection with electoral politics. Sometimes there really are not niches for new groups.
• Arnold Zwicky takes part in the #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob meme, this time looking at images of linguists.

[NEWS] Five cultural links: astronauts learning Chinese, hitchhiking, Catalonia, Croatia, Georgia

• The BBC reports on how astronauts from Europe are starting to learn Chinese, the better to interacting with future fellow travelers.
• MacLean’s takes a look at the practical disappearance of hitchhiking as a mode of travel in Canada, from its heights in the 1970s. (No surprise, I think, on safety grounds alone.)
• PRI notes the practical disappearance of the quintessentially Spanish bullfight in Catalonia, driven by national identity and by animal-rights sentiment.
• Transitions Online notes how the strong performance of Croatia at the World Cup, making it to the finals, was welcomed by most people in the former Yugoslavia.
• Open Democracy notes how tensions between liberal and conservative views on popular culture and public life are becoming political in post-Soviet Georgia.

[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.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly takes a look at the concept of resilience.
• D-Brief notes the many ways in which human beings can be killed by heat waves.
• The Dragon’s Gaze notes a claim for the discovery of a new pulsar planet, PSR B0329+54 b, two Earth masses with an orbit three decades long.
• The Frailest Thing’s Michael Sacasas argues that, in some was, online connectivity is like a drug.
• Hornet Stories considers the plight of bisexuals in the closet.
• Language Hat considers the origins of the family name of Hungarian Karl-Maria Kertbeny, the man who developed the term “homosexuality”, and much else besides.
• The NYR Daily looks at how the item of soap was a key component behind racism and apartheid in South Africa.
• Progressive Download’s John Farrell notes a new book, The Quotable Darwin.
• Peter Rukavina takes a look at 18 years’ worth of links on his blog. How many are still good? The answer may surprise you.
• Understanding Society considers the insights of Tony Judt on the psychology of Europeans after the Second World War.
• John Scalzi at Whatever considers, in Q&A format, some insights for men in the post-Weinstein era.
• Window on Eurasia looks at how boundaries in the Caucasus were not necessarily defined entirely by the Bolsheviks.
• Arnold Zwicky considers various odd appearances of pickles in contemporary popular culture.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross bets that barring catastrophe, the US under Trump will dispatch crewed circumlunar flights.
• D-Brief takes a look at the evolution of birds, through speculation on how the beak formed.
• Language Log looks at the ways Trump is represented, and mocked, in the languages of East Asia.
• Noting the death toll in a Mexico City sweatshop, Lawyers, Guns and Money reiterates that sweatshops are dangerous places to work.
• The NYR Daily notes the many structural issues likely to prevent foreign-imposed fixes in Afghanistan.
• Roads and Kingdoms reports from a seemingly unlikely date festival held in the depths of the Saudi desert.
• Rocky Planet reports that Mount Agung, a volcano in Indonesia, is at risk of imminent eruption.
• Drew Rowsome notes a new stage adaptation in Toronto of the Hitchcock classic, North by Northwest.
• Strange Company reports on how the Lonergans disappeared in 1998 in a dive off the Great Barrier Reef. What happened to them?
• Towleroad notes how Chelsea Manning was just banned from entering Canada.
• Window on Eurasia claims that the Russian language is disappearing from Armenia.
• Arnold Zwicky maps the usage of “faggot” as an obscenity in the United States.

[NEWS] Three links from eastern Europe: Bulgaria and Macedonia, Moldova, Georgia and Abkhazia

• Bulgaria and Macedonia have at last signed a treaty trying to put their contentious past behind them. Greece next?
• The legacies of Stalinist deportations in Moldova continue to trouble this poor country.
• The plight of the ethnic Georgians apparently permanently displaced from Georgia has been only muted by time.