[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Charlie Stross at Antipope shares an essay he recently presented on artificial intelligence and its challenges for us.
• P. Kerim Friedman writes at {anthro}dendum about the birth of the tea ceremony in the Taiwan of the 1970s.
• Anthropology net reports on a cave painting nearly 44 thousand years old in Indonesia depicting a hunting story.
• Architectuul looks at some temporary community gardens in London.
• Bad Astronomy reports on the weird history of asteroid Ryugu.
• The Buzz talks about the most popular titles borrowed from the Toronto Public Library in 2019.
• Caitlin Kelly talks at the Broadside Blog about her particular love of radio.
• Centauri Dreams talks about the role of amateur astronomers in searching for exoplanets, starting with LHS 1140 b.
• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber looks at what is behind the rhetoric of “virtue signalling”.
• Dangerous Minds shares concert performance from Nirvana filmed the night before the release of Nevermind.
• Bruce Dorminey notes new evidence that, even before the Chixculub impact, the late Cretaceous Earth was staggering under environmental pressures.
• Myron Strong at the Everyday Sociology Blog writes about how people of African descent in the US deal with the legacies of slavery in higher education.
• Far Outliers reports on the plans in 1945 for an invasion of Japan by the US.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing gathers together a collection of the author’s best writings there.
• Gizmodo notes the immensity of the supermassive black hole, some 40 billion solar masses, at the heart of galaxy Holm 15A 700 million light-years away.
• Russell Arben Fox at In Media Res writes about the issue of how Wichita is to organize its civic politics.
• io9 argues that the 2010s were a decade where the culture of the spoiler became key.
• The Island Review points readers to the podcast Mother’s Blood, Sister’s Songs, an exploration of the links between Ireland and Iceland.
• Joe. My. God. reports on the claim of the lawyer of the killer of a mob boss that the QAnon conspiracy inspired his actions. This strikes me as terribly dangerous.
• JSTOR Daily looks at a study examining scholarly retractions.
• Language Hat shares an amusing cartoon illustrating the relationships of the dialects of Arabic.
• Language Log lists ten top new words in the Japanese language.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the dissipation of American diplomacy by Trump.
• The LRB Blog looks at the many problems in Sparta, Greece, with accommodating refugees, for everyone concerned.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting the decline of the one-child policy in China has diminished child trafficking, among other crimes.
• Sean Marshall, looking at transit in Brampton, argues that transit users need more protection from road traffic.
• Russell Darnley shares excerpts from essays he wrote about the involvement of Australia in the Vietnam War.
• Peter Watts talks about his recent visit to a con in Sofia, Bulgaria, and about the apocalypse, here.
• The NYR Daily looks at the corporatization of the funeral industry, here.
• Diane Duane writes, from her own personal history with Star Trek, about how one can be a writer who ends up writing for a media franchise.
• Jim Belshaw at Personal Reflections considers the job of tasting, and rating, different cuts of lamb.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at a nondescript observatory in the Mojave desert of California that maps the asteroids of the solar system.
• Roads and Kingdoms interviews Eduardo Chavarin about, among other things, Tijuana.
• Drew Rowsome loves the SpongeBob musical.
• Peter Rukavina announces that Charlottetown has its first public fast charger for electric vehicles.
• The Russian Demographics Blog considers the impact of space medicine, here.
• The Signal reports on how the Library of Congress is making its internet archives more readily available, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers how the incredibly isolated galaxy MCG+01-02-015 will decay almost to nothing over almost uncountable eons.
• Strange Company reports on the trial and execution of Christopher Slaughterford for murder. Was there even a crime?
• Strange Maps shares a Coudenhove-Kalergi map imagining the division of the world into five superstates.
• Understanding Society considers entertainment as a valuable thing, here.
• Denis Colombi at Une heure de peine announces his new book, Où va l’argent des pauvres?
• John Scalzi at Whatever looks at how some mailed bread triggered a security alert, here.
• Window on Eurasia reports on the massive amount of remittances sent to Tajikistan by migrant workers, here.
• Arnold Zwicky notes a bizarre no-penguins sign for sale on Amazon.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Centauri Dreams notes how gas giants on eccentric orbits can easily disrupt bodies on orbits inwards.
• Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber suggests that the political culture of England has been deformed by the trauma experienced by young children of the elites at boarding schools.
• Dangerous Minds looks at the haunting art of Paul Delvaux.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the work of Tressie McMillan Cottom in investigating for-profit higher education.
• Far Outliers looks at Tripoli in 1801.
• Gizmodo shares the Boeing design for the moon lander it proposes for NASA in 2024.
• io9 shares words from cast of Terminator: Dark Fate about the importance of the Mexican-American frontier.
• JSTOR Daily makes a case against killing spiders trapped in one’s home.
• Language Hat notes a recovered 17th century translation of a Dutch bible into the Austronesian language of Siraya, spoken in Taiwan.
• Language Log looks at the origin of the word “brogue”.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the payday lender industry.
• Marginal Revolution notes a new biography of Walter Raleigh, a maker of empire indeed.
• The NYR Daily looks at a new dance show using the rhythms of the words of writer Robert Walser.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at how, in a quantum universe, time and space could still be continuous not discrete.
• Strange Company looks at a court case from 1910s Brooklyn, about a parrot that swore.
• The Volokh Conspiracy notes an affirmative action court case in which it was ruled that someone from Gibraltar did not count as Hispanic.
• Window on Eurasia notes rhetoric claiming that Russians are the largest divided people on the Earth.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at lizards and at California’s legendary Highway 101.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Architectuul looks at some architecturally innovative pools.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait looks at Wolf 359, a star made famous in Star Trek for the Starfleet battle there against the Borg but also a noteworthy red dwarf star in its own right.
• Centauri Dreams looks at how the NASA Deep Space Atomic Clock will play a vital role in interplanetary navigation.
• The Crux considers the “drunken monkey” thesis, the idea that drinking alcohol might have been an evolutionary asset for early hominids.
• D-Brief reports on what may be the next step for genetic engineering beyond CRISPR.
• Bruce Dorminey looks at how artificial intelligence may play a key role in searching for threat asteroids.
• The Island Review shares some poetry from Roseanne Watt, inspired by the Shetlands and using its dialect.
• Livia Gershon writes at JSTOR Daily about how YouTube, by promising to make work fun, actually also makes fun work in psychologically problematic ways.
• Marginal Revolution notes how the relatively small Taiwan has become a financial superpower.
• Janine di Giovanni at the NYR Daily looks back at the 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone. Why did it work?
• Jamais Cascio at Open the Future looks back at a 2004 futurological exercise, the rather accurate Participatory Panopticon. What did he anticipate correctly? How? What does it suggest for us now to our world?
• The Planetary Society Blog notes that LightSail 2 will launch before the end of June.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at how the discovery of gas between galaxies helps solve a dark matter question.
• Strange Company shares a broad collection of links.
• Window on Eurasia makes the obvious observation that the West prefers a North Caucasus controlled by Russia to one controlled by Islamists.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at American diner culture, including American Chinese food.

[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.

[AH] Five alternate history maps from r/imaginarymaps (#alternatehistory)

Reddit’s imaginarymaps forum has a lot of great alternate history maps.

• This r/imaginarymaps map depicts a Dutch Formosa crica 1900.
• This creation imagines a joint German-Polish invasion of the Soviet Union.
• this map imagines a different Cold War, with a largely Communist Germany opposed by a Franco-British Union.
• This map of an alternate Cold War circa 1960 that actually made it into a history book as our timeline
• This map shows the remarkably fragmented Central America of Marvel Comics’s famous Earth-616.

[MUSIC] Five music links: Seventeen, HMV and Sunrise, lo-fi hip-hop, Aretha Franklin, Matthew Lien

• Noisey looks at the deep interest of pop music with the age 17.
• HMV stores have been saved in Britain, as they have been in Canada, by the purchase of many remaining stores by Sunrise Records. The Guardian reports.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how lo-fi hip-hop became such a popular genre for students to listen to as they studied.
• Joshua Jelly-Schapiro at the NYR Daily writes about the grace drawn from religion that marks Aretha Franklin the musician.
• MacLean’s introduces its readers to Yukon-based musician Matthew Lien, a huge star in Taiwan but still unknown in Canada.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Cody Delistraty considers the new field of dystopian realism–of dystopia as a real thing in contemporary lives–in popular culture.
• D-Brief notes how direct experiments in laboratories have helped geologists better understand the mantle of the Earth.
• Far Outliers shares a terribly sad anecdote of a young woman in China who killed herself, victim of social pressures which claim many more victims.
• Imageo notes how recent headlines about ocean temperature increases are misleading in that they did not represent the steady incremental improvements of science generally.
• Joe. My. God. notes the unexpectedly rapid shift of the location of the northern magnetic pole.
• JSTOR Daily links to a paper that links to the quietly subversive aesthetics and politics of the 1950s and 1960s surf movie.
• Language Hat links to an intriguing paper looking at the relationship between the size of an individual’s Broca’s area, in their brain, and the ways in which they can learn language.
• Language Log shares a poster from Taiwan trying to promote use of the Hakka language, currently a threatened language among traditional speakers.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the extreme secrecy of Trump regarding his Helsinki discussions with Putin, going so far as to confiscate his translator’s notes.
• Justin Petrone at north! writes about the exhilarating and liberating joys of hope, of fantasy.
• The NYR Daily examines the new Alfonso Cuarón film, the autobiographical Roma.
• Drew Rowsome takes a look at the interesting show by Damien Atkins at Crow’s Nest Theatre, We Are Not Alone.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel reports on what a report of the discovery of of the brightest quasar actually means.
• Window on Eurasia notes the historical cooperation, before Operation Barbarossa, between the Nazis’ Gestapo and Stalin’s NKVD.
• Arnold Zwicky shares a video examining Chavacano, the Spanish-based creole still spoken in the Philippines.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber suggests that the planet Earth, judging by the progress of space travel to date, is going to be the only planet our species will ever inhabit.
• D-Brief notes surprising new evidence that maize was domesticated not in Mesoamerica, but rather in the southwest of the Amazon basin.
• Dangerous Minds notes the penalties proposed by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia for buggery, sodomy, and bestiality.
• Earther considers the extent to which Thanos’ homeworld of Titan, whether the Saturnian moon or lookalike world, could ever have been habitable, even with extensive terraforming.
• Hornet Stories notes the interesting light that a study of ideal penis sizes among heterosexual women sheds on studies of sexuality generally.
• JSTOR Daily takes an extended look at how the sharing economy, promoted by people like Lawrence Lessig and businesses like Airbnb, turned out to be dystopian not utopian, and why this was the case.
• Victor Mair at Language Log reports on controversy over bread made by a Taiwanese baker, and at the language used.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the latest proof of the decline of Harper’s as a meaningful magazine. (Myself, I lost respect for them when they published an extended AIDS denialist article in 2006.)
• Allan Metcalfe at Lingua Franca celebrates, using the example of lexicographer Kory Stamper’s new book, how the blog helped him connect with the stars of linguistics.
• Katherine Franke at the NYR Daily notes pressure from Israel directed against academic critics in the United States.
• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog notes how the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has picked up InSight hardware on the surface of Mars below.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes how NASA is running short of Plutonium-238, the radioactive isotope that it needs to power spacecraft like the Voyagers sent on long-duration missions and/or missions far from the sun.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, based on an excess of deaths over births, the population of Crimea will decline for the foreseeable future.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at some examples of the anaphora, a particular kind of rhetorical structure.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, looking at the Moon, considers what a “small” crater is.
• Citizen Science Salon looks at Amino Labs, a start-up that aims to enable people–even children–to use simple kits to engage in bioengineering.
• Crooked Timber notes that the collapse in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies means good things for the global environment.
• The Crux considers the extent to which gender–gender identity, gendered roles–is unique to humans.
• A Fistful of Euros considers the generalized extremism of the “filets jaunes” of France and where this might lead that country.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing shares the skepticism of Jacques Ellul in a “technical” humanism, one that seeks to ameliorate the details of a dehumanizing life.
• Gizmodo considers how we can start preparing for the risks of powerful artificial intelligence to humans, even potentially existential ones.
• The Island Review interviews Nancy Campbell, a writer concerned with the islands and cultures of the Arctic like Greenland.
• Language Hat considers the idea of “efficient languages”. What does this idea even mean?
• Language Log considers the potential impact of making English an official language on Taiwan.
• The LRB Blog considers the political future of France.
• Window on Eurasia notes how many people in Kyrgzystan are becoming angered by China’s Xinjiang policies.
• Arnold Zwicky considers St. Bernard, in connection with dogs and otherwise.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Crooked Timber takes a look at “abusive legalism”.
• D-Brief looks at unusual Type 1A supernova ASASSN-18bt, which exhibited an odd early burst of light.
• The Dragon’s Tales reports on a Dutch government report that Russia has developed a new cruise missile in violation of the INF treaty.
• Drew Ex Machina takes a look at the latest thought on habitable moons.
• Far Outliers notes how Korean, Taiwanese, and Okinawan prisoners in American prisoner of war camps for Imperial Japanese soldiers distinguished themselves (or not) from their ethnic Japanese counterparts.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing considers the metaphor of the cave in the digital era. Do data scientists truly understand the online world?
• JSTOR Daily looks at the different estimates as to the size of the legal cannabis market in Canada.
• Language Log links to a podcast that takes a look at the Philadelphia dialect of English.
• Out There makes the argument that Cubesats are perfectly suited to conducting surveys of asteroids.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the one-man show Obaaberima, performed by Tawiah Ben M’Carthy, currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times.
• Window on Eurasia notes a demographer’s argument that any future population growth in Russia will need to be driven by immigration.