[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomy notes the very odd structure of galaxy NGC 2775.
• Dangerous Minds reports on the 1987 riot by punks that wrecked a Seattle ferry.
• Bruce Dorminey reports on a new suggestion from NASA that the massive dust towers of Mars have helped dry out that world over eons.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at how changing technologies have led to younger people spending more social capital on maintaining relationships with friends over family.
• This forum hosted at Gizmodo considers the likely future causes of death of people in coming decades.
• In Media Res’ Russell Arben Fox reports on the debate in Wichita on what to do with the Century II performance space.
• Joe. My. God. reports on the decision of Hungary to drop out of Eurovision, apparently because of its leaders’ homophobia.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the debunking of the odd theory that the animals and people of the Americas were degenerate dwarfs.
• Language Hat reports on how the classics can be served by different sorts of translation.
• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money considers how Trump’s liberation of war criminals relates to folk theories about just wars.
• The LRB Blog reports from the ground in the Scotland riding of East Dunbartonshire.
• Marginal Revolution shares a paper suggesting that, contrary to much opinion, social media might actually hinder the spread of right-wing populism.
• The NYR Daily looks at the nature of the proxy fighters in Syria of Turkey. Who are they?
• Drew Rowsome interviews Sensational Sugarbum, star of–among other things–the latest Ross Petty holiday farce.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why we still need to be able to conduct astronomy from the Earth.
• Strange Maps explains the odd division of Europe between east and west, as defined by different subspecies of mice.
• Window on Eurasia notes how Chinese apparently group Uighurs in together with other Central Asians of similar language and religion.
• Arnold Zwicky explores the concept of onomatomania.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Architectuul visits the studio of Barbas Lopes Arquitectos in Lisbon, here.
• Bad Astronomer takes a look at a new paper examining the effectiveness of different asteroid detection technologies, including nuclear weapons.
• Centauri Dreams reports on a new study suggesting potentially habitable planets orbiting Alpha Centauri B, smaller of the two stars, could suffer from rapid shifts of their axes.
• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber argues some polls suggest some American conservatives really would prefer Russia as a model to California.
• Bruce Dorminey notes the discovery, by the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia, of 27 supernova remnants in our galaxy.
• The Dragon’s Tales shares a collection of links about stealth aircraft, here.
• Gizmodo notes a new study suggesting that DNA is but one of very very many potential genetic molecules.
• Language Hat shares a reevaluation of the Richard Stanyhurst translation of the Aeneid, with its manufactured words. Why mightn’t this have been not mockable but rather creative?
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money celebrated the 50th anniversary of the takeover of Alcatraz Island by Native American activists.
• Chris Bertram writes at the LRB Blog, after the catastrophe of the Essex van filled with dozens of dead migrants, about the architecture of exclusion that keeps out migrants.
• Marginal Revolution shares a comment looking at the fentanyl crisis from a new angle.
• Jenny Uglow writes at the NYR Daily about a Science Museum exhibit highlighting the dynamic joys of science and its progress over the centuries.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw takes a look at the question of how to prevent the wildfires currently raging in Australia. What could have been done, what should be done?
• The Planetary Society Blog reports on proposals from China for two long-range probe missions to interstellar space, including a Neptune flyby.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the wonderfully innocent Pinocchio currently playing at the Young People’s Theatre.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the evidence for the universe, maybe, being closed.
• Window on Eurasia notes that the Alexandria Patriarchate is the next Orthodox body to recognize the Ukrainian church.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at irregular versus regular, as a queer word too.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait urges caution in identifying K2-18b, a mini-Neptune with water vapour in its atmosphere, as Earth-like.
• Centauri Dreams reports on the discovery of C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), a likely interstellar comet like ‘Oumuamua.
• The Crux reports on the orange roughy, a fish commonly caught as byproduct that can live up to 250 years.
• D-Brief looks at the harm that may be caused by some insecticides to songbirds, including anorexia and delayed migrations.
• Dangerous Minds considers if David Bowie actually did burn his 360-ton Glass Spider stage prop.
• Gizmodo notes the formidable, fanged marsupials once existing in Australia.
• Imageo notes signs that a dreaded blob of hot water, auguring climate change, might now be lurking in the Pacific Ocean.
• io9 notes that Ryan Murphy has shared the official title sequence for the 1984 season of American Horror Story.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the history, in popular culture and actual technology, of the artificial womb.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at how lightly the Sackler family got off for their involvement in triggering the opioid crisis with OxyContin.
• Marginal Revolution notes many companies are now seeking insurance to protect themselves in the US-China trade war.
• Tim Parks writes at the NYR Daily about how every era tends to have translations which fit its ethos.
• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a paper suggesting that immigration and immigrants do not have major effects on the overall fertility of highly-developed countries.
• Frank Jacobs notes a mysterious 1920s German map of South America that shows Brasilia, the Brazilian capital built only from 1956. What is up with this?
• Window on Eurasia reports on the negative effects of massive migration of workers from Tajikistan on the country’s women.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams notes the astounding precision of the new Habitable Planet Finder telescope.
• D-Brief notes that the lack of small craters on Pluto and Charon suggests there are not many small bodies in the Kuiper Belt.
• Far Outliers notes the many and widely varying transliterations of Bengali to English.
• JSTOR Daily notes the extent to which border walls represent, ultimately, a failure of politics.
• Language Log examines the emergence of the Germanic languages in the depths of prehistory.
• Anna Aslanyan at the LRB Blog considers the eternal search for a universal language.
• Noah Smith shareshis Alternative Green New Deal Plan at his blog, one that depends more on technology and market forces than the original.
• Mitchell Abidor at the NYR Daily writes about the incisive leftism of journalist Victor Sorge.
• Out There notes the reality that the worlds of our solar system, and almost certainly other systems, are united by a constant stream of incoming rocks.
• At the Planetary Society Blog, Emily Lakdawalla examines the data transmitted back by OSIRIS-REx from that probe’s Earth flyby.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel examines cosmic conditions at the time the solar system formed 4.56 billion or so years ago.
• Towleroad notes the censorship of many explicitly gay scenes from Bohemian Rhapsody in its Chinese release.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the many ways in which the social norms of North Caucasian men are converging with those of the average Russian.
• On St. David’s Day, Arnold Zwicky pays tribute to the daffodil and to the Welsh.

[NEWS] Five Indigenous links: Ainu, Mayan cards, food culture, hip-hop, translation

• Japan Today notes that the Ainu, the indigenous people of the northern island of Hokkaido, are set to be recognized by the Japanese government as indigenous.
• Atlas Obscura looks at the decks of Mayan playing cards created by the Soviet Union.
• The Conversation reports on how Indigenous food cultures in Canada can be used to better understand the environment and its changes.
• Brielle Morgan at The Discourse reports on the Indigenous, political hip-hop of Diana Hellson.
• CBC reports on the experiences of Priscilla Bosun, official Cree-language translator in the House of Commons.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait writes about the ephemeral nature and historically recent formation of the rings of Saturn.
• Centauri Dreams hosts an essay looking at the controversies surrounding the arguments of Avi Loeb around SETI and ‘Oumuamua.
• D-Brief links to a new analysis of hot Jupiters suggesting that they form close to their stars, suggesting further that they are a separate population from outer-system worlds like our Jupiter and Saturn.
• Colby King at the Everyday Sociology Blog takes a look at the sociology of the online world, using the critical work of Zeynep Tufekci as a lens.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing makes a great point about the seemingly transparent online world: We might, like a protagonist in a Hawthorne story, confine ourselves falsely that we know everything, so becoming jaded.
• JSTOR Daily notes how, in the early 20th century, US Park Rangers were actually quite rough and tumble, an irregular police force.
• Language Hat looks at the overlooked modernist fiction of Dorothy Richardson.
• Language Log examines the origins of the phrase “Listen up”.
• The LRB Blog visits a Berlin cemetery to note the annual commemoration there of the lives of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.
• Marginal Revolution considers the proportion of centenarians on Okinawa, and considers if a carbohydrate-heavy diet featuring sweet potatoes is key.</li<
• Tim Parks at the NYR Daily engages with the idea of a translation being an accomplishment of its own.
• Roads and Kingdoms has a fascinating interview with Tanja Fox about the history and development of the Copenhagen enclave of Christiania.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that early returns from New Horizons suggest Ultima Thule is a typical “future comet”.
• Strange Company shares the story of the haunting of 18th century Gael Donald Bán.
• Towleroad shares the account by Nichelle Nichols of how her chance encounter with Martin Luther King helped save Star Trek.
• Window on Eurasia notes the different quasi-embassies of different Russian republics in Moscow, and their potential import.
• Arnold Zwicky, looking at penguins around the world, notices the CIBC mascot Percy the Penguin.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the remarkable amount of information produced by a study of globular clusters in the Coma cluster of galaxies.
• Crooked Timber notes the decision of British prosecutors to charge the Stansted 15, people who prevented a flight from taking off with reject asylum claimants, with terrorism-related offenses.
• The Crux notes some of the remarkable evolutionary tricks that let different insects develop ears and the sense of hearing.
• D-Brief notes that the Voyager 2 probe has exited the heliosphere, arguably leaving the solar system.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing notes how digital media accentuate the modern world’s fragmentation and exhaustion of time.
• Information is Beautiful shares the results of this year’s Information is Beauty awards, sharing all sorts of impressive data visualization products including the winner.
• JSTOR Daily notes some lessons about monks’ organization of time; productivity improvements, with better technology, were used not to increase production but rather to free up time for other uses.
• Language Hat links to a BBC article noting the potential that machine translation offers for the understanding of Sumerian cuneiform tablets, most of which are untranslated.
• Rose Jacobs at Lingua Franca announces that, after years of operation, this blog will be closed before the end of the month.
• The Planetary Society Blog’s Jason Davis announces that the OSIRIS-REx probe has detected water on asteroid 101955 Bennu.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw notes the death of his Canadian relative, the anthropologist Cyril Belshaw.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why we have not yet found Earth analog planets.
• Window on Eurasia notes how the leadership of Chechnya has been criticizing neighbouring Dagestan for its treatment of Chechens there.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait goes into more detail about the Milky Way Galaxy’s ancient collision with and absorption of dwarf galaxy Gaia-Enceladus.
• Centauri Dreams considers SETI in the infrared, looking at the proposal to use a laser to signal our existence to observers of our sun.
• D-Brief notes a study of Neanderthal children’s teeth that documents their hazardous environment, faced with cold winters and lead contamination.
• The Island Review shares three lovely islands-related poems by writer Naila Moreira.
• JSTOR Daily asks an important question: Can the United States and China avoid the Thucydides trap, a war of the rising power with the falling one? Things seems uncertain at this point.
• Mark Liberman at Language Log looks at the continuing lack of progress of machine translation.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at a recent discussion on the Roman Republic, noting how imperialism and inequality led to that polity’s transformation into an empire. Lessons for us now?
• The Map Room Blog shares a Canadian Geographic map describing the different, declining, populations of caribou in the north of Canada.
• Marginal Revolution notes a paper suggesting that global pandemics will not necessarily kill us all off, that high-virulence infections might be outcompeted and, even, controllable.
• The NYR Daily takes a look at historical reasons for the prominence of Rembrandt in the British artistic imagination.
• Towleroad notes that Massachusetts voted to keep transgender rights protected.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that the quality of Russian taught in schools in Uzbekistan is declining. I wonder: Is this a matter of a Central Asian variety emerging, perhaps?
• Livio di Matteo at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative takes a look at the long-run economic growth of Australia, contrasting it with the past and with other countries. In some ways, Canada (among others) is a stronger performer.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Centauri Dreams notes the lack of evidence for heat plumes around the Europan crater of Pwyll.
• Patrick Nunn at The Crux writes about the new evidence for the millennias-long records preserved remarkably well in oral history.
• D-Brief notes the discovery of a two-year cycle in gamma ray output in blazar PG 1553+113.
• Bruce Dorminey notes a proposal from French astronomer Antoine Labeyrie to create a low-cost hypertelescope in nearby space.
• Gizmodo interviews experts on the possibility of whether people who are now cryogenically frozen will be revived. (The consensus is not encouraging for current cryonicists.)
• JSTOR Daily notes how, looking back at old records, we can identify many veterans of the US Civil War suffering from the sorts of psychological issues we know now that military veterans suffer from.
• Language Hat notes the beauty of two stars’ Arabic names, Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgenubi, beta and alpha Librae.
• The LRB Blog takes a look at the encounters of Anthony Burgess with the Russian language.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution is surprised that Canada has allowed China to add deep-sea sensors to its deep-sea observatories in the Pacific, in a geopolitically-concerned American way.
• Tim Parks at the NYR Daily talks about the importance of translation, as a career that needs to be supported while also needing critiques.
• Drew Rowsome takes a look at two shows on young people coming out, the web series It’s Complicated and the documentary Room to Grow.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that the evidence of the existence of a potential Planet Nine in our solar system is not necessarily that strong.
• Strange Maps shares a map of Europe in 1920, one oriented towards Americans, warning of famine across a broad swathe of the continent including in countries now no longer around.
• Window on Eurasia notes that, in multiethnic Dagestan, Russian has displaced other local languages as a language of interethnic communication.
• Arnold Zwicky announces the creation, at his blog via the sharing of a Liz Climo cartoon, of a new category at his blog relating to pandas.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• At Anthropology.net, Kamzib Kamrani looks at the Yamnaya horse culture of far eastern Europe and their connection to the spread of the Indo-Europeans.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the predicted collision of China’s Tiangong-1 space station. Where will it fall?
• James Bow notes a Kickstarter funding effort to revive classic Canadian science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.
• Centauri Dreams notes the impending retirement of the pioneering Kepler telescope, and what’s being done in the time before this retirement.
• D-Brief notes how nanowires made of gold and titanium were used to restore the sight of blind mice.
• Russell Darnley takes a look at the indigenous people of Riau province, the Siak, who have been marginalized by (among other things) the Indonesian policy of transmigration.
• Dead Things reports on more evidence of Denisovan ancestry in East Asian populations, with the suggestion that the trace of Denisovan ancestry in East Asia came from a different Denisovan population than the stronger traces in Melanesia.
• Hornet Stories paints a compelling portrait of the West Texas oasis-like community of Marfa.
• JSTOR Daily notes how indigenous mythology about illness was used to solve a hantavirus outbreak in New Mexico in the 1990s.
• Language Log praises the technical style of a Google Translate translation of a text from German to English.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that, under the Shah, Iran was interested in building nuclear plants. Iranian nuclear aspirations go back a long way.
• The LRB Blog looks at the unsettling elements of the literary, and other, popularity of Jordan Peterson.
• Marginal Revolution notes the continuing existence of a glass ceiling even in relatively egalitarian Iceland.
• The NYR Daily looks at the unsettling elements behind the rise of Xi Jinping to unchecked power. Transitions from an oligarchy to one-man rule are never good for a country, never mind one as big as China.
• Drew Rowsome writes about Love, Cecil, a new film biography of photographer Cecil Beaton.
• Peter Rukavina celebrates the 25th anniversary of his move to Prince Edward Island. That province, my native one, is much the better for his having moved there. Congratulations!
• Window on Eurasia looks at a strange story of Russian speculation about Kazakh pan-Turkic irredentism for Orenburg that can be traced back to one of its own posts.
• At Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Frances Woolley takes the time to determine that Canadian university professors tend to be more left-wing than the general Canadian population, and to ask why this is the case.