[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Architectuul shares photos from a bike tour of Berlin.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reports on new evidence that exocomets are raining on star Beta Pictoris.
• Larry Klaes at Centauri Dreams reviews the two late 1970s SF films Alien and Star Trek I, products of the same era.
• D-Brief reports on Hubble studies of the star clusters of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
• Bruce Dorminey shares Gemini telescope images of interstellar comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov).
• The Dragon’s Tales shares video of Space X’s Starhopper test flight.
• Far Outliers notes the import of the 13th century Norman king of England calling himself Edward after an Anglo-Saxon king.
• Gizmodo notes that not only can rats learn to play hide and seek, they seem to enjoy it.
• io9 notes the fantastic high camp of Mister Sinister in the new Jonathan Hickman X-Men run, borrowing a note from Kieron Gillen’s portrayal of the character.
• Joe. My. God. notes that Guiliani’s soon-to-be ex-wife says he has descended from 911 hero to a liar.
• Language Log looks at the recent ridiculous suggestion that English, among other languages, descends from Chinese.
• The LRB Blog looks at the brief history of commemorating the V2 attacks on London.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the practice in Saskatchewan of sterilizing First Nations women against their consent.
• Marginal Revolution suggests that farmers in Brazil might be getting a partly unfair treatment. (Partly.)
• The Planetary Society Blog explains why C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) matters.
• Window on Eurasia notes that, for the first time, immigrants from Turkmenistan in Belarus outnumber immigrants from Ukraine.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Anthro{dendum} features an essay examining trauma and resiliency as encountered in ethnographic fieldwork.
• Architectuul highlights a new project seeking to promote historic churches built in the United Kingdom in the 20th century.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait examines Ahuna Mons, a muddy and icy volcano on Ceres, and looks at the nebula Westerhout 40.
• Centauri Dreams notes the recent mass release of data from a SETI project, and notes the discovery of two vaguely Earth-like worlds orbiting the very dim Teegarden’s Star, just 12 light-years away.
• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber notes that having universities as a safe space for trans people does not infringe upon academic freedom.
• The Crux looks at the phenomenon of microsleep.
• D-Brief notes evidence that the Milky Way Galaxy was warped a billion years ago by a collision with dark matter-heavy dwarf galaxy Antlia 2, and notes a robotic fish powered by a blood analogue.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that India plans on building its own space station.
• Earther notes the recording of the song of the endangered North Pacific right whale.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the role of emotional labour in leisure activities.
• Far Outliers looks at how Japan prepared for the Battle of the Leyte Gulf in 1944.
• Gizmodo looks at astronomers’ analysis of B14-65666, an ancient galactic collision thirteen billion light-years away, and notes that the European Space Agency has a planned comet interception mission.
• io9 notes how the plan for Star Trek in the near future is to not only have more Star Trek, but to have many different kinds of Star Trek for different audiences.
• Joe. My. God. notes the observation of Pete Buttigieg that the US has probably already had a gay president.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the many ways in which the rhetoric of Celtic identity has been used, and notes that the archerfish uses water ejected from its eyes to hunt.
• Language Hat looks at why Chinese is such a hard language to learn for second-language learners, and looks at the Suso monastery in Spain, which played a key role in the coalescence of the Spanish language.
• Language Log looks at the complexities of katakana.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the death of deposed Egypt president Mohammed Morsi looks like a slow-motion assassination, and notes collapse of industrial jobs in the Ohio town of Lordstown, as indicative of broader trends.
• The LRB Blog looks at the death of Mohamed Morsi.
• The Map Rom Blog shares a new British Antarctic Survey map of Greenland and the European Arctic.
• Marginal Revolution notes how non-religious people are becoming much more common in the Middle East, and makes the point that the laying of cable for the transatlantic telegraph is noteworthy technologically.
• Noah Smith at Noahpionion takes the idea of the Middle East going through its own version of the Thirty Years War seriously. What does this imply?
• The NYR Daily takes a look at a Lebanon balanced somehow on the edge, and looks at the concentration camp system of the United States.
• The Planetary Society Blog explains what people should expect from LightSail 2, noting that the LightSail 2 has launched.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw points readers to his stories on Australian spy Harry Freame.
• Rocky Planet explains, in the year of the Apollo 50th anniversary, why the Moon matters.
• Drew Rowsome reviews, and praises, South African film Kanarie, a gay romp in the apartheid era.
• The Russian Demographics Blog links to a paper examining the relationship between childcare and fertility in Belgium, and looks at the nature of statistical data from Turkmenistan.
• The Strange Maps Blog shares a map highlighting different famous people in the United States.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why different galaxies have different amounts of dark matter, and shares proof that the Apollo moon landings actually did happen.
• Towleroad notes the new evidence that poppers, in fact, are not addictive.
• Window on Eurasia warns about the parlous state of the Volga River.
• Arnold Zwicky takes an extended look at the mid-20th century gay poet Frank O’Hara.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Matt Thompson at anthro{dendum} writes about the complex, often anthropological, satire in the comics of Charles Addams.
• Architectuul looks at the photography of Roberto Conte.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes a new computer model suggesting a supernova can be triggered by throwing a white dwarf into close orbit of a black hole.
• D-Brief notes how ammonia on the surface of Pluto hints at the existence of a subsurface ocean.
• Bruce Dorminey notes how the bombardment of Earth by debris from a nearby supernova might have prompted early hominids to become bipedal.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that NASA has awarded its first contract for its plans in lunar space.
• Far Outliers notes the reactions, within and without the Soviet Union, to the 1991 Soviet coup attempt.
• Matt Novak at Gizmodo’s Paleofuture notes how, in 1995, Terry Pratchett predicted the rise of online Nazis.
• io9 notes the impending physical release this summer of DVDs of the Deep Space Nine documentary What We Left Behind.
• JSTOR Daily suggests some ways to start gardening in your apartment.
• Victor Mair at Language Log claims that learning Literary Chinese is a uniquely difficult experience. Thoughts?
• The NYR Daily features a wide-ranging interview with EU official Michel Barnier focused particularly, but not exclusively, on Brexit.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes that an Internet vote has produced a majority in favour of naming outer system body 2007 OR10 Gonggang.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer considers the possibility that foreign investors in Mexico might be at risk, at least feel themselves at risk, from the government of AMLO.
• The Signal looks at how the Library of Congress archives spreadsheets.
• Van Waffle at the Speed River Journal looks at magenta spreen, a colourful green that he grows in his garden.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes how we on Earth are carelessly wasting irreplaceable helium.
• Window on Eurasia refers to reports claiming that a third of the population of Turkmenistan has fled that Central Asian state. Could this be accurate?

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Centauri Dreams extends further consideration the roles that artificial intelligences might play in interstellar exploration.
• D-Brief notes that the genes associated with being a night owl also seem to be associated with poor mental health outcomes.
• Far Outliers looks at the lifeboat system created on the upper Yangtze in the late 19th century.
• Kashmir Hill, writing at Gizmodo, notes how blocking Google from her phone left her online experience crippled.
• Imageo notes that, even if halted, global warming still means that many glaciers well melt as they respond to temperature changes.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the racism that permeated ads in 19th century North America.
• Language Hat looks at how some Turkish-speaking Christians transcribed the Turkish language in the Greek alphabet.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how utterly ineffective the Trump Administration’s new refugee waiver system actually is.
• The LRB Blog looks at the film and theatre career of Lorenza Mazetti.
• Marginal Revolution notes, in passing, the import of being a YouTube celebrity.
• Molly Crabapple at the NYR Daily writes about the work of the New Sanctuary coalition, which among other things waits with refugees in court as they face their hearings.
• The Speed River Journal’s Van Waffle looks for traces of the elusive muskrat.
• Towleroad shares footage of New Order performing the early song “Ceremony” in 1981.
• Transit Toronto notes that Metrolinx now has an app for Presto up!
• At Vintage Space, Amy Shira Teitel looks at the Soviet Moon exploration program in 1969.
• Window on Eurasia notes the new pressures being placed by rising Islamism and instability in Afghanistan upon Turkmenistan.
• Arnold Zwicky considers, briefly, the little is known about the lives of 1980s gay porn stars Greg Patton and Bobby Pyron. How did they lead their lives?

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: greening vacant lots, lost St. Lawrence, Vaughan, Amsterdam, Ashgabat

• CityLab takes a look at how greening vacant lots can improve the mental health of the people living in different neighbourhoods.
• Paul Soucy at Global News reports on the lost villages of the St. Lawrence, drowned in the 1950s by the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway near Cornwall.
• There is controversy in Vaughan over a plan to sell public parkland to a developer. The Toronto Star reports.
• Is Amsterdam at risk of being hollowed out as mass tourism makes it a destination for partying tourists? Guardian Cities reports.
• David Farrier writes for Guardian Cities about his experiences in the strange new model city of Ashgabat, capital of Turkmenistan.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• At Anthropology.net, Kambiz Kamrani notes the Qesem caves of Israel, where four hundred thousand years ago hominids learned to make tools.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that star S2 is about to plunge to its closest approach to Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the heart of our galaxy, and what this means for science.
• Centauri Dreams takes a look at research done on Earth about the atmospheres of super-Earths.
• D-Brief takes a look at the recent research done on the regions on the edges of supermassive black holes.
• Bruce Dorminey notes that the Juno science team thinks that Jupiter probe has exceeded expectations.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes the evidence for a massive migration from the steppes into Europe circa 3300 BCE.
• The Frailest Thing’s Michael Sacasas makes the argument that the idea of humane technology is something of an oxymoron.
• Imageo notes evidence that permafrost will melt more quickly than previous predicted under the impact of global warming.
• JSTOR Daily looks at explanations for the unusually strong activism among high school students in East Los Angeles in the 1960s.
• Language Hat looks at evidence for the close relationship, in vocabulary and even in grammar, between the Turkish and Western Armenian languages now separated by bad blood.
• Lingua Franca notes how easy it is to change conventions on language use–like pronouns, say–at a well-functioning institution.
• Marginal Revolution looks at the economic progress made, after a recent lull, by Ghana.
• The NYR Daily looks at the growing involvement of the United States in small wars in Africa, starting with Niger and Cameroon.
• Justin Petrone at north! reports on a family visit to his ancestral home of Bari, seeing what little remains of the past there.
• Peter Rukavina wonders, apropos of a very successful experience shopping online at Amazon, how anyone else will be able to compete.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers the difference between mathematics and physics. Where is the line to be drawn?
• Strange Maps’ Frank Jacobs maps obesity in the United States and in Europe.
• Towleroad reports on the apparent interest of actor Cynthia Nixon in becoming governor of New York.
• John Scalzi at Whatever is a big fan of A Wrinkle in Time, a movie that is not perfect but is still quite good. I’m curious to see it myself.
• Window on Eurasia reports on food riots in isolated Turkmenistan.

[URBAN NOTE] “The Sochi Syndrome”

Anar Valiyev and Natalie Koch at Open Democracy describe how international sporting events like last year’s Sochi Olympics are used for multiple, self-propagandizing, purposes by authoritarian elites.

‘Urban boosterism’ is defined as the active promotion of a city, and it typically involves large-scale urban development schemes—constructing iconic new buildings, revamping local infrastructure, and creating a new image for the city.

For long a popular tactic of free market liberals, used to justify speculative building, the logic of urban boosterism hinges on freedom of movement of both capital and individuals. Curiously, though, it is increasingly at work in settings less committed to such freedoms. Urban planners in authoritarian countries are increasingly seeking to create new images for their cities and states through grandiose urban development and the hosting of major international spectacles, such as World Fairs, Olympic Games or the World Cup.

As citizens and their leaders in liberal democracies grow increasingly fatigued by—and intolerant of—the skyrocketing expense of hosting such spectacles, leaders in non-democracies have been quick to pick up the slack and are beginning to win first-tier event bids (like the 2008 Beijing Olympics; the 2014 Sochi Olympics and Russia’s 2018 World Cup; and Qatar’s 2022 World Cup). While urban boosterism in liberal democratic settings is also used to solidify the position of ‘growth machine’ elites, the unprecedented $51 billion price tag for Russia’s Olympic Games in Sochi shows that resource-rich, non-democratic states are positioned to develop such projects on a dramatically larger scale.

[. . .]

The ‘Sochi syndrome’ is a sign of what we can expect as more and more non-democratic, illiberal states host these events, as illustrated by the cases of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan.

According to Freedom House, in its classification system, these rank among the world’s least free countries. Boosterist agendas in Baku, Astana, and Ashgabat serve two related purposes—to distribute financial and political patronage, and to promote a positive image of the state for both international and domestic consumption.

[LINK] “Russia’s Waning Soft Power in Central Asia”

The Diplomat‘s Stephen Blank argues that in post-Soviet Central Asia, even in Kazakhstan, the Russian language is waning. This has obvious consequences for Russian soft power on the ground in the region.

[I]t has been clear for some time, and recent news reports confirm it, that the Russian language is steadily losing ground in Central Asia in educational institutions and in much of the media throughout Central Asia. To be sure, Moscow is trying to counter this, for instance with recent attempts to saturate the Kazakh media. Yet this trend towards establishing the primacy of national cultures and languages at the expense of Russian builds on twenty years of steady nationalization of the culture of these states as a matter of deliberate policy, on their deliberate efforts to maintain an openness to the larger globalizing trends in the world economy, and on a generation of growing restrictions on Russian language use in broadcasting and other media.

Of course, Central Asian leaders will not publicly attack the use of Russian language or create situations that could tempt Moscow to intervene in Central Asia on the same pretexts as it employed in Ukraine. But while the invasion of Ukraine created and still generates considerable anxiety in Central Asia, the crisis that Russia faces as a result of its action makes intervention in Central Asia a less likely prospect for the foreseeable future. Given the steep economic decline Russia has experienced following its Ukrainian adventure a third front on top of Ukraine and the North Caucasus is the last thing Moscow seeks. Nonetheless, leaders like Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev point with pride to the growth of Kazakh as the native language and more younger students are preferring English or Chinese to Russian.

In Kyrgyzstan, a recent report showed different forces at work but similar outcomes. The poverty of the Kyrgyz school system means that despite Russian claims of large-scale support for Russian-language teaching abroad, means that only 11 percent of Kyrgyz students are going to superior Russian schools in that republic. Students otherwise are not learning Russian and competent teachers are hard to find. All this, of course, generates a vicious cycle. Similarly, in December 2013, Veniamin Kaganov, Russia’s deputy education minister, was quoted in Tass as saying that the number of Russian speakers had fallen by 100 million since the break up of the Soviet Union. Neither is this outcome unique to Kyrgyzstan or Central Asia. Although globalization certainly plays a role here, all these states have taken serious policy steps since 1991 to create a stronger sense of national identity among their peoples, a policy line that inevitably translates into privileging native languages over Russian and English and now Chinese over it as well.

This outcome strongly suggests that while state support for the propagation of he Russian language abroad is a point in Russia’s 2009 national security strategy, Moscow is apparently steadily if somewhat unobtrusively failing to achieve its goals. And this testifies to a continuing failure to actualize Russia’s soft power despite an enormous state investment. The manifestations of this failure may be quiet and not immediately visible but they do point to the steady erosion over time of Russian power of all kinds in Central Asia, although its military capabilities there remain potentially formidable.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams considers the perhaps implausible magnetic sail.
• Crooked Timber looks at William Gibson’s new novel, The Peripheral.
• The Dragon’s Gaze links to a paper suggesting that half of all red dwarf stars might host Earth-like or super-Earth-like planets.
• D-Brief looks at the latest findings from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
• Joe. My. God. notes Irish same-sex marriage activists turning to their Irish-American counterparts.
• Language Log considers the distinction, in official Chinese, between “accident” and “incident”.
• The Planetary Society Blog considers the dynamics of the geysers and subsurface ocean of Enceladus.
• Savage Minds notes that the 17th of February is national anthropology day.
• Towleroad notes that Scotland has hosted its first pagan same-sex wedding.
• The Volokh Conspiracy notes an odd dispute, one parent suing another for writing a book about their moderately famous autistic son.
• Window on Eurasia notes Russia’s proposal to try a Russian soldier accused of murdering an Armenian family in a Russian court in Armenia, and points to armed unrest in Turkmenistan.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Anders Sandberg argues that there are good reasons to think that, even embedded in hive minds, individuals may keep some measure of privacy.
• James Bow found Legoland Toronto, in Vaughan Mills, disappointing. A pity; Vaughan is so much closer for me than Niagara Falls.
• Crooked Timber’s Daniel Davies posts another choose-your-own-adventure-style guide to the latest iteration of the Eurozone crisis, this one focusing on Cyprus.
• Daniel Drezner claims that the lack of bank runs, stock market collapses, or much else after the announcement of the Cypriot bank account haircut shows that the global financial system is more stable and mature than estimated.
• The Dragon’s Tales Will Baird announces that the Neandertal genome is online and publically available.
• Geocurrents maps the various expensive and (likely) failed water-related geoengineering projects of Turkmenistan.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer thinks that the risks behind Japan’s mining of methane hydrates on the seafloor make such activity dangerous, but also thinks natural gas costs are such that it won’t be viable.
• Torontoist covers a Syrian-Canadian protest calling for intervention in the Syrian civil war.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little considers the ways in which black Americans fare more poorly than their white counterparts, noting that explicit racial animus is not necessary.
• Zero Geography maps the origins of edits to Wikipedia’s Egypt pages.