[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.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, New Orleans, Berlin, Hasankeyf, Hong Kong

• Why not build a public beach in the Montréal neighbourhood of Lachine? Global News considers.
• The Vietnamese cuisine of New Orleans does look good. VICE reports.
• CityLab describes an effort to build a smart city in Berlin, in Siemensstadt. I wish Berliners better outcomes than what Toronto seems to be getting in the Port Lands.
• Guardian Cities reports on what seems to me to be a terrible plan to flood the ancient settlement of Hasankeyf in Turkey for dams.
• Saša Petricic at CBC looks at how the political consensus in Hong Kong has broken down, perhaps irretrievably.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Architectuul looks at the history of brutalism in late 20th century Turkey.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the evidence for the Milky Way Galaxy having seen a great period of starburst two billion years ago, and notes how crowded the Milky Way Galaxy is in the direction of Sagittarius.
• Centauri Dreams considers if astrometry might start to become useful as a method for detecting planets, and considers what the New Horizons data, to Pluto and to Ultima Thule, will be known for.
• Belle Waring at Crooked Timber considers if talk of forgiveness is, among other things, sound.
• D-Brief considers the possibility that the differing natures of the faces of the Moon can be explained by an ancient dwarf planet impact, and shares images of dust-ringed galaxy NGC 4485.
• Dead Things notes the discovery of fossil fungi one billion years old in Nunavut.
• Far Outliers looks at how, over 1990, Russia became increasingly independent from the Soviet Union, and looks at the final day in office of Gorbachev.
• Gizmodo notes the discovery of literally frozen oceans of water beneath the north polar region of Mars, and looks at an unusual supernova, J005311 ten thousand light-years away in Cassiopeia, product of a collision between two white dwarfs.
• JSTOR Daily notes how the colour of navy blue is a direct consequence of slavery and militarism, and observes the historical influence, or lack thereof, of Chinese peasant agriculture on organic farming in the US.
• Language Log considers a Chinese-language text from San Francisco combining elements of Mandarin and Cantonese.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the terrible environmental consequences of the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia, and Shakezula at Lawyers, Guns and Money takes a look at how, and perhaps why, Sam Harris identifies milkshake-throwing at far-right people as a form of “mock assassination”.
• The Map Room Blog shares a personal take on mapmaking on the Moon during the Apollo era.
• Marginal Revolution observes a paper suggesting members of the Chinese communist party are more liberal than the general Chinese population. The blog also notes how Soviet quotas led to a senseless and useless mass slaughter of whales.
• Russell Darnley writes about the complex and tense relationship between Indonesia and Australia, each with their own preoccupations.
• Martin Filler writes at the NYR Daily about I.M. Pei as an architect specializing in an “establishment modernism”. The site also takes a look at Orientalism, as a phenomenon, as it exists in the post-9/11 era.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw reflects on the meaning of Australia’s New England.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes how Hayabusa 2 is having problems recovering a marker from asteroid Ryugu.
• Peter Rukavina reports on an outstanding Jane Siberry concert on the Island.
• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a map of homophobia in Europe.
• The Signal looks at how the Library of Congress makes use of wikidata.
• The Speed River Journal’s Van Waffle reports, with photos, from his latest walks this spring.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers what the Earth looked like when hominids emerged, and explains how amateur astronomers can capture remarkable images.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shares a controversial map depicting the shift away from CNN towards Fox News across the United States.
• Daniel Little at Understanding Society examines the Boeing 737 MAX disaster as an organizational failure.
• Window on Eurasia looks why Turkey is backing away from supporting the Circassians, and suggests that the use of the Russian Orthodox Church by the Russian state as a tool of its rule might hurt the church badly.
• Arnold Zwicky takes apart, linguistically and otherwise, a comic playing on the trope of Lassie warning about something happening to Timmy. He also
  reports on a far-removed branch of the Zwicky family hailing from Belarus, as the Tsvikis.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Architectuul looks at the photos and the architecture of Carlo Mollino, all curves.
• Centauri Dreams notes a remarkable piece of detective work, identifying candidate stars responsible for a close encounter that threw a planet of star HD 109606 into a distant eccentric orbit.
• John Holbo at Crooked Timber takes a second look at the “Historovox” concept raised by Corey Robin.
• D-Brief notes a study suggesting planets in close orbit of red dwarf stars could experience sufficient tectonic stresses from their star to remain geologically active.
• Far Outliers looks at how and why, in Calcutta, the poor were kept physically close to the rich.
• Gizmodo reports on a massive nuclear superbubble thousands of light-years wide in the heart of galaxy NGC 3079, with photos.
• Hornet Stories shares a shortlist of essential books by LGBTQ writers from the United Kingdom.
• JSTOR Daily notes how architect Mary Colter came up with ingenious buildings for the Grand Canyon that fit this unique environment.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money shares a compelling argument against the Electoral College.
• Marginal Revolution notes that Mormonism stands out among American religions as enjoying continued, if decelerating, growth.
• The NYR Daily considers if there is a point at which empathy becomes banal.
• Corey S. Powell writes at Out There about how the Spirit and Opportunity rovers were deeply meaningful surrogates for human minds on Mars.
• Justin Petrone at north! argues that MTV’s The Real World set a precedent for individual people to be self-curating and self-creating their representations.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes the historic discovery of the cosmic neutrino background, a signal formed one second after the Big Bang.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shares a map showing the long train journey of Kim Jong-um across China to the recent summit in Hanoi.
• Towleroad notes</u. that the Donald Duck comic is going to see a lesbian character for the first time.
• Window on Eurasia notes how a new Russian governmental process of optimization is undermining many small communities in rural Russia, a picture familiar to many in Canada, too.

[URBAN NOTE] Six city links: Detroit, Oslo, Cox’s Bazar, Ho Chi Minh City, Shenzhen, Tokyo

• CityLab notes a new black-owned food coop in Detroit.
• CityLab notes the cool new designs of a new Oslo subway station.
• Al Jazeera notes the vulnerability of Cox’s Bazar, the Bangladesh city that is the heart of the Rohingya refugee settlements, to climate change.
• Guardian Cities notes how rapid redevelopment is devastating the architectural heritage of Ho Chi Minh City.
• This Culture Trip article looks at how, among other things, copying foreign technology helped make Shenzhen a global tech hub.
• Tokyo is offering subway users free food if they opt to travel on the subway outside of peak times, CityLab notes.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomy shares a photo taken by the H-ATLAS satellite of deep space, a sea of pale dusty dots each one a galaxy.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly shares, in photos and in prose, 11 views of New York City. (What a fantastic metropolis!)
• Centauri Dreams hosts an essay from Alex Tolley suggesting that most life in the universe is lithophilic, living in the stable warm interiors of planets.
• Cody Delistraty links to an essay of his looking at the tensions, creative and personal, between Renoir father and son.
• Gizmodo links to a paper suggesting the mysterious ASASSN-14li event can be explained by a star falling into a supermassive galactic black hole, the analysis suggesting the black hole was rotating at half the speed of light.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the mysterious dancing plagues of medieval Europe.
• The LRB Blog looks at casual anti-Semitism in British sports.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that the legacies of Confucian state-building in China may have depressed long-term economic growth in particularly Confucian areas.
• The Planetary Society Blog reports on the success of the Chang’e-4 probe, complete with photos and videos sent from the far side of the Moon.
• Roads to Kingdoms shares the photography of a changing Vietnam by Simone Sapienza.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the ongoing Toronto comedy show Unsafe Space, and enjoys it.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the achievements of the TESS planet-hunting satellites, looking for nearby planets, emphasizing its achievements in the Pi Mensae system.
• Window on Eurasia considers a fascinating alternate history. Could Beria, had he survived Stalin, have overseen a radical liberalization of the Soviet Union in the early Cold War?

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Anthrodendum reviews the book Fistula Politics, the latest from the field of medical anthropology.
• Architectuul takes a look at post-war architecture in Germany, a country where the devastation of the war left clean slates for ambitious new designers and architects.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at newly discovered Kuiper Belt object 2008 VG 18.
• Laura Agustín at Border Thinking takes a look at the figure of the migrant sex worker.
• Centauri Dreams features an essay by Al Jackson celebrating the Apollo 8 moon mission.
• D-Brief notes how physicists manufactured a quark soup in a collider to study the early universe.
• Dangerous Minds shares some photos of a young David Bowie.
• Angelique Harris at the Everyday Sociology Blog takes a look at what the social sciences have to say about sexuality and dating among millennial Americans.
• Gizmodo notes the odd apparent smoothness of Ultima Thule, target of a very close flyby by New Horizons on New Year’s Day.
• Hornet Stories notes the censorship-challenging art by Slava Mogutin available from the Tom of Finland store.
• Imageo shares orbital imagery of the eruption of Anak Krakatau in Indonesia, trigger of a devastating volcanic tsunami.
• Nick Stewart at The Island Review writes beautifully about his experience crossing the Irish Sea on a ferry, from Liverpool to Belfast.
• Lyman Stone at In A State of Migration shares the story, with photos, of his recent whirlwind trip to Vietnam.
• JSTOR Daily considers whether or not fan fiction might be a useful tool to promote student literacy.
• Language Hat notes a contentious reconstruction of the sound system of obscure but fascinating Tocharian, an extinct Indo-European language from modern XInjiang.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the irreversible damage being caused by the Trump Administration to the United States’ foreign policy.
• Marginal Revolution notes a paper suggesting users of Facebook would need a payment of at least one thousand dollars to abandon Facebook.
• Lisa Nandy at the NYR Daily argues that the citizens of the United Kingdom need desperately to engage with Brexit, to take back control, in order to escape catastrophic consequences from ill-thought policies.
• Marc Rayman at the Planetary Society Blog celebrates the life and achievements of the Dawn probe.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer notes that so many Venezuelans are fleeing their country because food is literally unavailable, what with a collapsing agricultural sector.
• The Russian Demographics Blog breaks down polling of nostalgia for the Soviet Union among Russians.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that simply finding oxygen in the atmosphere of an exoplanet is not by itself proof of life.
• Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy reports on how the United States is making progress towards ending exclusionary zoning.
• Whatever’s John Scalzi shares an interview with the lawyer of Santa Claus.
• Window on Eurasia reports on a fascinating paper, examining how some Russian immigrants in Germany use Udmurt as a family language.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the lives of two notable members of the Swiss diaspora in Paris’ Montmartre.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Crux considers the anthropic principle. To what degree are the natural laws of the universe naturally suited to supporting life?
• D-Brief notes the detection of an ultra-hot magnetosphere about white dwarf GALEXJ014636.8+323615, 1200 light-years away.
• Far Outliers notes how how Japan’s civil wars in the 1860s were not a straightforward matter of conflicts between supporters of the shogun and supporters of the emperor.
• Amanda Woytus at JSTOR Daily notes how the ever-popular Baby-Sitters Club series of children’s novels reflected a now-gone sense of an American life that could be safe.
• Language Log looks at the use of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary in a Vietnamese patriotic slogan.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the manufactured scandal around the supposed idea that Hillary Clinton wants to run for the American presidency in 2020.
• Lorna Finlayson writes at the LRB Blog, using the example of her great-uncle killed at the Somme, about how representing the dead of the First World War as willing sacrificers of their lives against tyranny misrepresents them.
• Rachelle Krygier writes at Roads and Kingdoms about how finding enough food to eat can be a day-long challenge if you happen to live in Venezuela.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explores the question of who, exactly, determined that the universe was expanding.
• Window on Eurasia quotes a Russian analyst who makes the point that, given many of the other Soviet successor states are going in directions away from Russia, it makes no sense to talk about a “post-Soviet space”.

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: Mashrou’ Leila, Raziel Reid, Vietnam, leather, The AIDS Memorial

• Eli Tareq Lynch writes at Daily Xtra about how the Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila helps them express their queer Arab identity.
• Laura Sciarpelletti at CBC interviews Raziel Reid about his new gay teen novel Kens.
• Them shares the heartwarming story of two women, contestants on Vietnam’s version of The Bachelor, who realized that they actually loved each other. That they have apparently gotten public support is an added bonus.
• Edward Siddons at The Guardian notes the threats to the leather scene, with property development threatening established venues coming at the end of a slew of menaces including HIV, the sheer cost of leather, and shifting cultural norms.
• Jeff Leavell’s personal article at VICE about impact of The AIDS Memorial Instagram is heart-felt. (Myself, I like every post there; the act of remembering can be, among other things, a victory.)

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Centauri Dreams writes about the ferocious storms of Titan.
• The Crux reports on the crisis of dark matter: What _is_ it, exactly?
• D-Brief reports on the particular strangeness around nearby neutron star RX J0806.4–4123, an unusually hot star.
• Bruce Dorminey reports on a new search for signs of extraterrestrial civilizations using optical telescopes directed towards the Andromeda Galaxy.
• Far Outliers describes the origins of the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.
• A Fistful of Euros considers the future of Angela Merkel in light of the election of Ralph Brinkhaus as joint parliamentary leader of the CDU and CSU in Germany.
• Language Hat reports on an unexpected connection, dynastically and culturally, between the last of Anglo-Saxon England and very early Kiev.
• Language Hat shares a sample of Vietnamese text written without diacritics.
• The NYR Daily shares a first-hand experience of a patient with the famed Mayo Clinic.
• Roads and Kingdoms reports on a meal of zaru soba in Tokyo.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers what the universe looks like when the second generation of stars began to form.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shares a canonical map of the planet of Gethen, from the Ursula LK. Le Guin classic The Left Hand of Darkness, made by Le Guin herself.
• At Understanding Society, Daniel Little talks about the lessons that he has taken from his study of technological failures, tracing many back to theoretically chartable organizational deficiencies.
• Window on Eurasia notes some late Stalinist deportations of Russians in districts bordering the Baltics, suggesting this may have been connected to the plans of Beria to establish the Baltics as satellite states separate from the USSR.
• Arnold Zwicky links to a collection of papers examining imperfect rhymes.