[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer notes the circumstances of the discovery of a low-mass black hole, only 3.3 solar masses.
• Crooked Timber shares a photo of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.
• The Crux looks at Monte Verde, the site in Chile that has the evidence of the oldest human population known to have lived in South America.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that Russia may provide India with help in the design of its Gaganyaan manned capsule.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing talks of his work, including his upcoming conference and his newsletter, The Convivial Society. (Subscribe at the website.)
• Gizmodo shares the Voyager 2 report from the edges of interstellar space.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the East India Company and its corporate lobbying.
• Language Hat shares an account from Ken Liu of the challenges in translating The Three Body Problem, linguistic and otherwise.
• Language Log looks at the problems faced by the word “liberation” in Hong Kong.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the implications of the surprising new relationship between Russia and the Philippines.
• Marginal Revolution seems to like Terminator: Dark Fate, as a revisiting of the series’ origins, with a Mesoamerican twist.
• Sean Marshall announces his attendance at a transit summit in Guelph on Saturday the 9th.
• Garry Wills writes at the NYR Daily about his experience as a man in the mid-20th century American higher education looking at the rise of women.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the strangely faint distant young galaxy MACS2129-1.
• Window on Eurasia considers the possibility of Latvia developing a national Eastern Orthodox church of its own.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy looks at ALMA’s observations of the birth of binary star system, here.
• The Buzz, at the Toronto Public Library, announces the Governor-General’s Literary Awards from 2019, here.
• Centauri Dreams notes how we might be able to find a wormhole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy.
• The Crux commemorates the enormously successful and long-lasting Voyager missions.
• D-Brief notes a self-tending swarm search and rescue drones.
• Bruce Dorminey notes how the first discoveries of exoplanets were a consequence of innovative technology and thinking.
• Steve Attewell at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that he is talking about the new idea in X-Men of a mutant nation-state over at Graphic Policy Radio.
• The LRB Blog notes Manif pour Tous mobilizing against new human reproduction laws in France.
• Marginal Revolution looks at how the drug war in Mexico has been getting worse.
• Neuroskeptic considers: What traits would a human population adapted to contemporary environmental pressures exhibit?
• The NYR Daily looks at a new exhibition of critical Internet-related art by Meriam Bennani.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at a remarkable double gravitational lens, and what it reveals about the universe.
• Window on Eurasia notes that although half of working-age people in Uzbekistan have been educated in the Latin script, many remain fluent in Cyrillic.
• Arnold Zwicky considers the many implications of fried pickles with ranch dressing.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Adam Fish at anthro{dendum} compares different sorts of public bathing around the world, from Native America to Norden to Japan.
• Charlie Stross at Antipope is unimpressed by the person writing the script for our timeline.
• Architectuul reports on an architectural conference in Lisbon.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares stunning photos of the eruption of the Raikoke volcano in Kamchatka.
• Centauri Dreams looks at what the Voyager spacecraft have returned about the edge of the solar system.
• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber takes issue with the idea of bipartisanship if it means compromising on reality, allegorically.
• The Crux counts the number of people who have died in outer space.
• D-Brief notes that the Andromeda Galaxy has swallowed up multiple dwarf galaxies over the eons.
• Dead Things notes the identification of the first raptor species from Southeast Asia, Siamraptor suwati.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes a paper tracing the origins of interstellar comet 2/Borisov from the general area of Kruger 60.
• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog writes about the privilege allowing people access to affordable dental care.
• Gizmodo tells how Alexei Leonov survived the first spacewalk.
• io9 looks at the remarkable new status quo for the X-Men created by Jonathan Hickman.
• Selma Franssen at the Island Review writes about the threats facing the seabirds of the Shetlands.
• JSTOR Daily looks at what led Richard Nixon to make so many breaks from the American consensus on China in the Cold War.
• Language Log notes an undergraduate course at Yale using the Voynich Manuscript as an aid in the study of language.
• Abigail Nussbaum at Lawyers, Guns and Money explains her recent experience of the socialized health care system of Israel for Americans.
• The LRB Blog looks at how badly the Fukuyama prediction of an end to history has aged.
• The Map Room Blog shares a few maps of the new Ottawa LRT route.
• Marginal Revolution notes a paper establishing a link between Chinese industries undermining their counterparts in Mexico and Mexican social ills including crime.
• Sean Marshall reports from Ottawa about what the Confederation Line looks like.
• Adam Shatz at the NYR Daily looks at the power of improvisation in music.
• Roads and Kingdoms looks at South Williamsburg Jewish deli Gottlieb’s.
• Drew Rowsome reviews</a the new Patti Smith book, Year of the Monkey.
• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a paper looking as the factors leading into transnational movements.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers the question of the direction(s) in which order in the universe was generated.
• Window on Eurasia shares a report noting the very minor flows of migration from China to Russia.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell looks at the politics in the British riding of Keighley.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at some penguin socks.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the Elon Musk proposal to terraform Mars by dropping nuclear weapons on the planet’s ice caps is a bad idea.
• James Bow writes about how the introduction of faeries saved his novel The Night Girl.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the storms of Jupiter.
• The Crux explains the mystery of a village in Poland that has not seen the birth of a baby boy for nearly a decade.
• D-Brief looks at the exoplanets of nearby red dwarf Gliese 1061.
• Cody Delisraty talks of Renaissance painter Fra Angelico.
• Drew Ex Machina commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune.
• The Dragon’s Tales shares links to some papers about the Paleolithic.
• JSTOR Daily hosts an essay by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger suggesting that Internet rot might be good since it could let people start to forget the past and so move on.
• Language Hat questions whether the phrase “free to all” has really fallen out of use.
• Language Log takes a look about immigration to the United States and Emma Lazarus’ famous poem.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money takes issue with the suggestion of, among other, Henry Farrell, that we are headed away from globalization towards fortress economies. Redundancy, he suggests, will be more important.
• Marginal Revolution links to a disturbing paper suggesting users of opioids use them in part for social reasons.
• The NYR Daily features an exchange on a new law in Singapore seeking to govern fake news.
• The Power and the Money features a guest post from Leticia Arroyo Abad looking at Argentina before the elections.
• Drew Rowsome takes a look at a new play by Raymond Helkio examining the life of out boxer Mark Leduc.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers if we can test gravitational waves for wave-particle duality.
• Arnold Zwicky shares photos of the many flowers of Gamble Garden, in Palo Alto.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the potential threat to the rings of Saturn by the dissipation of its ice over millions of years.
• Centauri Dreams notes the potential radical improvements in the imaging of exoplanets provided by the new generations of telescopes.
• D-Brief notes that the disk of massive star MM 1a is so dense with material that it is forming not companion planets–not visibly–but rather a companion star.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the achievements of Voyager 2, forty-one years after its launch.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money shares the argument of New Mexican Congresswoman Deb Haaland that the United States is neglecting the problems of Native people.
• Marginal Revolution notes the death of art critic Sister Wendy.
• The NYR Daily notes the terrible record of the Weekly Standard.
• Danielle Adams at the Planetary Society Blog writes about the stars and constellations identified by Arab astronomers.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer notes that Colombia lacks birthright citizenship, posing a serious long-term threat of social exclusion given the influx of Venezuelans as likely as not to be permanent.
• Roads and Kingdoms features an interview with photographer Laurence Geai on the protests of the Gilets Jaunes in Paris.

[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 Sunday links

• {anthro}dendum reads the recent Sokal Square project as satire.
• Architectuul takes a look at an ingenious floating school, in an artificial pond at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait takes an in-depth look at the possibility of moons having moons. What does the lack of such worlds in our solar system, despite possible spaces for their existence, say about their presence in the wider universe?
• Larry Klaes at Centauri Dreams takes a look at The Farthest, a recent film examining the Voyager probes.
• The Crux looks at Georges Lemaître, the Belgian Jesuit and physicist who first imagined the Big Bang.
• D-Brief notes that scientists have successfully created healthy mice using the genomes of two same-sex parents.
• Gizmodo notes that new computer models of pulsars have revealed unexpected new elements of their behaviour.
• JSTOR Daily interviews Alexander Chee, who tells about how the JSTOR database helped him write his novel The Queen of the Night.
• Marginal Revolution notes a Ukrainian bank that offers high-interest savings accounts to people who, as measured by app, walk at least 10 thousand steps a day.
• The NYR Daily profiles Jair Bolsonario, the likely next Brazilian president arguably because of his fondness for the military regimes of old, and what his success says about the failings of democracy in Brazil.
• Window on Eurasia notes how the impending recognition of a national Ukrainian Orthodox Church by the Ecumenical Patriarch will have global repercussions, being a victory for Ukraine and a major loss for Russia.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes J0045, once thought to be a star in Andromeda and but recognized as a binary black hole a thousand times further away.
• Centauri Dreams notes the longevity of the Voyager mission.
• D-Brief notes that some worms can thrive in a simulacrum of Mars soil.
• The Dragon’s Gaze notes an ambitious effort to try to detect a transit of Proxima Centauri b. Did the researchers pick something up?
• Hornet Stories links to a report suggesting HIV denialism is worryingly common in parts of Russia.
• Language Log reports on an apparently oddly bilingual Chinese/Vietnamese poster. Where did it come from?
• The LRB Blog reports on how Tunisian Anouar Brahem fused jazz with Arabic music on his new album Blue Maqems.
• The Map Room Blog links to a lecture by John Cloud on indigenous contributions to mapmaking in Alaska.
• The NYR Daily looks at the grim position of Theresa May in Brexit negotiations.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer considers what would have happened if the Americas had not been populated in 1492. How would imperialism and settlement differ?
• Roads and Kingdoms notes some of the architectural legacies–houses, for instance–of Basque settlement in the American West.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes three conundrums that neutrinos might be able to solve.
• Window on Eurasia notes why Russia is hostile, despite its program of merging federal units, to the idea of uniting Tatarstan with Bashkortostan.
• Using an interwar map of Imperial Airways routes, Alex Harrowell illustrates how the construction of globalized networks can make relatively marginal areas quite central.

[NEWS] Five links: Brexit, left-wing denialism, Menshevik Georgia, immigrants in cities, Voyager

• Prospect Magazine shares Ivan Rogers’ inside perspective on how David Cameron’s misunderstanding of the political priorities in the wider EU was (mostly) responsible for the ill-judged decision to hold a referendum on Brexit.
• Haaretz shares Oz Katerji’s devastating criticism of many left-wing intellectuals for turning a blind eye to genocides they find politically inconvenient. (Noam Chomsky, stand up please.)
• Eric Lee suggests that the moderate Menshevik government that ruled Georgia for a few brief years offers insight into a more humanistic way that the Russian Revolution could have taken, over at Open Democracy.
• Irena Guidikova suggests that initiatives taken at the level of the cities are most important for the integration of immigrants, that helping them build networks and acquire social capital must be central to any project, over at Open Democracy.
• Matt Novak at Gizmodo’s Paleofuture notes that, after substantial work, copies of the Voyager Golden Record are finally available for purchase.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Centauri Dreams links to archival video painstakingly collected from the Voyager missions.
• Citizen Science Salon notes ways ordinary people can use satellite imagery for archaeological purposes.
• Good news: Asian carp can’t find a fin-hold in Lake Michigan. Bad news: The lake is so food-deprived nothing lives there. The Crux reports.
• D-Brief notes that, once every second, a fast radio burst occurs somewhere in the universe.
• Dangerous Minds looks at the psychedelic retro-futurism of Swedish artist Kilian Eng.
• Dead Things notes the recovery of ancient human DNA from some African sites, and what this could mean for study.
• Cody Delistraty reconsiders the idea of the “coming of age” narrative. Does this make sense now that we have abandoned the idea of a unitary self?
• The Dragon’s Gaze links to a paper examining the evolution of icy bodies around different post-main sequence stars.
• The Great Grey Bridge’s Philip Turner notes anti-Putin dissident Alexei Navalny.
• Hornet Stories notes reports of anti-gay persecution in Azerbaijan.
• Language Log takes a look at the dialectal variations of southern Ohio.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money starts a discussion about what effective disaster relief for Puerto Rico would look like.
• The LRB Blog looks at the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Mexico, and the story of the buried girl who was not there.
• Marginal Revolution notes that Toronto real estate companies, in light of rent control, are switching rental units over to condos.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes a look at the origins and stories of migrant sex workers.
• The NYR Daily talks about the supposedly unthinkable idea of nuclear war in the age of Trump.
• Drew Rowsome gives a strongly positive–and deserved review to the Minmar Gaslight show The Seat Next to the King, a Fringe triumph now playing at the Theatre Centre.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how so many outer-system icy worlds have liquid water.
• Towleroad features Jim Parsons’ exploration of how important is for him, as a gay man, to be married.
• Window on Eurasia suggests Russian language policy limiting minority languages in education could backfire, and wonders if Islamization one way people in an urbanizing North Caucasus are trying to remain connected to community.