[LINK] A tour of the blogosphere

[rfmcdonald]

• Centauri Dreams carries the welcome news that Epsilon Eridani's suspected superjovian planet certainly exists. Now, for Alpha Centauri ...


• Crooked Timber's Harry Farrell eulogizes a missed friend, Adrian Grey-Turner, a fellow philosophy student who died in 1986 in the first wave of HIV/AIDS in Britain. After reading his essay, I miss the man, too. What a sad irony that the college friend Farrell was closest to was also the first college friend to die.


• Ken MacLeod quotes from Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism.

{W]e must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and "interrogated", all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

• Joel at Far Outliers has a compendium of his past posts on Nobel-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk.


• A Fistful of Euros' Doug Merrill links to Maria Farrell's Ukraine group blog.


• Douglas Muir superbly argues for a link children's animated movies with American demographics.


• In the wake of North Korea's nuclear test, The Marmot's Hole makes for interesting reading. South Korea, it turns out, might well follow Japan's precedent and become a virtual nuclear power.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen links to a paper examining South Africa's economic issues.


• pauldrye linked to the New Scientist cover article "Imagine Earth without people". Its description of the rather rapid and complete decomposition of human civilization reminds me of SimEarth's victory scenario, of how after the invention of nanotechnology your civilization's cities rise into space like something out of James Blish. Transcendence is so much nicer than simple extinction.


• Positive Liberty's Jason Kuznicki celebrates Bangladeshi Muhammad Yunus' reception of the Nobel Peace Prize for his implementation of microcredit banking, first in his homeland then worldwide. Elsewhere, angel80 is more critical of the utility of microcredit.