[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Over at 'Aqoul, The Lounsbury confirms that Ayman az-Zaouahiri's description of Obama as a "House Negro" is as bad as it sounds.


• Centauri Dreams has a brief post describing the requirements for an interplanetary Internet and some possible solutions to such a network's technical problems.
  
• Will Baird carries the news that a gas-giant planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris was imaged as early as 2003, but that it took a long time to properly analyze the data.


• Joe. My. God links to a Huffington Post analyst's suggestion that there is a positive correlation between secularism and progress. That's correct, I think, although "secularism" can mean any number of things.


• Strange Maps illustrates how the heavily slave-populated Cotton Belt counties of the U.S. South in 1860 map surprisingly well onto a map of pro-Obama counties a century and a half-later.