[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• 3 Quarks Daily's Azra Raza wonders how, in the face of the difficulty of creating life in the lab, life evolved on Earth as quickly as possible and survived massive asteroidal and cometary bombardments roughly four billion years ago.


• Andrew at Acts of Minor Treason imagines what the night sky might look like from a habitable world in the planetary system of 55 Cancri.


• This Centauri Dreams post has a lot of interesting stuff, everything from ideas for space elevators to bacteria discovered kilometres below the Greenland ice sheet.


• In what now seems to be a fine Republican tradition, Republican Senator John Ensign--he who voted against same-sex marriage bills--has been caught having an affair with the wife of one of his supporters. It's getting to be like the John Major Conservatives, really, when backbenchers kept being found dead, tied to a bed and dressed in women's underwear, every fortnight or so.


• While tumult in Iran continues--and I wish them the best--Daniel Drezner points out interesting information suggesting that the conservatives are getting help from Russia.


• Far Outliers has a wealth of material, everything from the nasty civil wars in Nazi-occupied countries to Germany's development of the originally British blitzkrieg theory to the Iranian society to outside observers.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros argues that the best model for Iranian events can be found in Yerevan, when after an obviously faked election the government clamped down and ended up surviving quite nicely, thank you very much.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money tackles the idea of geoengineering, fearing that it might be used as an excuse to do nothing else on global warming.


• On yet another blog, Douglas Muir examines why what should be a major Senegalese port, the community of Kaolack, isn't.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio links to some informative videos on geoengineering.


• pauldrye blogs about the many, many, destructive uses of Egyptian mummies in the foolish 19th century.


• Towleroad reports that same-sex couples can use the spouses' name on passports and that the White House wants to include same-sex couples on the census.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Dave Kopel blogs about a woman in China who was let off after killing a Communist Party official in self-defense following popular uproar, suggesting that this reflects not the rule of law so much as it does the need to satiate public opinion.


• Finally, Window on Eurasia reports that at least one Russian newspaper argues that Russian policies are alienating the other post-Soviet states, potentially leaving it alone in the region.