[CAT] Shakespeare, caught on blue

[PHOTO] Down to Rollo Bay, PEI

Rollo Bay at low tide can be a magical place to visit.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the discovery of Ross 128 b, a nearby exoplanet that looks like it actually might be plausibly very Earth-like.


• blogTO notes that, after a decade, the east entrance of the Royal Ontario Museum is finally going to be an entrance again.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about the importance of self-care, of making time to experience pleasure.


• Crooked Timber shares some of the 1871 etchings of Gustave Doré, fresh from the Paris Commune.


• Daily JSTOR notes how one man's collection of old tin cans tells a remarkable story about the settlement of the United States.


• Dangerous Minds shares a vintage 1980 television report on the Los Angeles punk scene.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes a recent study of chemical abundances around Kronos and Krios, two very similar stars near each other, these abundances suggesting they are just forming planetary systems.


• Gizmodo shares a revealing new table of exoplanets, one that brings out all sorts of interesting patterns and types.


• Hornet Stories notes Courtney Love's efforts to fundraise for LGBTQ homeless youth.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Margaret Court, an Australian tennis star now more famous for her homophobia, called for Australia to ignore the postal vote for marriage equality.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money makes the point that Trump's Russian links are important to explore, not least because they reveal the spreading influence of kleptocracy.


• Lingua Franca shares a perhaps over-stereotypical take on languages being caught between drives for purity and for diversity.


• The LRB Blog notes the murder of Honduran environmental activist Berta Cácares.


• The Map Room Blog links to an interesting collection of links to future and alternate-history mass transit maps of Melbourne.


• The NYR Daily links to an interesting exhibit about disposable fashion like the simple T-shirt.


• Roads and Kingdoms notes a remarkable performance of a Beatles song in the hill country of West Bengal.

[NEWS] Three links about interstellar communication: Arecibo, Sonar Festival, Luyten's Star, GJ 273b

• The Arecibo radio observatory of Puerto Rico, famous for (among other things) the first effort at communicating with extraterrestrial civilizations, has been saved from demolition. National Geographic reports.


• Wired looks at how the Sonar music festival got music to be transmitted and eventually decoded by a hypothetical civilization at Luyten's Star, on GJ 273b.


• George Dvorsky at io9 shares convincing arguments that the Luyten's Star transmission is not likely to cause harm--among other things, advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are likely to know we are here. And, hey, if they like our techno, maybe good things can come of this.

[NEWS] Three links about smart animals: elephants as legal persons, cetacean footage, bonobo empathy

• Three elephants in Connecticut are the latest animals subject to a bid by activists to grant them status as "legal persons". The Washington Post reports.


• Gary Chabonneau has won a court battle versus the Vancouver Aquarium to secure rights to footage he took of their captive cetaceans. CBC reports.


• Bonobos have been proven in a recent experiment to have the capacity to be empathetic towards strangers. National Geographic reports.

[NEWS] Four links on Antarctica: ancient Godwanaland forests, mantle plume, American infrastructure

• Elaina Zachos reports on the discovery of a remarkable intact petrified forest in Antarctica more than a quarter-billion years old, legacy of ancient Godwanaland, over at National Geographic.


• D-Brief reports on the remarkable adaptations of the forests of Godwanaland, now Antarctica, to six months without light.
  
• Universe Today reports that a hitherto unsupected plume from the mantle underneath Antarctica may be partially responsible for the ready melting of that continent's ice sheets.


• Justin Gillis and Jonathan Corum report on how the infrastructure of the American presence in Antarctica, including McMurdo station, is in desperate need for investment to compensate for decades of neglect, over at the New York Times.