[PHOTO] Shakespeare, pensive

[PHOTO] Red tulips and candle, The Greater Good

[PHOTO] Giant Sequoia Tree, cross-section (@amnh)

This sequoia tree from California, felled in 1891, records the passage of so many years in its very rings.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog offers some advice as to how to cope with rejection.


• Centauri Dreams shares Robert Zubrin's take on the Drake Equation, and on ways it is lacking and could be improved.


• Crooked Timber looks at a book examining (among other things) the interactions of libertarian economists with racism and racist polities.


• D-Brief notes a study suggesting that, actually, people would react positively and with a minimum of panic to the discovery of extraterrestrial life.


• Dangerous Minds takes a look at Chandra Oppenheim, an artist who at the age of 12 in 1980 released an amazing post-punk album.


• Gizmodo responds to the news that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are roughly the same mass.


• JSTOR Daily reports on the effects of the dingo fence in Australia on native wildlife there.


• Language Hat notes a new statistical analysis of literature that has found one of the sources of Shakespeare's language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how Trump's many affairs make him eminently blackmailable.


• The LRB Blog reports on why academic workers in the United Kingdom are getting ready to strike on behalf of their pension rights, starting next week.


• Marginal Revolution notes the sharp ongoing decline in the population of Bulgaria, and wonders what can be done. What need be done, in fact, if Bulgarians as individuals are happy?


• Anastasia Edel writes about the Russian-American community, and what it is like being Russian-American in the era of Trump, over at the NYR Daily.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that there seems to be no periodicity in extinction events, that there is no evidence of a cycle.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: King Street, Annex, Yonge and Sheppard, Chinatown, Keita Morimoto

• Global News reports that, based on spending data from Moneris, consumer expenditures on King Street have not dropped during the transit experiment.


• The homeless shelter in the Davenport Triangle area, thankfully, seems to be going through notwithstanding some local opposition and with the help of other locals. The Toronto Star reports.


• An area of unused land near Yonge and Sheppard may not become a park after all, due to disputes over ownership. CBC reports.


• These photos exploring how Chinatown on Spadina has evolved over the decades provide a good perspective on the development of this key neighoburhood. CBC reports.


• Toronto Life showcases the classic paintings of Keita Morimoto, currently with an exhibition at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery downtown.

[NEWS] Five LGBT links: Eric Radford, politics, Buddies in Bad Times, Pride House, app racism

• The story of how Eric Radford overcame a childhood in small-town Ontario to become an out winner of Olympic gold is inspiring. The Toronto Star has it.


• CBC looks at how some LGBTQ people interested in political office have gone through training sessions, to prepare.


• NOW Toronto reports on Buddies in Bad Times' program for emerging queer theatre creators.


• Global News reports from Pyeongchang, where Canada is maintaining a Pride House for LGBTQ athletes.


• VICE considers the issue of racial discrimination on dating apps. Is enough being done by the makers to deal with this?

[NEWS] Five links on life and intelligence both near and far: 'Oumuamua, ET, blue whales, orangutans

• Craig Welch at National Geographic notes how scientists, by carefully decoding the songs of blue whales, are figuring out how they are leading their lives.


• Sarah Gibbens at National Geographic notes a new study suggesting that, since 1999, hunting and environmental devastation has reduced the orangutan population of Borneo by almost half, by 150 thousand individuals. This sounds almost like genocide.


• Universe Today notes evidence that 'Oumuamua had a very violent past.


• Nadia Drake at National Geographic explores the recent study suggesting that, unless there were signs of menace, most people actually would react well to news of extraterrestrial life.


• Vikram Zutshi at Open Democracy recently suggested that contact with extraterrestrial intelligence could be good for the Earth, might even help us save it. Certainly this civilization would have survived the Great Filter; certainly it's a corrective to lazy assumptions of automatic menace.