[PHOTO] Two sunflowers, Bartlett Avenue

[PHOTO] A Bird's Eye View of Toronto's Downtown, from the northwest

This three-dimensional model of the city of Toronto, here photographed from the direction of the northwest, is a favourite thing for me to see whenever I visit Toronto City Hall. No matter that it is nearly three decades out of date, the tangible texture of this model and the obvious care for detail that went into its creation remain appealing.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait takes a look at the question of how far, exactly, the Pleiades star cluster is from Earth. It turns out this question breaks down into a lot of interesting secondary issues.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly starts an interesting discussion around the observation that so many people are uncomfortable with the details of their body.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the exciting evidence of cryovolcanism at Ceres.


• The Crux reports on new suggestions that, although Neanderthals had bigger brains than Homo sapiens, Neanderthal brains were not thereby better brains.


• D-Brief notes evidence that the ability of bats and dolphins to echolocate may ultimate derive from a shared gene governing their muscles.


• Bruce Dorminey notes that astronomers have used data on the trajectory of 'Oumuamua to suggest it may have come from one of four stars.


• Far Outliers explores the Appalachian timber boom of the 1870s that created the economic preconditions for the famed feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.


• Language Hat notes the unique whistling language prevailing among the Khasi people living in some isolated villages in the Indian state of Meghalaya.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicles, notes that the fastest-growing language in the United States is the Indian language of Telugu.


• Jeremy Harding at the LRB Blog writes about the import of the recognition, by Macron, of the French state's involvement in the murder of pro-Algerian independence activist Maurice Audin in 1958.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution praises the diaries of Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian Jewish intellectual alive during the Second World War


• The New APPS Blog takes a look at the concept of the carnival from Bakhtin.


• Gabrielle Bellot at NYR Daily considers the life of Elizabeth Bishop and Bishop's relationship to loneliness.


• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog describes how CubeSats were paired with solar sails to create a Mars probe, Mars Cube One.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers some possible responses from the left to a conservative Supreme Court in the US.


• Roads and Kingdoms takes a look at the challenges facing the street food of Xi'an.


• Rocky Planet examines why, for decades, geologists mistakenly believed that the California ground was bulging pre-earthquake in Palmdale.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel examines how some objects called stars, like neutron stars and white dwarfs and brown dwarfs, actually are not stars.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps notes how China and Europe stand out as being particularly irreligious on a world map of atheism.


• Window on Eurasia notes the instability that might be created in the North Caucasus by a border change between Chechnya and Ingushetia.


• Arnold Zwicky shares some beautiful pictures of flowers from a garden in Palo Alto.