[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes that far-orbiting body 2015 TC387 offers more indirect evidence for Planet Nine, as does D-Brief.
  
• Centauri Dreams notes that data from the Gaia astrometrics satellite finds traces of past collisions between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy.


• The Crux takes a look at the long history of human observation of the Crab Nebula.


• Sujata Gupta at JSTOR Daily writes about the struggle of modern agriculture with the pig, balancing off concerns for animal welfare with productivity.


• Language Hat shares a defensive of an apparently legendarily awful novel, Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle, takes a look at the controversy over the name of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, going up to the recent referendum on North Macedonia.


• The LRB Blog reports on the high rate of fatal car accidents in the unrecognized republic of Abkhazia.


• Reddit's mapporn shares an interesting effort to try to determine the boundaries between different regions of Europe, stacking maps from different sources on top of each other.


• Justin Petrone at North! writes about how the northern wilderness of Estonia sits uncomfortably with his Mediterranean Catholic background.


• Peter Watts reports from a book fair he recently attended in Lviv, in the west of Ukraine.


• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog notes the new effort being put in by NASA into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on some beer in a very obscure bar in Shanghai.


• Drew Rowsome reports on the performance artist Lukas Avendano, staging a performance in Toronto inspired by the Zapotech concept of the muxe gender.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps examines the ocean-centric Spielhaus map projection that has recently gone viral.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers the question of whether or not the Big Rip could lead to another Big Bang.


• Window on Eurasia notes the harm that global warming will inflict on the infrastructures of northern Siberia.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell considers the ecological fallacy in connection with electoral politics. Sometimes there really are not niches for new groups.


• Arnold Zwicky takes part in the #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob meme, this time looking at images of linguists.