[PHOTO] Looking west, east of Bartlett on Dupont

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Centauri Dreams notes the lack of evidence for heat plumes around the Europan crater of Pwyll.


• Patrick Nunn at The Crux writes about the new evidence for the millennias-long records preserved remarkably well in oral history.


• D-Brief notes the discovery of a two-year cycle in gamma ray output in blazar PG 1553+113.


• Bruce Dorminey notes a proposal from French astronomer Antoine Labeyrie to create a low-cost hypertelescope in nearby space.


• Gizmodo interviews experts on the possibility of whether people who are now cryogenically frozen will be revived. (The consensus is not encouraging for current cryonicists.)


• JSTOR Daily notes how, looking back at old records, we can identify many veterans of the US Civil War suffering from the sorts of psychological issues we know now that military veterans suffer from.


• Language Hat notes the beauty of two stars' Arabic names, Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgenubi, beta and alpha Librae.


• The LRB Blog takes a look at the encounters of Anthony Burgess with the Russian language.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution is surprised that Canada has allowed China to add deep-sea sensors to its deep-sea observatories in the Pacific, in a geopolitically-concerned American way.


• Tim Parks at the NYR Daily talks about the importance of translation, as a career that needs to be supported while also needing critiques.


• Drew Rowsome takes a look at two shows on young people coming out, the web series It's Complicated and the documentary Room to Grow.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that the evidence of the existence of a potential Planet Nine in our solar system is not necessarily that strong.


• Strange Maps shares a map of Europe in 1920, one oriented towards Americans, warning of famine across a broad swathe of the continent including in countries now no longer around.


• Window on Eurasia notes that, in multiethnic Dagestan, Russian has displaced other local languages as a language of interethnic communication.


• Arnold Zwicky announces the creation, at his blog via the sharing of a Liz Climo cartoon, of a new category at his blog relating to pandas.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Jennifer Keesmaat, John Tory, 650 Parliament, St. Clair, Don Valley

• Lauren Pelley at CBC Toronto notes how, despite trying hard, Jennifer Keesmaat was unable to displace John Tory as the clear front-runner.


• Mark Gollom at CBC notes that John Tory may be able to find ways to work with Doug Ford, though the province will remain the dominant partner in any relationship.


• Many of the tenants displaced from 650 Parliament Street were happy to return briefly to their old homes, to retrieve belongings. The Toronto Star reports.


• blogTO shares these vintage photos of St. Clair Avenue a century ago, to all appearances just another rural road.


• Urban Toronto shared a gorgeous aerial photo of Toronto, looking south from a point in the Don Valley towards the downtown.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Montréal links: separatism, Westmount church condos, transport, Métro, Hovespian

• This MTL Blog article calling for the separation of Montréal after the CAQ electoral victory in wider Québec sounds, to me, akin to calls to separate Toronto from Ontario after the PC victory outside this metropolis.


• CTV News reports on the possibility of the conversion of an old United Church in Westmount to condos. There can be, I think, no surer sign of a city's strong real estate market than such conversions, I say as a Torontonian.


• Olivier Robichaud writes at Huffington Post about the transport choices facing greater Montréal under the CAQ government.


• CTV reports on how Montréal mayor Valérie Plante is continuing to work towards building a Pink Line for the Metro, extending to Montréal-Nord.


• Craig Desson at CBC Montréal reports on 79 year old Joseph Hovsepian, one of the last classic electronics repairpersons in the city.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Brampton, Milton and Markham, New York City, Atlanta, London, Lisbon

• The Ontario government's cancellation of new post-secondary campuses years in the planning for booming Brampton, Milton, and Markham hurts these centres needlessly. Global News reports.


• Guardian Cities notes how the scale of voter repression in Georgia may not be enough to prevent the election of Stacey Abrams, given the scale of black migration to Atlanta.


• Feargus O'Sullivan at CityLab takes a look at a new report noting both the importance of venues for experimental music in New York City (and other cities) and these venues' vulnerability to gentrification.


• A long-abandoned street of Victorian London has been remade, CityLab reports, into a component of London Bridge Station.


• CityLab reports on the beautiful, but dangerous, tiled sidewalks of Lisbon. Is it worth keeping them?

[NEWS] Eight LGBTQ links: Shipman, flagging, tongzhi, Hadrian, China, Florent, Trump, genetics

• CBC reports on how the New Brunswick village of Shipman briefly gave an official sanction to the so-called "straight pride" flag. What can I say but that rural decline in the Maritimes does not have its good points?


• Mike Miksche at NewNowNext takes a look at flagging, something that is at once nightclubbing activity, performance art, and a uniquely queer sport.


• Hornet Stories notes that "tongzhi," the Chinese word for comrade appropriated by queer men, is no longer used by the Communist Party of China in light of this appropriation.


• CBC takes a look at the new explicitly queer opera by Rufus Wainwright, Hadrian.


• Asia Times notes the disappointing slow progress of LGBTQ rights, including marriage equality, in Taiwan.


• Atlas Obscura takes a look at the history of Florent, the all-night diner in Manhattan's Meatpacking District that watched over a whole generation of LGBTQ history and community.


• S. Bear Bergman writes at the Forward about how the introduction of the Trump administration's anti-trans laws are a Nuremberg Laws moment. Resistance is needed.


• Queerty reports on the news, recently found by scientists, that the genes linked to non-heterosexual orientations are also linked to straight possessors of those genes having more sex. (You're welcome.)