[PHOTO] Metropolitan United Church at twilight

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Centauri Dreams notes new findings suggesting that low metallicity in stars is linked to the formation of multi-planet systems, including systems with multiple small planets perhaps not unlike Earth.


• D-Brief notes that the potentially detectable S1 dark matter stream is heading past the Earth.


• Far Outliers reports on a visit of samurai to San Francisco in 1860.


• JSTOR Daily notes the wollemi pine of Australia, an ancient tree around in the era of the (non-avian) dinosaurs.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes yet another instance of the decidedly unimpressive leadership of Donald Trump in office.


• Lingua Franca looks at the emergence of an interesting linguistic tic in English, "regular" as in "like a regular William Safire".


• Marginal Revolution looks at how government propaganda in Rwanda aimed to minimize ethnic tensions and the salience of ethnic identity seems to have actually worked.


• The NYR Daily looks how at the English nationalism that has inspired Brexit is indifferent to the loss of Northern Ireland.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shows how crop data from the United States and Europe can be transformed into abstract art.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russia is responding to the Ecumenical Patriarchate's recognition of a Ukrainian church by trying to organize a Russian church in its territory of Turkey.


• Arnold Zwicky explores the word "teknonymy", "the practice of referring to parents by the names of their children".

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Chinatown, Alternative Thinking, Bloor West, Black Toronto,Quayside

• Toronto's Chinatown on Spadina Avenue is facing pressures from gentrification, including architectural ones, the Toronto Star observes.


• blogTO notes that the building housing shop Alternative Thinking is the only survivor of the old Honest Ed's-anchored Mirvish Village.


• Urban Toronto shares revised plans for 2452 Bloor Street West, in Bloor West Village near Jane.


• Black people in Toronto tend to live in "segregated" neighbourhoods, census and other data suggest, according to this article in the Toronto Star.


• Global News notes the demand of privacy commissioner Anne Cavoukian for the data being gathered by Waterfront Toronto in the Quayside project.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city notes: Churchill, New York City, Stockbridge, Ponce, Ramallah

• MacLean's looks at the long and sorry neglect of the Manitoba Arctic port of Churchill in its time of need by the Canadian federal government.


• Wired looks at the "pink tax" in New York City, the extra costs imposed on women who need to take private transit in order to avoid harassment in public spaces.


• Eater profiles the efforts of white neighborhoods in the Georgia city of Stockbridge to secede, something ostensibly presented as a desire to attract Cheesecake Factory and other restaurants to these areas.


• CityLab reports on a sensitive effort to restore an art deco building in the Puerto Rican city of Ponce.


• The Palestinian city of Ramallah, Guardian Cities reports, has its architectural heritage threatened by an unregulated construction boom.

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: Judy Garland, The Kids in The Hall, The Wire, Tumblr, TV

• JSTOR Daily considers the question of whether the movie A Star Is Born made Judy Garland a gay icon.


• Daily Xtra shares a first-person account telling the truth about how The Kids in The Hall gave young queer audiences an idea that escape is possible. (It was for me.)


• This Daily Xtra account shares one watcher's account of learning to accept being black and gay by watching The Wire.


• Tumblr, Daily Xtra notes, is still a powerful platform that allows queer people to meet.


• We really should, as this VICE interview notes, be watching more queer TV.

[NEWS] Five Indigenous links: demographics, Utah, Nova Scotia, Tanya Tagaq, maps

• This article at The Atlantic outlines new genetic research outlining the remarkably rapid colonization of the America by human beings.


• VICE notes the huge strides forward made by the majority Navajo in Utah's San Juan County towards fair political representation.


• CBC notes that it will now be possible for Indigenous people in Nova Scotia courts to make use of eagle feathers for legal affirmations including oath swearing.


• In this MacLean's interview, musician and artist Tanya Tagaq makes it clear that her goal is to help other Indigenous people struggling to recover from colonization.


• The Map Room Blog links to this map of Indigenous Canada, mapping native names and locations and population centres.

[NEWS] Five links about Barnard's Star b (#barnardb)

Today's announcement of the discovery of Barnard's Star b, a super-Earth orbiting the nearby red dwarf of Barnard's Star a mere six light-years away from the Earth, is exciting. Not only is this one of the closest exoplanets to our own solar system, this is exciting news about the Barnard's Star system, finally finding an actual exoplanet decades after the mistaken identification of exoplanets here.

M. Kornmesser's artistic impression of this world in orbit around its star is lovely.

• The official European Southern Observatory announcement of the discovery of a super-Earth orbiting Barnard's Star is exciting news!


• Centauri Dreams picks up the exciting news about Barnard b, as does Bruce Dorminey.


• D-Brief has an extended look into the background of the astronomical project responsible for determining the near-certainty of the existence of Barnard b.


• D-Brief notes that, unfortunately, Barnard b orbits too far from its parent red dwarf star to support anything like Earth-like conditions, to say nothing of the risk to life from occasional massive stellar flares.