[PHOTO] Holiday penguins of Dupont Street

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait reports on the black hole collisions recently identified in a retrospective analysis of data from gravitational-wave detector LIGO, while Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel also writes about the LIGO black hole collision discoveries.


• Centauri Dreams suggests that a slowing rate of star formation might be necessary for a galaxy to support life like ours.


• Crooked Timber reports on the outcome of a sort of live-action philosophy experiment, recruiting people to decide on what would be a utopia.


• The Crux reports on the challenges facing developers of a HIV vaccine.


• D-Brief notes the circumstances in which men can pass on mitochondrial DNA to their children.


• Far Outliers notes the fates of some well-placed Korean-Japanese POWs in India.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing wonders if the existential questions about human life raised by genetic engineering can even be addressed by the liberal-democratic order.


• Joe. My. God. reports on the worrying possibility of a Bernie Sanders presidential run in 2020.


• JSTOR Daily reports on the art and the politics of Chinese provocateur Ai Weiwei.


• Language Hat looks at the smart ways in which the film adaptation of My Brilliant Friend has made use of Neapolitan dialect, as a marker of identity and more.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at what a new Chinese blockbuster film, Operation Red Sea, does and does not say about how Chinese think they could manage the international order.


• Geoffrey Pullum at Lingua Franca considers the logical paradox behind the idea of a webpage that has links to all other webpages which do not link to themselves.


• Anna Badhken at the NYR Daily uses Olga Tokarczuk's new novel Flights and her own experience as an airline passenger to consider the perspectives offered and lost by lofty flight.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Jason Davis notes the successful launch of a Soyuz spacecraft two months after October's abort, carrying with it (among others) Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques.


• Strange Company notes the 1736 Porteous riot in Edinburgh, an event that began with a hanging of a smuggler and ended with a lynching.


• Towleroad notes that André Aciman is working on a sequel to his novel Call Me By Your Name.


• Daniel Little at Understanding Society takes a look at the organizational issues involved with governments exercising their will.


• Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy makes a good case as to why a second referendum on Brexit would be perfectly legitimate.


• Window on Eurasia suggests expanding Russian-language instruction in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan has more to deal with the needs of labour migrants.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell responds to Feng Jicai's book on the Cultural Revolution, Ten Years of Madness.


• Arnold Zwicky reports on Swiss food, starting with the McRaclette.

[PHOTO] Aglow, looking south, Yonge and Eglinton

[PHOTO] Holiday penguins of Dupont Street at night

[URBAN NOTE] Six Toronto links: downtown jobs, Galleria Mall, neighbourhoods, TTC

• Jeff Gray at The Globe and Mail reports on the "hyperconcentration" of jobs in downtown Toronto, something that may decidedly unbalance the wider metropolis.


• Toronto Life shares some of the photos taken by Shari Kasman of the Galleria Mall for her new book about this neighbourhood institution.


• Christopher Hume at the Toronto Star notes how Toronto's low density speaks of this city's difficulty in mastering good change.


• This ongoing fight in Cabbagetown regarding zoning for a daycare highlights many of the weaknesses of Toronto's civic culture. The Toronto Star reports.


• Happily, there will be no more shutdowns on Line 1 of the TTC subway system for the rest of December. The Toronto Star reports.


• Transit Toronto notes that the new automatic train control station has been installed north of Dupont Station.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Kingston, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, Churchill

• The vacancy rate in Kingston is easily the lowest of any major Ontario city, even worse than Toronto. Global News reports.


• CBC notes that Ottawa is continuing to work on building a film centre in its Greenbelt.


• La Presse notes that residents of the neighbourhood of Glenmount, in the Montréal borough of Côte-des-Neiges, are threatening to separate from the city.


• Québec City has again been rejected by the NHL, the North American hockey league deciding not to situate a team in this pro-hockey town despite strong local support. CBC reports.


• After more than a year, regular passenger rail service has finally resumed between Winnipeg and Churchill. CBC reports.

[NEWS] Five links: Tumblr, Lough Foyle, giant snails, Gillian Genser, Tell el-Hammam

• VICE's Motherboard suggests that the crackdown on anything NSFW on Tumblr can be blamed on the expanding power of the Apple Store, one element of its indiscriminate sanitization of the Internet.


• Garrett Carr at 1843 Magazine takes a look at Lough Foyle, the northern Irish bay that will become part of a hard border come Brexit.


• Giant African snails, Sarah Laskow suggests at Atlas Obscura, have spread so widely in recent centuries thanks to humanity that the presence of their shells might well be a noticeable marker of the Anthropocene.


• At Toronto Life, sculptor Gillian Genser tells the heartbreaking story of how she was poisoned by the heavy metals contained in the mussel shells that she used as raw materials for a sculpture.


• Evan Gough at Universe Today reports the claim of some archaeologists that, 3700 years ago, the city of Tell el-Hammam was destroyed by a meteor that exploded above it with the force of a large nuclear warhead. Inspiration for Sodom and Gomorrah?