[PHOTO] Looking out at my snowy laneway

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares stunning photos of the Triangulum galaxy.


• The Crux notes how innovative planning and recovery missions helped many NASA missions, like the Hubble and Kepler telescopes, improve over time.


• Sea stars on the Pacific coast of North America, D-Brief notes, are starting to die out en masse.


• David Finger at the Finger Post shows his readers his recent visit to the Incan ruins at Ollantaytambo, in Peru.


• Gizmodo notes how astronomers accidentally found the dwarf spheroidal galaxy Bedin I a mere 30 million light years away.


• JSTOR Daily notes the new evidence supporting the arguments of W.E.B. Dubois that black resistance under slavery helped the Confederacy lose the US Civil War.


• Language Hat notes the discovery of a new trilingual inscription in Iran, one combining the Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian languages.


• Language Log notes the impending death of the Arabic dialect of old Mosul, and notes what its speakers are said to talk like birds.


• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money thinks that if Cary Booker does not win the Democratic nomination for 2020, he will at least push the discourse leftwards.


• Marginal Revolution notes new evidence that the post-1492 depopulation of the Americas led directly to the global cooling of the Little Ice Age.


• Neuroskeptic considers the ways in which emergence, at different levels, could be a property of the human brain.


• The NYR Daily features an excerpt from the new Édouard Louis book, Who Killed My Father, talking about the evolution relationship with his father over time.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw muses on the potential for a revival of print journalism in Australia.


• Roads and Kingdoms interviews journalist Jason Rezaian on the subject of his new book about his long imprisonment in Iran.


• Drew Rowsome writes about how censorship, on Facebook and on Blogspot, harms his writing and his ability to contribute to his communities.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel writes about how galaxy clusters lead to the premature death of stellar formation in their component galaxies.


• Window on Eurasia notes a new poll from Ukraine suggesting most Orthodox Christians there identify with the new Ukrainian national church, not the Russian one.


• Arnold Zwicky talks about language, editing, and error.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Moss Park, The Junction, McArthur, TTC future, homelessness

• Tanya Mok writes at blogTO about the evolution of the Moss Park neighbourhood.


• Emily Mathieu at the Toronto Star notes that some tenants in a fire-damaged home in the Junction have returned, despite terrible living conditions, for fear of being priced out of the Toronto rental market.


• The family of McArthur victim Selim Esen has called for an inquiry into police conduct in this case. The Toronto Star reports.


• Francine Kopun and Ben Spurr at the Toronto Star note that the recent breakdown of the Scarborough RT line during last week's storm might hint at worse to come for transit users.


• Justin Haynes at NOW Toronto writes about the horrors of three nights spent in Toronto's Seaton House shelter. What of the people who, unlike him, could not escape?

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: St. Louis, Port Moody, Liverpool, Rio de Janeiro,

• CityLab notes what I think is a perfectly sensible plan in St. Louis, Missouri, to fuse city and county into one unit to allow for better regional governance.


• A project in Port Moody aiming to let people get condos through a rent-to-own scheme is massively oversubscribed. Global News reports.


• This essay in the Guardian notes the extent to which austerity in the United Kingdom has hit northern cities like Liverpool particularly badly.


• CityLab notes the influence of architect Oscar Niemeyer on the urban landscapes of Brazil, particularly but not only in Rio de Janeiro.


• Guardian Cities looks at the impressive scope of the plan to turn the Sichuan city of Chengdu into a garden city. What of the human cost of this transformation?

[ISL] Three #PEI links: Tryon, immigration, real estate, cats, Province House

• Peter Rukavina shares some photos and a sketch from the Tryon River Bridge on the Island.


• CBC Prince Edward Island notes that immigration retention rates on PEI, while low, are rising, perhaps showing the formation of durable immigrant communities.


• The Guardian of Charlottetown shares the story of a tenant facing eviction after he complained to his landlord about an illegally large rent increase.


• An elderly man on the Island has been reunited with his cats after his senior's housing unit forbade him from taking his pets with him, CBC PEI reports.


• CBC Prince Edward Island reports on the state of the extensive renovations of Province House, with new materials being sourced and secrets discovered.

[DM] Some news links: fertility, population aging, migration, demography is not destiny, Eurabia

Over the past week, I've come across some interesting news reports about different trends in different parts of the world. I have assembled them in a links post at Demography Matters.

• The Independent noted that the length and severity of the Greek economic crisis means that, for many younger Greeks, the chance to have a family the size they wanted--or the chance to have a family at all--is passing. The Korea Herald, meanwhile, noted that the fertility rate in South Korea likely dipped below 1 child per woman, surely a record low for any nation-state (although some Chinese provinces, to be fair, have seen similar dips).


• The South China Morning Post argued that Hong Kong, facing rapid population aging, should try to keep its elderly employed. Similar arguments were made over at Bloomberg with regards to the United States, although the American demographic situation is rather less dramatic than Hong Kong's.


• Canadian news source Global News noted that, thanks to international migration, the population of the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia actually experienced net growth. OBC Transeuropa, meanwhile, observed that despite growing emigration from Croatia to richer European Union member-states like Germany and Ireland, labour shortages are drawing substantial numbers of workers not only from the former Yugoslavia but from further afield.


• At Open Democracy, Oliver Haynes speaking about Brexit argued strongly against assuming simple demographic change will lead to shifts of political opinion. People still need to be convinced.


• Open Democracy's Carmen Aguilera, meanwhile, noted that far-right Spanish political party Vox is now making Eurabian arguments, suggesting that Muslim immigrants are but the vanguard of a broader Muslim invasion.