[PHOTO] Fading into electric blue twilight, Dupont Street

Last night was electric.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes new evidence that the Pathfinder probe landed, on Mars, on the shores of an ancient sea.


• The Crux reports on tholins, the organic chemicals that are possible predecessors to life, now found in abundance throughout the outer Solar System.


• D-Brief reports on the hard work that has demonstrated some meteorites which recently fell in Turkey trace their origins to Vesta.


• Colby King at the Everyday Sociology Blog explores sociologist Eric Klinenberg's concept of social infrastructure, the public spaces we use.


• Far Outliers reports on a Honolulu bus announcement in Yapese, a Micronesian language spoken by immigrants in Hawai'i.


• JSTOR Daily considers the import of the autobiography of Catherine the Great.


• Language Hat reports, with skepticism, on the idea of "f" and "v" as sounds being products of the post-Neolithic technological revolution.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen is critical of the idea of limiting the number of children one has in a time of climate change.


• Jim Belshaw at Personal Reflections reflects on death, close at hand and in New Zealand.


• Strange Company reports on the mysterious disappearance, somewhere in Anatolia, of American cyclist Frank Lenz in 1892, and its wider consequences.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel identifies five types of cosmic events capable of triggering mass extinctions on Earth.


• Towleroad reports on the frustration of many J.K. Rowling fans with the author's continuing identification of queer histories for characters that are never made explicit in books or movies.


• Window on Eurasia has a skeptical report about a Russian government plan to recruit Russophones in neighbouring countries as immigrants.


• Arnold Zwicky explores themes of shipwrecks and of being shipwrecked.

[URBAN NOTE] Six Toronto links: Hearn, laneway houses, Artscape, Coffee Time, Mmmuffins, Lilly Singh

• blogTO reports that the Hearn Generating Station is set to become a public space again this summer with a party.


• Laneway housing in Toronto, now legalized, is starting to take shape as an architectural form. The Toronto Star reports.


• The new Artscape Weston Common project for artists at Weston Road and Lawrence will hopefully help a neighbourhood taking on a new form. The Toronto Star reports.


• A redditor at r/Toronto confirms that the venerable Coffee Time outside of Jane station, supposedly closed for renovations, will not reopen.


• The last Mmmuffins store in Toronto, somewhere in the PATH, is also set to close. blogTO reports.


• The selection of Toronto-born Lilly Singh to be the next late-night host on NBC really breaks all sorts of boundaries. VICE reports.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, New York City, Atlanta, Barcelona, Copenhagen

• Montréal may yet get a new park to commemorate victims of the Irish famine of the 1840s. CTV reports.


• CityLab reports on the new spectacular Hudson Yards development in Manhattan.


• The nightclubs of Atlanta in the 1990s played a critical role in that decade's hip-hop. VICE reports.


• CityLab reports that, dealing with a housing crisis, city authorities in Barcelona have taken to finding the owners of empty buildings.


• Guardian Cities reports on how civic authorities in Copenhagen hope to create an offshore archipelago, a sort of floating Silicon Valley.

[NEWS] Five sci-tech links: Southeast Asian hominins, dinosaurs, robots

• National Geographic reports on the discovery of animals slaughtered by mysterious hominins present in the Philippines some 700 thousand years ago. Who were they?


• National Geographic notes a new study suggesting that, before the Chixculub impact, the dinosaurs were doing fine as a group of animals, that they were not on the verge of dying out. The dinosaurs simply had bad luck.


• CityLab notes how the jobs typically filled by women, particularly, are especially vulnerable to roboticization.


• CBC recently reported from a conference in Las Vegas, where robots demonstrated their ability to fill any number of jobs, displacing human workers.


• Matt Simon at WIRED wrote about the potential for robot and human workers to co-exist, each with their own strengths.

[AH] Five r/imaginarymaps maps: Panama, Greece, South Africa, US, Europe

• This map at r/imaginarymaps imagines what might have been had the unlikely Scottish colonial project in Panama, the Darien Scheme, had succeeded.


• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines an Islamic Greece.


• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a revisionist Afrikaner state in eastern South Africa.


• What organized crime networks might have sprung up in an independent Confederacy? This r/imaginarymaps post considers.


• The organization of a Europe unified under Napoleonic hegemony in 1820 is laid out in this r/imaginarymaps map.