[PHOTO] Tulips and daffodils and lilies by 900 Queen Street West

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Centauri Dreams links to a paper noting that the interiors of planets play a critical role in determining planetary habitability.


• Belle Waring writes at Crooked Timber about imaginative dream worlds, criticized by some as a sort of maladaptive daydreaming I don't buy that; I am interested in what she says about hers.


• D-Brief notes the very recent discovery of a small tyrannosaur.


• Dead Things considers the possibility that a new South African hominin, Australopithecus sediba, might actually be the ancestor of Homo sapiens.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how one negative side-effect of the renewable energy boom is the mass mining of rare earth elements.


• Erik Loomis writes at Lawyers, Guns and Money about the way in which not just history but history fandoms are gendered, the interests of women being neglected or downplayed.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen reports on how a new US-Chinese trade deal will not do much to deal with underlying issues.


• The New APPS Blog notes the great profits made by the gun industry in the United States and the great death toll, too, associated with the guns produced.


• The NYR Daily visits the Northern Ireland town of Carrickfergus, home to Louis MacNeice and made famous by violence as the whole province sits on the edge of something.


• Drew Rowsome takes a look at the queer horror film The Skin of The Teeth.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains what the technical limits of the Hubble Space Telescope are, and why it needs a replacement.


• Window on Eurasia notes changing patters of population change in the different regions of Russia.


• Arnold Zwicky shares some photos of notable public art in Switzerland, starting with The Caring Hand in his ancestral canton of Glarus.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: McDonald's, Faith Goldy, school lunches, Yonge/College, Scarborough

• This blogTO ranking of the best and the worst McDonald's restaurants in Toronto makes sense to me.


• I look forward to what an audit of the campaign finances of alt-right poster child Faith Goldy's mayoral campaign will reveal. The Toronto Star reports.


• This article at TVO notes that cuts in school lunches for needy children in Toronto should not necessarily be blamed on the Ford government.


• Urban Toronto looks back at Yonge and College before yet another of the intersection's transformations.


• This initiative by a Scarborough church to rebuild itself in such a way as to create affordable housing for its neighbourhood is certainly innovative. The Toronto Star reports.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Hamilton, Kingston, Montréal, Vancouver, Shenzhen

• CBC Hamilton notes that former white supremacist leader Marc Lemire is employed by the City of Hamilton in its IT department.


• The former Kingston Penitentiary will host a music concert this September. Global News reports.


• Allison Hanes writes at the Montreal Gazette about how the status of Montréal as a metropolis has not kept the city from coming into conflict with the Québec government. As she notes, this sounds familiar to Torontonians and Ontarians.


• Have the prices in the Vancouver condo markets dropped so much that developers really need to entice buyers with supplies of avocado toast? The Toronto Star reports.


• The SCMP notes that the city of Shenzhen is moving away from the Hong Kong model of laissez-faire housing towards the planning exemplified by Singapore.

[NEWS] Five tech links: Marion Stokes TV, data caps, Hydro-Québec, batteries, Anki

• Atlas Obscura remarks on the remarkable decades-long archive of taped television made by Marion Stokes.


• Motherboard notes, rightfully, that Americans will have good reason to be upset with data caps.


• Hydro-Québec is set to continue expanding its energy exports, with New York being the latest consumer. CBC reports.


• The National Observer comments on the game-changing improvements of batteries.


• Wired notes that home robotics company Anki is winding down, though not without leaving a good legacy for the future.

[NEWS] Five space science links: ocean worlds, M75, wormholes, neutron stars, black holes, LIGO

• Gizmodo notes the remarkable depth of the oceans of water worlds, going hundreds of kilometres down (or more!).


• Motherboard reports on the latest Hubble images of Messier 75, a star cluster that is the vestige of a galaxy absorbed into the Milky Way.


• Matt Williams at Universe Today notes a new study suggesting that, while traversable wormholes might be physically possible without exotic matter, they would not allow for FTL travel.


• Paul Sutter at Universe Today notes that a closer study of kilonovas might allow for a better understanding of the interior structures of neutron stars.


• Ars Technica notes that LIGO may have detected a collision between a black hole and a neutron star.