[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Centauri Dreams reports on an ingenious use of Google's Ngram, checking which stars are mentioned most often after 1935. Of the classics, Alpha Centauri is doing quite well, while 61 Cygni has not since 61 Cygni C was disproved.


• At Extraordinary Dreams, Rob Pitingolo examines the legislation in Washington D.C. limiting the height of buildings in that city, agreeing that it has a particular character but pointing out that the downtown needs space where people can live.


• Judging by gene flow, GNXP's Razib Khan suggests that modern-day Turks in Anatolia are descended at least as much from Armenians as from Greeks.


• io9 links to a cool map of Hong Kong's former Walled City of Kowloon, a sort of ultra-high-density interzone that acquired a reputation of its own.
• Mark Simpson notes briefly that cosmetic companies are now making use of the vanity of the middle-aged male.


• Registan's Umairj reviews the past year in Pakistan. On the plus side, the country still exists as a functioning entity.


• A bizarrely mislabeled map in the Daily Mail is the occasion for a Strange Maps post looking at the non-existent, yet shadow-existing, Australian state of Capricornia in the north of what's now Queenland.


• Sublime Oblivion's Anatoly Karlin posted his predictions for the coming year. Debt issues, among other things, look to be more salient for the United States than for the PiIGS.


• Towleroad has excerpts from an interview with a former skinhead gaybasher, now repentant.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little writes about comparative living standards around the world at different points in time. It looks like the high wages of the 18th century western European urbanite don't have parallels elsewhere--or, is it just a matter of insufficient data for other similarly prosperous regions of Asia?


• The Volokh Conspiracy has a couple of posts on Soviet Jewish immigration, the first looking at the Jackson-Vanik Amendment's effects on Soviet Jewish emigration and the community that stayed, and another observing that Soviet Jewish immigrants are considerably more right-wing than other Jews.