[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

[rfmcdonald]

A big one, today!

• 80 Beats notes a proposed NASA probe, a boat that would float on the cryogenic hydrocarbon seas of Titan.


• BAGNewsNotes comments on the misogyny lying behind that American newspaper's digital removal of two women, including Hillary Clinton, from that photo of the American cabinet watching footage of Osama's death.


• blogTO's Robyn Urback examines Toronto's Agincourt Mall, one that the writer describes--to some comments' considerable disdain--as reasonably functional and with some positive bits.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster examines models of exoplanets which speculate about the habitability of the different broadly Earth-like planets discovered by Kepler, and the different conditions of Earth-like worlds (or non-Earth-like worlds).


• Russian-languagedemographer comments, with links, on the Nazis' Generalplan Ost, which would have seen the mass deportation of Slavs and full-scale German colonization of central and eastern Europe.


• The Global Sociology Blog reviews Florence Aubenas' The Night Cleaner, a book that depicts the author's experience of life in France as a cleaning lady, terribly frustrating and precarious.


• GNXP comments on the collapse in the quality of handwriting in our computerized world. The shift between my neat Grade 12 handwriting and what I have noiw is fairly remarkable.


• Joe. My. God. notes the existence of a separatist movement in southern Arizona, "Baja Arizona", inspired by opposition to the--let's say, problematic--policies of the state government. Interesting reaction, if just a protest movement.


• Marginal Revolution observes that the Polynesian island nation of Samoa is shifting the International Date Line to its east, so as to share the same day with Samoa's major trading partners in Asia and Australasia.


• Nissology PEI reports on the use of foreign workers in a Prince Edward Island fish plant. Here as elsewhere, despite high local unemployment, there are jobs the natives won't do.


• Gideon Rachman doesn't think that Scotland will vote for independence, on the grounds of weak support in the polls and concerns over the country's economic viability as an independent state.


• Strange Maps shows a remarkable East German subway map for Berlin, one that manages to reduce enclaved West Berlin and its network--still connected, barely, to the East's--to a minor enclave.


• Towleroad reports that Uganda's gay-killing bill has been dropped by parliament. Hopefully ...