[BLOG] Some Monday links

[rfmcdonald]

To start, over at Demography Matters co-blogger Scott Peterson notes that, faced with a growing number of retirements, Oregon's public workers pension fund is starting to come under stress as it tries to finance everything. Is dis-saving beginning?

• Bag News Notes' Karen Anderson examines gender segregation on Israeli buses and streets as representing a particularly thorny misogyny--one reproduced in the United States too, in New York City's Williamsburg Park district.


• At Centauri Dreams, mention is made of the plan to use the Kepler space telescope's data on extrasolar planets to look for their moons, too.


• Daniel Drezner seems to think that sanctions are the least bad option in dealing with Iran's nuclear program, that at the very least it will make things more difficult for the Islamic Republic at a difficult time.


• Geocurrents notes a paradox in the science fiction of Frank Herbert's planet Dune and J.R.R. Tolkien continent of Middle Earth, that despite going into such detail about their realms the two authors actually don't create very plausible worlds.


• At GNXP, Razib Khan points to devastating epidemics among immunologically naive isolated populations--in Amazonia, in the Andaman Islands--and wonders if these people are closer to the original human stock, and current disease resistance is very recent.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Scott Lemieux points to evidence from Morocco to suggest that the only thing anti-abortion legislation does is harm women, not actually limit the number of abortions.


• Marginal Revolution links to a distressing article discussing the extent to which state neglect has let Italy's Pompeii ruins literally get carted away by tourists.


• Progressive Download's John Farrell describes a trend among certain Muslim scientists to claim that everything--even the theory of relativity--can be found sufficiently hidden, in the text of the Quran.