[BLOG] Some Monday links

[rfmcdonald]

• 80 Beats reports that NASA's Mercury probe Messenger has determined that the innermost planet in our solar system is almost entirely solid iron, with a much thinner mantle and crust than had been believed before.


• Centauri Dreams describes how self-replicating probes might set up--might already have set up?--an interstellar communications network, slowly spreading out from a point.


• Daniel Drezner makes the point that books claiming to trace the origins of economic prosperity in certain policies can't be overly reductive--how did North Korea keep up economically with South Korea until the mid-1970s, for instance?


• Extraordinary Observation's Rob Pitingolo is unimpressed by playwright/performer Mike Daisey's claims that, notwithstanding actual errors of facts and near-certain lies on his part in his piece on workers issues at an Apple manufacturer's plant in China, he speaks to a deeper truth.


• Geocurrents reports on conflicted responses to immigrant childrearing practices in Norway and Argentina's Tierra del Fuego electronics manufacturing industry.


• Language Hat reports that defenders of Chomsky's theory of language are responding to anthropologist Dan Everett's apparent disproof of Chomsky's thesis with the language of the Piraha by getting him banned and calling him a racist. Not cool.


• Steve Munro links to and summarizes a recent city report making the case for light rail in Scarborough, as opposed to subway extension.


• Torontoist points out that Rob Ford's call for a referendum on subway construction was legally ill-founded and near-pointless.


• Towleroad links to a neat video on life on the isolated South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha.