[BLOG] Some Thursday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Anders Sandberg at Andart approves of entrepreneur Elon Musk's desire to use space travel to create offworld backups for our biosphere.
  
• Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell believes that the close links between Brazil and Boston--driven by migration, at first strictly economic but then driven by interest in Massachusetts' education institutes--could serve Boston quite well.


• Two links from Centauri Dreams today, one describing the planetary system of HD 10180, a Sun-like star that supports nine planets to our eight, and the other describing hypothetical laser-based defenses for starships against interstellar dust.


• At Extraordinary Observations, Rob Pitingolo describes the difficulties tourism planners in destination cities have with getting people to visit sites that aren't the most heavily trafficked.


• Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig deflates the myth that Chinese men (lacking spouses owing to a male-biased sex ratio at birth) will flood into Russia (especially Siberia) looking for Russian women (lacking spouses owing to a high male death rate). Among other things, there actually isn't much of a shortage of theoretically marriageable men in Siberia.


• The Global Sociology Blog discusses what happens when celebrity culture and social networking sites like Twitter intersect. The answer? It's easier to get social capital than ever before.


• At GNXP, Razib Khan notes that Argentina--unlike English-speaking countries also products of mass European immigration--still evidences the genetic trace of indigenous populations.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio points out that, at long last, global climate change is kicking off (as expected as early as 1981).


• Registan features a guest post from Uzbekistan commentator Azamat Seitov, who discusses the possibility that the Eurasian Economic Community--a Russia-centered bloc also including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan--will take off. He's skeptical.