[BLOG] Some Saturday links

[rfmcdonald]

• 80 Beats reports on the dscovery of a mass grave in London dating to the mid-13th century that is a pointer to a famine induced by a likely volcanic winter, triggered by volcanoes in perhaps Iceland or even Indonesia.


• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton reports on recent news stories of the entire online lives of different people being hacked to point out that cloud computing isn't really secure.


• Are Chinese politics opaque? As Daniel Drezner documents, so too are the politics of the United States and Europe, just in different ways.


• Eastern Approaches starts with the recruitment of Georgian soccer player Kakha Kaladze by the opposition led by Bidzina Ivanishvili to speculate about Georgia's political future and the growth of Georgian populism.


• Geocurrents' Nicholas Baldi writes about Egypt's Wadi Tumilat, a defunct distributary of Egypt's Nile River that is the legacy of a Pharonic-era canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea.


• The Global Sociology Blog reviews Rainie and Wellman's new book Networked, which apparently argues that social networking technologies aren't destroying social network or social capital but rather are facilitating the growth of more diverse and looser networks instead. Looks interesting.


• Supernova Condensate wonders about the watery environment where live on Earth first evolved--was it a "cold soup" or rather a "warm soda"?


• Torontoist covers the Diner en Blanc at Fort York.


• Whatever's John Scalzi talks about why he considers himself to be politically independent, even though the balance of his views do place him more with the Democratic Party than not.