[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster considers recent research suggesting that hypothetical "waterworlds"--broadly Earth-like planets with very large amounts of water, covering their rocky surfaces entirely--might in fact enter into "moist greenhouse" phases that would see their excess of water evaporate, leaving an Earth-like planet with an Earth-like combination of rocky and watery surfaces behind.


• Geocurrents' Nicholas Baldo highlights various bodies of watyer with exceptionally high salt content, from Antarctica to Turkmenistan.


• Language Hat notes some interesting linguistic soupçons, unusual loanwords and the ease of post-war travel and the like, in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey.


• In one post at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis starts a discussion about continuing high levels of inequality in South Africa as evidenced by the recent massacre of miners, while Scott Lemieux starts a discussion about misogyny in the United States' Republican Party as illustrated by Akin's heinous comments.


• New APPS Blog's Mohan Matthen takes significant issue with Perry Anderson's recent criticisms of Gandhi and Nehru in the London Review of Books.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer argues from Canada's existing experience embedded in international property rights protection law regimes that ratifying the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes Convention won't change anything.


• Registan's Casey Michel is unimpressed with pro-Wikileaks Uzbekistan critic Craig Murray's use of his own wife's rape to attack Assange's accusers.


• Supernova Condensate's invaderxan presents his own, purely mass-based, classification of celestial objects in response to the ongoing dwarf planet controversy.


• Daniel Little at Understanding Society presents an interesting argument from a pair of sociologists in 2007 to the effect that political polarization can more often be not be an artifact of perception.