[BLOG] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Bag News Notes' Michael Shaw considers the remarkable cool of one of the terrorists involved in the Woolwich killing of a British soldier. Does this cool mean this is routine?


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling and Will Baird at The Dragon's Tales both note astronomers who think that Saturn's moon Titan, nearing summer, is about to experience hurricanes.


• Also at The Dragon's Tales, Will Baird notes a new study of exoplanet magnetic fields suggesting that planet Gliese 667Cc orbits too close to its sun to avoid tidal locking, and thus has suffered a collapse of its magnetic field and erosion of its atmosphere.


• Eastern Approaches notes the contretemps between Germany and Hungary, curiously triggered by the German chancellor saying that she would not send in the cavalry (metaphorically) to deal to Hungary's destruction of its democracy.


• GNXP's Razib Khan notes that the Aborigines of Australia were not culturally static, among other things observing that Aborigine language groups reflect the recent dominance of a single language family.


• The Search's Butch Lazorchak argues in favour of the development of lossless recording techniques versus lossy ones, from the perspective of long-term preservation.


• At Une heure de peine, Denis Colombi writes, in French about a recent article on race and sex. There may be tendencies, but they are only tendencies, not uniform across populations by any means. What does it take to belong to amorphous groups?


• Window on Eurasia links to a Russian commentator who argues that Russia should look not to Europe or China for models of development, but rather to the continental superpower that is the United States.