[BLOG] Some Monday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond links to an argument claiming that classical standard written English is on the decline because so many more users of English are writing than ever before.


• Centauri Dreams has more on the migration of our solar system's planets early in their history. Jupiter's inward migration may have given Earth oceans; will systems without Jupiters, only Neptunes, have watery rocky worlds like ours?


• Crooked Timber's Corey Robin takes one Jewish woman's narrative about feeling at home in Israel and starts a whole discussion on the Middle East.


• Far Outliers notes the rapid and thorough assimilation of Basque descendants and Basque cultural elements into the modern Philippines.


• Geocurrents shares French satirical maps of their own country.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen suggests, after Bryan Caplan, that immigration does not have any effect on the American welfare state.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer shares cites to interesting books on migration.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Marc Rayman describes the Dawn probe's painstaking deceleration as it moves to its Ceres encounter.


• The Signal wonders how to enculcate a love for electronic data, in the way that other formats--books, for instance, or LPs--have their own aficionados.


• Towleroad cites a gay Christian apologist who started a minor controversy by calling GLBT identity a choice.


• Window on Eurasia shares a Russian writer who argues that there is no impending Cold War over Arctic seafloor with Russia's neighbours.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell, meanwhile, takes issue with an account of the Royal Bank of Scotland's errors in the financial crisis that doesn't take into account the choices of Thatcherites to enable the RBS to go overboard in a financialized economy.