[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

[rfmcdonald]

• The Dragon's Tales notes that, to cut costs for its Ariane 6 rocket, the European Space Agency is no longer going to try to source parts for the Ariane 6 across its member-states, insteading aiming for more efficient distribution of suppliers.


• Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig wonders about the consequences Spain's offer of citizenship to the descendants of Jews deported in 1492 might have. How many will take up Spain on the offer?


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen is not a locavore at all.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla wonders, with others, just what Mercury's unique hollows are.


• Strange Maps chronicles the "hippie trail", a route popular with backpackers in the 1960s and 1970s that stretched from Europe through Turkey and Afghanistan towards Southeast Asia.


• Towleroad notes the vicious homophobia of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little chronicles the not-entirely unreciprocated sympathy of Karl Marx for the liberator Abraham Lincoln.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that immigration is unlikely to increase the size of the American welfare state. (If anything, as European rhetoric suggests, it might decrease it.)