[BLOG] Some Monday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait remembers recently departed colleague Bruce Woodgate.


• Centauri Dreams examines the possibility of layered subsurface oceans on Ganymede.


• Crooked Timber's Belle Waring quite likes the song and video "Tous les Mêmes" by Belgian musician Stromae.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper suggesting that circumbinary exoplanets--planets orbiting two closely-orbiting stars--might be quite common and another modelling the temperatures on the surface of a tide-locked ocean world.


• The Dragon's Tales notes a DNA study of house mice suggesting that Vikings might have been the first to explore the island of Madeira and its neighbours, four centuries before Portuguese colonization.


• Eastern Approaches visits east Ukraine and examines turmoil in Slovenia.


• Far Outliers traces the evolution of the Melanesian island of Rabaul under Japan as a military base in the Second World War.


• Joe. My. God. notes that anti-gay North Carolina Republican State Senate candidate Steve Wiles had a prior career as drag queen Miss Mona Sinclair.


• Language Hat samples the beautiful strange poetry of the recently passed Rosemary Tonks.


• Language Log's Mark Liberman wonders, inspired by XKCD's recent meditation on Morse code and Livejournal, how social media will continue to evolve.


• pollotenchegg maps the changing relative proportions of Russians in different regions of Ukraine over more than a century.


• Towleroad remembers the late disco great Sylvester.


• Window on Eurasia links to warnings that Putin is a fascist bent on taking to Russia to war and concerns that so far, the Eurasian customs union isn't boosting Russian ties with adjacent regions of Belarus and Kazakhstan.