[BLOG] Some Saturday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Bad Astronomer reports on Kepler-90, now known to have eight planets.


• Centauri Dreams notes a model suggesting low-mass worlds like Mars do not stay very habitable for long at all around red dwarf stars.


• Citizen Science Salon notes how Puerto Ricans are monitoring water quality on their own after Hurricane Maria.


• The Crux notes how climate change played a role in the fall of Rome. We know more about our environment than the Romans did, but we are not much less vulnerable.


• D-Brief notes a feature film that has just been made about Ötzi, the man who body was famously found frozen in the Tyrolean Alps five thousand years ago.


• Daily JSTOR notes how a postage stamp featuring an erupting volcano may have kept Nicaragua from hosting an inter-oceanic canal of its own.


• Hornet Stories reports on some exciting queer musicians.


• Language Hat links to an online dictionary of French slang from the 19th century.


• Language Hat has a post dealing with some controversy created on its author's perspective on "they" as a singular pronoun. (Language changes, that's all I have to say on that.)


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes a pretty wrong-headed take from a right-wing news source on sexuality and dating and flirting. Gack.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how the recent Kepler-90 press release shows how Kepler has reached the limit of the exoplanet science it can do. We need to put better technology at work.


• At Whatever, John Scalzi has some interesting non-spoiler thoughts about the direction of The Last Jedi. I must see this, soon.


• Window on Eurasia features a blithe dismissal by Putin of the idea that there is language or ethnic conflict at work. Tatars just need to learn Russian, apparently, though they can also keep Tatar as an extra.