[BLOG] Some Sunday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait takes a look at the question of how far, exactly, the Pleiades star cluster is from Earth. It turns out this question breaks down into a lot of interesting secondary issues.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly starts an interesting discussion around the observation that so many people are uncomfortable with the details of their body.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the exciting evidence of cryovolcanism at Ceres.


• The Crux reports on new suggestions that, although Neanderthals had bigger brains than Homo sapiens, Neanderthal brains were not thereby better brains.


• D-Brief notes evidence that the ability of bats and dolphins to echolocate may ultimate derive from a shared gene governing their muscles.


• Bruce Dorminey notes that astronomers have used data on the trajectory of 'Oumuamua to suggest it may have come from one of four stars.


• Far Outliers explores the Appalachian timber boom of the 1870s that created the economic preconditions for the famed feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.


• Language Hat notes the unique whistling language prevailing among the Khasi people living in some isolated villages in the Indian state of Meghalaya.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicles, notes that the fastest-growing language in the United States is the Indian language of Telugu.


• Jeremy Harding at the LRB Blog writes about the import of the recognition, by Macron, of the French state's involvement in the murder of pro-Algerian independence activist Maurice Audin in 1958.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution praises the diaries of Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian Jewish intellectual alive during the Second World War


• The New APPS Blog takes a look at the concept of the carnival from Bakhtin.


• Gabrielle Bellot at NYR Daily considers the life of Elizabeth Bishop and Bishop's relationship to loneliness.


• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog describes how CubeSats were paired with solar sails to create a Mars probe, Mars Cube One.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers some possible responses from the left to a conservative Supreme Court in the US.


• Roads and Kingdoms takes a look at the challenges facing the street food of Xi'an.


• Rocky Planet examines why, for decades, geologists mistakenly believed that the California ground was bulging pre-earthquake in Palmdale.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel examines how some objects called stars, like neutron stars and white dwarfs and brown dwarfs, actually are not stars.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps notes how China and Europe stand out as being particularly irreligious on a world map of atheism.


• Window on Eurasia notes the instability that might be created in the North Caucasus by a border change between Chechnya and Ingushetia.


• Arnold Zwicky shares some beautiful pictures of flowers from a garden in Palo Alto.