[BLOG] Some Sunday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Charlie Stross at Antipope asks his readers an interesting question: What are the current blind spots of science fiction? What issues and themes need to be addresses by contemporary writers?


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the discovery of three planets around young star HD 163296, and his role in the identification of one as a possibility.


• Crooked Timber notes the strange ways in which the predictive text function of Gmail echoes the all-quotations language of the Ascians of Gene Wolfe.


• D-Brief notes an ambitious plan to survey the Andromeda Galaxy for signs of powerful laser beams used by extraterrestrial intelligences for communications or transport.


• Joe. My. God. notes the plan of China to launch an artificial mirrored satellite into orbit to provide night-time light for the city of Chengdu.


• Allan Metcalfe at Lingua Franca considers some of the words candidate to be considered the best word for 2018.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that global economic divergence ended, after a century and a quarter, in 1990, and that there has been subsequently rapid economic convergence in the globalized neo-liberal era.


• Alex Carp at the NYR Daily reviews Jill Lepore's new book, These Truths: A History of the United States, examining the importance of fact and of narrative in forming identities.


• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog looks at the challenges involved in returning a sample from asteroid Ryugu.


• Drew Rowsome takes a look at the recent books of Raziel Reid and Jesse Trautman, noting how each delineates some of the contours of contemporary queer male life.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains how we can estimate that there are two trillion galaxies in the universe.


• Window on Eurasia notes the various inter-ethnic disputes over interpretations of ancient history in the North Caucasus.