[BLOG] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the frequency with which young red dwarf stars flare, massively, with negative implications for potential life on these stars' planets.


• Centauri Dreams shares a proposal for probe expeditions to Pluto and Charon, and to the wider Kuiper belt beyond.


• D-Brief explains just how elephants manage to eat with their trunks.


• JSTOR Daily answers the question of just why so many American states--other subnational polities too, I bet--have straight-line borders.


• Language Hat links to a recent blog post examining the very specific forms of language used by the Roman emperor Justinian.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos looks at where the whole concept of "political correctness" came from, and why. (Hint: It was not anti-racists who did this.)


• Geoffrey K. Pullum at Lingua Franca describes the circumstances behind his new book, _Linguistics: Why It Matters.


• At the LRB Blog, Caroline Eden writes about the shipwrecks of the Black Sea, preserved for centuries or even millennia by the sea's oxygen-poor waters.


• Gabrielle Bellot writes at the NYR Daily about how she refuses to be made into an invisible trans woman.


• At the Speed River Journal, Van Waffle describes--with photos!--how he was lucky enough to find a wild growth of chicken of the woods, an edible bracket mushroom of the Ontario forests.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that the loss of Ukraine by the Russian Orthodox Church will contribute to that church being increasingly seen as a national one, limited by borders.