[BLOG] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber suggests that the planet Earth, judging by the progress of space travel to date, is going to be the only planet our species will ever inhabit.


• D-Brief notes surprising new evidence that maize was domesticated not in Mesoamerica, but rather in the southwest of the Amazon basin.


• Dangerous Minds notes the penalties proposed by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia for buggery, sodomy, and bestiality.


• Earther considers the extent to which Thanos' homeworld of Titan, whether the Saturnian moon or lookalike world, could ever have been habitable, even with extensive terraforming.


• Hornet Stories notes the interesting light that a study of ideal penis sizes among heterosexual women sheds on studies of sexuality generally.


• JSTOR Daily takes an extended look at how the sharing economy, promoted by people like Lawrence Lessig and businesses like Airbnb, turned out to be dystopian not utopian, and why this was the case.


• Victor Mair at Language Log reports on controversy over bread made by a Taiwanese baker, and at the language used.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the latest proof of the decline of Harper's as a meaningful magazine. (Myself, I lost respect for them when they published an extended AIDS denialist article in 2006.)


• Allan Metcalfe at Lingua Franca celebrates, using the example of lexicographer Kory Stamper's new book, how the blog helped him connect with the stars of linguistics.


• Katherine Franke at the NYR Daily notes pressure from Israel directed against academic critics in the United States.


• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog notes how the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has picked up InSight hardware on the surface of Mars below.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how NASA is running short of Plutonium-238, the radioactive isotope that it needs to power spacecraft like the Voyagers sent on long-duration missions and/or missions far from the sun.


• Window on Eurasia notes how, based on an excess of deaths over births, the population of Crimea will decline for the foreseeable future.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at some examples of the anaphora, a particular kind of rhetorical structure.

Comments

[sovay]

(Myself, I lost respect for them when they published an extended AIDS denialist article in 2006.)

What?

[rfmcdonald]

In 2096, they published an article by Celia Farber some 15 pages long in which she made the case that AIDS was caused not by HIV infection but rather by malnutrition, or meth, or poppers.

[sovay]

that AIDS was caused not by HIV infection but rather by malnutrition, or meth, or poppers.

Yeah, that is not acceptable. Also wrong.

[jsburbidge]

I was waiting for the article on the sharing economy apps to point out that Uber &c. aren't about sharing at all. Uber doesn't provide an incentive to share rides: it provides an incentive to behave like a taxi driver and create rides. Airbnb provides incentives for people to rent apartments or buy condominia purely for re-leasing on short-term rentals, rather like the market for gîtes ruraux. All they do is lower the transaction cost for creating a contract.

A real ride-sharing application would be based on having a driver post "going from A to B at time X" and would cap remuneration at actual shared costs. A real model of sharing rooms with friends would piggyback on some form of existing social connection, like a mailing list, for people in the loosely-connected group who were travelling.