[BLOG] Some Saturday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Architectuul looks back at its work over 2018.


• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait reflects on an odd photo of the odd galaxy NGC 3981.


• The Crux tells the story of how the moons of Jupiter, currently enumerated at 79 and including many oddly-shaped objects in odd orbits, have been found.


• Gizmodo notes how some astronomers have begun to use the precise rotations of neutron stars to calibrate atomic clocks on Earth.


• Keiran Healy shares a literally beautiful chart depicting mortality rates in France over two centuries.


• Hornet Stories notes that, two years after his death, the estate of George Michael is still making donations to the singer's favoured charities.


• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox celebrates the Ramones song "I Wanna Be Sedated".


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how unauthorized migrants detained by the United States are being absorbed into the captive workforces of prisons.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution approves of the Museum of the Bible, in Washington D.C., as a tourist destination.


• The NYR Daily looks at soccer (or football) in Morocco, as a badge of identity and as a vehicle for the political discussions otherwise repressed by the Moroccan state.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on the paiche, a fish that is endangered in Peru but is invasively successful in Bolivia.


• Peter Rukavina makes a good point about the joys of unexpected fun.


• The Signal reports on how the American Folklife Centre processes its audio recordings in archiving them.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel debunks some myths about black holes, notably that their gravity is any more irresistible than that of any other object of comparable mass.


• Strange Company shares the contemporary news report from 1878 of a British man who binge-drank himself across the Atlantic to the United States.


• Window on Eurasia reports on a proposal in the fast-depopulating Magadan oblast of Russia to extend to all long-term residents the subsidies extended to native peoples.


• Arnold Zwicky reports on another Switzerland-like landscape, this one the shoreline around Lake Sevan in Armenia.