[BLOG] Some Sunday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that Israeli non-profit SpaceIL plans to launch a lander to the Moon in February.


• Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber writes about the material power of ideas and knowledge in 2019.


• D-Brief shares the latest images from Ultima Thule.


• Earther notes that temperatures in the Arctic have been higher than they have been for more than one hundred thousand years, with moss spores hidden by ice caps for millennia sprouting for the first time.


• Far Outliers notes the economic importance, in the early 20th century, of exports of tung oil for China.


• JSTOR Daily notes the uneasy relationship of many early psychoanalysts with the occult.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes an alarming report from California showing how the police have been deeply compromised by support for the far right.


• Gillian Darley at the LRB Blog writes about a now-forgotten Tolstoyan community in Essex.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution notes a new book by Kevin Erdmann arguing that the United States has been experiencing not a housing bubble but a housing shortage.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes the Boomerang Nebula, a nebula in our galaxy colder than intergalactic space.


• Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy looks at libel law as it relates to the Covington schoolboys' confrontation.


• Window on Eurasia notes a window, in the early 1990s, when the independence of the republic of Karelia from Russia was imaginable.


• Arnold Zwicky free-associates around blue roses, homoerotic and otherwise.

Comments

[dewline]

1. The more nations in play out in the black, the better. Preferably in coalitions, but I suspect that - for now - Likud's going to keep Israel's governmental space projects from having much in the way of partnerships with anyone other than the States.

Noting that SpaceIL is apparently a private non-profit going to work...

4. YIKES!

7. Infiltration of police by the Nazi-Klanster people has been an ongoing worry for a couple of decades. The issue has rightly gotten extra urgency thanks to the Vulgarian being installed as US President, because of fears that he'll have his own personal thought-police by such means.