[BLOG] Some Saturday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Architectuul features a photo essay made by Evan Panagopoulos in the course of a hurried three-hour visit to the Socialist Modernist and modern highlights of 20th century Kiev architecture.


• Bad Astrronomer Phil Plait notes how the latest planet found in the Kepler-47 circumbinary system evokes Tatooine.


• Centauri Dreams looks at tide and radiation, and their impacts on potential habitability, in the TRAPPIST-1 system.


• Citizen Science Salon looks at how the TV show Cyberchase can help get young people interested in science and math.


• Crooked Timber mourns historian David Brion Davis.


• The Crux looks at how the HMS Challenger pioneered the study of the deeps of the oceans, with that ship's survey of the Mariana Trench.


• D-Brief looks at how a snowball chamber using supercooled water can be used to hunt for dark matter.


• Earther shares photos of the heartbreaking and artificial devastation of the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil.


• Gizmodo shares a beautiful Hubble photograph of the southern Crab Nebula.


• Information is Beautiful shares a reworked version of the Julia Galef illustration of the San Francisco area meme space.


• io9 notes that, fresh from being Thor, Jane Foster is set to become a Valkyrie in a new comic.


• JSTOR Daily explains the Victorian fondness for leeches, in medicine and in popular culture.


• Language Hat links to an interview with linguist Amina Mettouchi, a specialist in Berber languages.


• Language Log shares the report of a one-time Jewish refugee on changing language use in Shanghai, in the 1940s and now.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on the horror of self-appointed militias capturing supposed undocumented migrants in the southwestern US.


• Marginal Revolution reports on the circumstances in which volunteer militaries can outperform conscript militaries.


• At the NYR Daily, Christopher Benfey reports on the surprisingly intense connection between bees and mourning.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw, responding to Israel Folau, considers free expression and employment.


• The Planetary Society Blog shares a guest post from Barney Magrath on the surprisingly cheap adaptations needed to make an iPhone suitable for astrophotography.


• Peter Rukavina reports on the hotly-contested PEI provincial election of 1966.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains what the discovery of helium hydride actually means.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little praises the Jill Lepore US history These Truths for its comprehensiveness.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the growing divergences in demographics between different post-Soviet countries.


• Arnold Zwicky starts with another Peeps creation and moves on from there.