[BLOG] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Charlie Stross at Antipope shares an essay he recently presented on artificial intelligence and its challenges for us.


• P. Kerim Friedman writes at {anthro}dendum about the birth of the tea ceremony in the Taiwan of the 1970s.


• Anthropology net reports on a cave painting nearly 44 thousand years old in Indonesia depicting a hunting story.


• Architectuul looks at some temporary community gardens in London.


• Bad Astronomy reports on the weird history of asteroid Ryugu.


• The Buzz talks about the most popular titles borrowed from the Toronto Public Library in 2019.


• Caitlin Kelly talks at the Broadside Blog about her particular love of radio.


• Centauri Dreams talks about the role of amateur astronomers in searching for exoplanets, starting with LHS 1140 b.


• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber looks at what is behind the rhetoric of "virtue signalling".


• Dangerous Minds shares concert performance from Nirvana filmed the night before the release of Nevermind.


• Bruce Dorminey notes new evidence that, even before the Chixculub impact, the late Cretaceous Earth was staggering under environmental pressures.


• Myron Strong at the Everyday Sociology Blog writes about how people of African descent in the US deal with the legacies of slavery in higher education.


• Far Outliers reports on the plans in 1945 for an invasion of Japan by the US.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing gathers together a collection of the author's best writings there.


• Gizmodo notes the immensity of the supermassive black hole, some 40 billion solar masses, at the heart of galaxy Holm 15A 700 million light-years away.


• Russell Arben Fox at In Media Res writes about the issue of how Wichita is to organize its civic politics.


• io9 argues that the 2010s were a decade where the culture of the spoiler became key.


• The Island Review points readers to the podcast Mother's Blood, Sister's Songs, an exploration of the links between Ireland and Iceland.


• Joe. My. God. reports on the claim of the lawyer of the killer of a mob boss that the QAnon conspiracy inspired his actions. This strikes me as terribly dangerous.


• JSTOR Daily looks at a study examining scholarly retractions.


• Language Hat shares an amusing cartoon illustrating the relationships of the dialects of Arabic.


• Language Log lists ten top new words in the Japanese language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the dissipation of American diplomacy by Trump.


• The LRB Blog looks at the many problems in Sparta, Greece, with accommodating refugees, for everyone concerned.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting the decline of the one-child policy in China has diminished child trafficking, among other crimes.


• Sean Marshall, looking at transit in Brampton, argues that transit users need more protection from road traffic.


• Russell Darnley shares excerpts from essays he wrote about the involvement of Australia in the Vietnam War.


• Peter Watts talks about his recent visit to a con in Sofia, Bulgaria, and about the apocalypse, here.


• The NYR Daily looks at the corporatization of the funeral industry, here.


• Diane Duane writes, from her own personal history with Star Trek, about how one can be a writer who ends up writing for a media franchise.


• Jim Belshaw at Personal Reflections considers the job of tasting, and rating, different cuts of lamb.


• The Planetary Society Blog looks at a nondescript observatory in the Mojave desert of California that maps the asteroids of the solar system.


• Roads and Kingdoms interviews Eduardo Chavarin about, among other things, Tijuana.


• Drew Rowsome loves the SpongeBob musical.


• Peter Rukavina announces that Charlottetown has its first public fast charger for electric vehicles.


• The Russian Demographics Blog considers the impact of space medicine, here.


• The Signal reports on how the Library of Congress is making its internet archives more readily available, here.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers how the incredibly isolated galaxy MCG+01-02-015 will decay almost to nothing over almost uncountable eons.


• Strange Company reports on the trial and execution of Christopher Slaughterford for murder. Was there even a crime?


• Strange Maps shares a Coudenhove-Kalergi map imagining the division of the world into five superstates.


• Understanding Society considers entertainment as a valuable thing, here.


• Denis Colombi at Une heure de peine announces his new book, Où va l'argent des pauvres?


• John Scalzi at Whatever looks at how some mailed bread triggered a security alert, here.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the massive amount of remittances sent to Tajikistan by migrant workers, here.


• Arnold Zwicky notes a bizarre no-penguins sign for sale on Amazon.

Comments

[dewline]

So glad to see Diane continue to blog at all, wherever she does so these days.

More on other stuff anon.