A Bit More Detail

• Architectuul looks at the Portuguese architectural cooperative Ateliermob, here.


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at how white dwarf WD J091405.30+191412.25 is literally vapourizing a planet in close orbit.


• Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog explains
  
• Centauri Dreams looks at the slowing of the solar wind far from the Sun.


• John Holbo at Crooked Timber considers the gap between ideals and actuals in the context of conspiracies and politics.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on how the ESA is trying to solve a problem with the parachutes of the ExoMars probe.


• Far Outliers reports on what Harry Truman thought about politicians.


• Gizmodo reports on a new method for identifying potential Earth-like worlds.


• io9 pays tribute to legendary writer, of Star Trek and much else, D.C. Fontana.


• The Island Review reports on the football team of the Chagos Islands.


• Joe. My. God. reports that gay Olympian Gus Kenworthy will compete for the United Kingdom in 2020.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how early English imperialists saw America and empire through the lens of Ireland.


• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money does not like Pete Buttigieg.


• The LRB Blog looks at the London Bridge terrorist attack.


• The Map Room Blog shares a map of Prince William Sound, in Alaska, that is already out of date because of global warming.


• Marginal Revolution questions if Cuba, in the Philippines, is the most typical city in the world.


• The NYR Daily looks at gun violence among Arab Israelis.


• The Planetary Society Blog considers what needs to be researched next on Mars.


• Roads and Kingdoms tells the story of Sister Gracy, a Salesian nun at work in South Sudan.


• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a paper noting continued population growth expected in much of Europe, and the impact of this growth on the environment.


• Strange Maps shares a map of fried chicken restaurants in London.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why a 70 solar mass black hole is not unexpected.


• John Scalzi at Whatever gives his further thoughts on the Pixel 4.


• Window on Eurasia notes that, last year, 37 thousand Russians died of HIV/AIDS.


• Arnold Zwicky starts from a consideration of the 1948 film Kind Hearts and Coronets.

• MTL Blog looks at the proposal for a sleeper train connecting Montréal and New York City. (Can Toronto get one too, please?)


• Lauren Pelley reports for CBC about how climate change leads, through increased pollen production, to worse allergies for residents of cities in Canada.


• Guardian Cities reports that the fires in Alaska, too, outside of Anchorage, are things that dwellers of cities will have to get used to.


• The heat island effect, CityLab warns, will be a major threat to life in the cities of India.


• CityLab does an interesting crowdsourced map, tracing the boundaries of the American Midwest.

• Architectuul looks at the modernist works of Spanish Antonio Lamela, building after the Second World War under Franco.


• Centauri Dreams considers the possibility of life-supporting environments on Barnard's Star b, a frozen super-Earth.


• The Crux takes a look at how, and when, human beings and their ancestors stopped being as furry as other primates.


• D-Brief notes the Russian startup that wants to put advertisements in Earth orbit.


• Drew Ex Machina takes a look at the Soyuz 4 and 5 missions, the first missions to see two crewed craft link up in space.


• Far Outliers notes
  
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing notes the ironies of housing a state-of-the-art supercomputers in the deconsecrated Torre Girona Chapel in Barcelona.


• Gizmodo notes a new study claiming that the rings of Saturn may be less than a hundred million years old, product of some catastrophic obliteration of an ice moon perhaps.


• Joe. My. God. notes the death of Pulitzer-winning lesbian poet Mary Oliver.


• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the rising prominence of hoarding as a psychological disorder.


• Language Hat shares a manuscript more than a hundred pages long, reporting on terms relating to sea ice used in the Inupiaq language spoken by the Alaska community of Kifigin, or Wales.


• Language Log examines the etymology of "slave" and "Slav". (Apparently "ciao" is also linked to these words.)


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that Buzzfeed was right to claim that Trump ordered his lawyer to lie to Congress about the Moscow Trump Tower project.


• Marginal Revolution notes a serious proposal in the Indian state of Sikkim to set up a guaranteed minimum income project.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps links to a map showing visitations of the Virgin Mary worldwide, both recognized and unrecognized by the Vatican.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes the continuing controversy over the identity of AT2018cow.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russians have more to fear from a Sino-Russian alliance than Americans, on account of the possibility of a Chinese takeover of Russia enabled by this alliance.

• Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net notes that lidar scanning has revealed that the pre-Columbian city of Angamuco, in western Mexico, is much bigger than previously thought.


• James Bow makes an excellent case for the revitalization of VIA Rail as a passenger service for longer-haul trips around Ontario.


• D-Brief notes neurological evidence suggesting why people react so badly to perceived injustices.


• The Dragon's Tales takes a look at the list of countries embracing thorough roboticization.


• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina takes a look at the most powerful launch vehicles, both Soviet and American, to date.


• Far Outliers considers Safavid Iran as an imperfect gunpowder empire.


• Despite the explanation, I fail to see how LGBTQ people could benefit from a cryptocurrency all our own. What would be the point, especially in homophobic environments where spending it would involve outing ourselves? Hornet Stories shares the idea.


• Imageo notes that sea ice off Alaska has actually begun contracting this winter, not started growing.


• JSTOR Daily notes how the production and consumption of lace, and lace products, was highly politicized for the Victorians.


• Language Hat makes a case for the importance of translation as a political act, bridging boundaries.


• Language Log takes a look at the pronunciation and mispronunciation of city names, starting with PyeongChang.


• This critical Erik Loomis obituary of Billy Graham, noting the preacher's many faults, is what Graham deserves. From Lawyers, Guns and Money, here.


• Bernard Porter at the LRB Blog is critical of the easy claims that Corbyn was a knowing agent of Communist Czechoslovakia.


• The Map Room Blog shares this map from r/mapporn, imagining a United States organized into states as proportionally imbalanced in population as the provinces of Canada?


• Marginal Revolution rightly fears a possible restart to the civil war in Congo.


• Neuroskeptic reports on a controversial psychological study in Ghana that saw the investigation of "prayer camps", where mentally ill are kept chain, as a form of treatment.


• The NYR Daily makes the case that the Congolese should be allowed to enjoy some measure of peace from foreign interference, whether from the West or from African neighbous (Rwanda, particularly).


• At the Planetary Society Blog, Emily Lakdawalla looks at the many things that can go wrong with sample return missions.


• Rocky Planet notes that the eruption of Indonesian volcano Sinabung can be easily seen from space.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how the New Horizons Pluto photos show a world marked by its subsurface oceans.


• Window on Eurasia notes that, although fertility rates among non-Russians have generally fallen to the level of Russians, demographic momentum and Russian emigration drive continue demographic shifts.


• Livio Di Matteo at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative charts the balance of federal versus provincial government expenditure in Canada, finding a notable shift towards the provinces in recent decades.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell makes the case, through the example of the fire standards that led to Grenfell Tower, that John Major was more radical than Margaret Thatcher in allowing core functions of the state to be privatized.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at some alcoholic drinks with outré names.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes J0045, once thought to be a star in Andromeda and but recognized as a binary black hole a thousand times further away.


• Centauri Dreams notes the longevity of the Voyager mission.


• D-Brief notes that some worms can thrive in a simulacrum of Mars soil.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes an ambitious effort to try to detect a transit of Proxima Centauri b. Did the researchers pick something up?


• Hornet Stories links to a report suggesting HIV denialism is worryingly common in parts of Russia.


• Language Log reports on an apparently oddly bilingual Chinese/Vietnamese poster. Where did it come from?


• The LRB Blog reports on how Tunisian Anouar Brahem fused jazz with Arabic music on his new album Blue Maqems.


• The Map Room Blog links to a lecture by John Cloud on indigenous contributions to mapmaking in Alaska.


• The NYR Daily looks at the grim position of Theresa May in Brexit negotiations.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers what would have happened if the Americas had not been populated in 1492. How would imperialism and settlement differ?


• Roads and Kingdoms notes some of the architectural legacies--houses, for instance--of Basque settlement in the American West.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes three conundrums that neutrinos might be able to solve.


• Window on Eurasia notes why Russia is hostile, despite its program of merging federal units, to the idea of uniting Tatarstan with Bashkortostan.


• Using an interwar map of Imperial Airways routes, Alex Harrowell illustrates how the construction of globalized networks can make relatively marginal areas quite central.

• The CBC u>notes the consensus that the new Ontario minimum wage will not hurt the economy, overall, but provide a mild boost.


• The Toronto Star notes that, from 2019, analog television broadcasts will start ramping down.


• The Toronto Star notes that high prices in Ontario's cottage country are causing the market to expand to new areas.


• Gizmodo reports on one study suggesting that Proxima Centauri b does have the potential to support Earth-like climates.


• Gizmodo notes one study speculating on the size of Mars' vanished oceans.


• Quartz reports on how one community in Alaska and one community in Louisiana are facing serious pressures from climate change and from the political reaction to said.


• CBC notes an oil platform leaving Newfoundland for the oceans.

A Gwich'in woman is using social media to get people speaking one of the most endangered languages in Canada.

Although nearly 10,000 Gwich'in people live in the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Alaska, a United Nations study estimates just a few hundred fluent speakers of the Gwich'in language are left.

"We don't have time to wait for another generation or so to really work on bringing the Gwich'in language back to being spoken more," said 23-year-old Jacey Firth-Hagen.

Just over a year ago, she sparked a social media campaign called #SpeakGwichinToMe.

The ink hasn’t yet dried on the UN climate accord and one of the territories most at risk from global warning is already demanding an opt-out.

“We still have the option of making a territorial opt-out to COP21," Kim Kielsen, the prime minister of Greenland, said during a visit to Copenhagen on Monday. "We have an emissions quota of 650,000 tonnes of CO2, which is the same as a single coal-fired power plant in Denmark, or a minor Danish city."

Kielsen oversees a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. With a size roughly that of Mexico and a population that’s smaller than the Cayman Islands’, Greenland is the least densely populated country in the world. More than 22,000 people live in the capital Nuuk, while the remaining 34,000 are dispersed over an area of 2.2 million square kilometers.

As a result, the most common way for locals to traverse its icy expanses is via highly polluting planes.

"We want to solve that issue as we have considerably larger geographical distances to cover,” Kielsen said after a meeting with Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen and their colleague from the Faroe Islands, another autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.

Patricia Lekanoff-Gregory remembers when a delegation of American Unangax flew to Russia’s Komandorski Islands to meet their kin in the early 1990s.

Lekanoff-Gregory’s father made the journey to Russia as the global euphoria at the end of the Cold War reached far north, into the Bering Sea. She said her father, who is elderly and asked her to speak for him, said the Russian and American Unangax were sitting on either side of a room, staring at each other in silence, told to wait for the official interpreters to arrive. But they couldn’t wait. Soon enough, the two groups were shouting words in their native language to each other. “Seal.” “Table.” Hugs. Tears. The two communities had not met in decades.

Lekanoff-Gregory has traveled to the Komandorski Islands five times since her father’s journey. She’s hoping to go again in the coming months to help teach Russian Unangax traditional hat making.

“They’re just finding out they’re Native again,” she said of the Russian Unangax, citing the cultural damage from the oppression they faced during the Soviet era. “But money is harder to get, and it’s getting more expensive [to go there] now.”

While some other Native communities that straddle the Russia-U.S. border have protections that allow for direct visa-free travel between the countries, no such arrangement exists for the Unangax. The efforts to reconnect Unangax communities across the border in the remote North Pacific remain at the mercy of deteriorating relations between Moscow and Washington, and locals say it’s getting harder to keep the cultural exchanges going.

“Bringing a couple of people [from Russia to Alaska] is an expensive proposition,” said Jim Gamble, the executive director of the Aleut International Association. “And one that we can only do once in a while when we gather enough funding together. And it’s similar going the other way.”

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about the simple pleasures of her life.


• Centauri Dreams discusses 2014 MU69.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that less that 0.3% of galaxies could host Kardashev III civilizations.


• Kieran Healy shares his paper "Fuck Nuance."


• Joe. My. God. notes the unhappiness of one American conservative with the restoration of Denali's name.


• Language Hat mourns poet Charles Tomlinson.


• Marginal Revolution argues that China's 2008-era debt binge is now coming back to haunt it.


• The New APPS Blog discusses the role of philosophy in making life decisions.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw dislikes the rhetoric and institutions charged with guarding Australia's borders.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that the reports of Russian losses in Donbas are likely false.


• Torontoist is unimpressed by the satirical musical version of Full House.


• Towleroad notes an American conservative who is going to continue participating in Scouting despite its new gay-friendliness.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that secession rarely works out well for seceding entities.


• Window on Eurasia notes a prediction that Ukraine is now on track to go west.