A Bit More Detail

• 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.

• Bloomberg notes Venezuela is considering dollarization in order to save its auto industry, and looks at the possibility of an OAS intervention.


• Bloomberg View looks at the anti-immigrant mindset.


• The Inter Press Service notes political crisis in Nicaragua and examines the plundering of African fisheries by foreign fleets.


• MacLean's notes Conrad Black's seeking an emergency hearing to let him sell his home.


• National Geographic investigates the origins of the stars which produced the first detected gravitational wave.


• The National Post notes Bolivia's interest in a new chronology.


• Open Democracy examines the British Chinese perspective on Brexit and looks at the tremendous alienation in British society.

Overturned fishing skiffs lie abandoned on the shores of what was Bolivia’s second-largest lake. Beetles dine on bird carcasses and gulls fight for scraps under a glaring sun in what marshes remain.

Lake Poopo was officially declared evaporated last month. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people have lost their livelihoods and gone.

High on Bolivia’s semi-arid Andean plains at 3,700 metres and long subject to climatic whims, the shallow saline lake has essentially dried up before only to rebound to twice the area of Los Angeles.

But recovery may no longer be possible, scientists say.

“This is a picture of the future of climate change,” says Dirk Hoffman, a German glaciologist who studies how rising temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels has accelerated glacial melting in Bolivia.

As Andean glaciers disappear so do the sources of Poopo’s water. But other factors are in play in the demise of Bolivia’s second-largest body of water behind Lake Titicaca.

Drought caused by the recurrent El Nino meteorological phenomenon is considered the main driver. Authorities say another factor is the diversion of water from Poopo’s tributaries, mostly for mining but also for agriculture.

Lake Poopó gets most of its water from the Desaguadero River, which flows from Lake Titicaca (Bolivia's largest lake). According to the published management plan, water managers are supposed to allow flow down the river into Poopó, but they have recently allowed that to slow to a trickle.

Titicaca has plenty of water in it, so that's not the problem, Borre says. Officials just aren't opening control gates often enough to send water down the river. Some of the water is being diverted for agriculture and mining. And even when water is available, the river is often clogged with sedimentation, due to the runoff from development and mining in the area.

Poopó is high, at 12,000 feet (3,680 meters), and the area has warmed an estimated one degree Celsius over the past century, leading to an increase in the rate of evaporation from the lake. And the lack of rain over the past year has sped the process even further. But these factors weren't surprises, Borre says, they were foreseeable changes that scientists anticipated.

What happened to Lake Poopó is not unlike the drying of the vast Aral Sea in Central Asia, says Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project and a National Geographic Explorer. In both cases, a closed water system was overdrawn, with more water going out than coming in.

Back in the late 1970s, when Venezuela’s oil wealth fueled the supersonic Concorde’s flights from Paris to Caracas, the idea that a poverty-stricken, landlocked nation known for bowler hats and coca leaves would someday surpass it was unthinkable. How times have changed.

Bolivia, South America’s poorest country on a per-capita GDP basis, leads or is poised to surpass Venezuela in a number of areas. Already plagued with a plunging currency and the world’s fastest inflation rate, Venezuela’s decline is stunning for a country that holds the world’s largest reserves of oil and whose late president, Hugo Chavez, once served as a mentor for Bolivia’s leader, Evo Morales.

While Morales took over Bolivia’s natural gas industry in 2006, his policies were never as radical as Chavez, who once walked through Caracas’s downtown, pointing at various companies and saying "nationalize it." Morales and Finance Minister Luis Arce “understood the importance of having orderly fiscal policy,” said Ben Ramsey, chief economist and head of sovereign debt strategy for the Andean region at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, who follows the two countries. “They have massive reserves vis-à-vis their economy.”

After peaking at more than $40 billion in 2008, Venezuela’s reserves have tumbled to less than $15 billion, much of that in gold. While falling energy prices have also affected Bolivia, its reserves have been on an upward or stable trajectory under Morales, peaking at about $15 billion last year from less than $5 billion when Morales took office in 2006.

• Anthropology.net reacts to the discovery of Neanderthal abstract carvings and what they say about the Neanderthal mind.


• blogTO shares Toronto postcards from the 1980s and lists the five least used TTC subway stations.


• Centauri Dreams reports that potentially habitable exoplanets Gliese 667Cc has been confirmed to exist.


• Crooked Timber's Corey Robin describes the continuing Steven Salaita affair, with another Crooked Timber post and one at Lawyers, Guns and Money providing more context.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper placing HD 10180g in its star's habitable zone and links to another making the case for the potential habitability of exomoons.


• The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird is very concerned for the fate of Ukraine.


• Language Log's Victor Mair examines the pressing question of why Hello Kitty is not a cat.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at rape culture in England.


• Marginal Revolution notes that Bolivians of different classes rarely marry each other and is relatively optimistic about the country's future.


• Spacing Toronto has a lovely picture of a track on a ride at the CNE under construction.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Kazakhstan is ready to leave the Euriasian Union to protect its independence, argues that the Ukrainian war is sparing Tatarstan and North Caucasus attention, and examines the depopulation of Pskov oblast next to the Baltic States.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes the strengths and weaknesses of the Islamic State as described in an article: a willingness to risk death isn't always a plus.

• Bag News Notes examines the use of a stock photo of some Dutch immigrant youths to illustrate a variety of different alarming articles.


• Crasstalk's Maxichamp introduces readers to the Port Chicago disaster during the Second World War, which incidentally led to a notable civil rights case.


• Daniel Drezner didn't find many surprises with the terms of the Cypriot bailout and notes that Russian disinterest in bailing Cyprus out underlines the extent to which it's a status quo, non-revisionist power.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh speculates that the current trend of emigration from Spain may put the Spanish health and pension systems at risk, especially inasmuch as Spain needs skilled labour to boost its productivity.


• A Geocurrents comparison of Bolivia with Ecuador, two Andean republics with large indigenous populations and radical governments, underlines the differences (Ecuador's government draws its support from the coastal Hispanophone majority and is somewhat hostile to the indigenous minority of the interior).


• Language Hat links to a site describing the small languages of Russia.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen seems much more worried about the outcomes of the Cypriot bailout than Drezner.


• Whatever's John Scalzi notes the unsustainability of Ohio's current constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, legally and in terms of popular opinion, and suggests it indicates current patterns of change.


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble notes that the Moldovan enclave of Gagauzia, an autonomous Turkic-populated district, wants a voice in Moldovan foreign policy.


• Zero Geography's Mark Graham notes the proportion of edits to geotagged English-language Wikipedia articles coming from users in the relevant countries. There are significant variations, with African articles being largely maintained by non-national users.

• 80 Beats' Smitri Rao makes me wish that Canada, too, had a black R&D budget, since the United States Air Force came up with a very cool and equally mysterious space plane.


• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton points out that even though streetcars are an old technology, they're still a very useful technology.


• Daniel Drezner makes the point that just because the new governments in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan are friendly to Russia than their predecessors, it doesn't mean that they're hostile to the United States. (It also doesn't mean that they're not democratic, but that's a different issue.)


• Extraordinary Observations' Rob Pitingolo strongly dislikes escalators and elevators, which he sees as essentially pointless wastes of energy.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Douglas Muir writes about how Kosovo now has its own cell phone network, notwithstanding the Serbian government's unwillingness to let the UNMIK-mandated authority operate.


• Geocurrents blogs about how the devastation of the Aral Sea has devastated the environment of the aquatic Karakalpak of Uzbekistan.


• Joe. My. God reports that long-time Toronto gay bathhouse Club Toronto is about to become a straight swingers' club.


• Marginal Revolution cites a new study suggesting that increased acceptance of queer men corresponds to decreased rates of HIV infection, by encouraging low-risk men to be active and by discourage some high-risk men from taking risks.


• Michael's Bloor-Lansdowne blog reveals how the Dufferin Mall's site was occupied for fifty years by a race track.


• At Passing Strangeness, pauldrye writes about how mysterious radio signals emanating from spots within the former Soviet Union turned out to be over-the-horizon radar systems.


• Slap Upside the Head mocks Bolivian president Evo Morales for blaming homosexuality on chicken consumption.


• At Sublime Oblivion, Anatoly Karlin criticizes Vladimir Putin for not having done enough, early enough, to deal with Russia's socioeconomic problems, in addition to his unrealistic plans for expanding Russian influence and power despite a lacking infrastructure.


• Towleroad writes about the news that Archie comics now has an out gay teen character, and more, than his first storyline isn't going to be the learning-to-be-tolerant one so typical of these introductions.


• Wasatch Economics' Scott Peterson suggests that the speed of the demographic transition in Mexico will diminish the number of immigrants to the United States from that country. Perhaps; then again, natural population decrease is quite compatible with mass emigration, as much of central and eastern Europe shows.


• Window on Eurasia cites an article suggesting, on the basis of a comment by a diplomat at the Russian embassy to Estonia, that Russia may explicitly recognize the occupation of the Baltic States.

• Bear Left writes about how soccer can be a vehicle for international amity, whether between Cubans and Americans or Turks and Armenians (this last also described by Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros). That said, there's also case studies of conflicts like the Football War of 1969.


• Centauri Dreams touches upon the idea of interstellar panspermia, the belief that microorganisms suitably prepared could not only traverse the vast distances within a planetary system but the vaster gaps between planetary systems. It's an evocative idea.


• Daniel Drezner addresses the question through links of whether or not al-Qaeda is still a threat, with Bruce Hoffman pro and Juan Cole con. I lean towards a moderate version of con--the organization proper might be down but the ideology has a lot of support.


• The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird wonders whether the poor showing of Russia's military equipment and its soldiers as evidenced in the Georgian war and its ongoing financial issues means that the current troubles are the reactions of a declining power.


• Gideon Rachman reports on polls suggesting that in only 9 out of 17 countries does a majority of the population believe that al-Qaeda was responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11th, with the American government coming next, then Israel


• Hunting Monsters takes a look at the increasingly publicized tendency for some Egyptian men to grope woman, making the plausible suggestion that this phenomenon is likely a product of sexual and other frustrations felt by young Egyptians.


• If not for The Pagan Prattle I would not have learned that the computer game Spore is evil because it deals with evolution. Sigh.
  
• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer reports that Bolivia is nearing civil war thanks to ethnic conflict and disputes over the sharing of hydrocarbon revenues.


• Wis(s)e Words reports on a remarkably reckless American military adviser who suggests that Georgia should model its armed forces on those of Hezbollah, combining light and highly mobile infantry with modern weapons. As if that would work in the face of an upset Russia.