A Bit More Detail

• Centauri Dreams considers, in the context of 'Oumuamua, the import of shads and axis ratios. What does it suggest about the processes by which planetary systems form?


• The Dragon's Tales notes a report suggesting that Russia is not at all likely to legalize bitcoins.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Alex Harrowell takes a look at Article 63, the German constitutional article that governs the selection of the Chancellor.


• The Frailest Thing quotes a passage from Jacques Ellul about the adaptation of humans to a mechanized world.


• Hornet Stories notes that out actor Russell Tovey is set to play the (also out) Ray in the Arrowverse, an anti-Nazi superhero from an alternate Earth.


• Language Hat tells the story of Lin Shu, an early 20th century translator of European fiction into Chinese whose works were remarkably influential.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money is amused by the story of a young university student who has used basic knowledge of Foucault to play with his family's household rules.


• The LRB Blog notes the very awkward, and potentially fatal, position of the Rohingya, caught between Burma and Bangladesh.


• The Map Room Blog links to a talk recently given on fake maps, on maps used to lie and misrepresent and propagandize.


• The NYR Daily meditates on the precocity and the homoeroticism inherent in the Hart Crane poem "The Bridge."


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that we can see, so far, only a surprisingly small fraction of the observable universe. (So far.)


• The Volokh Conspiracy celebrates the many defeats of Trump as he fights against sanctuary cities as a victory for federalism and against executive power.


• Window on Eurasia notes a poll suggesting that, after 2014, while Crimeans may feel less Ukrainian they do not necessarily feel more Russian.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look, linguistically, at an Ian Frazier phrase: "That is aliens for you."

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at enormous, explosive Wolf-Rayet stars, and at WR 124 in particular.
  
• The Big Picture shares heart-rending photos of Rohingya refugees fleeing Burma.


• Centauri Dreams considers the potential of near-future robotic asteroid mining.


• D-Brief notes the discovery of vast cave systems on the Moon, potential homes for settlers.


• Hornet Stories exposes young children to Madonna's hit songs and videos of the 1980s. She still has it.


• Inkfish notes that a beluga raised in captivity among dolphins has picked up elements of their speech.


• Language Hat notes a dubious claim that a stelae containing Luwian hieroglyphic script, from ancient Anatolia, has been translated.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the question of preserving brutalist buildings.


• The LRB Blog considers how Brexit, intended to enhance British sovereignty and power, will weaken both.


• The Map Room Blog notes that the moons and planets of the solar system have been added to Google Maps.


• The NYR Daily considers how the Burmese government is carefully creating a case for Rohingya genocide.


• The Power and Money's Noel Maurer concludes, regretfully, that the market for suborbital travel is just not there.


• Visiting a shrimp festival in Louisiana, Roads and Kingdoms considers how the fisheries work with the oil industry (or not).


• Towleroad reports on the apparent abduction in Chechnya of singer Zelimkhan Bakayev, part of the anti-gay pogrom there.


• Window on Eurasia notes that rebuilding Kaliningrad as a Russian military outpost will be expensive.

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross considers the ways in which Big Data could enable an updated version of 1984.


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at all the ways in which this photo of galaxy NGC 5559 is cool, with a supernova and more.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly shares a week of her life as a professional writer.


• Crooked Timber looks at the potentially dominant role of racism as a political marker in the US.


• Far Outliers notes that the Confederacy's military options circa 1864 were grim and limited.


• Language Log shares an example of a Starbucks coffee cup with biscriptal writing from Shenyang.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that the Rohingya are being subjected to genocide. What next?


• Marginal Revolution notes the introduction of a new chocolate, ruby chocolate".


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw has it with ideological divisions of left and right.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at the remarkably intemperate Spanish court decision that kicked off modern separatism in Catalonia.


• Charley Ross looks at the sad story of missing teenager Brittanee Drexel.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that now is an excellent time to start highlighting the politics of climate change.


• Towleroad mourns New York City theatre star Michael Friedman.


• Window on Eurasia notes the ways in which Russia is, and is not, likely to use the military.


• Arnold Zwicky shares a map of the regional languages of France.

• If Greyhound pulls out of northern BC, and the rest of rural Canada, what will happen to these regions? CBC reports.


• The militarized community policing describes in Bloomberg View in New York's famed Hamptons does say something worrisome of psyches.


• A Bangladeshi observer makes the obvious point over at the Inter Press Service that Myanmar needs to radically change its treatment of the Rohingya.


• Open Democracy looks at how the miliitarized US-Mexican border harms the Tohono O'odham, divided by said.


• This Wired interview with Antonio Guillem, the photographer whose images made distracted boyfriend meme, is amazing.

• Bloomberg notes Saudi Arabia's efforts to cut Iran off from trade with its neighoburs, looks at how population growth in London will outpace--and be different from--population change in the rest of the United Kingdom, and reports on the plight of child labourers in Indonesia's tobacco fields.


• Bloomberg View argues Uber is no match for mass transit in the European Union and suggests that any negative consequences of immigration for native workers are overblown.


• CBS News and BBC talk about the use of old technology like floppy disks in key software programs, the BBC being kinder than CBS.


• Gizmodo describes the current heat wave in the Arctic, something literally off the charts.


• IPS News notes the politics o mapping Kashmir, notes the chaos in Venezuela, and looks at water shortages in Burma.


• Kotaku notes how the Ghibli museum in Japan is getting a catbus.


• MacLean's looks at the political potential of Kevin O'Leary.


• The National Post notes the serious concerns over the Rio Olympics.


• Open Democracy looks at the Moscow consensus for autocracy in the former Soviet Union and proposes a new security policy for Ukraine.


• The Toronto Star and MacLean's report from the sentencing of James Forcillo for the murder of Sammy Yatim.


• Wired wonders if scientists can engineer coral resistant to climate change.

Impoverished migrant workers in Thailand are sold or lured by false promises and forced to catch and process fish that ends up in global food giant Nestle SA's supply chains.

The unusual disclosure comes from Geneva-based Nestle SA itself, which in an act of self-policing announced the conclusions of its year-long internal investigation on Monday. The study found virtually all U.S. and European companies buying seafood from Thailand are exposed to the same risks of abuse in their supply chains.

Nestle SA, among the biggest food companies in the world, launched the investigation in December 2014, after reports from news outlets and nongovernmental organizations tied brutal and largely unregulated working conditions to their shrimp, prawns and Purina brand pet foods. Its findings echo those of The Associated Press in reports this year on slavery in the seafood industry that have resulted in the rescue of more than 2,000 fishermen.

The laborers come from Thailand's much poorer neighbors Myanmar and Cambodia. Brokers illegally charge them fees to get jobs, trapping them into working on fishing vessels and at ports, mills and seafood farms in Thailand to pay back more money than they can ever earn.

• blogTO notes that John Tory supports the decriminalization of marijuana.


• The Dragon's Gaze considers if there might be a hot Jupiter orbiting a pulsating star.


• The Dragon's Tales wonders if multicellularity in cyanobacteria three billion years ago helped drive the Great Oxidation Event.


• Far Outliers notes the 1878 introduction of football to Burma.


• A Fistful of Euros notes that Europe is muddling through in the Mediterranean versus migrants and observes that even the optimistic scenarios for economic growth in Greece are dire.


• The Frailest Thing considers the idea of a technological history of modernity.


• Language Log notes an example of multiscript graffiti in Berlin.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how the Confederate cause won the Civil War despite losing the battles.


• Marginal Revolution argues that default will do nothing to make the underlying issues of Greece business-wise better.


• The Planetary Society Blog looks at the intriguing geology of Ceres.


• Peter Rukavina shows the Raspberry Pi computer he built into a Red Rocket tea tin.


• The Russian Demographics Blog links to a paper studying Russian patriarchy and misogyny in public health.


• Spacing Toronto looks at the genesis of the Bloor Viaduct's Luminous Veil.


• Towleroad examines the Texan pastor who threatened to set himself on fire over same-sex marriage.


• Une heure de peine celebrates its eighth birthday.


• The Volokh Conspiracy reacts to the Michael Oren controversy over American ties with Israel.


• Window on Eurasia warns that Putin's system in Chechnya is not viable, predicts a worsening of the Russian HIV/AIDS epidemic, and notes that Jewish emigration from Russia has taken off again.

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly considers old friends.


• Centauri Dreams considers the search for extraterrestrial civilizations using infrared astronomy, concentrating on Dyson spheres and the like.


• The Dragon's Gaze has two links to papers looking at unusual brown dwarfs.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on the flora of late Permian Antarctica.


• Language Log notes a potentially problematic effort at Bangladesh to put hundreds of thousands of Bengali words online with Google, ready for translators. What of quality control, Victor Mair asks?


• Lawyers, Guns and Money comments on the Burmese slaves in the Thai fisheries and looks at the desperate last efforts of Confederates to persist.


• Marginal Revolution suggests that air conditioning really didn't drive much interstate migration in the United States.


• The Planetary Society Blog observes discoveries and anticipation for more at Ceres and Pluto.


• Savage Minds looks to the example of Lesotho to point out that giving people land title by no means necessarily helps them out of poverty.


• Torontoist looks at the Prism music video prize.

"With China's industrial heartland in the coastal regions of the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta facing increasing pressures on competitiveness due to rising labor costs, the GMS offers considerable potential as an alternative location for the establishment of low cost manufacturing," Rajiv Biswas, Asia-Pacific chief economist at IHS Global Insight, said in a note last week.

Biswas estimates the region's combined gross domestic product (GDP) at $1.1 trillion this year, larger than in Indonesia, Southeast Asia's most populous country. By 2015, the region is forecast to grow 6.2 percent and hit a combined GDP of $3 trillion by 2024. The area currently accounts for less than 5 percent of global manufacturing in value-added terms, but IHS notes that infrastructure is key to realizing the region's potential.

"If infrastructure connectivity is strengthened in Southeast Asia to allow high-speed rail networks and modern roads to link provinces such as Yunnan in southern China to the Indian Ocean via Thailand and Myanmar, this could significantly improve freight logistics...and create significant opportunities for the development of major ports and free trade zones in Thailand and Myanmar, boosting their economic development as entrepots."

While China still enjoys retains its reputation as the world's leading production center, its slowing economy and double-digit wage increases are causing foreign firms to look to Asia's frontier economies.

• Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram writes about the racist raids against immigrants in the United Kingdom.


• Charlie Stross fears revolution against increasingly xenophobic and increasingly police states in the West.


• Eastern Approaches touches upon the still-vexing question of how to deal with Romania's Communist past and its perpetrators.


• A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell notes that the United States really has largely recovered from the 2008-2009 recession.


• Geocurrents describes the awkward position and questionable future of Burmese migrants in Thailand.


• GNXP's Razib Khan notes that a crowd-sourced South Asian DNA project suggests interesting things about South Asian history, apparently confirming--among other things, to my eyes--Indo-European migrations.


• Language Hat notes a Mexican telenovela broacast in Yucatec Maya.


• New APPS Blog notes that Detroit's bankruptcy is a consequence of too-limited frames--for instance, the self-exclusion of prosperous suburbs from the city they are part of.


• Registan's Kendrick Kuo argues that Russia and China need to be engaged by the United States as stakeholders in Central Asia.


• Strange Maps maps lactose tolerance in Old World populations. Conquering groups are quite ready to take to milk.


• Understanding Society links to description of a fascinating-sounding project analysing populations in Eurasia for differences and similarities in their evolution over time.