A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes how evidence of exoplanets can be found in a spectrum of Van Maanen's Star taken in 1917.


• blogTO notes that Michelle Obama is coming to visit Toronto.


• Dangerous Minds notes that someone has scanned in the copies of 1980s periodical The Twilight Zone Magazine.


• D-Brief notes the tens of thousands of genders of fungus.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes a paper calculating circumstellar habitable zones and orbits for planets of binary stars.


• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas argues it is much too late to retroactively add ethical concerns to new technologies.


• Language Log notes the struggle of many to pronounce the name of the president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes an alarming increase in mass shootings in the US over the past decades.


• The LRB Blog argues that a moral panic over "pop-up brothels" helps no one involved.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on Zubaida Tariq, the Martha Stewart of Pakistan.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel likes the new Discovery episode. I wonder, though: hasn't Trek always been a bit science fantasy?
• Window on Eurasia argues Russian policies which marginalize non-Russian languages in education may produce blowback.

• blogTO considers if the Union-Pearson Express might work as a rapid transit line.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that Earth-like worlds which rapidly lose most of their water can extend their habitable lifetimes.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog talks about the sociological lessons of party crashers.


• Geocurrents notes the complexities of Valencian identity and its relationship to Catalonia.


• Joe. My. God. notes the introduction of a civil unions bill into the Italian parliament.


• Language Hat links to a contemporary survey of spoken Irish in the Aran Islands.


• Language Log looks at the Hakka and their distinctive Chinese language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the impacts of structural racism on the lives of people living in unincorporated communities in California.


• Marginal Revolution notes some young Argentines are throwing wedding parties without an actual married couple.


• Steve Munro looks at waterfront transit plans.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla notes a 3-d model of Charon.
  
• The Russian Demographics Blog shows the 1897 Russian Imperial census' data on speakers of the Ukrainian language.


• Window on Eurasia notes the extension of the Chinese transport net to the Russian Far East, argues Ukrainians are losing interest in Russia, and notes potential Russian border issues with the Baltic States.

The oldest profession in the world is....translation. That’s what Catalan-language writer and poet Francesc Parcerisas tells us in a delightful book entitled Sense mans. Metàfores i papers sobre la traducció (No hands! Metaphors and papers on translation).

In the past, state ambassadors used to heavily rely on translation. Today, in a world perpetually connected, everybody uses it; often resorting to quick, error-prone methods. That is, Google Translator’s way: really fast and since translations are truly indispensable, the automatic translator has finally managed to combine necessity and practicality. Hence its success. The traditional version, i.e. the good old editorial one – created almost by hand and with the aid of dictionaries (often still paper ones) – is a rather slow, delicate, painstaking activity that feeds on shades of grey; one that doesn’t allow for syntax errors.

Take for instance a region of Europe which has sparked much debate in recent years, Catalonia, of which Parcerisas is a native. The region is the historic cradle of Catalan, a language spoken by roughly one out of four citizens in the Kingdom of Spain (it is also used in the region of Valencia and the Balearic Islands). A language that has been able to resist intimidation and repression. They say it’s in excellent health, according to the official language academy Institut d’Estudis Catalans: the small publishers popping up everywhere testify to this, along with its widespread use on social media. It’s never been in better shape, really, at least since the fall of the Franco regime.

One could almost argue that instead of losing a language, Europe has celebrated the comeback of Catalan. A grandee of the Continent’s age-old cultural heritage – Catalan was indeed born in the early Middle Ages. Not a dialect of Spanish, as many believe, but one of the evolutions of late-empire Vulgar Latin. An astonishing linguistic recovery. Those who care about diversity in general of any kind can’t fail to be happy about it. Diversity is good. Mankind embodies diversity. Fellini, who knew a thing or two about visions and wide angles, said that each language offered a unique point of view on the world. Surely, the renowned Barcelona-based London journalist and author Matthew Tree would also agree with that. Trilingual, he’s been writing professionally and successfully, mostly in Catalan, for over thirty years now.

Three decades after Pete Seeger's visit, a modern constitution confirmed the power of the representatives of the banking elite that have long dominated the principality. As long as the economic prospects were fine, and a steady stream of day-visitors from Barcelona and Toulouse, each under four hours away by car, came for duty-free goods and to take money from their undeclared bank accounts, there was no reason to change. But the shifting economic climate - as well as pressure from France and Spain over banking secrecy - has altered that.

The elections of April 2009 for the twenty-eight seats in the Andorran parliament brought to power for the first time the Andorran Social-Democratic Party (PSA), headed by the lawyer Jaume Bartumeu. The traditional ruling party, the Reformist Coalition (and a recent split from it, Andorra for Change [ApC]) were pushed into opposition. There is also a small Green Party, which won 3.5% of the vote, and supports the PSA: its representatives are proud to declare that they are the first party in Andorran history to call for a "republic", i.e. the abolition of the "co-princes" arrangement.

All parties have committed themselves to meeting the demands of the new European banking and taxation systems: if Switzerland is unable to resist pressure from Europe and the USA, it is evident even to the most resistant of Andorrans that they cannot either, even as they point out that the biggest fraud in Europe is not the existence of tax-havens, but the European Union's VAT system. Sarkozy's threats, and the sharpening of the global-governance response to the crisis reflected in the formalisation of the Group of Twenty (G20) at the Pittsburgh summit on 24-25 September 2009, have served to focus minds in the co-principality.

However, as younger Andorrans are quick to point out, it is not just the banking and tax systems that are in need of change, but the whole "Andorran model" of banking, duty-free and winter sports. At present, considerable efforts are going into promoting Andorra as an all-year round tourist resort. The country has a rich heritage of Romanesque churches - although, sadly, over 80% of all the original frescoes are now housed elsewhere (in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, in private collections in the United States and other, unknown, places, and, in the case of some works stolen by the visiting members of the Gestapo during the second world war, in Germany). The country can certainly boast a healthy climate and its mountain slopes are ideal for summer walking.