A Bit More Detail

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross examines the connections between bitcoin production and the alt-right. Could cryptocurrency have seriously bad political linkages?


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes GW170680, a recent gravitational wave detection that is both immense in its effect and surprising for its detection being normal.


• Centauri Dreams reports on a new study suggesting hot Jupiters are so large because they are heated by their local star.


• Crooked Timber counsels against an easy condemnation of baby boomers as uniquely politically malign.


• Daily JSTOR notes one paper that takes a look at how the surprisingly late introduction of the bed, as a piece of household technology, changed the way we sleep.


• Dangerous Minds shares a 1968 newspaper interview with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, talking about Charlie Manson and his family and their influence on him.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog takes a look at the opioid epidemic and the way that it is perceived.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Alex Harrowell suggests that the unsolvable complexities of Northern Ireland may be enough to avoid a hard Brexit after all.


• The LRB Blog describes a visit to a seaside village in Costa Rica where locals and visitors try to save sea turtles.


• Lingua Franca reflects on the beauty of the Icelandic language.


• The Map Room Blog shares an awesome map depicting the locations of the stars around which we have detected exoplanets.


• Marginal Revolution notes the ill health of North Korean defectors, infected with parasites now unseen in South Korea.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on the revival of fonio, a West African grain that is now starting to see successful marketing in Senegal.


• Spacing reviews a fascinating book examining the functioning of urban villages embedded in the metropoli of south China.


• Strange Company reports on the mysterious 1920 murder of famous bridge player Joseph Bowne Elwell.


• Towleroad reports on Larnelle Foster, a gay black man who was a close friend of Meghan Markle in their college years.


• Window on Eurasia notes that, although Ukraine suffered the largest number of premature dead in the Stalinist famines of the 1930s, Kazakhstan suffered the greatest proportion of dead.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell has a photo essay looking at the Berlin Brandenburg Airport, still years away from completion and beset by many complex failures of its advanced systems. What does the failure of this complex system say about others we may wish to build?

The slump in raw materials prices that has hurt Brazil, Chile, Peru and Colombia is leaving Central America unscathed.

The region is bucking a trend of sluggish growth in the rest of Latin America as cheaper crude prices cut its fuel bills and faster growth in the U.S. boosts remittances and tourist spending. The region will grow 4.2 percent this year, led by Panama’s 6.3 percent expansion, according to forecasts from the International Monetary Fund. That compares to a forecast of a 0.3 percent contraction for Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole while Brazil, the region’s biggest economy, is set to shrink 3.5 percent.

All seven Central American nations count the U.S. as their biggest trading partner, while Brazil, Peru and Chile all do more business with China. Cooling demand in the Asian giant has contributed to falling prices for South America’s oil, iron ore, copper and soy. As a net importer of oil and most other raw materials, Central America is a net winner from falling commodities prices.

“Their fortunes are really tied more to the U.S. than to China,” JPMorgan Chase & Co emerging market analyst Franco Uccelli said in a phone interview. “They aren’t seeing some of the perils of being an oil exporter with oil trading as low as it is today.”

Remittances sent home to Guatemala by workers living in the U.S. and elsewhere rose 18 percent in January from the year earlier. The country, which has the largest economy is Central America, had received a record $6.3 billion in remittances last year, equivalent to about 10 percent of gross domestic product.

The crisis that has broken out at several border crossings in Latin America as a result of thousands of Cubans attempting to reach the United States has revived a problem that remains unresolved between the two countries in spite of agreements, negotiations and the diplomatic thaw that started a year ago.

In the meantime, measures taken by Havana to curb the exodus of health professionals have led to reversals in the flexibilisation of the country’s migration policies which was part of the reforms being adopted, and have given rise to reflection on the causes and the consequences for the country of the growing wish to move abroad.

Analysts say it’s time to discuss why so many young people want to leave Cuba, despite the risks of failing in their attempt. In October 2012, the government of Raúl Castro lifted the restrictions that for decades kept Cubans from going abroad, eliminating, for example, the requirement of an exit visa to leave the country.

But the main hurdle was still the visa demanded by the United States, the main recipient of immigration from Cuba, and nearly all other countries. “Two friends of mine are stuck in Costa Rica and another was about to buy a ticket to fly to Ecuador when that country began to demand an entry visa, starting on Dec. 1,” a young local musician who preferred not to give his name told IPS.

In response to the announcement that Ecuador would no longer be one of the few countries to which Cubans can freely travel, around 300 people protested outside the Ecuadorean embassy to demand a solution. Some cried while others asked for visas or to be reimbursed for the money they had spent on plane tickets.

• The Big Picture has photos from the scene of the disastrous Chinese cruise liner sinking on the Yangtze.


• blogTO observes that a schooner found buried at the foot of Bathust Street will be moved to Fort York.


• D-Brief notes that the antidepressant Zoloft can be used to fight Ebola.


• The Dragon's Tales notes how pre-agricultural Europeans were more robust than their agriculturalist successors.


• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas discusses the problems of a mind that reduces everything to routine algorithms.


• Joe. My. God. notes how a Costa Rican judge recognized a common-law same-sex marriage in that country.


• Marginal Revolution wonders if Greece might be well-advised to default.


• pollotenchegg charts declining economic output.


• Torontoist examines the growing controversies over garding.


• Peter Watts wonders what consciousness is actually good for.


• Window on Eurasia looks at the extent to which Russian sanctions against the European Union try to distinguish between pro- and anti-Russian states, and argues that Russia's traumatic long 20th century still continues.

Costa Rica’s energy utility hasn’t burned any fossil fuel this year. None. The country of nearly 4.9 million people ran on nothing but renewable power for 75 days, a goal that many richer countries—including and especially the United States—can only dream of. So how did Costa Rica do it? Smart infrastructure investments and an assist from an unlikely ally: climate change.

Like Paraguay, Colombia, Brazil, and many other Latin American countries, Costa Rica gets most of its energy—about 80 percent—from hydroelectric plants. Damming rivers has environmental consequences too, obviously, but the energy from the resulting power plants is carbon-free. Hydropower is also more reliable and easier to scale up than existing wind and solar technologies.

So in that sense, Costa Rica’s 75-day streak may be impressive, but it isn’t surprising, says Juan Roberto Paredes, a renewable energy expert at the Inter-American Development Bank. On average, the country’s energy matrix was already nearly 90 percent renewable, making it the second most “renewable country” in Latin America (after Paraguay, which gets nearly all of its energy from just one dam).

But a reliance on hydropower still puts you at the mercy of the elements—just different ones than solar or wind. The key to hydropower is rainfall. Less rain means less water behind the dams, which quickly translates into less power. Just last year, Costa Rica declared a state of emergency in the country’s northwest because of an El Niño-fueled drought, and hydro’s contribution to the country’s electric grid dropped, forcing the utility to switch on some diesel generators. (Brazil is currently experiencing a similar crisis, with a catastrophic drought endangering many of the hydroelectric plants that power São Paulo and the rest of the country’s populous southeast.) But this year, Costa Rica’s four largest hydropower plants have enjoyed unusually heavy rains—so far.

Here’s where climate change comes in. Almost all climate models predict that “one effect of climate change will be a concentration of rainfall, and as a consequence of that, longer periods of drought,” explains Walter Vergara, a climate change specialist focused on Latin America at the World Resources Institute. Especially in tropical countries like Costa Rica, more rain will fall in less time. That’s great for hydroelectric plants, but terrible if you worry about, say, flash floods and mudslides. Plus, rainfall now might just mean drought later. Costa Rica’s rainy winter won’t last, and comparable levels of precipitation might not return for a long time. “Only El Niño and La Niña can tell us how much longer we won’t need fossil fuels to generate electricity,” says Julio Mata, an energy expert at the University of Costa Rica.

• blogTO notes that a party celebrating the end of Rob Ford's term as mayor is being planned for election night at City Hall.


• Centauri Dreams notes the discovery of secondary targets for New Horizons after it passes Pluto.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper that looks to examine the oblateness or otherwise of some exoplanets discovered by Kepler.


• The Dragon's Tales links to one paper examining underwater archeology and links to a series debating the question of whether or not there was a human presence 30 thousand years ago at a site in Uruguay.


• Eastern Approaches reports on the aftermath of a failed claim by Radek Sikorski that Russia made a 2008 proposal on partitioning Ukraine.
  
• Joe. My. God. notes a Costa Rican survey suggesting that up to a fifth of Costa Rican police think that harassing GLBT people is OK.


• Language Hat notes the etymology of the Egyptian title of "khedive", apparently obscure for a reason.


• Language Log notes a contentious issue in Chinese translation: "rule of law" or "rule by law"?


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at the aftermath of a stunt at a Serbian-Albanian football game.


• The Russian Demographics Blog considers estimates for Russian losses in Ukrainian fighing.


• Towleroad notes that Argentina has granted asylum to a Russian GLBT claimant.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Ukrainian events have awakened Belarusian nationalism.

• Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams argues that the nature of our modern broadcasting techniques make it unlikely that SETI will pick up radio (or other) leakage from extraterrestrial civilizations.


• Over at A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh argues that relatively high debt and bad demographics will complicate Croatia's future, never mind Croatia's membership in the Eurozone.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis examines the Nicaraguan emigration to Costa Rica, a richer country where Nicaraguan migrants form a tenth of the population (half undocumented). Tensions exist, naturally.


• GNXP's Razib Khan points to new data showing that although self-identified Amerindians form less than 1% of the Brazilian population, DNA tests reveal that one-fifth of Brazilians have substantial Amerindian ancestry.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's SEK is decidedly unimpressed by critics of Wonder Woman's recent wardrobe change, arguing that like many misogynists who accuses women who don't meet his needs of being misandrists.


• Examining the subject of mass shipments of methane from Titan that I raised earlier in my helium-3 discussion, More Words, Deeper Holes' james_nicoll gets his readers to calculate the consequences of a million-ton methane tanker from Titan cracking open in the Earth's atmosphere. The general conclusion seems to be that it wouldn't be a huge catastrophe, at the very least a big aurora-type event.


• The Numerati's Stephen Baker writes about an interesting way for companies to find patterns in vast data stores: start a contest and get people to look for some.


• At Passing Strangeness, after too long an absence, pauldrye writes about the massive 1811 earthquake in Missouri's Reelroot Rift that reshaped the geography of the Mississippi valley and could devastate the unprotected American heartland if it recurs.


• Over at Sublime Oblivion, Anatoly Karlin argues that India faces so many challenges it's not likely to equal China any time soon.


• Torontoist's Steve Kupferman writes about how Toronto's Shriners prepared for their recent parade in the downtown.


• At Window on Eurasia, a reporter observes that despite growing religious identification, Christian and Muslims in Tatarstan still intermarry at a high rate--30% of all marriages cross confessional boundaries.