A Bit More Detail

• Evan Gough at Universe Today notes that the long-term climate predictions of NASA have so far proven accurate to within tenths of a degree Celsius.


• Matt Williams at Universe Today notes how the launching of satellites for the Starlink constellation, providing Internet access worldwide, could be a game-changer.


• Eric Niiler at WIRED suggests that Texas--and other world regions--could easily sequester carbon dioxide in the seabed, in the case of Texas using the Gulf of Mexico.

Matteo Ceriotti explains at The Conversation how, as in The Wandering Earth, the Earth might be physically moved. https://theconversation.com/wandering-earth-rocket-scientist-explains-how-we-could-move-our-planet-116365ti

• Matt Williams at Universe Today shares a remarkable proposal, suggesting Type II civilizations might use dense bodies like black holes to create neutrino beam beacons.

• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber suggests that the planet Earth, judging by the progress of space travel to date, is going to be the only planet our species will ever inhabit.


• D-Brief notes surprising new evidence that maize was domesticated not in Mesoamerica, but rather in the southwest of the Amazon basin.


• Dangerous Minds notes the penalties proposed by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia for buggery, sodomy, and bestiality.


• Earther considers the extent to which Thanos' homeworld of Titan, whether the Saturnian moon or lookalike world, could ever have been habitable, even with extensive terraforming.


• Hornet Stories notes the interesting light that a study of ideal penis sizes among heterosexual women sheds on studies of sexuality generally.


• JSTOR Daily takes an extended look at how the sharing economy, promoted by people like Lawrence Lessig and businesses like Airbnb, turned out to be dystopian not utopian, and why this was the case.


• Victor Mair at Language Log reports on controversy over bread made by a Taiwanese baker, and at the language used.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the latest proof of the decline of Harper's as a meaningful magazine. (Myself, I lost respect for them when they published an extended AIDS denialist article in 2006.)


• Allan Metcalfe at Lingua Franca celebrates, using the example of lexicographer Kory Stamper's new book, how the blog helped him connect with the stars of linguistics.


• Katherine Franke at the NYR Daily notes pressure from Israel directed against academic critics in the United States.


• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog notes how the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has picked up InSight hardware on the surface of Mars below.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how NASA is running short of Plutonium-238, the radioactive isotope that it needs to power spacecraft like the Voyagers sent on long-duration missions and/or missions far from the sun.


• Window on Eurasia notes how, based on an excess of deaths over births, the population of Crimea will decline for the foreseeable future.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at some examples of the anaphora, a particular kind of rhetorical structure.

• Centauri Dreams reports on the work of the MASCOT rover on asteroid Ryugu.


• The Crux considers the critical role of the dolphin in the thinking of early SETI enthusiasts.


• D-Brief goes into more detail about the import of the Soyuz malfunction for the International Space Station.


• Dangerous Minds notes an artist who has made classic pop song lyrics, like Blue Monday, into pulp paperback covers.


• Earther is entirely correct about how humans will need to engage in geoengineering to keep the Earth habitable.


• David Finger at The Finger Post describes his visit to Accra, capital of Ghana.


• Gizmodo notes a new paper suggesting that, in some cases where massive moons orbit far from their parent planet, these moons can have their own moons.


• Hornet Stories shares the first look at Ruby Rose at Batwoman.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how the image of southern California and Los Angeles changed from a Mediterranean paradise with orange trees to a dystopic urban sprawl.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money imagines what might have happened to the navy of China had it not bought the Ukrainian aircraft carrier Varyag.


• Lingua Franca at the Chronicle reports on how the actual length of "minute", as euphemism for a short period of time, can vary between cultures.


• The LRB Blog reports on the disaster in Sulawesi, noting particularly the vulnerability of colonial-era port settlements in Indonesia to earthquakes and tsunamis.


• The Map Room Blog shares Itchy Feet's funny map of every European city.


• The New APPS Blog wonders if the tensions of capitalism are responsible for the high rate of neurological health issues.


• The NYR Daily considers what, exactly, it would take to abolish ICE.


• At the Planetary Society Weblog, Ian Regan talks about how he assembled a photoanimated flyover of Titan using probe data.


• Roads and Kingdoms explores some excellent pancakes in the Malaysian state of Sabah with unusual ingredients.


• Drew Rowsome raves over a new documentary looking at the life of opera star Maria Callas.


• Window on Eurasia notes the continued high rate of natural increase in Tajikistan.

• Anthrodendum considers the issue of the security, or not, of cloud data storage used by anthropologists.


• Architectuul takes a look at the very complex history of urban planning and architecture in the city of Skopje, linked to issues of disaster and identity.


• Centauri Dreams features an essay by Ioannis Kokkidinis, examining the nature of the lunar settlement of Artemis in Andy Weir's novel of the same. What is it?


• Crux notes the possibility that human organs for transplant might one day soon be grown to order.


• D-Brief notes evidence that extrasolar visitor 'Oumuamua is actually more like a comet than an asteroid.


• Bruce Dorminey makes the sensible argument that plans for colonizing Mars have to wait until we save Earth. (I myself have always thought the sort of environmental engineering necessary for Mars would be developed from techniques used on Earth.)


• The Everyday Sociology Blog took an interesting look at the relationship between hobbies and work.


• Far Outliers looks at how, in the belle époque, different European empires took different attitudes towards the emigration of their subjects depending on their ethnicity. (Russia was happy to be rid of Jews, while Hungary encouraged non-Magyars to leave.)


• The Finger Post shares some photos taken by the author on a trip to the city of Granada, in Nicaragua.


• The Frailest Thing's L.M. Sacasas makes an interesting argument as to the extent to which modern technology creates a new sense of self-consciousness in individuals.


• Inkfish suggests that the bowhead whale has a more impressive repertoire of music--of song, at least--than the fabled humpback.


• Information is Beautiful has a wonderful illustration of the Drake Equation.


• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the American women who tried to prevent the Trail of Tears.


• Language Hat takes a look at the diversity of Slovene dialects, this diversity perhaps reflecting the stability of the Slovene-inhabited territories over centuries.


• Language Log considers the future of the Cantonese language in Hong Kong, faced with pressure from China.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how negatively disruptive a withdrawal of American forces from Germany would be for the United States and its position in the world.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle, notes the usefulness of the term "Latinx".


• The LRB Blog reports on the restoration of a late 19th century Japanese-style garden in Britain.


• The New APPS Blog considers the ways in which Facebook, through the power of big data, can help commodify personal likes.


• Neuroskeptic reports on the use of ayahusasca as an anti-depressant. Can it work?


• Justin Petrone, attending a Nordic scientific conference in Iceland to which Estonia was invited, talks about the frontiers of Nordic identity.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw writes about what it is to be a literary historian.


• Drew Rowsome praises Dylan Jones' new biographical collection of interviews with the intimates of David Bowie.


• Peter Rukavina shares an old Guardian article from 1993, describing and showing the first webserver on Prince Edward Island.


• Seriously Science notes the potential contagiousness of parrot laughter.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little t.com/2018/06/shakespeare-on-tyranny.htmltakes a look at the new Stephen Greenblatt book, Shakespeare on Power, about Shakespeare's perspectives on tyranny.


• Window on Eurasia shares speculation as to what might happen if relations between Russia and Kazakhstan broke down.


• Worthwhile Canadian Initiative noticed, before the election, the serious fiscal challenges facing Ontario.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell points out that creating a national ID database in the UK without issuing actual cards would be a nightmare.


• Arnold Zwicky reports on a strand of his Swiss family's history found in a Paris building.

• Motherboard takes a look at the Cleveland Free-Net, an early bulletin board system that was one of the first vehicles for people to get online in the 1980s, here.


• Wired hosts an article making the case that blaming smartphones for causing human problems fits in an ancient tradition of human skepticism of new technologies, here.


• Universe Today's Matt Williams notes that upcoming generations of telescopes may be able to map mountains on exoplanets. (Well, really bumpy planets orbiting small stars, but still.)


• The kilonova GW170817/GRB in NGC 4993, nearest detected source of gravitational waves, is continuing to brighten mysteriously. Matt Williams at Universe Today reports.


• Brian Kahn at Earther notes that, although one popular theorized geoengineering method involving injecting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere would greatly slow down global cooling and be good for almost all ecosystems, if it stopped rapid calamitous change would be the result.

A United Nations body is investigating controversial methods to avert runaway climate change by giving humans the go-ahead to re-engineer the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere.

So-called geoengineering is seen as necessary to achieve the COP21 Paris agreement clinched in December, when 197 countries pledged to keep global temperatures rises below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to researchers who produced a report for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

“Within the Paris agreement there’s an implicit assumption that there will need to be greenhouse gases removed,” said Phil Williamson, a scientist at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia, who worked on the report. “Climate geoengineering is what countries have agreed to do, although they haven’t really realized that they’ve agreed to do it.”

Large-scale geoengineering may include pouring nutrients into oceans to save coral habitats or spraying tiny particles into the Earth’s atmosphere to reflect sun rays back into space. Geoengineering proposals have been shunned because of their unpredictable consequences on global ecosystems.

It's the option climate negotiators here are loath to talk about.

What if they fail to curb global warming and the environment gets so dangerous that someone decides to do something drastic and play mad scientist? Should nations purposely pollute the planet to try to counteract man-made warming and cool the world? Scientists are pretty sure they can do it, but should they?

The issue is called geoengineering — purposely tinkering with the planet as opposed to the unintentional warming that's happening now. The most talked about and advanced method involves putting heat-reflecting particles high in the air, but there also have been proposals to seed clouds other ways, put mirrors in space and seed the oceans with iron.

Scientists noticed a temporary but pronounced cooling after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. What's in mind would be, essentially, an artificial and constant man-made volcano with material released by aircraft or cannons.

No one is talking about doing it — yet. But some scientists want to study it to find about side effects and other issues. And earlier this year, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences said small-scale and controlled experiments could be helpful to inform future decisions.

The international scientific community’s fears about the damage that will be caused by Nicaragua’s future interoceanic canal have been reinforced by the environmental impact assessment, which warns of serious environmental threats posed by the megaproject.

The report “Canal de Nicaragua: Executive Summary of Environmental and Social Impact Assessment” was carried out by the British consulting firm Environmental Resources Management (ERM) and commissioned by the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development (HKDN Group), the Chinese company that won the bid to build the canal.

The 113-page executive summary sums up the study, whose unabridged version has not been made publicly available by the government, ERM or HKND.

In the study, ERM says the megaproject could be of great benefit to the country as long as best international practices on the environmental, economic and social fronts are incorporated at the design, construction and operational stages, for which it makes a number of recommendations.

[. . .]

The canal will go across the 8,624-sq-km Lake Cocibolca, also known as Lake Nicaragua – the second largest lake in Latin America after Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo. The route will be nearly four times longer than its rival, the Panama Canal.

The 276-km canal will link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; of that length, 105 km will cross Lake Cocibolca.

• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that stars commonly ingest hot Jupiters.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on the spread of robots.


• Far Outliers shares terms for making shoyu.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Ashley Madison nearly bought Grindr.


• Language Log notes the changing usage of "hemp" as a political term.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the plan to save New Orleans by abandoning the Mississippi delta.


• The Russian Demographics blog notes the genetic distinctiveness of the Denisovans.


• Towleroad notes the pulling-down of a Warsaw rainbow monument.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes the American debate over birthright citizenship.

The climate of Earth is susceptible to catastrophes that could threaten the longevity of human civilization. Geoengineering to reduce incoming solar radiation has been suggested as a way to mediate the warming effects of contemporary climate change, but a geoengineering program for thousands of years could also be used to enlarge the size of the polar ice caps and create a permanently cooler climate. Such a large ice cap state would make Earth less susceptible to climate threats and could allow human civilization to survive further into the future than otherwise possible. Intentionally extending Earth's glacial coverage will require uninterrupted commitment to this program for millenia but would ultimately reach a cooler equilibrium state where geoengineering is no longer needed. Whether or not this program is ever attempted, this concept illustrates the need to identify preference among potential climate states to ensure the long-term success of civilization.