A Bit More Detail

• Architectuul profiles architectural photographer Lorenzo Zandri, here.


• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes a new study suggesting red dwarf stars, by far the most common stars in the universe, have plenty of planets.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly shares 11 tips for interviewers, reminding me of what I did for anthropology fieldwork.


• Centauri Dreams notes how water ice ejected from Enceladus makes the inner moons of Saturn brilliant.


• The Crux looks at the increasingly complicated question of when the first humans reached North America.


• D-Brief notes a new discovery suggesting the hearts of humans, unlike the hearts of other closely related primates, evolved to require endurance activities to remain healthy.


• Dangerous Minds shares with its readers the overlooked 1969 satire Putney Swope.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that the WFIRST infrared telescope has passed its first design review.


• Gizmodo notes how drought in Spain has revealed the megalithic Dolmen of Guadalperal for the first time in six decades.


• io9 looks at the amazing Jonathan Hickman run on the X-Men so far, one that has established the mutants as eye-catching and deeply alien.


• Joe. My. God. notes that the Pentagon has admitted that 2017 UFO videos do, in fact, depict some unidentified objects in the air.


• JSTOR Daily looks at the origin of the equestrian horseback statue in ancient Rome.


• Language Log shares a bilingual English/German pun from Berlin.


• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money reflects on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson at Jefferson's grave.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution looks at a new book arguing, contra Pinker perhaps, that the modern era is one of heightened violence.


• The New APPS Blog seeks to reconcile the philosophy of Hobbes with that of Foucault on biopower.


• Strange Company shares news clippings from 1970s Ohio about a pesky UFO.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why the idea of shooting garbage from Earth into the sun does not work.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps explains the appearance of Brasilia on a 1920s German map: It turns out the capital was nearly realized then.


• Towleroad notes that Pete Buttigieg has taken to avoiding reading LGBTQ media because he dislikes their criticism of his gayness.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at diners and changing menus and slavery.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes evidence that white dwarf Gaia J1738–0826 is eating its planets.


• Crux takes a look at the stars closely orbiting Sagittarius A* at the heart of the galaxy like relativity-proving S2.


• D-Brief notes a recent proposal for an unmanned probe to Uranus and Neptune.


• Dangerous Minds shows the eerily decomposing sculptures of YuIchi Ikehata.


• Bruce Dorminey explores the provocative idea of era in the early Moon where it was briefly habitable.


• Far Outliers explores the reasons why George Orwell has become so popular lately.


• Hornet Stories notes that Tom Daley has recently posed nude for a painting by the celebrated David Hockney.


• JSTOR Daily explores the reality behind the imminent arrival of the laser gun into militaries worldwide.


• Language Hat notes that the Austrian state of Vorarlberg sponsors an interesting contest, of performances of songs--including pop songs--in local dialect.


• The LRB Blog notes the severity of the forest fires in Greece, aggravated by climate change, systematic corruption, and recent austerity.


• The Planetary Society Blog shares photos of asteroid Ryugu taken by the Hayabusa2 probe.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on a T-bone steak heavy breakfast lasting twenty hours in Bilbao.
  
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps notes a joke political party in Hungary that wants to make the country smaller.


• Window on Eurasia notes how the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Moscow is caught between its Ukrainian goals and its Russian links.

One hundred years ago, a thriving Canadian city disappeared from the map.

As of Sept. 1, 1916, the southwestern Ontario community of Berlin ceased to be. On a grim day in the middle of a war fought to assert Canada’s best values, bullies and xenophobes won a battle for control of our national identity. A city of 19,000 people rooted in its century-old Germanic heritage was forced to deny its own existence, succumbing to the acts of intimidation and accusations of disloyalty perpetrated by small-minded patriots who resisted the truth that Canada could be other than anglo.

The historical reality of Berlin was wiped away from memory, and the city we call Kitchener came into being. This wasn’t just a simple, innocent adjustment of municipal nomenclature like York turning into Toronto or Bytown becoming Ottawa. It was a contrived and calculated switch that served the propaganda needs of Canada’s imperialist leaders: A subversive reference to the capital of the hated Hun could be annihilated from the pristine Ontario landscape and replaced with a tribute to Britain’s recently deceased Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener.

A century later, when it is not all that clear that Canadians have much appetite for remembering the finer details of the so-called Great War, a name-change on an Ontario map may seem like little more than a colonial-era fait accompli. Internecine hatred on the home front just doesn’t fit the well-meaning version of Canada’s war that history’s image-builders have manufactured – all those belated feel-good stories of a courageous young nation coming of age and forging its independence through the sweat and sacrifice of Vimy.

But in a country of immigrants and refugees where arguments about loyalty are noisier and more venomous than ever, it’s worth remembering that these fights over national identity have been fought before – and lost by those who wrongly believed their Canada to be an open and tolerant and welcoming place.

That’s certainly what Canada’s Berlin was meant to be in the beginning. Long before this country came into official existence, the Berlin area was a haven for immigrants escaping the ancient enmities and disruptive compulsions of narrow-minded nationalism. The earliest settlers in the late 1700s were German-speaking Swiss Mennonites, a pacifist and much-persecuted Christian group who moved north from Pennsylvania seeking cheaper farmland, religious tolerance under the generally hands-off British rulers and peaceful relief from the intrusive government control they’d experienced in the wake of the American Revolution.

Crowdsourcing linguistic phenomena with smartphone applications is relatively new. In linguistics, apps have predominantly been developed to create pronunciation dictionaries, to train acoustic models, and to archive endangered languages. This paper presents the first account of how apps can be used to collect data suitable for documenting language change: we created an app, Dialäkt Äpp (DÄ), which predicts users’ dialects. For 16 linguistic variables, users select a dialectal variant from a drop-down menu. DÄ then geographically locates the user’s dialect by suggesting a list of communes where dialect variants most similar to their choices are used. Underlying this prediction are 16 maps from the historical Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland, which documents the linguistic situation around 1950. Where users disagree with the prediction, they can indicate what they consider to be their dialect’s location. With this information, the 16 variables can be assessed for language change. Thanks to the playfulness of its functionality, DÄ has reached many users; our linguistic analyses are based on data from nearly 60,000 speakers. Results reveal a relative stability for phonetic variables, while lexical and morphological variables seem more prone to change. Crowdsourcing large amounts of dialect data with smartphone apps has the potential to complement existing data collection techniques and to provide evidence that traditional methods cannot, with normal resources, hope to gather. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize a range of methodological caveats, including sparse knowledge of users’ linguistic backgrounds (users only indicate age, sex) and users’ self-declaration of their dialect. These are discussed and evaluated in detail here. Findings remain intriguing nevertheless: as a means of quality control, we report that traditional dialectological methods have revealed trends similar to those found by the app. This underlines the validity of the crowdsourcing method. We are presently extending DÄ architecture to other languages.

Namibia was a German colony from 1884 to 1919, then administered by apartheid South Africa until 1990. It is still home to a small German population.

In 2013, the Caprivi Strip – a 280-mile (450km) area known for its tropical rivers and wildlife and named after count Leo von Caprivi – was rechristened the Zambezi region, after the river that forms the northern border with Angola.

At the time, the president, Hifikepunye Pohamba, also announced that Lüderitz would be called !Nami≠nüs, which means “embrace” in a Nama language and incorporates click-like sounds, often represented in written form by punctuation symbols.

According to the newspaper the Namibian, !Nami≠nüs was the original name given to Lüderitz by the !Aman community, a Nama subtribe that was the first to settle at the coastal town. German tobacco merchant Adolf Lüderitz is said to have bought the town from a Nama chief and named it after himself.

In 2004, Germany apologised for a genocide that killed 65,000 Herero people through starvation and slave labour in concentration camps that, according to some historians, later influenced the Nazis in the second world war. The Nama, a smaller ethnic group, lost half their population in what one book has described as the kaiser’s Holocaust.

But some in the town are resistant to the change and are calling for a referendum. Speaking on behalf of the business and tourism sector, Ulf Grünewald said an overwhelming majority of residents who attended consultation meetings were against it, according to the Namibian.

Businesspeople fear it will badly affect their business, Grünewald added. “They are selling their businesses under the trade name Lüderitz.”

• Antipope Charlie Stross speculates about the consequences of SYRIZA's eleciton victory.


• Bad Astronomy discusses the Rosetta probe's pictures of Comet 67P.
  
• blogTO notes that Uniqlo is coming to Toronto.
  
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a comparative study of binary stars with exoplanets.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a study of the atmosphere of Pluto.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Alexis Tsipras has foresworn a religious oath of office.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that fast food restaurants could pay their employee living wages.


• Otto Pohl links to a study of his on German exiles in central Asia.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that the Nicaragua Canal still makes no sense.


• Transit Toronto observes the spread of Presto cards on the TTC.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes an English court's distinction between female genital mutilation and male circumcision.


• Window on Eurasia notes the decline of Christianity in the North Caucasus, high inflation in Kaliningrad, official Belarus' measures to deal with a Ukraine-style invasion, and suggests Ukraine could still win the conflict.


• The Financial Times' World blog considers the question of Greek debt.

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling is skeptical that plans to archive vast quantities of archived data accumulated over decades, even centuries, are going to be viable.


• The Burgh Diaspora notes that for southern Europeans, Latin America is once again emerging as a destination--this time, the migration is of professionals seeking opportunities they can't find at home.


• The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird links to a proposal by biologists that life initially evolved in highly saline environments.


• Democracy is still fragile in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Eastern Approaches notes.


• Odd placenames in Minnesota are analyzed at Far Outliers.


• A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell notes the translation problems surrounding the Nazi term volkisch, liking one recent translator's suggestion that "racist" works best.


• Razib Khan at GNXP introduces readers to the historical background behind the recent ethnic conflict in Burma.


• Itching for Eestimaa's Guistino takes a look at same-sex marriage in Estonia.


• Savage Minds reviews Nicholas Shaxson's book Treasure Islands, which took a look at offshore banking centres like Cyprus.


• Torontoist's Kevin Plummer describes the background behind Elvis' 1957 performances in Toronto.


• The negative effects of mass migration to Russia from Central Asia on sending countries, especially the republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, are introduced at Window on Eurasia.

Home to around 800 different languages, New York is a delight for linguists, but also provides a rich hunting ground for those trying to document languages threatened with extinction.

[. . .] New York is not just a city where many languages live, it is also a place where languages go to die, the final destination for the last speakers of some of the planet's most critically endangered speech forms.

[. . .]

A recent Census Bureau report notes that in the United States, the number of people speaking a language other than English at home increased by 140% over the last 30 years, with at least 303 languages recorded in this category.

Originally home to the indigenous Lenape people, then settled by the Dutch, conquered by the English and populated by waves of migrants from every country ever since, the five boroughs that make up the Big Apple - The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island - are home to every major world language, but also countless vanishing voices, many of which have just a few remaining speakers.

No longer do aspiring field linguists have to trek halfway across the world to collect data on Zaghawa or Livonian, they can just take the Number 7 train a few stops where they will find speakers of some of the 800 languages that experts believe are spoken in New York.

[. . .]

Recognising what a unique opportunity New York provided, two linguists and a performance poet - Daniel Kaufman, Juliette Blevins and Bob Holman - set up the Endangered Language Alliance, an urban initiative for endangered language research and conservation.

"This is the city with the highest linguistic density in the world and that is mostly because the city draws large numbers of immigrants in almost equal parts from all over the globe - that is unique to New York," says Kaufman.

Several languages have been uttered for the very last time in New York, he says.

"There are these communities that are completely gone in their homeland. One of them, the Gottscheers, is a community of Germanic people who were living in Slovenia, and they were isolated from the rest of the Germanic populations.

"They were surrounded by Slavic speakers for several hundreds of years so they really have their own variety [of language] which is now unintelligible to other German speakers."

The last speakers of this language have ended up in Queens, he says, and this has happened to many other communities.

• A BCer in Toronto's Jeff Jedras wonders whether the Liberal Party of Canada should continue to exist, if in so doing it would allow a centre to exist beyond the Conservatives on the right and the NDP on the left. (If, as he notes, is the question.)


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling mourns the imminent death of Minitel, the prototype French computer network launched in the 1980s that after three decades is set to be ended. (It still has three-quarters of a million users, apparently.)


• Centauri Dreams notes the recent astronomical data suggesting that planets are common regardless of the abundances of elements in their parent stars. The discussion in the comments about the sorts of variations noted in planetary systems so far is worth noting.


• Eastern Approaches visits northwestern Bulgaria and finds a declining region kept afloat by mass migration,to Bulgarian cities and to the wider European Union.


• Extraordinary Observations takes a look at statistics on migration to and from Rust Belt cities in the United States, finding that while net migration seems to be up there's not such a huge revolution as some sources suggest.


• Language Hat and Language Log take a look at the emergent linguistic tendency to refer to LPs as "vinyls".


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Erik Loomis points out that the term "Latino" in the United States is so broad as to make generalizations about the present behaviour of Spanish-speakers untenable, never mind future predictions.


• Strange Maps looks at the north-south variations in vocabulary spoken in German-speaking Europe. Bavaria and Baden-Württemburg have more in common linguistically with Austria than with the former East Germany, unsurprisingly.


• Supernova Condensate features pictures of the Egg Nebula, AFGL 2688, a pre-planetary nebula belonging to a planetary system in the process of forming.

Unlike Belgium, Luxembourg has been able to generate a fairly solid sense of national identity. This process was helped by the partitions of the formerly multi-lingual Grand Duchy, whose French-speaking areas were annexed by France and Belgium. The German-speaking rump-state sought to culturally differentiate itself from Germany by elevating its own local dialect to a national language after World War II. From a linguistic standpoint, Luxembourgish (Letzeburgesch, locally) is a French-influenced variant of a group of local Germanic dialects known as Moselle Franconian. The boundaries between Germanic dialects do not correspond with national boundaries anywhere in the greater Netherlands, as the 1890 German dialect map posted above shows. Local dialects, however, are in decline, gradually being replaced by national languages. Outside of Luxembourg, Moselle Franconian is yielding to standard German to the east and north and French to the south and west. Inside the country, it is thriving. Due both to its national status and to the fact that speakers of standard German cannot generally understand it, Luxembourgish is now classified as a language rather than a mere dialect.

Europe’s feudal remnants, incongruous bits of territory that escaped state-building aggregation, are often viewed as quaint anachronisms. But Luxembourg and Lichtenstein can also be viewed as highly important and utterly modern geo-political formations: small places that have leveraged their anomalous sovereignty into lucrative positions in the global financial system. Whether the roles that they have carved out for themselves serve the interests of the world at large is another question.