A Bit More Detail

• Centauri Dreams explores Pluto and its worlds.


• Crooked Timber considers the question of how to organize vast quantities of data.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to two papers on exoplanet habitability, noting that the composition of exoplanets influences their habitability and suggests exomoons need to be relatively massive to be habitable.


• Geocurrents notes the inequalities of Chile.


• Joe. My. God. notes an article about New York City gay nightclub The Saint.


• Language Hat links to a site on American English.


• Language Log suggests that the Cantonese language is being squeezed out of education in Hong Kong.


• Languages of the World notes a free online course on language revival.


• Peter Watts of No Moods, Ads, or Cutesy Fucking Icons examines the flaws of a paper on a proto-Borg collective of rats.


• Spacing Toronto looks at the Toronto connection to a notorious late 19th century American serial killer.


• Towleroad notes a study suggesting that people with undetectable levels of HIV can't transmit the virus.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes the issues of compliance with lawful orders.


• Whatever's John Scalzi likes the ASIS Chromebook flip.


• Window on Eurasia notes the connection between the wars of Yugoslavia and eastern Ukraine, looks at Buryat-Cossack conflict, and notes disabled Russian veterans of the Ukrainian war.

• 3 Quarks Daily considers the ethics of suicide.


• Slate's Atlas Obscura blog shares photos of Second World War relics in Alaska's Aleutian islands.


• The Big Picture shares images of Australia's doll hospital.


• blogTO lists five things Toronto could learn from New York City.


• The Dragon's Tales notes China's growing presence in Latin America and observes that apes and hmans share the same kind of empathy.


• Joe. My. God. notes the coming out of an Irish beauty queen.


• Marginal Revolution expects inequality to start growing in New Zealand.


• Discover's Out There looks forward to the new age of exploration of Pluto and the rest of the Kuiper belt.


• The Planetary Society Blog shares beautiful photo mosaics of Neptune from Voyager 2.


• The Search examines in an interview the use of a hundred million photo dataset from Flickr for research.


• Torontoist notes a mayoral debate on Toronto heritage preservation.


• Towleroad observes that a pro-GLBT advertisement won't air on Lithuanian television because of restrictive legislation.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Ukrainian refugees are being resettled in the North Caucasus to bolster Slav numbers and predicts the quiet decline of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

• blogTO chronicles the time when Toronto bus transit went as far as Niagara Falls.


• The Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell notes that falling global mobility is combining with low fertility rates to produce labour shortages.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster, thinking of pulsar planets, starts a discussion about science fiction set in extreme environments.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes the complexity of discovering exoplanets around young--hence very active--stars.


• The Dragon's Tales, meanwhile, observes evidence that the Indus Valley civilization collapsed because of climate change.


• Far Outliers observes the speed with which German and Austro-Hungarian fronts collapsed in 1918 and comments on American respect for their German counterparts in the First World War.


• Marginal Revolution notes a paper claiming that immigration doesn't undermine public support for welfare states.


• Livejournal's pollotenchegg maps the distributions of Russians and Crimean Tatars in that autonomous--and contested?--Ukrainian peninsula.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer thinks that, though things are bad in Venezuela, they aren't nearly as bad as one database on democracy claims.


• Peter Rukavina shares the story of how much he cost the Prince Edward Island health system and how he found out.


• Towleroad goes into greater detail about the changes in royal nomenclature forced by same-sex marriage.

• 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.

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster writes about the likely abundance of Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits.


• Daniel Drezner writes (1, 2) about how ad hoc coalitions of world powers are able to deal relatively decisively in some matters of global affairs.


• At The Dragon's Tales, Will Baird notes that Titan's hydrocarbon lakes appear to have floating ice.


• Eastern Approaches notes the toxicity that disputes over war memorials in the Balkans, noting an Albanian memorial in southern Serbia.


• False Steps' Paul Drye notes one rocket technology that, if adequately developed, could have let the Soviet Union reach the moon.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Alexander Harrowell notes that the United States does not want the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.


• Marginal Revolution asks questions about the geographical, historical, and other factors that let free cities survive.


• The Signal's Bill LeFurgy compares digital archivists' work to that of paleontologists. Nice analogy.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell notes that conservative British pundits in the United States are a much smaller and more unrepresentative minority than is often believed.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Soviet-era apologia for the deadly assault on the Vilnius radio station in 1991 is being used in modern Russia.

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait and Centauri Dreams guest poster Lee Billings and Supernova Condensate all react joyfully to the news of the discovery of Alpha Centauri Bb (or is it B b).


• Next, at Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling blogged about two prescient computer-related predictions, one describing tablet computer for children imagined in 1972 and the other revisiting the Xerox Star.


• Daniel Drezner takes a look at a study describing China's increasing tendency to apply sanctions on other countries. So far Chinese sanction use has been fairly limited.


• Eastern Approaches examines the politics of Montenegro and the potential for progress in deadlocked Greek-Macedonian relations.


• Marginal Revolution notes that a computer manufacturer owned by the father of Psy, K-Pop star famed for "Gangnam Style", is undergoing a boom in its prices.


• J. Otto Pohl argues that leftists in the developed world have a vested interest in Africa not developing and remaining abject.


• The Population Reference Bureau's blog Behind the Numbers notes a study suggesting that, contrary some predictions, a decreasing sex ratio in China and India and elsewhere doesn't strengthen the bargaining position of women but rather does the contrary.


• Torontoist notes a celebration of the one-year anniversary of Occupy Toronto.


• At the Volokh Conspiracy, historian Eric Hobsbawm's support for Stalinism is addressed in the context of the neglect of Communist crimes against humanity generally.


• The Zeds' Michael Steeleworthy fears that the new paywall of The Globe and Mail might augur--if we're not careful--an era of restricted public access to information generally.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of a musical format many of us grew up with: the compact disc. It's been three decades since the first CD went on sale in Japan. The shiny discs came to dominate music industry sales, but their popularity has faded in the digital age they helped unleash. The CD is just the latest musical format to rise and fall in roughly the same 30-year cycle.

[. . .]

The CD was supposed to have the last word when it came to convenience and sound quality. And for a while, it did. The CD dominated record sales for more than two decades — from the late 1980s until just last year, when sales of digital tracks finally surpassed those of physical albums. It's a cycle that has played out many times in the history of the music industry, with remarkable consistency.

Sam Brylawski, the former head of the recorded sound division at the Library of Congress, says, "If you look at the last 110, 115 years, the major formats all have about 20 to 30 years of primacy."

He says one of the biggest factors driving this cycle is a desire on the part of manufacturers to sell new players every generation or so. "The real money — the real profits — for companies have been in the sales of hardware. That is to say, machines that play back recordings."

Brylawski says that's true for Apple's iPod, the must-have MP3 player that drove the demand for digital music tracks beginning in the early years of the 21st century. And it was just as true at the very beginning of music industry for one of the pioneers of sound recording: Thomas Edison.

"Edison put his heart and soul into this beautiful equipment," says Tim Brooks, who wrote a book about the beginnings of the recording industry called Lost Sounds. "He didn't care much who the singers were."

Edison practically gave his recordings away for free in order to get people to buy his phonographs. He invented the recording cylinder in 1877, but it didn't really catch on until the 1890s. Cylinders were about four inches long, and they looked like empty toilet paper rolls covered in wax or lacquer. They were the state-of-the-art musical format for about 20 years, until they were supplanted by a new invention: the 78 rpm disc, touted by Edison's competitor, the Victor Talking Machine Co.

"The early machines were very, very crude," says Brooks. "The sound was not as good as the sound on cylinders. But it was a lot more convenient. They didn't break as easily. They could be made longer, bigger, that sort of thing."

Convenience over sound quality — that's a theme we'll come back to later. The 78 reigned as the most popular format until the early 1950s, when it was replaced by the LP. The bigger disc definitely sounded better. But its success stemmed in part from how conveniently you could listen to a dozen songs on a single disc. The LP was in turn the format of choice for — you guessed it — roughly 30 years, until it was challenged by the cassette and finally supplanted by the CD. At each turn, of course, Brooks says the record industry was happy to repackage all of your old favorites in the new format.

"When 78s went out and LPs took over," says Brooks, "the record companies were able to resell stuff they'd sold before. When CDs replaced LPs and things in the 1990s, go back to the catalog and sell it again. So it's a cash cow for them that way."

To prepare for writing my encyclopedia entry I went to the library to see what actual encyclopedias look like. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. As a student I spurned encyclopedias as ‘secondary sources’ and plowed through texts. As a result, I have an invaluable knowledge that can’t be duplicated by reading secondary sources, and a keen awareness of how exhausting not using secondary sources is! Reading the high-quality, professionally edited entries in my library’s encyclopedias was an eye-opener and a guilty pleasure — you could learn so much with so little effort! And you don’t have to work as hard untangling the entries the way you do with Wikipedia!

But this is exactly the problem with closed, for-profit encyclopedias: they require no work. In fact, they require just the opposite: submission to authority. The writing guidelines for my encyclopedia entry insist that there be no quotations or citations — just a short list of additional readings. Encyclopedias give us no reason to believe their claims are true except the arbitrary authority of those who write them. They are the ultimate triumph of the authoritarian impulse in academics.

Compare this to Wikipedia, which has gotten so persnickety about insisting on citations and references that much of the charm of its early days has gone. Every wikipedia entry is an argument between its composers, spilling out of the discussion page and into the entry. Accuracy and verifiablity are there on the page to see. In other words, Wikipedia is the ultimate realization of academic ideals of argumentation, presentation of evidence, probing claims to logical coherence, and the deliberative use of reason. There is no better place for people to cut their teeth on the life of the mind, or to begin to learn the fundamental skill of close and critical reading of a text.

It is this refusal of arbitrary authority that really scares encyclopedia types, not worries about accuracy. Wikipedia is a place where you must learn to think for yourself, encyclopedias are places where you are told what to believe.

Of course, there is a lot to like about the arbitrary exercise of authority if you have faith in the authority in question: the gullible are not duped, the conspiracy theorists are silenced, and the trains run on time. The down side of intellectual debate is the possibility of intellectual chaos — and there’s certainly a lot of that on Wikipedia! If you are pessimistic about the capacities of your students to know and learn then feeding them the party line is, to you at least, the best way to protect them.

But we as educators can and must believe that our students — and everyone else! — is capable of more than this. Our fundamental principles and highest aspirations lead us ineluctably to the conclusion that attaining intellectual maturity requires immersion in the rough waters of public debate, which is exactly what Wikipedia is. The real danger of Wikipedia is its use by people made gullible by a system which promises them that someone, somewhere knows The Truth, exactly the belief that college teachers try to educate their students out of rather than into. We’d have less uncritical reading of Wikipedia if there were less people trained to be uncritical readers.

[. . .]

Wikipedia is flawed, human, complex, and ultimately deeply worthwhile. It is real life, not a child-proof playroom. What sort of educators are we if we believe the latter is better for our students than the former?

2. You can’t change people’s minds by direct attack on their views. You have to come at it indirectly.
3. Don’t deal in universals. Eurabia and Muslims have become universals, labels to which other things are attached. Each time you use them as universals, you carry other people’s labels with them. At a purely personal level I try to avoid the use of the world Muslim unless I am speaking about a faith with all its varieties.
4. Recognise diversity. Within Europe each country, and sometimes parts of countries, are different. Australia is different again.
5. Attack intolerance, but do not attack the validity of views on which that intolerance may draw. Precisely, recognise them and address them independently as different issues. Avoid culture wars. Don’t confuse issues.