A Bit More Detail

• This Noisey interview with musician Tiga shows how he and his music helped make Montréal a leading nightlife city.


• La Presse notes that Québec City is looking to bypass an environmental impact study for its proposed streetcar.


• Guardian Cities notes that the rapid development of Kuala Lumpur has displaced the native macaques from their home, creating new interactions between them and invasive primates.


• Guardian Cities reports on the Sicilian town of Sambuca, which has put vacant homes on sale for one Euro each. Will this be enough to reverse depopulation?


• CityLab notes how the city of Birmingham has resisted an Alabama state law requiring the display of a Confederate monument.

• 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.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares photos of rings around a distant galaxy's central black hole.


• Inspired by Finland's Olympic team, the Toronto Public Library's The Buzz shares some interesting books on knitting and for knitters.


• Centauri Dreams notes the surprising news that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies actually have the same mass. This changes everything about what was thought about the future of the Local Group. D-Brief also reports on this news.


• JSTOR Daily notes how the conversion of tobacco fields into solar farms is not just potentially life-saving but economically viable, too.


• Language Hat rounds up links relevant to the discovery, by field linguists, of the Malaysian language of Jedek.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle of Higher Education, shares a story from Lucy Ferris of Paris of old and the bookstore Shakespeare and Company.


• The LRB Blog notes that the privatization of military officers' housing in the United Kingdom was another disaster.


• Marginal Revolution considers if Los Angeles is the most right-wing major American city, and what that actually means.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that, even in the face of subsidence in Groningen around gas fields and cheap wind energy, even the Netherlands is not moving away from oil and gas.


• Drew Rowsome reports on porn star/actor Chris Harder and his new show, Porn To Be A Star. (NSFW.)


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel examines the factors which distinguish a good scientific theory from a bad one.


• The Volokh Conspiracy makes a decent argument that the politicized pop culture fandom around supreme court judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg is not good for the future of jurisprudence.


• John Scalzi, at Whatever, reviews the new Pixel Buds from Google.

• Anthrodendum features a guest author talking about the need for artificial intelligence's introduction into our civilization to be managed.


• Dangerous Minds tells the story of how John Lennon and Yoko Ono met Marshall McLuhan.


• Cody Delistraty suggests Freud still matters, as a founder and as a pioneer of a new kind of thinking.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on cloud circulation patterns of exoplanet HD 80606b.


• Far Outliers examines just how Chinese immigration to Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore, became so big.


• Hornet Stories interviews Moises Serrano, one of the many undocumented queer people victims of the repeal of DACA.


• Marginal Revolution notes a study suggesting some Indian students have math skills which do not translate into the classroom.


• The NYR Daily looks at the crackdown on free media in Cambodia.


• The Planetary Society Blog looks at a new set of recommendations for Canada's space future by the Space Advisory Board.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports from Burma, noting the prominence of social media in anti-Rohingya hate.


• Cheri Lucas Rowlands shares beautiful photos from the Sicilian community of Taormina.


• Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang talks about the mystery of some stars which appear to be older than the universe.


• Window on Eurasia is critical of a Russian proposal for UN peacekeepers in the Donbas making no mention of Russia.

The most recognizable feature of Toronto's skyline isn't a matter of debate. The CN Tower is both our most famous building and a navigational beacon that even longtime residents rely on to get their bearings on occasion. Take away this soaring landmark, and the city no longer looks like Toronto at all.

That's why it's so strange to look at images of certain Tehran's skyline. If you squint your eyes, it can seem startlingly like Toronto thanks to the cranes that seem to continually cover the sky and the presence of the Milad Tower, a slightly shorter communications beacon that shares a number of traits with our local version.

Kuala Lumpur also has a structure that resembles the CN Tower, but it shares the skyline with the brighter Petronas Twin Towers, which diminishes the centrality of the the KL Tower. Other major observation/communications towers in cities like Seattle don't really resemble the CN Tower in the first place.

Tehran's tower is just over 100 metres shorter than our central landmark, but the resemblance is heightened by the disc on its top section, which is located around the same area where the Skypod is on the CN Tower. As a distant silhouette, the two structures are eerily similar (even if that can't be said when they're examined up close).

• Bloomberg notes that Azerbaijan's oil wealth lets it outspend Armenia on military good, looks at a hydropower project in Congo intended to eventually protect mountain gorillas, and notes that spending on solar and wind energy is outpacing fossil fuel spending.


• CBC notes the alarming possibility that smart devices could be bricked by their manufacturers.


• The Dragon's Tales linked to a Eurekalert press release examining how population levels in the pre-Columbian Southwest were intimately tied to climate.


• Fortune reports about the many failures of the F-35 project.


• The National Post notes that a gay atheist Malaysian student in Winnipeg has received asylum and looks at the discontent of Jewish groups with an inclusion committee at York University.


• Vox suggests
  

Malaysia is encouraging schools to teach more classes in English and will offer free lessons to the masses as manufacturers and company chiefs say a deteriorating command of the language is hurting the country’s competitiveness.

Over 90 percent of the 190,000 respondents in an online poll this month said there should be an option to take more subjects in the language, Idris Jala, head of the government’s Performance Management and Delivery Unit, said in an interview on Monday. Prime Minister Najib Razak introduced a dual-language program during his budget speech last week, and the New Straits Times said Thursday the government will organize English communication lessons at no charge from next year.

The poll highlights the challenges for Malaysia even as the World Bank’s annual Doing Business report showed the country is making progress on becoming more investor-friendly, having made it easier and less costly for companies to pay taxes.

“Malaysia has lost its competitiveness due to our standards in English going down,” AirAsia Bhd. co-founder Tony Fernandes wrote on Twitter this month. It’s a critical time "to reverse decades of decline in English,” he said. “Our children have suffered.”

Malaysia's highest court has rejected the Catholic Church's application to appeal a ban on its use of the word "Allah" in the Malay-language section of its newspaper, the Catholic Herald, bringing to an end a protracted legal battle over constitutional rights.

The five-man panel, headed by Federal Court Judge Abdul Hamid Embong, on Wednesday dismissed unanimously the application, the second by the Church.

The bench said there was no indication of any "procedural unfairness" in the court's earlier decision not to allow the Church's appeal.

[. . .]

Malay-speaking Malaysians, mostly indigenous people from the Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak, have long used "Allah" as the Malay translation for "God", but in 2008 the government threatened to withdraw the paper's permit if it continued using the word.

The Catholic Church sought a judicial review and the High Court ruled in 2009 that it was Malay-speaking Christians' constitutional right to use the word, which is widely used by Christians in Indonesia and much of the Middle East.

• The Big Picture shares pictures of the ongoing confusion and human tragedy surrounding the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes preliminary results for the hunt of exoplanets around very cool stars.


• The Dragon's Tales, meanwhile, observes that the red-coloured formation on Europa's icy surface seem to be produced by internal events.


• Far Outliers notes that Japan provided naval protection to Australia during the First World War, causing the Australians no small amount of alarm at their vulnerability.


• A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell notes the personal and ideological connection between now-separate Crimea and Transnistria.


• At The Frailest Thing, Michael Sacasas talks about how the phenomenon of people disconnecting from the online world can evoke the Bakhtinian carnival, and how it also might not be enough.


• Geocurrents notes that, in various referenda, Switzerland's Francophone cantons are consistently more open (to immigrants, to the European Union) than others.)


• Joe. My. God. observes that for the first time since the epidemic hit, HIV/AIDS has stopped being one of the top ten causes of death in New York City.


• Ukrainian demographics blogger pollotenchegg shares the results of recent detailed polling of Crimea's population, on everything from political views or language usage.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that markets are reacting to Russia's actions, though whether it's Crimea alone or broader fears about a Ukrainian war is open to question.


• Torontoist explains to its readership what co-op apartments actually are, in the course of an explanation that Jack Layton and Olivia Chow were not living in subsidized apartments.


• Towleroad celebrates the classic TV series Golden Girls.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Russian relations with Lithuania are also deteriorating.

• Anthropology.net's Kambiz Kamrami notes a recent study suggesting that human intelligence is a product not of the need to adapt to new environments but rather to the need to manage large and complex social organizations. The smarter the species, the larger the viable size of the group.


• Bag News Notes has a photo essay describing the plight of the Batek of Malaysia, beset by the cutting down of their forest.


• Crooked Timber's Corey Robin documents the strong support of economist Friedrich Hayek for Pinochet and his dictatorship in Chile, while the more right-leaning audience at Marginal Revolution reacts.


• The Dragon's Tales broke for me the news of the discovery of three potentially Earth-like worlds orbiting nearby Gliese 667C, while Centauri Dreams comments here and here.


• Eastern Approaches notes the shenanigans in the Czech Republic, as the president is trying to appoint a government to his liking against the protests of parliamentarians.


• Far Outliers describes the Crusaders' conquest of Constantinople in 1204.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Scott Lemieux is appropriately polite to Ralph Nader.


• Normblog links to an extended New York Times story describing the human cost of the civil war in Syria, on both sides.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes the success of Venezuela in the Chavez years in reorienting its oil exports from the United States to China.


• Registan's Kendrick Kuo notes China's strategies in presenting conflict in Xinjiang as terrorist or sppontaneous violence, without connecting to root causes of ethnic conflict.


• Window on Eurasia notes the ongoing assimilation of ethnic Russians even in Russophile Belarus.