A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares a lovely photo of the Earth peeking out from behind the far side of the Moon.


• At the Broadside Blog, Caitlin Kelly shares lovely photos of delicate ice and water taken on a winter's walk.


• Centauri Dreams looks</> at the study by Chinese astronomers who, looking at the distribution of Cepheids, figured out that our galaxy's disk is an S-shaped warp.


• D-Brief notes new evidence that melting of the Greenland ice sheet will disrupt the Gulf Stream.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing takes issue with the uncritical idealization of the present, as opposed to the critical examination of whatever time period we are engaging with.


• Gizmodo notes that an intensive series of brain scans is coming closer to highlighting the areas of the human brain responsible for consciousness.


• Mark Graham links to new work of his, done in collaboration, looking at ways to make the sharing economy work more fairly in low- and middle-income countries.


• JSTOR Daily notes how the mystic Catholicism of the African kingdom of Kongo may have gone on to inspire slave-led revolutions in 18th century North America and Haiti.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at an exhibition examining the ambitious architecture of Yugoslavia.


• The Map Room Blog links to a cartographer's argument about the continuing importance of paper maps.


• Marginal Revolution shares one commenter's perception of causes or the real estate boom in New Zealand.


• Neuroskeptic considers the role of the mysterious silent neurons in the human brain.


• At NYR Daily, Guadeloupe writer Maryse Condé talks about her career as a writer and the challenges of identity for her native island.


• Roads and Kingdoms shares a list of ten dishes reflecting the history of the city of Lisbon.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel takes a look at the promise of likely mini-Neptune Barnard's Star b as a target for observation, perhaps even life.


• Window on Eurasia shares the perfectly plausible argument that, just as the shift of the Irish to the English language did not end Irish identity and nationalism, so might a shift to Russian among Tatars not end Tatar identity.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the landing of the Franco-German MASCOT probe on asteroid Ryugu from the Japanese Hayabusa-2 probe.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly shares a powerful New York Times article she wrote about her health status.


• Centauri Dreams notes the continued fine-tuning of the New Horizons probe as it approaches Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, also known as Ultima Thule.


• D-Brief notes how the Gaia satellite has detected hundreds of hypervelocity stars heading towards the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, perhaps coming from other galactic neighbours like the Large Magellanic Cloud.


• At the Everyday Sociology Blog, Karen Sternheimer writes about the possibilities opened up by learning another language.


• JSTOR Daily notes that, once, working-class children regularly roamed the night.


• Language Hat notes how the Maori remembered in their proverbs the disappearance of the moa, long after that species' extinction in New Zealand.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money rejoices at the despair of the alt-right on learning their favourite pop star, Taylor Swift, supports the Democratic Party.


• Lingua Franca takes a look at the past usage of the phrase "cold civil war".


• The LRB Blog writes about the profoundly disturbing case of the apparent murder, inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has a critical take on the concept of "Airspace", the sort of shared minimalist public spaces enabled by modern technologies.


• Strange Company reports on the mysterious Napoleonic-era haunting of the Upper Silesian castle of Slawensik.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps reports on the most common last names in different European countries, finding that local variations on "Smith" are exceptionally common.

• Architectuul reports on how architects, at a time of new environmental pressures on water, how some architects are integrating water into their works.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about what books she is (and is not) reading these days.


• D-Brief notes a new study suggesting that the prospects of planet-based life at globular cluster Omega Centauri are low, simply because the tightly-packed stars disrupt each others' planets too often.


• Hornet Stories notes how some American conservatives wish to prohibit states from mandating adoption agencies not bar same-sex couples as applicants.


• JSTOR Daily notes how the tattooed heads of Maori first became international trade items in the 19th century, then were returned to New Zealand in more recent years.


• Language Log's Victor Mair writes about his favourite Nepali expression, "Bāphre bāph!".


• The Map Room Blog notes the release of a revised vision of Star Trek: Stellar Cartography, including material from season 1 of Discovery.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw explains how, in 1976, he appeared on Australian television talking about the Yowie, the Australian equivalent to a Yeti.


• Drew Rowsome reviews Folsom Street Blues, Jim Stewart's memoirs of the leather/SoMA scene in San Francisco in the 1970s.


• Peter Rukavina writes about the newly liberal liquor laws of Prince Edward Island, allowing children to be present in environments where liquor is being served.


• Window on Eurasia shares suggestions that the government of Ukraine needs to take a much more visible, and active, approach towards protecting its international tourists, for their sake and for the country's.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell talks about the redefinition, at least in the United Kingdom, of Euroskepticism into a movement of extreme suburban nationalists, away from rational critiques of the European Union.

• The suggestion of Maltese academic Godfrey Baldacchino that Malta relieve its overcrowding by buying the nearby Italian island of Pantelleria has the advantage of being attention-catching. Malta Today has it.


• I wish the lawsuit of American Samoans seeking full citizenship in the United States all possible success. NBC News reports.


• Atlas Obscura takes a look at the distinctive history and culture of the Moriori of the Chatham Islands.


• Tasmania turns out to be a hugely popular destination for tourists from China. Bloomberg reports.


• The Newfoundland government's program of relocating marginal settlements remains hugely controversial. CBC reports.

• Charley Ross reports on an unexpected personal involvement in the disappearance of Kori Gossett. Did an informant know?


• Citizen Science Salon reports, in the time of #sharkweek, on the sevengill sharks.


• The Dragon's Tales links to an article on the Chinese base in Sudan.


• Inkfish has a fascinating article describing how New Zealand's giant black swans went extinct, and were replaced.


• Language Hat notes two obscure words of Senegalese French, "laptot" and "signare". What do they mean? Go see.


• Language Log argues that the influx of English loanwords in Chinese is remarkable. Does it signal future changes in language?


• Lawyers, Guns Money notes how Los Angeles and southern California were, during the American Civil War, a stronghold of secessionist sentiment, and runs down some of the problems of Mexico, including the militarization of crime.
  
• Marginal Revolution reports on what books by which authors tend to get stolen from British bookstores.
  
• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer suggests that Donald Trump is not likely to be able to substantially reshape NAFTA.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports from the recent protests in Poland against changes to the Supreme Court.


• Understanding Society takes a look at the structure of the cities of medieval Europe, which apparently were dynamic and flexible.


• Unicorn Booty shares some classic gay board games.


• Window on Eurasia argues that Russia is going to try to wage a repeat of the Winter War on Ukraine.

New Zealand became a British colony in 1841, but white emigration to the island nation, which was inhabited by the native Maori people, didn’t really surge until gold was discovered in 1861. The gold rush saw New Zealand’s population explode in the 1860s from roughly 99,000 at the start of the decade to 256,000 by 1871. The gold rush brought plenty of Californians, and the colony became inundated with a relatively small but rowdy bunch of Americans who didn’t acknowledge any allegiance to the United Kingdom.

As historian Gerald Horne explains in the 2007 book The White Pacific, “When gold was discovered in Otago in 1861, it was the New Zealanders who attracted attention from California to the point where there was very temporary talk of New Zealand becoming a part of the United States. In both England and New Zealand it was widely believed that an independent New Zealand would gravitate toward the U.S. sphere.”

If the small colony of New Zealand had sought independence from Britain in the 1860s or 70s, Americans could well be calling it a territory, or even a state. After all, there were just 33 American states in 1860.

The New Zealand gold rush also happened to coincide with the beginning of the American Civil War. After the war, there was a Confederate diaspora to the South Pacific—former slave owners in the Southern United States who kept up the slave trade in places like Fiji and Australia. Former American Confederates fled to places like New Zealand, which itself had outlawed slavery, but was just a short hop away from where the trade of human beings was still tacitly accepted.

Anywhere from 60,000 to 120,000 slaves were brought to Australia to work in sugar and cotton fields there between the 1860s and 1900, despite the fact that the country officially forbade slavery. Trade skyrocketed between the United States and New Zealand in the second half of the 19th century as a result of this increased activity by Californians and Confederates in the South Pacific—traders trafficking in both the gold rush of human beings, driven by British and American demand for cheap cotton, and the literal gold rush.

When Hong Kong-based financier Michael Nock wanted a place to escape in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, he looked beyond the traditional havens of the rich to a land at the edge of the world, where cows outnumber people two-to-one.

Nock, the founder of hedge fund firm Doric Capital Corp., bought a retreat 5,800 miles away in New Zealand’s picturesque Queenstown. In the seven years since, terror threats in Europe and political uncertainty from Britain to the U.S. have helped make the South Pacific nation -- a day by air away from New York or London -- a popular bolthole for the mega wealthy.

Isolation has long been considered New Zealand’s Achilles heel. That remoteness is turning into an advantage, however, with hedge-fund pioneer Julian Robertson to Russian steel titan Alexander Abramov and Hollywood director James Cameron establishing multi-million dollar hideaways in the New Zealand countryside.

“The thing that was always working against New Zealand -- the tyranny of distance -- is the very thing that becomes its strength as the world becomes more uncertain,” Nock, 60, said by phone from Los Angeles during a recent business trip.

Nock’s 2-hectare (5-acre) estate is named “Giverny” after artist Claude Monet’s iconic home and garden in northern France, and the “funny old farmhouse” is surrounded by ponds and mature plants, he said. Nock is converting a barn into an art studio on the property, which overlooks Queenstown’s Shotover River -- a fast-flowing, turquoise stretch of water that tourists speed down on jet boats and whitewater rafts.

• Beyond the Beyond's notes the imminent end of Moore's law.


• Centauri Dreams imagines what a stellified gas giant might look like.


• D-Brief notes Ceres' lack of large craters and looks at how New Zealand is declaring war on invasive fauna.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at Venus analog Gliese 832d.


• Joe. My. God. notes intensifying scrutiny of Trump's Russian links.


• Language Log looks at the portmanteaux used in the Japanese language.


• The LRB Blog notes Erdogan's many voices.


• Marginal Revolution argues that slow economic growth will not undermine the Chinese system.


• Steve Munro looks at the effects of construction on the 501 Queen.


• The Planetary Society Blog looks at the final landing site of the Rosetta probe.


• pollotenchegg maps wages across Ukraine.


• Savage Minds reports how war can fragment families, looking to Ukraine.


• Transit Toroto notes GO Transit's adding of new double-decker buses.


• The Volokh Conspiracy considers the thesis that Trump is a consequence of the breakdown of traditional political parties.


• Window on Eurasia looks at Daghestan's restriction of movement of "potential" criminals.


• The Yorkshire Ranter searches for a statistical link between austerity and Brexit.

• Bad Astronomy notes the literally cosmic homophobia of Louie Gohmert.


• The Big Picture notes a Chinese factory set to make a fortune off of making masks of the American presidential candidates.


• blogTO notes the raising of the Trans and Pride flags at Toronto City Hall, marking the beginning of Pride month.


• Crooked Timber notes the racism that erased the genealogy of African-Americans.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Britain's NHS has rejected PrEP again.


• Language Log notes the sensitivity of the local version of the name "Pikachu" in Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong.


• The LRB Blog reports from the scene of an active volcano in Nicaragua.


• Marginal Revolution notes that witchcraft apparently does hurt economic progress.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer wonders why New Zealand and Uruguay, with such similar economies, saw such substantial economic divergence after 1950.


• Peter Rukavina reports on an interesting Asian food store in Charlottetown.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes a Russian claim that condoms cause HIV transmission.

Britain’s entry into the Common Market in 1973 was widely considered a betrayal at the time, upending decades of tradition and a host of tariff agreements. Australia was especially hard hit and resentment still lingers.

“The 1970s were a bloodbath for the dairy industry,” said Stephen Henty, a dairy farmer in the Australian state of Victoria. “There was no market for calves, so we were forced to shoot calves and bury them because they weren’t worth anything.”

But that was then.

“We were pretty much tied to the U.K.’s apron strings and when they pulled the pin, we suffered,” he added. “We have a lot more markets where our products are sold into now. The U.K. leaving the EU wouldn’t have any impact this time.”

Just a glance at trade flows speaks volumes. Britain takes only 2.5 per cent of Australia’s exports, China more than 31 per cent. Around 5 per cent of New Zealand’s exports go to Britain, while Canada sends less than 3 per cent of its export there.

The detachment goes both ways, with Canada 19th on the table of export destinations for Britain and Australia a rung behind.

That might mean there is room for growth, but it is not clear what they would trade in. Australia’s biggest single export is iron ore, but Britain has no steel industry.