A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the findings that the LISA Pathfinder satellite was impacted by hypervelocity comet fragments.


• Centauri Dreams reports on what we have learned about interstellar comet Borisov.


• Bruce Dorminey notes the ESA's Matisse instrument, capable of detecting nanodiamonds orbiting distant stars.


• Gizmodo reports a new study of the great auk, now extinct, suggesting that humans were wholly responsible for this extinction with their hunting.


• The Island Review links to articles noting the existential vulnerability of islands like Venice and Orkney to climate change.


• Joe. My. God. reports on the claim of Tucker Carlson--perhaps not believably retracted by him--to be supporting Russia versus Ukraine.


• Language Hat reports on the new Indigemoji, emoji created to reflect the culture and knowledge of Aboriginal groups in Australia.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes one of the sad consequences of the American president being a liar.


• James Butler at the LRB Blog writes about the optimism of the spending plans of Labour in the UK, a revived Keynesianism.


• Marginal Revolution notes the exceptional cost of apartments built for homeless people in San Francisco.


• Strange Maps looks at some remarkable gravity anomalies in parts of the US Midwest.


• Towleroad notes the support of Jamie Lee Curtis for outing LGBTQ people who are homophobic politicians.


• Understanding Society looks at organizations from the perspective of them as open systems.


• Whatever's John Scalzi gives a generally positive review of the Pixel 4.


• Arnold Zwicky notes the irony of sex pills at an outpost of British discount chain Poundland.

• CBC Hamilton reports on the options of the City of Hamilton faced with its having hired a prominent former white supremacist.


• CBC Ottawa reports that flood levels on the Ottawa River have reached record highs.


• The Montreal Gazette considers possible solutions to crowding on the Montréal subway, including new cars and special buses.


• Kingston is preparing for flooding, the city seeing a threat only in certain waterfront districts. Global News reports.


• Vancouver is applying a zoning freeze in a future mass transit corridor. Global News reports.


• CityLab looks at how the post-war dream of mass transit and densification for the Ohio city of Toledo never came about, and how it might now.


• Guardian Cities looks at construction proposals for New York City that never were.


• CityLab looks at how the California ghost town of Bodie is kept in good shape for tourists.


• Vox notes that just over one in ten thousand people in San Francisco is a billionaire.


• Leonid Bershidsky at Bloomberg considers why productivity in Berlin lags behind that in other European capital cities. Could it be that the young workers of Berlin are not devoted to earning income?

• them interviews Troy Lee Hudson, the engineer working on NASA's InSight Mars who has gone viral as #ScienceDaddy, letting him talk about Mars and about being an out scientist.


• Stefanie Duguay at The Conversation writes about how the new Tumblr ban on NSFW content will harm young LGBTQ people, by depriving them of community and information.


• Rinaldo Walcott at Daily Xtra makes the case for downsizing Pride Toronto to better fit community needs and desires.


• The Canadian federal government has created a new Canada Pride Citation, available to present and past LGBTQ employees of the federal government, including many who were persecuted for their sexual orientation. Global News reports.


• them reports on how gentrification in the leather community in San Francisco impacts the wider city.

• Centauri Dreams notes new findings suggesting that low metallicity in stars is linked to the formation of multi-planet systems, including systems with multiple small planets perhaps not unlike Earth.


• D-Brief notes that the potentially detectable S1 dark matter stream is heading past the Earth.


• Far Outliers reports on a visit of samurai to San Francisco in 1860.


• JSTOR Daily notes the wollemi pine of Australia, an ancient tree around in the era of the (non-avian) dinosaurs.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes yet another instance of the decidedly unimpressive leadership of Donald Trump in office.


• Lingua Franca looks at the emergence of an interesting linguistic tic in English, "regular" as in "like a regular William Safire".


• Marginal Revolution looks at how government propaganda in Rwanda aimed to minimize ethnic tensions and the salience of ethnic identity seems to have actually worked.


• The NYR Daily looks how at the English nationalism that has inspired Brexit is indifferent to the loss of Northern Ireland.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shows how crop data from the United States and Europe can be transformed into abstract art.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russia is responding to the Ecumenical Patriarchate's recognition of a Ukrainian church by trying to organize a Russian church in its territory of Turkey.


• Arnold Zwicky explores the word "teknonymy", "the practice of referring to parents by the names of their children".

• That the real estate market in Hamilton, Toronto's traditionally more affordable western neighbor, is so strong that some people have been pushed into homelessness is a concern. The Toronto Star reports.


• Iqaluit is acting to deal with the threatened water shortages, but will it succeed in time to hold off this concern? MacLean's reports.


• This Bloomberg View article suggesting the unaffordability of San Francisco came not so much as a result of the tech sector as because of Barry Bonds' sports success is interesting. Thoughts?


• The extended fire season of Sydney, Australia, will force Sydneysiders to adapt to this dangerous new environment. Guardian Cities reports.


• The SCMP looks at how an influx of Chinese investment is transforming Sihanoukville, the leading deep-sea port of Cambodia.

• If ever I make it to Detroit, the John K King bookstore would surely be a must-visit. Atlas Obscura reports.


• Metropolis, Illinois, is celebrating Superman. Where better to do so? Wired reports.


• Seattle, like so many cities around North America, is apparently facing a gentrification that makes it increasingly uncomfortable for too many. Crosscut has it.


• The San Francisco Bay area community of Foster City faces imminent danger from rising sea levels. CBC reports.


• Decades after the horrors of the mid-1990s, dogs in the Rwandan capital of Kigali are starting to be treated as potential pets again. National Geographic reports.

• The Guardian reports on the Michigan town of Bay View, a community that literally forbids non-Christians from holding property locally.


• Net migration from the San Francisco area seems to be accelerating, with unaffordability being commonly cited as explanation. CBS reports.


• Will rapid wage increases in Houston be enough to protect the labour market of the city if much-needed undocumented workers are forced out in significant numbers? Bloomberg reports.


• Data from smartphones is being used to simulate what might happen if Washington D.C. was subjected to a nuclear attack. VICE reports.


• The tourist agencies of Montréal and Québec City are having a cute little online exchange. Global News reports.

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about the long process of planning and work--almost two years!--going into the production of a trade non-fiction book.


• Centauri Dreams touches upon the new European Southern Observatory ExTrA telescope that will study Earth-like planets of red dwarfs, and shares a new model indicating the likely watery nature of the outer planets of TRAPPIST-1.


• D-Brief takes a look inside the unsettlingly thorough data-collection machineries of home assistants like Google Home and Alexa.


• JSTOR Daily looks at a paper examining the long and complicated process by which, through trade and empire, the United Kingdom ended up embracing tea.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money pays tribute to Ursula K Le Guin and Mark E. Smith of the Fall.


• Marginal Revolution links to a source arguing that regulatory costs have played the biggest role in the sharp increase of housing prices in California (and elsewhere?).


• The NYR Daily considers if Pope Francis' shocking willingness to make excuses for the abetters of child abuse in Chile has anything to do with his relationship, as an Argentine, to his home country's complicated past of church collaboration with the military regime of the dirty war.


• Out There considers what, exactly, would happen to a person if they stood completely still in relation to the universe. Where would they go (or, more accurately, where would the universe go without them)?


• The Planetary Society Blog reports on the preparations of the New Horizons probe for its encounter, at the very start of 2019, with Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69.


• Peter Rukavina shares beautiful posters he made out of last year's map calendar.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that, although the multiverse is almost certainly real, its existence hardly solves the pressing problems of physics.


• Towleroad describes Reverend Raymond Broshears, a gay preacher in San Francisco who, after one beating in 1973, organized the vigilante Lavender Panthers to defend the community and to fight back. Complicated man, he, with a complicated legacy.


• Arnold Zwicky looks into the latest sociological and psychological research on the especially warm friendships that can exist between gay men and straight women. What factors are at work?

San Francisco is one of the most progressive cities in the nation, especially when it comes to national immigration. We believe so much in the natural right of people to join us here in America that we fought to keep our status as sanctuary city even in the face of being federally defunded for it. We pride ourselves on our rejection of plans to tighten immigration controls and deport undocumented immigrants. Yet take that same conversation to the local level and all bets are off. City meetings have become heated, divisive and prone to rhetoric where we openly discuss exactly which kinds of people we want to keep out of our city.

This is an ethically incoherent position. If we in San Francisco so strongly believe that national immigration is a human right, then it seems strange to block migration into our own neighborhoods.

Consider the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ decision to challenge the environmental review of a proposed housing project at 1515 Van Ness Ave. Despite the project’s plan to rent 25 percent of its units at a below-market rate, many members of the neighborhood preservation group, Calle 24, expressed anger that the project might bring tech workers into the Latino Cultural District.

Or that members of the Forest Hill homeowners association opposed a project that would build affordable housing for seniors and the formerly homeless on a site now occupied by a church. One of the grievances aired was that it might bring mentally unstable or drug-addicted people into the neighborhood.

Public transit riders in the San Francisco Bay Area often find subways so congested that they take trains in the opposite direction so when they get off and swing around, they’ll have a seat to beat the horde of people travelling during rush hour.

Ridership is surging, Bay Area Rapid Transit spokeswoman Alicia Trost said, to the point where the transit organization has begun bribing riders with cash to avoid taking the subway during rush hour.

“The number of riders we’re having right now…it’s like when the (San Francisco) Giants win and there’s a World Series parade.”

To combat an average of 430,000 weekday trips and a 30 per cent increase in ridership since 2010, BART has introduced a points-based perks system which offers its riders cash payouts if they avoid the daily 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. rush hour.

During a six-month trial, riders will be given one point per mile travelled on the subway. They need to travel 1,000 miles to earn US$1. Trips one hour before the rush hour and one hour after earn riders between three and six points per mile. The more commuters ride, the more they can advance through different rewards categories and begin to earn more points. Fares are paid with electronic payment cards and points are also tracked using the technology. At the end of the month, the points can be cashed out or gambled in a “Spin to Win” game with prizes of up to US$100.