A Bit More Detail

• Charlie Stross at Antipope shares an essay he recently presented on artificial intelligence and its challenges for us.


• P. Kerim Friedman writes at {anthro}dendum about the birth of the tea ceremony in the Taiwan of the 1970s.


• Anthropology net reports on a cave painting nearly 44 thousand years old in Indonesia depicting a hunting story.


• Architectuul looks at some temporary community gardens in London.


• Bad Astronomy reports on the weird history of asteroid Ryugu.


• The Buzz talks about the most popular titles borrowed from the Toronto Public Library in 2019.


• Caitlin Kelly talks at the Broadside Blog about her particular love of radio.


• Centauri Dreams talks about the role of amateur astronomers in searching for exoplanets, starting with LHS 1140 b.


• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber looks at what is behind the rhetoric of "virtue signalling".


• Dangerous Minds shares concert performance from Nirvana filmed the night before the release of Nevermind.


• Bruce Dorminey notes new evidence that, even before the Chixculub impact, the late Cretaceous Earth was staggering under environmental pressures.


• Myron Strong at the Everyday Sociology Blog writes about how people of African descent in the US deal with the legacies of slavery in higher education.


• Far Outliers reports on the plans in 1945 for an invasion of Japan by the US.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing gathers together a collection of the author's best writings there.


• Gizmodo notes the immensity of the supermassive black hole, some 40 billion solar masses, at the heart of galaxy Holm 15A 700 million light-years away.


• Russell Arben Fox at In Media Res writes about the issue of how Wichita is to organize its civic politics.


• io9 argues that the 2010s were a decade where the culture of the spoiler became key.


• The Island Review points readers to the podcast Mother's Blood, Sister's Songs, an exploration of the links between Ireland and Iceland.


• Joe. My. God. reports on the claim of the lawyer of the killer of a mob boss that the QAnon conspiracy inspired his actions. This strikes me as terribly dangerous.


• JSTOR Daily looks at a study examining scholarly retractions.


• Language Hat shares an amusing cartoon illustrating the relationships of the dialects of Arabic.


• Language Log lists ten top new words in the Japanese language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the dissipation of American diplomacy by Trump.


• The LRB Blog looks at the many problems in Sparta, Greece, with accommodating refugees, for everyone concerned.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting the decline of the one-child policy in China has diminished child trafficking, among other crimes.


• Sean Marshall, looking at transit in Brampton, argues that transit users need more protection from road traffic.


• Russell Darnley shares excerpts from essays he wrote about the involvement of Australia in the Vietnam War.


• Peter Watts talks about his recent visit to a con in Sofia, Bulgaria, and about the apocalypse, here.


• The NYR Daily looks at the corporatization of the funeral industry, here.


• Diane Duane writes, from her own personal history with Star Trek, about how one can be a writer who ends up writing for a media franchise.


• Jim Belshaw at Personal Reflections considers the job of tasting, and rating, different cuts of lamb.


• The Planetary Society Blog looks at a nondescript observatory in the Mojave desert of California that maps the asteroids of the solar system.


• Roads and Kingdoms interviews Eduardo Chavarin about, among other things, Tijuana.


• Drew Rowsome loves the SpongeBob musical.


• Peter Rukavina announces that Charlottetown has its first public fast charger for electric vehicles.


• The Russian Demographics Blog considers the impact of space medicine, here.


• The Signal reports on how the Library of Congress is making its internet archives more readily available, here.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers how the incredibly isolated galaxy MCG+01-02-015 will decay almost to nothing over almost uncountable eons.


• Strange Company reports on the trial and execution of Christopher Slaughterford for murder. Was there even a crime?


• Strange Maps shares a Coudenhove-Kalergi map imagining the division of the world into five superstates.


• Understanding Society considers entertainment as a valuable thing, here.


• Denis Colombi at Une heure de peine announces his new book, Où va l'argent des pauvres?


• John Scalzi at Whatever looks at how some mailed bread triggered a security alert, here.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the massive amount of remittances sent to Tajikistan by migrant workers, here.


• Arnold Zwicky notes a bizarre no-penguins sign for sale on Amazon.

Prime Minister David Cameron said Wednesday he will offer British citizens a vote on whether to leave the European Union if his party wins the next election, a move which could trigger alarm among fellow member states.

He acknowledged that public disillusionment with the EU is "at an all-time high," using a long-awaited speech in central London to say that the terms of Britain's membership in the bloc should be revised and the country's citizens should have a say.

Cameron proposed Wednesday that his Conservative Party renegotiate the U.K.'s relationship with the European Union if it wins the next general election, expected in 2015.

"Once that new settlement has been negotiated, we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in or out choice to stay in the EU on these new terms. Or come out altogether," Cameron said. "It will be an in-out referendum."

[. . .] Cameron stressed that his first priority is renegotiating the EU treaty — not leaving the bloc.

"I say to our European partners, frustrated as some of them no doubt are by Britain's attitude: work with us on this," he said.

Much of the criticism directed at Cameron has accused him of trying an "a la carte" approach to membership in the bloc and seeking to play by some but not all of its rules.

• Much of British history towards political Europe is ill-informed. One thing that frequently comes up in Euroskeptic discourse is a hostility towards the European Court of Human Rights, a supranational legal institution associated not with the European Union but with the entirely separate Council of Europe. Too much critical detail goes unnoticed, or unknown.


• Much like Québec separatists who confidently assume that after a "Oui" majority in a referendum the province could negotiate whatever arrangement it would like with a rump Canada, even a nominally pro-European Union politician like David Cameron seems to be making the mistake of assuming that a threat of separation will lead Britain's European partners to make whatever changes the British government might want. I'm very skeptical of this. Perhaps more likely is a complete breakdown of the federation--in their own ways, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia came apart when this brinkmanship occurred.


• Many British Euroskeptics also seem to believe that, if the United Kingdom left the European Union, not only the United States but the entire Commonwealth would welcome the erstwhile founder of the Anglo-Saxon world. I can speak only for Canada, but there is no body of radically pro-Commonwealth sentiment in Canada. Canadian identity is no longer bound up with the Commonwealth in the way it was a half-century ago. If anything, British departure from the European Union would make the United Kingdom a less desirable partner relative to other European countries of a similar size.


• British departure from the European Union would be a catastrophe for the country. Unless a non-EU United Kingdom follows the lead of Switzerland and Norway in accepting European Union regulations while lacking any voice in formulating them, the United Kingdom will be outside of the various markets. What will happen to, among other things, Britain's financial sector? (Frankfurt and Dublin will do nicely.)


• I can't help but wonder what the consequences for Scotland might be if Britain departed. Could we get a Scottish separatism invigorated by the desire to remain in, or return to, the European Union?

Mozambique invites Brazilian soy, corn and cotton growers to plant on its savanna and introduce their farming know-how to sub-Saharan Africa, the head of Mato Grosso state’s cotton producers association Ampa said on Monday.

Brazil has been successfully growing crops on its centre-west plains since a breakthrough in tropical soybeans in the 1980s unlocked the productive potential of the expansive region by breeding soy to grow closer to equatorial regions.

While Mozambique possesses similar climatic and soil characteristics, Amapa president Carlos Ernesto Augustin told Reuters that some areas in the country on the southeast coast of Africa even had more fertile soils than Brazil.

“The price of the land there is too good to ignore,” said Mr. Augustin, who added that the risks inherent in buying Brazilian land as a producer were enormous because of high costs and stiff environmental regulations.

Producers who are granted concessions to plant would be required only to pay a tax of 21 reais per hectare ($5.30/acre U.S.), and would receive an exemption from import tariffs on farm equipment.

Prime productive land in Brazil’s developed south can run to 35,000 reais a hectare, compared with 5,000 reais in the extreme frontier regions of the centre-west and northeast savannas, where infrastructure is poor. Brazil’s import tariffs on farm equipment can also be steep.

[. . .]

“Mozambique is probably going to look a lot like Mato Grosso [Brazil’s leading soy state] 40 years ago,” Mr. Augustin said. “We are well-acquainted with the challenges of this type of frontier farming. Transport will be a concern.”