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.

• Architectuul looks at some architecturally innovative pools.


• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait looks at Wolf 359, a star made famous in Star Trek for the Starfleet battle there against the Borg but also a noteworthy red dwarf star in its own right.


• Centauri Dreams looks at how the NASA Deep Space Atomic Clock will play a vital role in interplanetary navigation.


• The Crux considers the "drunken monkey" thesis, the idea that drinking alcohol might have been an evolutionary asset for early hominids.


• D-Brief reports on what may be the next step for genetic engineering beyond CRISPR.


• Bruce Dorminey looks at how artificial intelligence may play a key role in searching for threat asteroids.


• The Island Review shares some poetry from Roseanne Watt, inspired by the Shetlands and using its dialect.


• Livia Gershon writes at JSTOR Daily about how YouTube, by promising to make work fun, actually also makes fun work in psychologically problematic ways.


• Marginal Revolution notes how the relatively small Taiwan has become a financial superpower.


• Janine di Giovanni at the NYR Daily looks back at the 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone. Why did it work?


• Jamais Cascio at Open the Future looks back at a 2004 futurological exercise, the rather accurate Participatory Panopticon. What did he anticipate correctly? How? What does it suggest for us now to our world?


• The Planetary Society Blog notes that LightSail 2 will launch before the end of June.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel looks at how the discovery of gas between galaxies helps solve a dark matter question.


• Strange Company shares a broad collection of links.


• Window on Eurasia makes the obvious observation that the West prefers a North Caucasus controlled by Russia to one controlled by Islamists.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at American diner culture, including American Chinese food.

• This r/imaginarymaps map depicts a Dutch Formosa crica 1900.


• This creation imagines a joint German-Polish invasion of the Soviet Union.


• this map imagines a different Cold War, with a largely Communist Germany opposed by a Franco-British Union.


• This map of an alternate Cold War circa 1960 that actually made it into a history book as our timeline


• This map shows the remarkably fragmented Central America of Marvel Comics's famous Earth-616.

• Cody Delistraty considers the new field of dystopian realism--of dystopia as a real thing in contemporary lives--in popular culture.


• D-Brief notes how direct experiments in laboratories have helped geologists better understand the mantle of the Earth.


• Far Outliers shares a terribly sad anecdote of a young woman in China who killed herself, victim of social pressures which claim many more victims.


• Imageo notes how recent headlines about ocean temperature increases are misleading in that they did not represent the steady incremental improvements of science generally.


• Joe. My. God. notes the unexpectedly rapid shift of the location of the northern magnetic pole.


• JSTOR Daily links to a paper that links to the quietly subversive aesthetics and politics of the 1950s and 1960s surf movie.


• Language Hat links to an intriguing paper looking at the relationship between the size of an individual's Broca's area, in their brain, and the ways in which they can learn language.


• Language Log shares a poster from Taiwan trying to promote use of the Hakka language, currently a threatened language among traditional speakers.


• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the extreme secrecy of Trump regarding his Helsinki discussions with Putin, going so far as to confiscate his translator's notes.


• Justin Petrone at north! writes about the exhilarating and liberating joys of hope, of fantasy.


• The NYR Daily examines the new Alfonso Cuarón film, the autobiographical Roma.


• Drew Rowsome takes a look at the interesting show by Damien Atkins at Crow's Nest Theatre, We Are Not Alone.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel reports on what a report of the discovery of of the brightest quasar actually means.


• Window on Eurasia notes the historical cooperation, before Operation Barbarossa, between the Nazis' Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD.


• Arnold Zwicky shares a video examining Chavacano, the Spanish-based creole still spoken in the Philippines.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, looking at the Moon, considers what a "small" crater is.


• Citizen Science Salon looks at Amino Labs, a start-up that aims to enable people--even children--to use simple kits to engage in bioengineering.


• Crooked Timber notes that the collapse in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies means good things for the global environment.


• The Crux considers the extent to which gender--gender identity, gendered roles--is unique to humans.


• A Fistful of Euros considers the generalized extremism of the "filets jaunes" of France and where this might lead that country.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing shares the skepticism of Jacques Ellul in a "technical" humanism, one that seeks to ameliorate the details of a dehumanizing life.


• Gizmodo considers how we can start preparing for the risks of powerful artificial intelligence to humans, even potentially existential ones.


• The Island Review interviews Nancy Campbell, a writer concerned with the islands and cultures of the Arctic like Greenland.


• Language Hat considers the idea of "efficient languages". What does this idea even mean?


• Language Log considers the potential impact of making English an official language on Taiwan.


• The LRB Blog considers the political future of France.


• Window on Eurasia notes how many people in Kyrgzystan are becoming angered by China's Xinjiang policies.


• Arnold Zwicky considers St. Bernard, in connection with dogs and otherwise.

• CBC reports on how the New Brunswick village of Shipman briefly gave an official sanction to the so-called "straight pride" flag. What can I say but that rural decline in the Maritimes does not have its good points?


• Mike Miksche at NewNowNext takes a look at flagging, something that is at once nightclubbing activity, performance art, and a uniquely queer sport.


• Hornet Stories notes that "tongzhi," the Chinese word for comrade appropriated by queer men, is no longer used by the Communist Party of China in light of this appropriation.


• CBC takes a look at the new explicitly queer opera by Rufus Wainwright, Hadrian.


• Asia Times notes the disappointing slow progress of LGBTQ rights, including marriage equality, in Taiwan.


• Atlas Obscura takes a look at the history of Florent, the all-night diner in Manhattan's Meatpacking District that watched over a whole generation of LGBTQ history and community.


• S. Bear Bergman writes at the Forward about how the introduction of the Trump administration's anti-trans laws are a Nuremberg Laws moment. Resistance is needed.


• Queerty reports on the news, recently found by scientists, that the genes linked to non-heterosexual orientations are also linked to straight possessors of those genes having more sex. (You're welcome.)

• The death late last month of poet laureate John Smith has left the Island bereft. He was a wonderful man, and is much missed. The Guardian reports.


• 47 acres of land have been bought near Brudenell, PEI, for a Buddhist nuns' monastery. Buddhism is getting deep roots on the Island, I see. The Guardian reports.


• The Filipino tradition of touring churches on Easter Monday has been transplanted to the Island. CBC reports.


• Kevin Yarr reports on the extensive upgrades that Charlottetown's Province House will need, even after the current emergency repairs are finished, over at CBC.


• The Green Party is strengthening its growing roots in Atlantic Canada by appointing Island-born Jo-Ann Roberts as a deputy leader. CBC reports.

• At Anthrodendum, P. Kerim Friedman talks about the technologies he uses to help him navigate Chinese-speaking Taiwan.


• Dead Things notes new dating showing the Neanderthals of Vindija cave, in Croatia, were much older than thought.


• Far Outliers takes a brief look at the history of Temasek, the Malay polity that once thrived in Singapore.


• Hornet Stories shares photos from New York City's Afropunk festival.


• Imageo shows the scale of the devastating wildfires in the western United States, with satellite photos.


• Language Hat looks at the sort of mistakes characteristic of medieval manuscripts written in Latin and Greek.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at Trump's revocation of DACA and the harm that will face the Dreamers. I am so sorry.


• Maximos62 looks at a new book examining how biologists, including Darwin and Wallace, came to draw a borer between Asia and Australia.


• Peter Rukavina blogs about his visit to Wheatley River's Island Honey Wine Company. (Mead, it seems.)


• Strange Company takes a look at the life of violent war-mongering British eccentric Alfred Wintle.


• Window on Eurasia notes the very poor state of sex education in Russia's education system.

Prince Edward Island is becoming home to a growing number of Buddhist nuns, who say the Island is a comfortable place for them to practise their spirituality.

Four years ago, 13 Buddhist nuns moved to the Island from Taiwan. Today, there are 134 at their home on the Uigg Road in eastern P.E.I.

In the next couple of years, they hope to attract about 100 more and move to a new building that will be modelled after a traditional Chinese temple.

"Canada has a great acceptance of different cultures and religions," said Yvonne, one of the nuns at what is called the Great Wisdom Buddhist Institute.

"It is a very good environment to practise and study here, that's why it will attract more nuns from other countries."

The majority are from Taiwan, but some are from Singapore, New Zealand, United States and Canada. The average age is 25.

• Bloomberg notes concern in Asia regarding Brexit, and reports on a Taiwanese call to China to heal from Tiananmen.


• CBC notes a shocking proposal to assemble a human being using an artificial genome.


• io9 notes the interest of the Chinese government in setting up a local science fiction award.


• MacLean's notes Russian crime gangs are blackmailing gay men.


• The National Post observes one suggestion that Stonehenge was originally Welsh, and reports on a Wildrose parliamentarian in Alberta who compared a carbon tax to the Ukrainian genocide.


• Open Democracy examines English identity in the context of Brexit and reports on South America's Operation Condor.


• The Toronto Star reports on an African grey parrot that may be a murder witness and notes Trudeau's statement that preserving indigenous languages is key to preventing youth suicides.