A Bit More Detail

• Anthro{dendum} features an essay examining trauma and resiliency as encountered in ethnographic fieldwork.


• Architectuul highlights a new project seeking to promote historic churches built in the United Kingdom in the 20th century.


• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait examines Ahuna Mons, a muddy and icy volcano on Ceres, and looks at the nebula Westerhout 40.


• Centauri Dreams notes the recent mass release of data from a SETI project, and notes the discovery of two vaguely Earth-like worlds orbiting the very dim Teegarden's Star, just 12 light-years away.


• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber notes that having universities as a safe space for trans people does not infringe upon academic freedom.


• The Crux looks at the phenomenon of microsleep.


• D-Brief notes evidence that the Milky Way Galaxy was warped a billion years ago by a collision with dark matter-heavy dwarf galaxy Antlia 2, and notes a robotic fish powered by a blood analogue.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that India plans on building its own space station.


• Earther notes the recording of the song of the endangered North Pacific right whale.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the role of emotional labour in leisure activities.


• Far Outliers looks at how Japan prepared for the Battle of the Leyte Gulf in 1944.


• Gizmodo looks at astronomers' analysis of B14-65666, an ancient galactic collision thirteen billion light-years away, and notes that the European Space Agency has a planned comet interception mission.


• io9 notes how the plan for Star Trek in the near future is to not only have more Star Trek, but to have many different kinds of Star Trek for different audiences.


• Joe. My. God. notes the observation of Pete Buttigieg that the US has probably already had a gay president.


• JSTOR Daily looks at the many ways in which the rhetoric of Celtic identity has been used, and notes that the archerfish uses water ejected from its eyes to hunt.


• Language Hat looks at why Chinese is such a hard language to learn for second-language learners, and looks at the Suso monastery in Spain, which played a key role in the coalescence of the Spanish language.


• Language Log looks at the complexities of katakana.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the death of deposed Egypt president Mohammed Morsi looks like a slow-motion assassination, and notes collapse of industrial jobs in the Ohio town of Lordstown, as indicative of broader trends.


• The LRB Blog looks at the death of Mohamed Morsi.


• The Map Rom Blog shares a new British Antarctic Survey map of Greenland and the European Arctic.


• Marginal Revolution notes how non-religious people are becoming much more common in the Middle East, and makes the point that the laying of cable for the transatlantic telegraph is noteworthy technologically.


• Noah Smith at Noahpionion takes the idea of the Middle East going through its own version of the Thirty Years War seriously. What does this imply?


• The NYR Daily takes a look at a Lebanon balanced somehow on the edge, and looks at the concentration camp system of the United States.


• The Planetary Society Blog explains what people should expect from LightSail 2, noting that the LightSail 2 has launched.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw points readers to his stories on Australian spy Harry Freame.


• Rocky Planet explains, in the year of the Apollo 50th anniversary, why the Moon matters.


• Drew Rowsome reviews, and praises, South African film Kanarie, a gay romp in the apartheid era.


• The Russian Demographics Blog links to a paper examining the relationship between childcare and fertility in Belgium, and looks at the nature of statistical data from Turkmenistan.


• The Strange Maps Blog shares a map highlighting different famous people in the United States.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why different galaxies have different amounts of dark matter, and shares proof that the Apollo moon landings actually did happen.


• Towleroad notes the new evidence that poppers, in fact, are not addictive.


• Window on Eurasia warns about the parlous state of the Volga River.


• Arnold Zwicky takes an extended look at the mid-20th century gay poet Frank O'Hara.

• Centauri Dreams extends further consideration the roles that artificial intelligences might play in interstellar exploration.


• D-Brief notes that the genes associated with being a night owl also seem to be associated with poor mental health outcomes.


• Far Outliers looks at the lifeboat system created on the upper Yangtze in the late 19th century.


• Kashmir Hill, writing at Gizmodo, notes how blocking Google from her phone left her online experience crippled.


• Imageo notes that, even if halted, global warming still means that many glaciers well melt as they respond to temperature changes.


• JSTOR Daily looks at the racism that permeated ads in 19th century North America.


• Language Hat looks at how some Turkish-speaking Christians transcribed the Turkish language in the Greek alphabet.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how utterly ineffective the Trump Administration's new refugee waiver system actually is.


• The LRB Blog looks at the film and theatre career of Lorenza Mazetti.


• Marginal Revolution notes, in passing, the import of being a YouTube celebrity.


• Molly Crabapple at the NYR Daily writes about the work of the New Sanctuary coalition, which among other things waits with refugees in court as they face their hearings.


• The Speed River Journal's Van Waffle looks for traces of the elusive muskrat.


• Towleroad shares footage of New Order performing the early song "Ceremony" in 1981.


• Transit Toronto notes that Metrolinx now has an app for Presto up!


• At Vintage Space, Amy Shira Teitel looks at the Soviet Moon exploration program in 1969.


• Window on Eurasia notes the new pressures being placed by rising Islamism and instability in Afghanistan upon Turkmenistan.


• Arnold Zwicky considers, briefly, the little is known about the lives of 1980s gay porn stars Greg Patton and Bobby Pyron. How did they lead their lives?

• At Anthropology.net, Kambiz Kamrani notes the Qesem caves of Israel, where four hundred thousand years ago hominids learned to make tools.


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that star S2 is about to plunge to its closest approach to Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the heart of our galaxy, and what this means for science.


• Centauri Dreams takes a look at research done on Earth about the atmospheres of super-Earths.


• D-Brief takes a look at the recent research done on the regions on the edges of supermassive black holes.


• Bruce Dorminey notes that the Juno science team thinks that Jupiter probe has exceeded expectations.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the evidence for a massive migration from the steppes into Europe circa 3300 BCE.


• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas makes the argument that the idea of humane technology is something of an oxymoron.


• Imageo notes evidence that permafrost will melt more quickly than previous predicted under the impact of global warming.


• JSTOR Daily looks at explanations for the unusually strong activism among high school students in East Los Angeles in the 1960s.


• Language Hat looks at evidence for the close relationship, in vocabulary and even in grammar, between the Turkish and Western Armenian languages now separated by bad blood.


• Lingua Franca notes how easy it is to change conventions on language use--like pronouns, say--at a well-functioning institution.


• Marginal Revolution looks at the economic progress made, after a recent lull, by Ghana.


• The NYR Daily looks at the growing involvement of the United States in small wars in Africa, starting with Niger and Cameroon.


• Justin Petrone at north! reports on a family visit to his ancestral home of Bari, seeing what little remains of the past there.


• Peter Rukavina wonders, apropos of a very successful experience shopping online at Amazon, how anyone else will be able to compete.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers the difference between mathematics and physics. Where is the line to be drawn?


• Strange Maps' Frank Jacobs maps obesity in the United States and in Europe.


• Towleroad reports on the apparent interest of actor Cynthia Nixon in becoming governor of New York.


• John Scalzi at Whatever is a big fan of A Wrinkle in Time, a movie that is not perfect but is still quite good. I'm curious to see it myself.


• Window on Eurasia reports on food riots in isolated Turkmenistan.

[I]t has been clear for some time, and recent news reports confirm it, that the Russian language is steadily losing ground in Central Asia in educational institutions and in much of the media throughout Central Asia. To be sure, Moscow is trying to counter this, for instance with recent attempts to saturate the Kazakh media. Yet this trend towards establishing the primacy of national cultures and languages at the expense of Russian builds on twenty years of steady nationalization of the culture of these states as a matter of deliberate policy, on their deliberate efforts to maintain an openness to the larger globalizing trends in the world economy, and on a generation of growing restrictions on Russian language use in broadcasting and other media.

Of course, Central Asian leaders will not publicly attack the use of Russian language or create situations that could tempt Moscow to intervene in Central Asia on the same pretexts as it employed in Ukraine. But while the invasion of Ukraine created and still generates considerable anxiety in Central Asia, the crisis that Russia faces as a result of its action makes intervention in Central Asia a less likely prospect for the foreseeable future. Given the steep economic decline Russia has experienced following its Ukrainian adventure a third front on top of Ukraine and the North Caucasus is the last thing Moscow seeks. Nonetheless, leaders like Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev point with pride to the growth of Kazakh as the native language and more younger students are preferring English or Chinese to Russian.

In Kyrgyzstan, a recent report showed different forces at work but similar outcomes. The poverty of the Kyrgyz school system means that despite Russian claims of large-scale support for Russian-language teaching abroad, means that only 11 percent of Kyrgyz students are going to superior Russian schools in that republic. Students otherwise are not learning Russian and competent teachers are hard to find. All this, of course, generates a vicious cycle. Similarly, in December 2013, Veniamin Kaganov, Russia’s deputy education minister, was quoted in Tass as saying that the number of Russian speakers had fallen by 100 million since the break up of the Soviet Union. Neither is this outcome unique to Kyrgyzstan or Central Asia. Although globalization certainly plays a role here, all these states have taken serious policy steps since 1991 to create a stronger sense of national identity among their peoples, a policy line that inevitably translates into privileging native languages over Russian and English and now Chinese over it as well.

This outcome strongly suggests that while state support for the propagation of he Russian language abroad is a point in Russia’s 2009 national security strategy, Moscow is apparently steadily if somewhat unobtrusively failing to achieve its goals. And this testifies to a continuing failure to actualize Russia’s soft power despite an enormous state investment. The manifestations of this failure may be quiet and not immediately visible but they do point to the steady erosion over time of Russian power of all kinds in Central Asia, although its military capabilities there remain potentially formidable.

• Anders Sandberg argues that there are good reasons to think that, even embedded in hive minds, individuals may keep some measure of privacy.


• James Bow found Legoland Toronto, in Vaughan Mills, disappointing. A pity; Vaughan is so much closer for me than Niagara Falls.


• Crooked Timber's Daniel Davies posts another choose-your-own-adventure-style guide to the latest iteration of the Eurozone crisis, this one focusing on Cyprus.


• Daniel Drezner claims that the lack of bank runs, stock market collapses, or much else after the announcement of the Cypriot bank account haircut shows that the global financial system is more stable and mature than estimated.


• The Dragon's Tales Will Baird announces that the Neandertal genome is online and publically available.


• Geocurrents maps the various expensive and (likely) failed water-related geoengineering projects of Turkmenistan.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer thinks that the risks behind Japan's mining of methane hydrates on the seafloor make such activity dangerous, but also thinks natural gas costs are such that it won't be viable.


• Torontoist covers a Syrian-Canadian protest calling for intervention in the Syrian civil war.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little considers the ways in which black Americans fare more poorly than their white counterparts, noting that explicit racial animus is not necessary.


• Zero Geography maps the origins of edits to Wikipedia's Egypt pages.

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster considers recent research suggesting that hypothetical "waterworlds"--broadly Earth-like planets with very large amounts of water, covering their rocky surfaces entirely--might in fact enter into "moist greenhouse" phases that would see their excess of water evaporate, leaving an Earth-like planet with an Earth-like combination of rocky and watery surfaces behind.


• Geocurrents' Nicholas Baldo highlights various bodies of watyer with exceptionally high salt content, from Antarctica to Turkmenistan.


• Language Hat notes some interesting linguistic soupçons, unusual loanwords and the ease of post-war travel and the like, in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey.


• In one post at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis starts a discussion about continuing high levels of inequality in South Africa as evidenced by the recent massacre of miners, while Scott Lemieux starts a discussion about misogyny in the United States' Republican Party as illustrated by Akin's heinous comments.


• New APPS Blog's Mohan Matthen takes significant issue with Perry Anderson's recent criticisms of Gandhi and Nehru in the London Review of Books.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer argues from Canada's existing experience embedded in international property rights protection law regimes that ratifying the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes Convention won't change anything.


• Registan's Casey Michel is unimpressed with pro-Wikileaks Uzbekistan critic Craig Murray's use of his own wife's rape to attack Assange's accusers.


• Supernova Condensate's invaderxan presents his own, purely mass-based, classification of celestial objects in response to the ongoing dwarf planet controversy.


• Daniel Little at Understanding Society presents an interesting argument from a pair of sociologists in 2007 to the effect that political polarization can more often be not be an artifact of perception.

• Laura Agustín takes note of Chinese prostitutes in Kinshasa who, after being taken from their brothel by police, demanded to be allowed to return.


• After too long an absence, Will Baird of The Dragon's Tales comes back with an analysis of the new Chinese stealth fighter, the J-20/JXX. It looks good.


• At Far Outliers, Joel points to the substantial number of Japanese soldiers in post-war Indonesia who tried to settle down, as rebels against the Dutch or simply as farmers.


• The Global Sociology Blog takes a look at Durkheim's theory of suicide, specifically "fatalistic suicide" driven by an individual's despair with his or her society, classifed by him as a marginal type. The author takes a look at the example of Afghan women who burn themselves to death, and wonders how marginal that is.


• Mark Liberman of Language Log examines the origins of the word "overspoke," used by Tucker Carlson to explaibn his call for Michael Vick's death. It turns out it dates back to the early 20th century.


• The Long Game's Matt Warren describes a rather ghastly/amusing Christmas special, which starts with Pac-Man's starring role.


• Behind the Numbers' Eric Zuehlke notices the significant correlation between obesity and the lack of ready access to supermarkets.


• Slap Upside the Head comments on how, after missing the fact for years, the Albertan health ministry has finally delisted homosexuality as an illness.


• Window on Eurasia presents an analysis of Turkmenistan that focuses on the country's clans as the dominant unit of social life, suggesting a certain amount of turnover and the likelihood that opposition to the current regime can be found in these recently excluded clans.