A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomy notes the mystery of distant active galaxy SDSS J163909+282447.1, with a supermassive black hole but few stars.


• Centauri Dreams shares a proposal from Robert Buckalew for craft to engage in planned panspermia, seeding life across the galaxy.


• The Crux looks at the theremin and the life of its creator, Leon Theremin.


• D-Brief notes that termites cannibalize their dead, for the good of the community.


• Dangerous Minds looks at William Burroughs' Blade Runner, an adaptation of a 1979 science fiction novel by Alan Nourse.


• Bruce Dorminey notes a new study explaining how the Milky Way Galaxy, and the rest of the Local Group, was heavily influenced by its birth environment.


• JSTOR Daily looks at why the Chernobyl control room is now open for tourists.


• Dale Campos at Lawyers. Guns and Money looks at the effects of inequality on support for right-wing politics.


• James Butler at the LRB Blog looks at the decay and transformation of British politics, with Keith Vaz and Brexit.


• Marginal Revolution shares a paper explaining why queens are more warlike than kings.


• Omar G. Encarnación at the NYR Daily looks at how Spain has made reparations to LGBTQ people for past homophobia. Why should the United States not do the same?


• Corey S. Powell at Out There shares his interview with physicist Sean Carroll on the reality of the Many Worlds Theory. There may be endless copies of each of us out there. (Where?)


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why 5G is almost certainly safe for humans.


• Strange Company shares a newspaper clipping reporting on a haunting in Wales' Plas Mawr castle.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps looks at all the different names for Africa throughout the years.


• The Volokh Conspiracy considers, in the case of the disposal of eastern Oklahoma, whether federal Indian law should be textualist. (They argue against.)


• Window on Eurasia notes the interest of the government of Ukraine in supporting Ukrainians and other minorities in Russia.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at syntax on signs for Sloppy Joe's.

The tale of how an amateur archaeologist’s hunch led him to uncover a lost medieval town and spend £32,000 of his own money to buy the land, would stand to be the archaeological discovery of any year. On the border between England and Wales, the site of the medieval town of Trellech reveals much about a tumultuous period of history – and how the town came to be lost.

The story begins in 2004, when archaeology graduate Stuart Wilson began his search for this lost medieval town in Monmouthshire, south-east Wales, near where now only a small village bears the name. In the face of scepticism from academic archaeologists, Wilson’s years of work have been vindicated with the discovery of a moated manor house, a round stone tower, ancillary buildings, and a wealth of smaller finds including pottery from the 1200s.

The town could turn out to be one of the largest in medieval Wales, and while there is more work to be done, the evidence is building. The large number of finds – including metalwork, cooking vessels and decorated pottery – point to a large settlement, and are essential in helping archaeologists date the site. What they suggest is a short-lived but intensive period of occupation between the 12th and early 15th centuries, during which the town was founded by the De Clare family as an industrial centre and later destroyed during the Owain Glyndwr rebellion in 1400. This was a period of instability on the Welsh border, with conflict between rival Welsh princes and the English throne. Settlements like Trellech would become the focus of such clashes, culminating in Glyndwr’s rebellion.

What makes the lost city of Trellech so important is its rarity and the quality of its preservation. Most large medieval settlements in England and Wales are still towns and cities to this day. This means archaeological investigations of medieval London or York for example are difficult and expensive, and can only occur piecemeal as urban redevelopment allows excavation of small areas. If Trellech turns out to be an extensive town, it will be a unique and important site. As archaeology is key to understanding the lives of everyday people who are ignored by the histories of the great and the good, sites like Trellech are the only way we gain these insights.

• Bloomberg notes Ireland's huge unexpected recent reported growth, looks at the deindustrialization of Israel, observes Deutsche Bank's need to search for wealth abroad, looks at the demographic imperatives that may keep healthy Japanese working until they are 80, notes the slipping ANC grip on Pretoria and looks at the rise of anti-Muslim Pauline Hanson in Australia, and predicts Brexit could kill the London property boom.


• Bloomberg View calls for calm in the South China Sea.


• CBC notes some idiot YouTube adventurers who filmed themselves doing stupid, even criminal, things in different American national parks.


• The Globe and Mail reports on the plans for a test tidal turbine in the Bat of Fundy by 2017.


• MacLean's looks at the heckling of a gay musician in Halifax and reports on the civil war in South Sudan.


• The New York Times looks at the new xenophobia in the east English town of Boston.


• Open Democracy notes that talk of a working class revolt behind Brexit excludes non-whites, and reports on alienation on the streets of Wales.


• Wired looks at how some cash-strapped American towns are tearing up roads they cannot afford to maintain.

• 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.

• Alpha Sources' Claus Vistesen argues that as a result of various factors including shrinking populations, economic bubbles are going to be quite likely.


• blogTO argues that Toronto's strip clubs are in trouble.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly wonders who is going to pay for journalism in the future.


• Centauri Dreams looks at ringed Centaur objects.


• Crooked Timber's Daniel Davies describes his family's recent experience in New Zealand. Want to find out how the Maori are like the Welsh?


• D-Brief notes the return of wood bison to the United States.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting Alpha Centauri Bb is a superdense world.


• The Dragon's Tales note Indonesia's upset with Chinese claims to the South China Sea.


• Far Outliers reports on how NGOs feed corruption in Cambodia.


• Language Hat links to a gazetteer of placenames in Jamaica.


• Language Log's Victor Mair looks at some Sino-English constructions.


• Marginal Revolution points to its collection of Singapore-related posts.


• The Planetary Society Blog considers Cassini's footage of Saturn's F ring.


• The Power and the Money hosts Will Baird's argument that the Ukrainian east will soon see an explosion of violence.


• Spacing Toronto and Torontoist look at the architectural competition for the Toronto Islands ferry terminal.


• Torontoist reports on Martin Luther King's 1962 visit to Toronto.


• Towleroad notes a raging syphillis epidemic among gay men in New York City's Chelsea neighbourhood.


• Window on Eurasia notes changes in the Islam of Tatarstan, notes Russia's transition towards totalitarianism, observes Russian claims of Finnish meddling in Karelia, and looks at polls suggesting Ukrainians fear Russia but do not trust the European Union.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell describes what seems to have been a shambolic attempt to co-opt the English Defense League somehow. (I don't understand it. All I can figure out is that.

• The Toronto Star notes that Mississauga is celebrating its 40th anniversary with--among other things--a new logo.


• The Atlantic Cities shares photos of a Soviet Second World War memorial that keeps getting repainted as a form of political graffiti and notes that banks of offshore windfarms could conceivably cut down the strength of hurricanes.


• The Guardian notes the slave-like conditions that less privileged foreign workers suffer in Qatar.


• The CBC notes that the roommates of Loretta Saunders--the Inuk student found murdered in New Brunswick--have both been charged with first-degree murder.


• National Geographic examines the consequences of a storm in Wales that uncovered a storied forest.


• BusinessWeek shows how many prominent Ukrainians have been living in luxury, with extensive property holdings throughout Europe.

If, then, Scotland departs from the Union, there is no more Great Britain, and all pretensions of British nationhood fall away. But the / a United Kingdom could remain, albeit perhaps renamed the ‘United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland’. So Tim Luckhurst was wrong when he suggested in a discussion on Radio Four’s ‘Today’ programme today that all UK citizens should have a say on Scottish independence in a referendum because Scottish independence would mean the end of the UK, which Luckhurst regards as his ‘nation’. He is not wrong in suggesting the need for a UK-wide referendum but is wrong in asserting that the UK would be broken up by Scottish independence: it’s Britain that would be finished, but the UK could continue in a new form.

And it’s the need to re-define the UK, and re-design its constitution and structures of governance, that should be seized upon by constitutional reformers as a great opportunity presented by the prospect and process of Scottish secession. Indeed, this could be the occasion for a radical re-design of the constitution that reformers have been longing for. For starters, Parliament would have to be completely overhauled. Just as the idea of a unitary ‘Britain’ is designed to suppress the thought that the UK is really England plus its ‘Celtic’ appendages, so the stubborn holding on to the idea that the UK parliament remains integrally British even when so many of its powers and actions relate to England only is designed to suppress the idea that Parliament is really an English parliament: that it has always been so and should honestly re-style itself as such if it is to be a truly democratic forum for England on a par with the parliament and assemblies for the UK’s other nations.

If the UK were to become the ‘United Kingdom of England, Wales and N. Ireland’ – if Scotland departs and the need for a unitary ‘Britain’ and its parliament fades away – there would be a golden opportunity to craft a new federal UK. Civic English nationalists such as myself would rather the new UK was a federation of nations, including perhaps an autonomous Cornwall; while many liberal reformers would rather see a regional model of governance applied to England. But we could at least have the argument along with many other arguments, such as how to evolve the Lords into a federal parliament (dealing with reserved UK matters)-cum-revising chamber for the national / regional parliaments; a written constitution; the monarchy and the Church; proportional representation; a new Bill of Rights; a referendum on the new state’s membership of the EU; etc.