• Apostrophen's 'Nathan Smith announces some of his plans for the forthcoming year.
• C.J. Cherryh talks about her experience of early winter in Oklahoma.
• The Map Room Blog links to a collection of electoral map what-ifs.
• Marginal Revolution looks at the worrying connection between Rogue One and fake news.
• The NYRB Daily shares Tim Parks' reflections on ( Read more... )

• Bloomberg notes that Azerbaijan's oil wealth lets it outspend Armenia on military good, looks at a hydropower project in Congo intended to eventually protect mountain gorillas, and notes that spending on solar and wind energy is outpacing fossil fuel spending.
• CBC notes the alarming possibility that smart devices could be bricked by their ( Read more... )

From Facebook's Andy I found The Guardian-hosted version of Sudarsan Raghavan's Washington Post article suggesting that the slow certification of Congolese mines as unassociated with conflict mineral mining has wrecked emergent economies throughout central Africa.

When his father could no longer make enough money from the tin mine, when he could ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes an organic tea shop and cafe opening in Regent Park.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the mysteries behind Titan's polar weather.
• Crooked Timber discusses the uses of the military in an epidemic like Ebola.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper concerned with suggesting how worlds can become super-Earths not gas giants.
• The Dragon's Tales links to an ( Read more... )

Joe. My. God. linked to an excerpt (published in the Washington Post of Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin's new book Tinderbox, one of several books recently published which draw upon molecular biology and history to describe how HIV became a global pandemic with tens of millions of dead and infected when a century ago it was limited to chimpanzee ( Read more... )

• 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 ( Read more... )

The ongoing unpleasantness in Korea, which has the potential to erupt into a devastating Second Korean War but seems considerably more likely the self-limiting power games of the North Korean military elite as a new leader succeeds, has reminded me, at least, that Korea is the only area of the world where the potential of the Cold War to become a ( Read more... )

• Did you know that astronomers have determined that the planet HD 209458b, a gas giant orbiting very close to its sun, has winds in excess of ten thousand kilometres an hour? Centauri Dreams tells us.
• Crooked Timber reports on the astonishing news of the amazing defense of Leopold II's genocide rule in the Congo by Belgian politician Louis Michel.
• The ( Read more... )

Many of you may have heard about the proposal, by a Congolese man in Belgium, to ban the 1930-1931 Tintin graphic novel, second of its kind, Tintin in the Congo on account of its racism.

A Congolese man living in Belgium is trying to have Tintin in the Congo banned in the boy reporter's native country, almost 80 years after Tintin first donned his ( Read more... )

• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell suggests that e-book publishing, by virture of the lower costs involved, will encourage the popularity of relatively short texts over novels of standard length.
• Daniel Drezner suggests that the success of Yanukovich the Ukrainian election is a good thing, inasmuch as it indicates that Ukraine's a politically and ( Read more... )