• Beyond the Beyond references Vincent Cerf's concern about the fragility of new media.
• Crooked Timber considers the politics inherent in monetary unions.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes a paper suggesting Alpha Centauri A is quite evolved.
• Discover's Dead Things wonders if Georgia is the birthplace of wine.
• Joe. My. God. notes the claim of a Florida public ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams explores Pluto and its worlds.
• Crooked Timber considers the question of how to organize vast quantities of data.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to two papers on exoplanet habitability, noting that the composition of exoplanets influences their habitability and suggests exomoons need to be relatively massive to be habitable.
• Geocurrents notes ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes a projection suggesting there will be nearly seven million Torontonians by 2025.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining how
  
• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper examining a very unusual planetary system around a subdwarf B star and fears the Russo-Ukrainian war will heat up again.
• Language Hat examines the nearly extinct dialect of ( Read more... )

• 3 Quarks Daily considers the ethics of suicide.
• Slate's Atlas Obscura blog shares photos of Second World War relics in Alaska's Aleutian islands.
• The Big Picture shares images of Australia's doll hospital.
• blogTO lists five things Toronto could learn from New York City.
• The Dragon's Tales notes China's growing presence in Latin America and observes ( Read more... )

Adrienne Lafrance's article in The Atlantic makes me think that I should back up my compact disc library immediately. The fragility of such a once-ubiquitous medium says worrisome things about the future of our cherished information. (Apparently, read/write discs are much worse.)

"All of the modern formats weren't really made to last a long period ( Read more... )

• BlogTO's Derek Flack shares pictures of Toronto in the 1970s.
• James Bow thinks, in response to discussion at Toronto city council, that the position of head of the TTC should be put up to a general election.
• Centauri Dreams notes the ESA's new PLATO planet-hunter telescope, positioned at the Earth-Sun L2 point, and features a guest post from J. N. ( Read more... )

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling is skeptical that plans to archive vast quantities of archived data accumulated over decades, even centuries, are going to be viable.
• The Burgh Diaspora notes that for southern Europeans, Latin America is once again emerging as a destination--this time, the migration is of professionals seeking opportunities they ( Read more... )

The events leading to the death of computer programmer an activist Aaron Swartz were succinctly described in an obituary in The Economist.

Small, dark, cluttered places were important in the life of Aaron Swartz. His days were spent hunched in his bedroom over his MacBook Pro, his short-sighted eyes nearly grazing the screen (why, he asked himself ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster writes about the likely abundance of Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits.
• Daniel Drezner writes (1, 2) about how ad hoc coalitions of world powers are able to deal relatively decisively in some matters of global affairs.
• At The Dragon's Tales, Will Baird notes that Titan's hydrocarbon lakes appear to have floating ( Read more... )

• James Bow comes out in support of today's strike by Ontario teachers.
• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling links to an article describing how NASA archivists tried to recover data from a 1960s lunar orbiter.
• Centauri Dreams has two posts on habitable exomoons, the first on gas giants in the habitable zones of other stars and the second on the ( Read more... )