• Antipope's Charlie Stross worries about the literal survival of Britons in the post-Brexit United Kingdom.
• D-Brief notes the discovery of an ancient corpse in China shrouded in cannabis.
• Dangerous Minds reports on a 1971 BBC documentary about New York City starring a pre-stardom Patti Smith.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a study mapping the changing ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams considers Juno's photos of Jupiter's poles.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes the discovery of another star that behaves much like mysterious Tabby's Star.
• Far Outliers reports on the good reputation of the Chinese forces at Shanghai in 1937.
• Joe. My. God. notes a Christian site that claims gay sex is not sex.
• Language Hat reports on the problems ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that Conrad Black's mansion is up for sale, and looks inside the climbing gym that replaced Koreatown's Metro Theatre.
• Centauri Dreams notes a new telescope optimized for detecting, among other things, Kuiper Belt objects.
• Dangerous Minds shares a video of South African cyclists chased by an ostrich.
• Far Outliers notes the existence of a ( Read more... )

The BBC's article "How an eight-year-old boy invented a new word" looks at how the Internet helped birth an Italian word.

A few weeks back, primary school teacher Margherita Aurora, in the small town of Copparo in central Italy, was intrigued when one of her students, Matteo, used an unfamiliar word in a written assignment ( Read more... )

• Anthropology notes the latest archeological findings suggesting that Easter Island was not destroyed by war.
• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling notes that Wired will now no longer be allowing people with ad blockers to access the site.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes the likely existence of a substantial gas giant in the disk of TW Hydrae and describes a ( Read more... )

• Crooked Timber's John Holbo wonders about people who are foxes and hedgehogs, following Isaiah Berlin.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to one examination of carbon and oxygen in exoplanet atmospheres and links to another noting how white dwarfs eat their compact asteroid and other debris belts.
• The Dragon's Tales notes that the dinosaurs disappeared in the ( Read more... )

Bloomberg's Marco Bertacche and Daniele Lepido report on an Albania-based Italian-language television channel, Agon Channel Italia, that is taking advantage of lower costs and a certain degree of cultural familiarity.

More than 20 years after Albanian refugees began arriving on rickety boats in southern Italy, fading Italian television stars are ( Read more... )

Earlier this week, annafdd had an interesting post, "This is the day for getting upset aka What Italy means to me", examining Wikipedia's biased article on Venetian language/dialect. The article, overaccentuating Venetian's distinctiveness and underplaying the numerous (and growing) links of the language and its speakers with standard Italian, gets ( Read more... )