• D-Brief shares rare video of beaked whales on the move.
• Dangerous Minds notes that someone has actually begun selling unauthorized action figures of Trump Administration figures like Bannon and Spencer.
• Language Log looks at a linguistic feature of Emma Watson's quote, her ending it with a preposition.
• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen considers, ( Read more... )

• James Bow calls for an end to the US-Canada Safe Third Country agreement prohibiting people coming from American soil from claiming refugee status in Canada.
• D-Brief reports on the vast array of man-made minerals appearing in what is now being called the Anthropocene Era of Earth.
• Dangerous Minds notes the efforts of the Disco Preservation Society to ( Read more... )

• Antipope's Charlie Stross wonders if the politics of Trump might mean an end to the British nuclear deterrent.
• Centauri Dreams shares Andrew LePage's evaluation of the TRAPPIST-1 system, where he concludes that there are in fact three plausible candidates for habitable status there.
• Dangerous Minds shares the gender-bending photographs of Norwegian ( Read more... )

News of the remarkable density of planets, including potentially Earth-like planets, in the system of nearby ultra-cool dwarf TRAPPIST-1 spread across the blogosphere. This NASA JPL illustration comparing the TRAPPIST-1 worlds with the four rocky worlds of our own solar system, underlining the potential similarity of some worlds to the worlds we ( Read more... )

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross wonders--among other things--what the Trump Administration is getting done behind its public scandals.
• blogTO notes a protest in Toronto aiming to get the HBC to drop Ivanka Trump's line of fashion.
• Dangerous Minds reflects on a Talking Heads video compilation from the 1980s.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money reflects on a murderous ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that the redevelopment of Toronto's Port Lands is continuing.
• Crooked Timber argues that climate denialism exposes the socially constructed nature of property rights.
• D-Brief notes the reburial of Kennewick Man.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes there is no sign of a second planet around Proxima Centauri.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at life in ( Read more... )

At Demography Matters, I have a brief note noting the sad death earlier this week of Gapminder's Hans Rosling. 68 was too young for anyone, certainly too young for someone so dedicated to helping the world know itself through the truth. Scott Gilmore's article in MacLean's is one I recommend.

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What can I say but that I wish that his vision be

• blogTO tries to pit the west side of Toronto against the east side.
• Centauri Dreams describes an inventive plan to launch a probe to rendezvous with Proxima Centauri.
• Crooked Timber looks at the idea of civil society in the age of Trump.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper that aims to explore why Neptune-class exoplanets are so common.
• Marginal ( Read more... )

• The Crux makes the case that, for too long, modern homo sapiens have underestimated the genius of the Neanderthals.
• D-Brief looks at the efforts of some scientists to develop brewing standards for the Moon.
• Language Hat examines different languages' writing standards--Turkish, Greek, Armenian--in the late Ottoman Empire.
• Language Log deconstructs ( Read more... )

• Bad Astronomy shares photos of the ripple made by moon Daphnis in the rings of Saturn, as does the Planetary Society Blog.
• The Broadside Blog questions whether readers actually like their work.
• Centauri Dreams notes evidence for the discovery of a Jupiter-mass planet in the protoplanetary disk of TW Hydrae.
• Dangerous Minds links to the 1980s work of ( Read more... )