At Model View Culture, Aditya Mukerjee has a post with the arresting title of "I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name". Mukerjee makes the convincing case that the underpresentation of non-Western languages in Unicode, especially South and East Asian ones, is a serious problem for the Internet. That undeciphered scripts like Linear ( Read more... )

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly considers old friends.
• Centauri Dreams considers the search for extraterrestrial civilizations using infrared astronomy, concentrating on Dyson spheres and the like.
• The Dragon's Gaze has two links to papers looking at unusual brown dwarfs.
• The Dragon's Tales reports on the flora of late Permian Antarctica.
• Language ( Read more... )

The Inter Press Service's Manipadma Jena notes how one family in the Sundarbans, the rain forest delta at the mouth of the Ganges endangered by sea level rise, is surviving by adopting a more diversified agricultural model.

Several farmers’ groups in the Patharpratima administrative block of the South 24-Parganas district told IPS that every ( Read more... )

Al Jazeera's Nishtha Chugh writes about the lives of Italy's large and growing community of Bangladeshi migrants.

[Italy] is now home to a growing number of Bangladeshi migrants, many of whom have been smuggled or trafficked into the country ( Read more... )

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton comes out in favour of seeing Scottish independence not as a sign of failure. Sometimes relationships just end.
• blogTO lists the top ten thrift shops in Toronto.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a study on interactions between exoplanets and their host stars.
• The Dragon's Tales notes the growing strength of the ( Read more... )

• Al Jazeera notes on the seemingly inevitable exodus of Muslims from the Central African Republic and reports on the wariness of Georgians versus Russia.
• Bloomberg and Bloomberg BusinessWeek touch upon a variety of interesting things: the leading role of Poland in supporting Ukraine; the introduction of egg-freezing technology to women who want to ( Read more... )

• Bag News Notes features photographs of the aftermath of the Bangladeshi factory collapse.
• Centauri Dreams takes a look at the electric sail, propulsion method for spaceships currently being tested.
• At The Dragon's Tales, Will Baird links to a study suggesting that China's Yangtze river is at least 23 million years old.
• Daniel Drezner doesn't think ( Read more... )

• The Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell takes issue with an American conservative's criticism of an anti-fracking film as state propaganda for the United Arab Emirates. No, the oil/natural gas market doesn't work that way.
• Crooked Timber's Corey Robin wonders why Matthew Yglesias sees state repression--state policies, more broadly--as key to the problems ( Read more... )

German politics, Slovakia's geopolitics, regionalism and cities in India, racism in science, and the benefits of self-governance for islands and the Internet alike--all are linked to here.

• Daniel Drezner is very unimpressed with German chancellor Angela Merkel, whose leadership style he describes as dithering and then announcing sudden policy ( Read more... )