• Boing Boing and Centauri Dreams both react to the very recent gamma ray burst GRB 080319B, an explosion so bright that it would have been briefly visible to the naked eye despite the fact that it occurred 7.5 billion light years away.


• Crooked Timber's John Holbo links to his sprightly new edition of Edward E. Hale’s 1869 classic short story "The Brick Moon". (Yes, I think Holbo is the person who came up with the word "brickpunk.")


• Douglas Muir at Halfway Down the Danube describes the various problems with Armenia's genocide museum.


• Language Hat covers a recent report that linguists have found links between Siberian and North American language families, with many of the linguists involved popping in to comment on their own or on others' theories.


• Finally, James Nicoll has linked to an interesting report about a collection of science fiction writers including Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and David Brin who are offering their services to the government of the United States as freelance advisors. Among their ideas is Niven's that "a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants."

• Phil Hunt at Amused Cynicism wonders if the European Union, free from the United States' baggage and much closer than China, could give a post-Castro Cuba some sort of protectorate status.


• The Lounsbury at 'Aqoul observes that al-Jazeerah's coverage of the Kosovo independence celebrations included more than a few pairings of Kosovar and American flags. Good public relations?


• At Crooked Timber, Christ Bertram's celebratory post on Castro and John Quiggin's more measured consideration of dictatorship might both have generated more heat than light, but there's still enough of the latter there. If you page past the flamewars, that is.


• Ken MacLeod speculates that Technocracy and science fiction are too close for comfort.


• Joel at Far Outliers has had a few good Timothy Garton Ash excerpts, including one on Belgrade in 1997, one in Sarajevo in 1995, and one in Kosovo in 1998, one on Bosnia in 1998, and finally, a personal view of Yugoslavia's murder.


• At Joe. My. God, Rupert Everett is quoted as saying that pride marches have become depoliticized. The blogger and many commenters disagree.


• In the aftermath of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to Australian Aborigines, Language Log has its own take on the situation, touching upon Australian Aborigine languages.


• normblog blogs about Castro's unsurprisingly long period in office and his appropriation of the word "amor."


• Strange Maps describes the Republic of New Netherlands, population 31.2 million.

• In the light of Mike Huckabee's recent victory in Iowa's Republican caucuses, the criticism of 1948's Richard that Huckabee's refusal to accept evolution should be seen as a hallmark of non-rational intellectually should be heeded. Elect the right person, guys.


• Over at 'Aqoul, The Lounsbury examines the badly-structured housing market for lower- and middle-class Egyptians.


• Claus Vistesen predicts that some of the more prominent economics-related news stories in 2008 will include slow Japanese growth, a patchwork of performances in Europe, the impact of the declining value of the US dollar on international capital flows, and the risk of stagflation.


• Joe. My. God links to disturbing reports that the incidence of HIV infection among young MSM in New York City is rising. Canadian statistics seem to suggest that this trend hasn't manifested north of the border, but it may be only a matter of time.


• Mark Liberman at Language Log blogs about how the use of two different scripts for Hindustani helped produce separate Hindu and Urdu languages by the time of Partition, despite the languages' continued mutual intelligibility at the popular level.


• Norman Geras' essay "Criticism and Cleanliness" is an interesting meditation on the circumstances under which citizens of imperfect democracies can criticize faults elsewhere in the world.


• The Pagan Prattle has a roundup of fundamentalists' predictions of apocalypse in the year 2008.


• Strange Maps hosts Charles Joseph MInard's famous statistical map showing the horrific casualties resulting from Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia.
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• Boing Boing reports about the existence of the amazing Temples of Humankind, carved by a New Age cult in northern Italy (the Damanhur Federation) deep underground, with kilometres of tunnels and vast chambers.


• Crooked Timber's Eszter Hargittai reports on a recent study she made concerning the socioeconomic differences between users of facebook and MySpace. She suggests that founder's effect might be involved here, with Facebook starting off with a limited Ivy League clientele and MySpace being open to everyone from the start.


• Daniel Drezner's links to an amusing group scenario speculating how the United States and the world would recover from an Independence Day-style attack.


• Will Baird reports that South Korea is planning moon probes, launched on indigeneously-designed rockets, for the 2020s.


• Edward Lucas argues that Greece should end its long names feud with Macedonia, if only because Greece needs a stable northern border.


• Ian Irving provides a slew of links to the upcoming movie Breakfast with Scot.


• Joel at Far Outliers has two interesting posts up, one on patterns of European immigration in 19th century Louisiana and Asian immigration across the South, the other on the amount of stagnation imposed by the UN protectorate on a Kosovo that, absent statehood, can't function.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros examines the likely consequences if Kosovo declares an independence that comes to be recognized by the United States and most European Union countries, but not Serbia or Serbia's patron of Russia. He concludes that it's most likely to end up as "a sort of Balkan Taiwan, recognized by some states but not by others," contingent upon the desire of Serbia's leadership to remain credible actors integrated with the wider world.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen reports that the last two people who speak Ayapan Zoque, a Mexican indigenous language, aren't talking to each other, with obvious consequences for the survival of the tongue for any length of time.


• Strange Maps links to Matthew White's alternate history scenario and map, Balkanized North America-. Dakota, Métis Nation, Louisiana, California, Deseret--they're all there.


• Finally, Tin Man's Jeff wonders how The Daily Show will fare after Bush leaves the presidency. Will the show be able to adapt to its new environment?

Although we knew the area we were moving to, we hadn't taken on board its linguistic complexity. If I look out of the window now I can see areas where four distinct languages are spoken.

Our house is on the northern boundary of the old kingdom of Béarn and the view is across the lovely Béarnaise countryside to the Pyrenees on the skyline. Now Béarn is part of France and its official language is French although that is a recent phenomenon.

Many of our older friends in the area only started to learn French when they went to school and their parents' generation never spoke it at all. But also we can see the (Spanish) Pyrenees - another language which is the main means of communication in a number of the mountain passes on the French side of the border.