[325/366] just some links today

[cosmolinguist]

Is Freedom White?

By recognizing power, race, and the capacity for violence as core dimensions in what freedom means and how it moves, we gain a fresh perspective on central problems in American ideology. Such a framework begins to explain why cries for freedom so often exist in an uncomfortable romance with racial bigotry, religious intolerance, misogyny, land hunger, violence, and a belligerent form of gun rights."

"Fossil galaxy" found hidden in Milky Way

Astronomers have found a fossil galaxy, named "Heracles", inside the Milky Way. They analyzed the chemical composition of tens of thousands of stars in the Milky Way's halo, and found hundreds with compositions so strikingly different that they must have come from a different galaxy - one that collided with the Milky Way billions of years ago.

Famed Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

The Arecibo telescope’s long and productive life has come to an end. The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today it will decommission the iconic radio telescope in Puerto Rico following two cable breaks in recent months that have brought the structure to near collapse.

I shared this link (from a friend who said of it "i will always remember how my stomach dropped out of my butt when i saw Contact") and diffrentcolours texted me to comment on it. It's good to have partners who know I will be sad about things like this! As I told him, Contact introduced me to Arecibo as well, and I imprinted hard on that book when I read it as a teenager. But he reminded me this makes Arecibo a relative elder telescope, and there are bigger and better now -- we know someone working on the Square Kilometre Array and that's pretty damn cool. We can always hope Arecibo can be restored enough to be a museum we can go see one day. How cool would that be?

We Didn’t Start The Fire: This Transgender Awareness Week, Meet Michael Dillon

This year has felt pretty “We Didn’t Start The Fire” all round, but nowhere more than in the arena of Trans Issues. J.K Rowling, Abigail Shrier, we don’t want no men in here, self-ID, where to pee, gender recognition fear. But I didn’t want to start this piece by talking about people who’re desperate to make the world aware of trans people in a way that fits a false narrative, one in which trans people are a new and pressing threat. They get enough time in the spotlight. I wanted to talk about Michael Dillon instead.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I learned of Arecibo from the SF book The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, and then treasured it even more from Contact.

So glad to learn of Michael Dillon.

[cosmolinguist]

Ah yes, I read The Sparrow a couple years later, as a freshman in college when my best friend was obsessed with it and then we were both obsessed with it. :)

[rugessnome]

I think I first heard of Michael Dillon in the author's notes for this quietly spectacular (admittedly HP) trans man Eileen Prince Snape fic, "The Seahorse".

[silveradept]

Good links, all of them. A bit sad to see a telescope being decommissioned, but much better than having it break and hurt or kill people.