Link roundup for 11 October 2011

Sharing links, closing open tabs, etc. as is often the case.

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The first article is this one on titanium deposits on the moon. We've known about titanium on the moon for a long time but apparently the fact that some parts are composed of 10% titanium is new. Titanium is common on Earth and so mining it to bring it back here would never happen, but as it is an extremely useful metal it's good to know for future colonization that there is so much there. In comparison, titanium on Earth only reaches up to about 1% abundance.

Google Alerts sent this link my way today, a guest article by the creator of a site called visual latin. The teacher seems to speak Latin with a pronunciation between reconstructed Roman and Ecclesiastic (plus an English accent). I prefer the videos found here, but a popular language should have all types of teachers promoting it and so the more the better.

Visual Latin | Sentences from Compass Cinema on Vimeo.

There are at least two films in Afrikaans coming out next year, called Semi-Soet and Pretville. This year the movie Skoonheid was quite popular.

New online Norwegian course here: made by the University of Trondheim, it's 3-gender bokmål with a lot of background on Trondheim itself. I don't have a great deal of time to check it out but for a language that promotes itself as badly as Norwegian does it's certainly a welcome site and a good one to bookmark.

Esperanto: someone has been banned from an English forum for people in Switzerland in a thread about Esperanto.

Brown dwarfs: add another 30 to 40 to the total. These were discovered in NGC 1333, some 1,000 light years away. Still waiting to see the brown dwarf(s) that should lie within just a few light years of us, very hopefully (and very possibly) under 4.3 LY, the distance to Alpha Centauri.