[LINK] Some Saturday links

[rfmcdonald]

• 1948's bloggers have chosen to merge into another group blog, The Invisible College.


• Claus Vistesen takes a look at how post-Communist central Europe may get hammered by global and local credit crunches.


• Richard at Castrovalva takes on the new sub-genre of fictive biography and what it might say about an ailing realist novel./li>
  
• Aziz Poonawalla argues that tribalism, not Islam, is responsible for the low status of women in Pakistani (and Afghan) society.


• Charlie Stross has started a list of things that someone born in 1990 would take for granted.


• Ken MacLeod argues that two effects of Sputnik were creationism and the new maths.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros has two more posts (1, 2) on the contest between Tadic and Nikolic. His conclusion? Even if Nikolic wins, Serbia's future prospects will only be delayed, not wiped out.


• Language Hat links to fascinating material on the French influence on the Ladino language and culture of Sephardic Jews from the 19th century on.


• Peteris Cedrins at Marginalia reflects on Belarus, a country closely linked by geography and history to his Latvian city of Daugavpils.


• Strange Maps has a map showing the predominance of different religions in the counties of the United States. The broad swathes of Baptism in the greater South and Roman Catholicism elsewhere predominate, although Mormonism in the area of Utah and Lutheranism in the Midwest can also lay claim to notable geographic domains.