[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• James Bow suggests that the adoption of a system of proportional representation in the Canadian House of Commons, perhaps using a Single Transferable Vote or Mixed Member Proportional scheme, would be the best way to avoid aggravating regional splits--Conservatives have been shut out of major cities in central Canada despite having relatively strong support there.


• Centauri Dreams reports that carbon dioxide has been found in the atmosphere HD 189733b, some 63 light years from us. It won't be long until we'll be finding oxygen.


• Far Outliers quotes at length from a passage by Tunzelmann in his book Indian Summer describing the profound corruption afflicting British India's largely self-governing princely states.


• Joe. My. God quotes British author Mark Simpson (inventor of "metrosexual") as suggesting, perhaps unsurprisingly, that attempts to limit marriages may well hasten the institution's collapse and its replacement by civil partnerships of one kind or another. He also suggests that most gay men are likely to be single, something that doesn't fit well with my personal experience of gay men in my age group at least.


• Arnold Zwicky's Language Log considers the very interesting question of the origin of phrases like "day without a gay."


• Strange Maps links to the famous map showing Ukraine's division between a pro-Yushchenko/Orange Revolution west and north and a pro-Yanukych south and east, this division roughly corresponding to language divisions between Ukrainophones and Russophones.


• At Torontoist, Stephen Michalowicz writes ("The City Known as Dixon" about the concentration of Somali-Canadians in the Dixon area of northwestern Toronto. It's main selling point, it seems, was its location near Pearson International Airport.


• Noel Maurer pointed this curious Canadian to The Daily Show's take on Canada's ongoing political crisis. Visits from the Queen really are worth all that.


• Eugene Volokh makes the interesting suggestion that tasers be made legally available to the general public, on the grounds of their effectiveness.


• Paul Goble quotes a Russian scientist who suggests that, as a result of the growth of non- and often anti-Russian national consciousnesses elsewhere in the Soviet space, the overwhelming majority of ethnic Russians in Russia and the official support for a civic nationalism, and a sense of threat coming from Western economic and political expansion at Russian expense is encouraging a growth of Russian ethnic nationalism. This, he thinks, is a good thing.