[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• 3 Quarks Daily's Robin Varghese wonders if Google is killing individuals' ability to recognize even basic things.


• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason photographs the busiest highway in Canada, the 401, at its busiest.


• 'Aqoul notes that Algeria's latest economic policies look very bad and that there were recently riots between Chinese migrants and Algerians.


• blogTO's Derek identifies the most unsafe roads for cyclists in Toronto, with the commenters throwing in their own suggestions.


• Daniel Drezner writes about the current system of international relations as if it was The Birthday Club.


• Demography Matters' Aslak Berg writes about the very difficult situation faced by an arguably already overpopulated Yemen still seeing high population growth, and Claus links to a video on human evolution and wonders how sub-replacement fertility is evolutionarily adaptive.


• Far Outliers links to an article arguing that where Indonesia is a successful emerging pluralistic democracy and economic power Burma is doing nearly the exact opposite.


• A Fistful of Euros' Douglas Muir reports that the aftermath of the sale of Serbia's oil company to Gazprom is going as well as one could expect.


• Hunting Monsters reports on the phantom country of Nagorno-Karabakh.


• Inkless Wells' Paul Wells reports on the latest in a series of polls demonstrating that contrary to mythology, Québécois--especially Francophones--are more likely to support strict jail sentences for criminals that many English Canadians elsewhere.


• Language Hat reports that an Indonesian tribe is adopting Korea's hangul script for their language, the first time ever, apparently, that hangul has been used for a language other than Korean.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Dave Brockington memorializes the late filmmaker John Hughes of 1980s fame.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio discusses his participation in a Slate series examining how the United States could collapse.


• Slap Upside the Head celebrates the fact that a woman who said that British Columbia's school system discriminated against non-heterosexual children by not providing so-called "reparative therapy" had her complaint dismissed.


• Strange Maps hosts an unusual early modern map that shows Europe upside down. Literally.


• Will Baird at The Dragon's Tales wonders (1, 2) if the Russian elite has decided to adopt Huntington's clash of civilization theory and make Russia into the central state of Orthodox civilization.


• Noel Maurer reports on a Brazilian plan for a high-speed rail link that actually makes sense economically.


• The Vanity Press reports on the fact that a faked birth certificate actually belonging to Obama was actually an editing version of South Australian David Jeffrey Bomford.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that many of the small peoples of Russia's Middle Volga region are upset with Moscow's centralizing and potentially even assimilatory policies, and argues that the Abkhazian/South Ossetian precedent might encourage the peoples of the Russian North Caucasus to break away.