[BLOG] Some Thursday links

[rfmcdonald]

Anthropology.net announces the discovery of a remaining community of Pontic Greek speakers in the northeastern Anatolian homeland, who stayed and preserved their unique language because they were Muslim and weren't forced to depart with their Christian co-linguals.

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton, visiting Toronto from Vancouver, makes the point that one thing distinguishing Vancouver from Toronto is
  the latter's desperate pretensions to be a world-class city. Toronto should relax, embrace its low-slung informality. Honest Ed's defines Toronto.

Watch on YouTube

• blogTO notes the controversy surrounding a map ad by supporters of the Transit City concept that uses the wrong baseline, comparing Ford's subway plan with an unrealistic version of Transit City.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster considers the potential use of solar sails for near Earth asteroid mining and communications satellites.


• Marginal Revolution notes the life of a young Bombay rat catcher, a profitable career in Bombay's slums.


• NewAPPSblog quotes one Gary Olson, who suggests that the foreign service of Cuban doctors and soldiers demonstrates Cuba's capacity for empathy, superior to that of the fragmented capitalist world. The question of whether these are press-ganged workers who are taken from a Cuban health system in need of their services, and used as sources of foreign exchange and ideological prestige while suffering poor working conditions and in fact defecting in large numbers, doesn't seem to occur.


• Tim Gueguen shares the good news that the criminally neglected mid-1990s animated series Undergrads is being aired now on Teletoon. I'm glad.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little writes about how the wonderful historian Theodore Zeldin explained France and the French "personality" through comparing the different ordinary people of society, almost an ethnographic effort.


• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Stewart Baker makes claims about hypocrisy over criticisms of American and European border fences aimed at keeping out illegal migrants by different European Union officials in different bureaucracies. The situations are alike, actually, save in the many many ways in which they are completely different. (Thanks to nwhyte for indicating the flaws in my original wording of the link.)