[BLOG] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton suggests that Vancouver's use by American film crews as a stand-in for American cities generally worked well enough in the alternate-history television show Sliders, set in alternate versions of San Francisco, mostly. Alienation?


• At Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling notes that former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma has finally been charged with murder for hte death of Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze in 2000.


• BlueJacket 1862 lists the many different monarchies in the world, with their diverse histories, and wonders about the institution's future.


• At Border Thinking, Laura Agustín links to an old article of hers wondering why sex work isn't viewed as a job or a service, excluding sex workers from protection.


• Centauri Dreams notes that the fastest space probes launched so far, the Helios probes of the 1970s, only reached speeds of 70 kiometres a second, far less than one percent of light speed. We've a lot of speed to catch up on.


• Crooked Timber hosts Conor Foley, who argues that the intervention on behalf of Libya's rebels was justified on the grounds that a threshold of violence was about to be crossed and that the intervention did make things better. Controversy ensues in the comments.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley thinks that the Libyan rebels are too fragmented to take over.


• Torontoist's Brian McLachlan focuses on two interesting pieces of Toronto sports-related public statues.


• At Wasatch Economics, Scott Peterson points out that demands Western wages be reduced to Chinese levels overlooks higher Western levels of productivity compensating for wage differences and, indeed, rising wages in China itself.