[BLOG] Some Thursday links (2)

[rfmcdonald]

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• At Language Log, Victor Mair comments on claims that Mandarin is "weirder" than Cantonese, and suggests that Indian-Americans have advantages over Chinese-Americans in spelling bees owing to the complexity of memorization with Chinese characters.


• This Lawyers, Guns and Money post wonders whether neoliberalism has made geeks of us all and if that's a bad thing.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer suspects that a skyscraper boom in China signals an imminent Chinese economic slowdown, and wonders why the Syrian government used chemical weapons if it did so.


• Prince Edward Island blogger Peter Rukavina chronicles patterns of resource usage on PEI, to wit, statistics on e-book and audiobook usage in the provincial library system and the surprisingly non-seasonal and constant amount of electricity consumed by Islanders.


• The Search's Leslie Johnston argues that the challenges associated with digital preservation of archives doesn't differ substantially from the issues with preserving physical artifacts.


• Strange Maps' Frank Jacobs maps the various plans intended to give Northern Ireland smaller borders and a larger (more secure?) Protestant majority.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little points to Loic Wacquant's very interesting chronicle of the years he spent learning to box at a substantially African-American club in Chicago. Remarkable story.


• Window on Eurasia is bearish on Russia, with stories suggesting that melting permafrost is turning much of northern Russia into swampland, suggesting that the high cost of domestic air flight is isolating Russians from each other, warning about Siberian separatism and Iranian influence in Tatarstan and elsewhere in the Middle Volga, noting the popularity of anti-immigrant sentiment among creative classes, and reporting on the lessons taken by Estonia from the 2008 South Ossetian war.