• blogTO ranks Toronto's newest neighbourhoods from best to worst.
• The Dragon's Gaze suggests exoplanets which receive between 60 to 90% of the energy the Earth received are likely to be Earth-like.
• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper suggesting the solar system likely did not eject a fifth gas giant and looks at what happened to the very early crust ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that graffiti artists around the world, including in Toronto, are promoting Justin Bieber's new album.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly likes pilot Mark Vanhoenacker's book about flight.
• Centauri Dreams notes one possibility for a Europa sample mission.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes simulations which suggest spiral arms in circumstellar disks ( Read more... )

I quite look forward to this. From Metro:

Lovers of French-language books will soon have a new place to get their fill in Toronto, as a Quebec City-based bookstore plans to open a branch here by early next year ( Read more... )

I have a post up at Demography Matters taking a quick look at Francophone immigration in Toronto and Ontario.

Selena Ross' article in The Globe and Mail earlier this month, mirrored at 24news.ca, looks at the growing number of French-medium schools in Toronto. As Francophones continues to immigrate to Ontario and older-established Francophones start to make use of these facilities, the numbers of students keep rising.

Despite guarantees in the Charter of ( Read more... )

Jillian Kestler-D’Amours at the Toronto Star shares the exciting news that a Québec chain hopes to open up a French-language bookstore in collaboration with the Alliance Française.

Christophe Gagnon-Lavoie, co-owner of La Librairie du Quartier in Quebec City, told the Star that Toronto is an ideal place to open the shop, which would be the only ( Read more... )

The Toronto Star's Peter Edwards reports on patterns in Google searches in Toronto. I would suggest that another explanation might be that users of Chinese languages use search engines other than Google, Baidu for instance.

Toronto has a large Chinese community, but there’s not much Chinese-language Googling out of the GTA. But Toronto has a far ( Read more... )

• Anthropology.net notes the embarrassing discovery that one of the vertebrae believed to have been part of the skeleton of early hominid Lucy actually belonged to a baboon.
• Antipope Charlie Stross comes up with another worrisome explanation for the Great Filter.
• BlogTO visits the Toronto offices of photo community site 500px.
• Centauri Dreams features a ( Read more... )

The argument advanced by Aaron Hutchins' article in MacLean's, that instead of working primarily to broaden knowledge of the French language among English Canadians it serves as an elite stream of education, drawing off talent to the detriment of other students, is one I've heard before.

Decades worth of French immersion studies can testify to its ( Read more... )

Starting from an examination of the French language in Mali, Crooked Timber's Juliet Sorenson starts an interesting debate on the utility of having a foreign language be a local official language. Neutrality in local cultural clashes is one benefit; links with the wider world and with the past are another.

French is the language of instruction ( Read more... )