[PHOTO] Is this robin egg blue?

Not all too frequently, Torontonians have been graced with beautiful perfect blue skies, perhaps the colour of robin egg blue, perhaps not. I invite you to judge.

Blue Sky
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Blue Sky and Moon
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

If you want music to go along with your appraisal, this remix of BT's song "Blue Skies" featuring Tori Amos comes highly recommended.

"Beyoncé - XO" (Watch on YouTube)

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On how Canada's Conservatives are demonstrating their competency in government

There was a minor political scandal when an aide to Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt left some marginally secret documents in a public place and was fired. More recently, the Chalk River Laboratories, Canada's oldest nuclear facility and a source of medical radioisotopes, was closed due to safety reasons, potentially leaving huge numbers of people worldwide without medical treatment. Raitt, it's been revealed, thinks the crisis sexy.

Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt called the medical isotopes crisis "sexy," said she wanted to take credit for fixing it, and expressed doubts about the skills of Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq on a recording obtained by The Chronicle Herald.

Ms. Raitt made the comments to her former aide, Jasmine MacDonnell, in a conversation that appears to have been inadvertently recorded by Ms. MacDonnell on Jan. 30, while the two were being driven to an event in Victoria, B.C.

The news is likely to raise questions about Ms. Raitt's handling of the isotope crisis, and about her judgment, since she promoted Ms. MacDonnell, 26.

Soon after the Victoria trip, Ms. MacDonnell misplaced the voice recorder containing the recording in the press gallery in Ottawa, and asked The Chronicle Herald to hold it for her until she could collect it. Five months later, she had not picked it up.

[. . .]

As they drive around Victoria, chatting with their driver, Ms. Raitt and Ms. MacDonnell discuss their unsuccessful efforts to get Ms. Aglukkaq to contribute a quote to a news release on the isotope crisis.

“They’re terrified of the issues,” said Ms. Raitt.

“You know what? Good. Because when we win on this, we get all the credit. I’m ready to roll the dice on this. This is an easy one. You know what solves this problem? Money. And if it’s just about money, we’ll figure it out. It’s not a moral issue.”

“No,” says Ms. MacDonnell. “The moral and ethical stuff around it are just clear.”

“It’s really clear,” says Ms. Raitt. “Oh. Leona. I’m so disappointed.”

“Isn’t that interesting,” says Ms. MacDonnell. “They’re just so .... I wonder if it’s her staff trying to shield her from it or whether she is just terrified.”

“I think her staff is trying to shield her,” says Ms. Raitt. “Oh, God. She’s such a capable woman, but it’s hard for her to come out of a co-operative government into this rough-and-tumble. She had a question in the House yesterday, or two days ago, that planked. I really hope she never gets anything hot.”

[. . .]

Ms. MacDonnell said the isotope issue is hard to control, “because it’s confusing to a lot of people.”

“But it’s sexy,” says Ms. Raitt. “Radioactive leaks. Cancer.”

“Nuclear contamination,” says Ms. MacDonnell.

“But it’s only about money,” say Ms. Raitt.

Sexy?

"Oh, yeah, take the knowledge that you're not going to have the therapy that you need to save your life, oh yeah, you take it bitches."

Anyway, you can listen to the conversation at the Chronicle-Herald.

By the way, guess which recent Conservative minority government fired an ombudsperson who closed down the facility on technical and safety grounds.

Elsewhere, John Baird, Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communitites, had something interesting to say in relation to Toronto's request for more funding for the TTC from the federal government.

The Spec has a story that details the Conservative Transport Minister muttering curses at Toronto for its $1.6-billion request for economic stimulus cash — as Alison Hanes wrote on May 1: $1.22-billion for 204 new light-rail vehicles from Bombardier and $345-million for a new car house to store and maintain them. The TTC approved Bombardier as the supplier, all the while noting it needs funding from higher levels of government to place the order by a June 27 deadline.

In an unguarded moment in front of some reporters Mr. Baird spoke his mind about the application, which is ineligible for stimulus cash in his view:

"Twenty-seven hundred people got it right. They didn't. That is not a partnership and they're bitching at us," he said.

"They should f--- off."

...

Miller said last night Toronto's proposal fits the federal criteria.

He said his meeting with Baird at the convention was "amicable and frank" and that the minister "didn't say that to me" when asked if Baird used the obscenity.

[Baird] said Toronto's submission is ineligible because it doesn't focus on job creation within the next two years in the 416 area.

Meanwhile, he's being accused of covering up an alleged bid to bury complaints of mismanagement against his beleaguered cabinet colleague, Lisa Raitt:

Baird has been accused of "political interference," in connection with Ms Raitt's former job as head of the Toronto Port Authority. New Democrat MP Olivia Chow yesterday called on the federal Auditor-General to investigate why Mr. Baird increased the membership of the authority's board of directors from seven to nine and allowed Ms. Raitt to run up almost $80,000 in travel and other expenses over two years when the organization was running a deficit. Chris Day, a spokesman for Mr. Baird said many of the concerns raised by Ms. Chow have already been raised publicly, and referred all queries to Mark MacQueen, chairman of the Port Authority.

All in all, I feel quite good about the ruling party's governance of Canada. Don't you?

[LINK] "Eye on the ball"

I quite like Paul Wells' post on the radioisotope scandal.

This thing with the tape is all very entertaining, but I find myself kind of brooding over this bit:

“They’re terrified of the issues,” said Ms. Raitt. “You know what? Good. Because when we win on this, we get all the credit.”

Fair enough. You win on this — “this” being a global shortage of isotopes that are crucial for the treatment of a lot of people who could, you know, die horribly — you should get all the credit.

But the conversation in question happened in January. It’s June. One-Two-three-four-five months later. And hospitals all over are running out of isotopes.

So I’ll put this question out to the house. What should you get all of if you don’t win on this?

In the comments, various people have put the blame ultimately on the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited for failing to design and maintain a durable Chalk River reactor.

[LINK] "Alpha Centauri Hunt Intensifies"

Centauri Dreams has an exciting post suggesting that current planet-hunting technologies are almost up to the task of detecting terrestrial planets orbiting at least one of the stars in the neighbouring Alpha Centauri trinary.

[Astronomer Greg] Laughlin writes about the search in Alpha Centauri: Market Outperform, noting that “…when HARPS is working full bore on a bright quiet star, it can drill right down into the habitable zone.” Note, too, that Alpha Centauri is visible almost year-round from La Silla. Laughlin plugs in values for Centauri B’s habitable zone and creates data sets for differing values of planetary mass in the system. He then extrapolates from this to determine where the Geneva team might be now that it has upped its frequency of observations.

The results: A 4.6 Earth-mass planet in an optimally habitable orbit around Centauri B might be “…on the verge of current ‘announceability.’” A smaller 2.3 Earth-mass planet in the same zone would not be visible yet, requiring another year and a half of observations. If we’re anxious to find not a ’super Earth’ but a true Earth analog, then, silence on the Centauri front for another eighteen months may, as Laughlin suggests, be good news.

Me, I'm still hoping for Tirane.

[LINK] Two Far Outliers Links

The always-interesting Far Outliers blog has recently posted two fascinating recent book excerpts dealing with events in East Asia in the first millennium CE.

• In "Effects of Tang Imperialism on Its Eastern Neighbors" examines how the Tang dynasty's 7th century invasion of the Korean peninsula led to Japanese military intervention on behalf of the state of Paekche, eventually leading to the adoption of Chinese political and economic structures in the name of self-defense both in Japan and in Korea.


• "Early Japan's Peaceful Foragers, Violent Farmers" takes a look at how the replacement of the hunter-gatherer Jomon culture--likely related to the modern Ainu--by the agrarian Yayoi culture that developed into modern Japan led to an upsurge of violence in the Japanese archipelago, as resource scarcities set the new communities upon each other.

[LINK] "Compete: Facebook US Traffic Nearing Google, Yahoo"

The Washington Post has a very interesting article up suggesting that Facebook's about to overtake Google.

Web analytics firm Compete has released its data for the month of May, and as Justin Smith over at InsideFacebook has already pointed out, US traffic to Facebook.com has increased by nearly 8% to 82.9 million unique visitors last month, with Facebook Connect sites generating an additional 65 million uniques. That means that, according to Compete, a total of 113 million people in the U.S. interacted with the Facebook service. The data also shows MySpace is (still) steadily decreasing compared to the beginning of the year, while Twitter growth seems to have flattened all of the sudden.

While it is interesting to see how the hot social networks stack up in terms of traffic, I thought I'd also take a look at how well Facebook is doing compared to other Web giants like Google.com, Yahoo.com and MSN.com. To my surprise, Facebook appears to have become a real challenger to these Internet juggernauts, who are relatively old compared to the social network that started out in 2004 as a university student-only service and only really opened up to the public in September 2006.

Facebook has unmistakingly grown up to become one of the most popular Internet destinations on the planet, both in terms of registered users (well beyond 200 million at this point) and in terms of received traffic. And we're still talking about a privately-held (albeit massively funded) company that has come this far. No wonder its valuation is surging.

[. . .]

For comparison, Compete pegs Google to have received a total of 145.5 million unique visitors in May, ahead of Yahoo (135.5 million) and MSN.com (97.5 million), which means Facebook has already overtaken the MSN website and is nearing the former two. It's important to note that all four sites show a significant increase in U.S. traffic since the beginning of this year, but Facebook is definitely on the steepest growth curve here. In January 2009, total traffic to Facebook was somewhere around 68.5 million uniques, which means the May number of 113 million represents a 61% jump, mostly thanks to the successful spread of the Facebook Connect service.