[PHOTO] U of T Admissions and Awards Office, 315 Bloor Street West

U of T Admissions and Awards Office, 315 Bloor Street West
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The building that is now the University of Toronto's Admissions and Awards Office (315 Bloor Street West was, as described by Plaque 80 in Wayne Cook's list, once a cutting-edge centre for climate research.

The British Army began regular meteorological and magnetic observations on this campus in 1840, stimulating colonial society's fascination with science. After the Province of Canada took over the program in 1853, it built a new observatory, which became the headquarters of the Meteorological Service of Canada. Superintendent G.T. Kingston set up a system of stations, many telegraphically linked, which enabled the Service to issue both storm warnings and daily forecasts by 1876. Opened in 1909, this building was the Service's headquarters until its centenary in 1971.

[LINK] Some Friday links

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton breaks down the minutiae of recent Toronto city politics.


• Centauri Dreams examines the possibility of planets evolving in a distant binary star system, something with obvious relevance for the Alpha Centauri A/B pair.


• Crooked Timber reports on the shameful news that the Washington Post was promoting its web of contacts to people who wanted in on the Washington scene.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on a recent study claiming that climate change on Earth isn't linked to the Sun's position in the galaxy.


• Far Outliers introduces the reader to the corruption of the Japanese Buddhist clergy by nobles towards the end of the first millennium CE.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros describes the pointless show surrounding Bulgaqria's recent arrest of a controversial Kosovar leader, Hashim Thaci.


• Gideon Rachman takes a look at the culture of Britain-bashing in Iran.


• The Invisible College celebrates 400 years of Netherlands-American relations.
  
• Lawyers, Guns and Money critiques Spain's former conservative leader Aznar.
  
• Noel Maurer points out that the Honduran coup was botched.


• Remember that odd little triangle of unclaimed land between Egypt and Sudan by the Red Sea? Strange Maps introduces us to the fine details.


• The Volokh Conspiracy links to an interesting article describing how France became McDonald's biggest market.


• Window on Eurasia points out that Russia is increasingly following the American pattern of appointing non-diplomats as ambassadors.

[LINK] "The Newsweekly’s Last Stand"

The Atlantic's Michael Hirschhorn has an article up examining why newsweekly magazines like Time and Newsweek are declining while The Economist, perhaps uniquely, is rising. His answer?

The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact survey. Another word for this is blogging, or at least what blogging might be after it matures—meaning, after it transcends its current status as a free-fire zone and settles into a more comprehensive system of gathering and presenting information. As a result, although its self-marketing subtly sells a kind of sleek, mid-last-century Concorde-flying sangfroid, The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009.

True, The Economist virtually never gets scoops, and the information it does provide is available elsewhere … if you care to spend 20 hours Googling. But now that information is infinitely replicable and pervasive, original reporting will never again receive its due. The real value of The Economist lies in its smart analysis of everything it deems worth knowing—and smart packaging, which may be the last truly unique attribute in the digital age.

[MUSIC] Why I'm going to sell off the Pet Shop Boys' latest album without even burning it

Yes leaves me unimpressed. The album just sounds like so much sonic wallpaper, unworthy of sustained listenings, unworthy my unfortunate expenditure of money. Very was their last great original album, I think, and the B-sides collection Alternatives is their last good album full stop. They've had good singles since then--"New York City Boy" comes to mind--but they're only a singles group now. Frankly, my money's better spent buying these singles as downloads.

[BRIEF NOTE] My take on Iran?

This post will be fairly superficial, informed by only three Asia Times articles, but what the hell? The only thing that I can say for certain is that the Islamic Republic is currently stifling the people of Iran and that a new regime woujld be wonderful, but how likely is that?

• Pepe Escobar ("Iran's streets are lost, but hopes remain") suggests that the opposition to Ahmadinejad and the religious oligarchy isn't a thing only of the young, but rather includes conservatives and business classes upset by recent economic mismanagement, potentially creating a broad coalition aimed against the Islamic Republic as currently constituted.


• Shahir Shahidsaless' "Miscalculations abound in Iran" also argues that the recent election helped created a broad coalition against the established order, but argues that even if the lowest possible number of Ahmadinejad voters that's still a huge number of people opposed to the anti-government coalition. Culture--and political--wars are ungoing.


• Kaveh L Afrasiabi's "Crunching the numbers" takes a critical look at the criticisms of the election as fraudulent, arguing that many of the claims made by the anti-Ahmadinejad coalition might be inaccurate, and that their nemesis might have won fairly.

So what will happen? If the military remains under the control of the established order, there won't be a revolution now or for some time to come. Maybe there will be a gradual softening; maybe there will be a sharp shock. Who knows? I'd just hope that it would come quickly, for everyone's sake. A stable, prosperous, and hopefully secularizing Iran would be a much better policeman of the Persian Gulf than Saudi Arabia, I'd like to believe.

[DM] "A brief look at Iranian demographics"

I've a post up at Demography Matters, examining Iran's recent demographic trends--some rural areas have TFRs as low as many regions in southern Europe--and their implications on the country's economic and political scene. Go, read.