[PHOTO] St. Andrew's Society Monument, Mount Pleasant Cemetery, 1891

St. Andrew's Society Monument, Mount Pleasant Cemetery, 1891
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This monument, put up in 1891 by the still-existing St. Andrew's Society of Toronto, speaks to the Scottish Canadian strain in Toronto.

[DM] "On the serious problems with replacement migration to Sweden (and elsewhere)"

Over at Demography Matters I've a post up linking to a study, examining the particular case of Sweden but applicable universally, suggesting that there's no reason to think that immigration can compensate for unfavourable demographic trends in a country for any number of reasons. Go, read the post and the paper I linked to.

[BRIEF NOTE] It's best to avoid a Scottish sovereignty-association movement, IMHO

I'd like to thank feorag for pointing out that the Scottish civil service is already planning for policy approaches in the case of Scottish independence. That's a wise idea, speaking from a Canadian perspective; having beforehand an idea what to do if Québec votes "Oui" is always smart. I can't help but be somewhat concerned by what I see Salmond has been saying.

The SNP administration at Holyrood has for the first time raised the concept of people holding "dual citizenship" following Scottish independence.

[. . .]

The First Minister has also promised that a separate Scotland would keep the Pound, at least initially, and even that the Bank of England would continue to set interest rates north of the Border.

However, his citizenship pledge risks infuriating extremist elements of his party, known as the "fundies", short for fundamentalists, who are infamous for their anti-British rhetoric.

Leading SNP figures, including John Swinney, the party's former leader, have previously launched high-profile tirades against "the Brits" and the "Brit establishment".

Six years ago Mr Swinney, now the Scottish finance minister said the SNP should "ask the big question - do you want independence, yes or no? And then tell the Brits to get off."

Mr Salmond plans to hold a referendum next year, but a recent YouGov opinion poll said that barely a quarter of the population back the break-up of Britain.

The British citizenship promise is made in a Scottish Executive report, launched in Brussels yesterday (tues), examining foreign policy in post-independence Scotland.

It is the latest in a series of papers SNP ministers plan to release as part of the National Conversation, their taxpayer-funded campaign promoting separation.

The document shows Mr Salmond envisages an independent Scotland continuing to use UK embassies abroad, becoming a haven for asylum seekers, and enjoying an open border with England.

It indicates states that a flexible attitude to citizenship would be adopted, with people allowed to be Scottish and British.

The above reminds me far too much of the sovereignty-association concept first proposed by Québec nationalists in the 1970s, which imagines the existence of a Canada-Québec confederation of sorts. That's decent enough an image, I suppose. The problem with that is that it presumes that the other party wants to negotiate this. In the case of the 1995 referendum, moreover, this leads to very confusing questions that can easily mislead voters: "Do you agree that Québec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Québec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?"

[/rant]

The above was just a warning, that's all.

[LINK] "Bay of Fundy's waves to be put to work"

At long last, the Globe and Mail's Oliver Moore lets us know, it looks like the immense tidal power potential of the Bay of Fundy--a long narrow west-to-east bay separating the Atlantic Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia--may be exploited. May be.

The first of three turbines is expected to go into the Bay of Fundy next month in spite of concerns raised by some local fishermen after the government approved the initial phase of a tidal energy project.

Nova Scotia's Minister of the Environment, a long-time fisherman himself, acknowledged those concerns and admitted that the possible effects are unknown. But Sterling Belliveau said the only way to identify problems is to start installing turbines and monitor closely the result.

“These questions are only going to be addressed [if] you have a demonstration project,” he said Tuesday after approving the trial based on an environmental assessment.

“I think you basically cannot sit in a conference room and get the answer to that, you have to go out in the real life, in the real world.”

A full-scale tidal energy project, if viable, would involve hundreds of turbines and could produce about 100 megawatts from the bay's huge tides. That would be 10 per cent of the province's energy needs, but such a system is years away.

The demonstration phase of the project, involving three turbines, is expected to cost $60-million to 70-million. Each of the three companies involved – which will co-operate on environmental monitoring and onshore development – intends to test a different type of turbine.

Minas Basin Pulp and Power will suspend its equipment between the bottom and the surface. The turbine will float until the best current is found and then be fixed to the bottom with anchors. Company vice-president John Woods said yesterday that his firm aims to have the turbine operational this time next year.

The president of Clean Current, a British Columbia company, would not comment yesterday on the project. Earlier information from the company suggested it would use a turbine designed to rest on the seabed.

The model chosen by Nova Scotia Power is similar. About six storeys high, with a turbine 10 metres across, it will use gravity to stay still underwater. This design is expected to be in place first, with the turbine going into the water late next month. It will not initially feed power into the grid.

“It's really a big science experiment,” said David Rodenhiser, a spokesman with the utility.

[LINK] "Was Jane Jacobs a saint?"

In the Globe and Mail on the 29th of August, columnist John Barber asked this controversial question. In Toronto, she undergirds the whole conception of Toronto as a modern livable metropolis of neighbourhoods. In New York City? Apparently not so much.

Jane Jacobs got a rough ride in her old home town on the occasion of her death three years ago at the age of 89, beginning with a waspish assessment in The New York Times and culminating with the opening, less than a year later, of an influential exhibition celebrating the achievements of Robert Moses, the legendary city builder whom the writer and urban activist famously took on and brought down before leaving New York for Toronto in 1968.

"At least he got it built!" declared Eliot Spitzer, then on his way to being elected state governor, summing up nostalgia for the can-do age that Mr. Moses dominated, when New York produced great public works at an astonishing rate. And it was the sainted Jane Jacobs, others added, who ruined the dream of a great metro- polis by empowering the "not in my backyard" naysayers.

Ms. Jacobs merely gave "an eloquent voice to Greenwich Village chauvinism," Moses scholar Joel Schwartz wrote in Robert Moses and the Modern City, a book of essays accompanying the exhibition. Her real concern was Democratic Party politics and the result was "a selfish NIMBYism," he charged, ridiculing the myth of "Saint Jane and the Dragon."

With no wisdom more widely received than the commandments Jane Jacobs had laid down almost 50 years earlier in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, revision was inevitable. The most pointed critic of all was an unidentified caller to a New York radio show, Jacobs biographer Anthony Flint says. "He said, 'You know, Jane Jacobs enabled hipsters in Greenwich Village and New Jersey shoppers in SoHo. But there are still workers living in the houses Robert Moses built.' "

It happens that there are still workers living in Toronto's now-fashionable St. Lawrence neighbourhood, a pioneering, mixed-income housing project built in the 1970s with the enthusiastic support of Ms. Jacobs. Remembering only the dragon-slayer, New Yorkers remain unaware of the vital role she played as a promoter of respectful, socially inclusive urban renewal in her adopted country. She disappeared from the U.S. view at the same time as federal funding for affordable housing dried up, and somehow got the blame.

The whole article's quite worth reading, trust me.

Can my New Yorker readers offer anything on this subject?

[LINK] "Sun on the Run"

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn has a very informative post examining the histories of all of the various Toronto Sun columnists--Lubor Zink, Peter Worthington, et cetera--who have tried to run for public office without quite succeeding.

When voters go to the ballot box in St. Paul’s on Thursday their choices will include the latest in a long line of Toronto Sun columnists who have attempted to parlay their print personas into elected office, usually for parties that have matched the paper’s right-wing tilt. City Hall columnist Sue-Ann Levy’s run is part of a tradition that stretches back to the early days of the paper and was inherited from a large number of staffers from the Telegram that sought to represent the public. Some came to the paper during/after their elected stints (True Davidson, Douglas Fisher, Paul Hellyer, Morton Shulman), while others found the exposure didn’t hurt when they ran (Garth Turner).

[BRIEF NOTE] On Venus' lost oceans

I forget who posted a link to this CBC article, "Venus probe images hint at ancient ocean." Venus, it seems, now Earth's hellish twin, might once have been a lush water world. Thank the Venus Express space probe for this discovery.

Long before Venus became a hot, dry and barren planet with a choking mass of carbon dioxide for an atmosphere, it might have once been home to shifting continents and an ocean of water, according to the latest data from a European space probe.

Using infrared images of the planet's southern hemisphere taken in 2006 and 2007 from the Venus Express probe, German astronomers say they have produced a map that reveals the planet's highland plateaus were likely once ancient continents surrounded by water.

The researchers relied on infrared imagery because the planet's thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid makes visual imagery of the planet's surface difficult, and probes landing on the planet haven't lasted long on the surface, where temperatures can get up to 477 C.

The imagery showed that different areas of the planet had different surface temperatures, information that provided insight into the chemical composition of different areas of the planet.

A look at the highland plateaus suggests they are made of a substance similar to granite, which is formed on Earth when ancient rocks made of basalt are driven down into the planet by shifting continents, mix with water and then re-emerge through volcanic activity.

[. . .]

Past theories of the history of our sun suggest that about four billion years ago, it might have been just 70 per cent as bright, raising the possibility temperatures on Venus might have once been cool enough to have liquid water.

But as the sun's power grew, the thinking goes, conditions on Venus changed, and liquid water would have evaporated, leaving carbon dioxide in the atmosphere instead of dissolving in water. The increased carbon dioxide would in turn trap more heat on the planet.

This idea has been discussed for a long time, with mechanisms discussed in the early part of this century and mentions beforehand--Sagan and Druyan mentioned this possibility in their 1980s book Comet. The planet was doomed to be a hellhole, sadly; the idea ofterraforming the planet seems almost impossible given that Venus has good reasons to be a dead world.

Life could well have evolved on this world.

"If that's true, then the two warm and wet bodies in the early solar system would have been Earth and Venus, and as far as a place for the origin of life, Venus was equally favourable to Earth - Venus may be the closer analog to early Earth," [planetary scientist David Grimspoon] says.

If oceans on Venus lasted long enough, then more complex life forms might even have emerged, he says: "If we get into the 2 billion year range in timescale then you could imagine that more complex evolution happened - not just an origin of life, but time for interesting evolutionary development."

Life might even exist on Venus now, floating high in the clouds far from the rock-melting surface.

In September 2002, planetary scientists (Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Louis Irwin) made public their speculations that there may be microbial life in the high Venusian clouds (as those in Earth's clouds), based on their finding of atmospheric abnormalities uncovered in data from past Russian and U.S. space probes (Venera, Pioneer, and Magellan). Although Solar radiation and lightning (which has been detected by the ESA's Venus Express probe in 2007) should be producing large amounts of carbon monoxide (CO), the gas was found to be scarce, as if something was removing it (such as hydrogenogens, diverse bacteria and archaea that grow anaerobically utilizing CO as their sole carbon source and water as an electron acceptor to produce carbon dioxide and molecular hydrogen as waste products). The Venusian atmosphere also contains hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide, although these two compounds react with each other and so are not usually found together unless they are being continually produced by anaerobic bacteria decomposing organic matter. In addition, carbonyl sulphide was also found, although it is most easily produced by organic processes

Hence, the scientists suspect that bacteria in Venusian clouds may be using energy from ultraviolet radiation to produce those unusual chemical compounds from carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide. If they exist, these bacteria could be the evolved descendants of those that developed in oceanic waters on a cooler, early Venus, before those waters evaporated from a runaway greenhouse effect. If the planet's change of climate was slow enough for life to adapt, however, microbes like those on Earth (capable of aerobic and anaerobic biochemical processes involving sulfur compounds exhibited by diverse microorganisms that include autotrophic thiobacilli, methylotrophs, methanogens, and sulphate-reducing bacteria) could have survived, perhaps living today in acidic clouds at altitudes of about 31 miles (or 50 kilometers) where the temperature ranges only from about 50 to 70 °C. Venusian clouds at this altitude are very acidic, but this region of its atmosphere also has the highest concentration of water droplets.

Here's to hoping. I'd like some of Venus' biosphere--Earth's kindred biosphere, perhaps--to have survived that world's heat death.