[META] On the new breed of photo posts

Now that I've got a digital camera that finally has an adequate memory--something capable of storing more than, say, four photos--I've got plenty of things to upload.

I've forty or so photos to upload from my trip a couple of weekends ago to the Kawarthas; I've got in excess of a hundred photos I've taken since I got the memory card; I've got more besides. I've got pictures of Toronto, of other people, of the Kawarthas, of all kinds of subjects, and at least a few [CAT] pictures featuring Shakespeare in his many various cute poses.

(You will see all the pictures belonging to that last category)

Up until now, I've reserved multi-photo photo posts for Thursdays and Sundays, with single-photo photo posts for all the other days of the week, not least because Flickr supports only single-photo photo posts and this works well for me when I can't right-click to copy the photos' address on public computers. This, is going to change.

Consider this advance warning. Colours, in all manner of intricate combinations and in even greater volume than usual, are going to appear on these pages shortly. Enjoy.

[PHOTO] Orchids under plastic

Orchids under plastic
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I snapped this picture of orchids prepped for sale at a convenience store/flower shop on a College Street corner a month ago.

[LINK] "Ex-KGB officer loses latest fight in court to avoid deportation"

Is it wrong for me to think, knowing the KGB's history, "good"?

A federal-court judge has upheld Ottawa's decision to deport a former KGB officer who moved to Canada with his family after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Mikhail Lennikov, 49, has been waging a long and solitary battle with federal Immigration and border officials to stay in Canada, even though he was ordered deported in June.

Instead, he hid out in a Vancouver church where he has lived ever since.

But Mr. Lennikov's latest appeal to the courts has again been rejected, this time by a federal-court judge who rejected his request for a judicial review of the federal government's decision to deport him.

In a 24-page decision, Mr. Justice Michel Beaudry dismissed Mr. Lennikov's application, saying there were no reviewable errors to "warrant the Court's intervention."

Yesterday, Mr. Lennikov was resigned, but vowed he will remain at the church indefinitely.

He has said he fears for his life if he's forced to return to Russia.

"I do not have anywhere to go," he said in a phone interview.

"I cannot go back."

Thoughts?

[LINK] "Rising seas create first climate refugees"

The Toronto Star's Mitch Potter has the story about the sad fate facing the people of the Carteret Islands.

When sharks started showing up in the garden, Ursula Rakova knew her home and native islands were doomed.

And so the exodus is now underway for Rakova, 43, and the other 1,700 residents of the Carteret Islands, who are in the process of abandoning their ancestral coral atoll 86 kilometres off the coast of Papua New Guinea for higher ground before the sea takes everything. But they will not go quietly, says Rakova, who is in New York City this week forlornly staking a claim for her people as the world's first climate-change refugees.

"The signs are clear: we used to have storms during the rainy season. Now we cannot predict it because they come more frequent and stronger," she said. "We built seawalls and planted mangroves but it gets worse. Last Christmas the storms destroyed homes and the food gardens were devastated. Now we know the sea will wash over our islands. It is heartbreaking but we have to leave."

Earlier this year five men from Carteret moved to establish a beachhead on the larger island of Bougainville, setting up homes and gardens. Next month their wives and children will follow. And over the span of the next several years the pattern will continue until the Carteret Islands – Rakova's people call themselves the Tuluun, a matrilineal society with a 1,000-year history – will be empty.

"It is especially hard for the older people. Many of them are refusing to leave. We don't want to force them. None of us want to go. But the saltwater is spoiling our ability to grow food. So there is no choice," she said.

[LINK] "Searching for Interstellar Communications"

I'd like to thank james_nicoll and ultimately Centauri Dreams for linking to the paper "Searching for Interstellar Communications", co-written by physicists Guiseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison (Nature, Vol. 184, Number 4690, pp. 844-846, September 19, 1959), for starting the on-going discourse about how to find extrateerrestrial civilizations via radio signals.

No guesswork here is as good as finding the signal. We expect that the signal will be pulse-modulated with a speed not very fast or very slow compared to a second, on grounds of band-width and of rotations. A message is likely to continue for a time measured in years, since no answer can return in any event for some ten years. It will then repeat, from the beginning. Possibly it will contain different types of signals alternating throughout the years. For indisputable identification as an artificial signal, one signal might contain, for example, a sequence of small prime numbers of pulses, or simple arithmetical sums.

The first effort should be devoted to examining the closest likely stars. Among the stars within 15 light years, seven have luminosity and lifetime similar to those of our Sun. Four of these lie in the directions of low background. They are Tau Ceti, 02 Eridani, Eta Eridani, and Eta Indi. All these happen to have southern declinations. Three others, Alpha Centauri, 70 Ophiucus and 61 Cygni, lie near the galactic plane and therefore stand against higher backgrounds. There are about a hundred stars of the appropriate luminosity among the stars of known spectral type within some fifty light years. All main-sequence dwarfs between perhaps GO and K2 with visual magnitudes less than about +6 are candidates.

It's certainly ongoing, and the discussion has advanced significantly beyond this first consideration, but going back to the basics is always a good thing.

[DM] "And the Canadian birth rate goes up"

Over at Demography Matters I've a post up linking to Zosia Bielski's Globe and Mail artilce which takes a look at this Statistics Canada news release on Canada's rising birth rate.

Canadian women gave birth to 367,864 babies in Canada in 2007, up 13,247 or 3.7% from 2006 and the fastest annual increase since 1989.

The number of births rose in all age groups, particularly among mothers aged 30 to 34, and in every province and territory, except Prince Edward Island and Yukon.

The total fertility rate, or the average number of children per woman, increased from 1.59 in 2006 to 1.66 in 2007.

While this was the highest total fertility rate since 1992, it remained well below replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. This is the fertility rate that must be maintained to replace the population in the absence of migration.

This upward trend is not unique to Canada. In recent years, other countries with low fertility rates (such as Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and Australia) also experienced an increase in their total fertility rate.

The number of babies born in 2007 was the highest since 1995 and the fifth consecutive annual increase.

Elsewhere in the release, Statistics Canada emphasizes that the increase in births is concentrated in older women, and that for the first time ever women in their 30s have more children than women in their 20s. Births increased in all jurisdictions save Yukon, and Newfoundland and Labrador retains the country's lowest TFR

Go, read.

[LINK] "Trudeau, Tewksbury among first inductees into Queer Hall of Fame"

Many once unimaginable histories are now publicly recognized.

Pierre Trudeau's flamboyance and tendency to provoke debate often landed him in controversy and those traits have now landed him in the Queer Hall of Fame.

Mr. Trudeau is one of five inaugural inductees into the newly-established hall, along with Olympic gold swimmer Mark Tewksbury and three other long-time activists in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

The former prime minister was a key figure in decriminalizing homosexuality and his famous partial quote — “there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” — helped convince Parliament to pass the law in 1969.

Mr. Trudeau's son, Justin, said he is incredibly honoured that the work his father did is being acknowledged.

“I know that the decriminalization of homosexuality 40 years ago was something that my father was very proud of,” Justin said.

“He'd be touched,” he said, of his father who passed away almost nine years ago.

[. . .]

Paul Therien, chairman of the Queer Hall of Fame, said the hall was started after his group decided they wanted to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality.

“For lack of better terminology, Trudeau was the wrench that turned the nut,” Mr. Therien laughed.

“There's not a lot of acknowledgment in the queer community of these people. They really are heroes.”