[LINK] "As It Might Have Been: Hexagonal London"

Call this London the gamer's paradise.

Hexagonal London
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Strange Maps is to thank for letting us know about this uchronia.

It takes aspiring London cabbies two to four years to acquire ‘The Knowledge’. Only if they know their way around the 25,000 streets in a 6-mile radius from Charing Cross (and along 320 main roads within Greater London) will they be licensed to drive one of London’s iconic black cabs. The London Taxicab Examination System is reputed to be the hardest of its kind in the world, and this speaks to the complexity of the British capital’s road grid.

That complexity, and the cabbies’ Knowledge, put passengers at the risk of being overcharged, the Victorians feared. Mid-19th century, even before the current Examination System was instituted (in 1865), a Mr John Leighton devised a system to prevent passengers from being taken for a proverbial as well as a literal ride. Leighton, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, published a scheme to divide London in a number of hexagonals, specifically aimed at preventing overcharging by cab drivers.

“John Leighton suggested that the old borough boundaries should be altered to conform to a honeycomb pattern. Within a 5-mile radius of the General Post Office all the sprawling, differently sized boroughs were to become hexagonal-shaped areas, 2 miles across. There were 19 altogether with the City in the centre of the honeycomb. Each hexagonal borough would be identified by a letter, and the letter as well as a number would be painted or cut out of tin-plate to be visible by day and night on lampposts at every street corner.”

The proposal for a hexagonal London is described in London As It Might Have Been, a book by Felix Barber and Ralph Hyde, also detailing plans for a giant pyramid to house the remains five million dead Londoners, and a scheme to erect a structure in Wembley to dwarf the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

[LINK] "Anne of Green Gables depicted as martyr"

This CBC article is, well, interesting, perhaps in the sense of "interesting" but perhaps not.

An Ottawa exhibition that depicts the martyrdom of famous Canadian icons could upset some fans of Anne of Green Gables.

Thorneycraft's image is based on the Martyrdom of St. Agatha, by Francisco de Zurbaran. Artist Diana Thorneycroft uses Canadian icons to show how religion and torture have come together over the centuries, and her exhibit includes a photograph of a mutilated Anne of Green Gables doll.

"She is standing with a plate, and on her plate are her severed breasts," Thorneycroft told CBC News Monday.

"I'm totally aware that this work could upset some people."

The image is based on a 17th-century painting by the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran depicting St. Agatha, who was tortured when she refused to marry a pagan prince in the third century.

"Having her breasts severed was just step 1," said Thorneycroft.

"The guy who wanted to marry her, he did monstrous things to her. It was truly horrible. This went on then, and this is going on today. The things we are capable of doing to each other, the list is phenomenal."

The photo included with the article makes the work look thought-provoking, at least, and Thorneycraft's idea of making the religious past contemporary isn't that original or that unacceptable. But is her work unartistically cheesy and gratuitous? I don't know.

[LINK] "'Ida' was distant kin, not ancestor: scientists"

And creationists say that scientists don't admit their errors.

Darwinius masillae, a 47-million-year-old lemur-like creature nicknamed Ida, was dubbed "The Link" in a book and a documentary, but now appears to belong to an extinct fringe branch of the primates that left no living descendants.

Erik Seiffert of Stony Brook University in New York and his colleagues examined 360 anatomical features — the jaw and teeth in particular — of 117 species of primate, living and extinct, and compiled a family tree based on those comparisons.

The researchers also described a newly discovered primate called Afradapis, which lived 37 million years ago in the Eocene period. Its fossil remains were found in Egypt.

The tree places Darwinius and Afradapis in a group called the adapoids, which were not ancestors of the living, higher primates, but shared a common ancestor with smaller primates, the lemurs and lorises.

[. . .]

The scientists who unveiled Darwinius said it was not a direct ancestor to humans or monkeys, but could show what an ancestor of apes and humans might have looked like. They said it shared some characteristics with higher primates worth examining.

The new analysis says the adapoids don't belong to the same major grouping of primates as apes, monkeys and humans. The features it shares with higher primates, such as the loss of certain teeth, must have evolved independently, the researchers said.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Twitter adoption and the young

The Associated Press' Martha Irvine, in the Globe and Mail, makes a point in the article "Grudgingly, young people finally flock to Twitter" that surprised me somewhat. Between E-mail, Livejournal, Blogspot, Facebook, and, perhaps soon, LinkedIn, I'm already facing information overload. (Yes, that's what I said. Is it that hard to believe?) Adopting another platform, this one something that I still don't understand ... I don't think I'm that atypical of my peers in that respect.

[M]ore young adults and teens — normally at the cutting edge of technology — are finally coming around to Twitter, using it for class or work, monitoring the minutiae of celebrities' lives.

It's not always love at first tweet, though. Many of them are doing it grudgingly, perhaps because a friend pressures them or a teacher or boss makes them try the 140-character microblogging site.

[. . .]

“Every semester, Twitter is the one technology that students are most resistant to,” says Mr. Silver, a media studies professor at the University of San Francisco, where he regularly teaches a class on how to use various Internet applications. “But it's also the one they end up using the most.”

It is a rare instance, he and others say, of young people adopting an Internet application after many of their older counterparts have already done so.

Their slowness to warm to Twitter comes in part from a fondness for the ease and directness of text messaging and other social networking services that most of their friends already use.

Many also are under the false impression that their Twitter pages have to be public, which is unappealing to a generation that's had privacy drilled into them.

[. . .]

“In some ways, what we're seeing here is a kind of closing of that generational gap as it relates to technology,” says Craig Watkins, a University of Texas professor and author of the book “The Young and the Digital.”

Consider, for instance, that the median age of a Facebook user is now 33, despite the social-networking site's roots as a college hangout, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The median age for Twitter is 31.

And while Facebook's audience is aging, Twitterers are getting younger. Internet tracker comScore Inc. found that 18- to 24-year-olds made up 18 percent of unique visitors to Twitter in September, compared with 11 per cent a year earlier.

Then again, I might be. One of the researchers quoted argue that "that wireless devices are increasingly a factor in Twitter involvement, as in the more you have — laptop, mobile phone and so on — the more likely you are to tweet." If I get a cell, maybe even an iPhone--I may as well buy into the Apple cult sometime--I suppose that I might download a relevant app.

[BRIEF NOTE] On saving the seals

This article came up on my RSS feed.

Pamela Anderson will help launch a new ad campaign against the Canadian seal hunt Friday morning at the Ontario legislature in Toronto.

The Canadian actress and activist is one of several celebrities who will be part of the PETA campaign calling for an end to the annual seal hunt.

They will be wearing PETA's "Save the Seals" T-shirt, which was previewed this summer by Sarah McLachlan at a Canada Day concert.

Among the other Canadians featured in the ad campaign are Jayde Nicole (of the teen TV show The Hills) and Battlestar Galactica stars Tricia Helfer and Grace Park.

Others include rocker Kelly Osborne (who appears on the current season of Dancing With the Stars) and blogger Perez Hilton.

PETA says the ads will appear in entertainment magazines and on blogs and will be tweeted in many languages starting this fall, to keep pressure on the government year-round instead of just during the spring when protests are expected.

I actually agree with this campaign. It's a fairly incontrovertible fact, I think, that the seals of Atlantic Canada are not responsible for the collapse of the fisheries. Rather, it's the shameless thoughtlessness of fishers, including--yes, really--a majority of Atlantic Canadians who didn't think about the codfish save as a source of income. Why haven't the cod recovered? Decades of industrial fishing, including that undertaken by Atlantic Canadians--remember the fisheries plant in every outport period in the 1980s-- have wrecked the marien ecology. Killing seals under this erroneous pretense, frankly, seems to be a combination of blind regionalism and displacement. The Atlantic Canadian seal hunt amounts to killing animals because you're unhappy. Must this be defended?

As for the official Canadian outrage at the European Union ban, I really don't see how a trading bloc saying that it doesn't want to import a product deemed to have been produced immorally can be condemned, the ad hominems I've heard confirming the point.

So, yes. I wish PETA the best of luck. May it save us Canadians from our short-sighted selves.