[PHOTO] The Art Gallery of Ontario's Sculptural Staircase

The Art Gallery of Ontario's Sculptural Staircase
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

After its Frank Gehry redesign, the Art Gallery of Ontario has many nice things about it. The sculptural staircase is one of these things.

[META] Still more blogs on my blogroll

I know that the speed and scale of this week's blogroll expansion is significant indeed, perhaps akin to that of a uchronical European Union that had decided to expand to include such cities as Tirane, Vladivostok, and Diyarbakir by 1995. In my defense, all these are very good blogs.

• Phil Plait's blog Bad Astronomy is a famous blog, one that not only takes a look at the wonders of outer space but one that deconstructs superbly ridiculous claims, like the one suggesting that the Jupiter probe Galileo's end-of-life collision with Jupiter was intended to trigger stellar ignition, terraforming the Jovian moons and bombarding the Earth with debris, in order to demonstrate that God didn't exist. Or something.


• Dan Hirschman's A (Budding) Sociologist's Commonplace Book is a blog interested, among other things, in the concept of "economics," how it got started and how it was used.


• The Grumpy Academic is the weblog of an American sociologist concerned with all manner of things relating to Asia, especially Southeast Asia, with a focus on sports.


• Kieran Healy's Weblog is, as it happens, the blog of Crooked Timber contributor Kieran Healy.


• My dear friend Erin Gallé's Lost & Found shows how wonderfully a person can engage with art and with this city.

[CAT] "Stray kittens in good hands with Goldman Sachs"

Steve Ladurantaye's Globe and Mail article does, as the author notes, say a lot about the perception of big finance in the United States.

Never let it be said that the fat cats on Wall Street don't care about the stray kittens living in their gutters.

Indeed, Goldman Sachs wants the world to know that it did not abandon unfortunate felines after reports suggested the world's most influential and profitable investment bank skipped out on a $2,000-ish veterinarian bill for five black kittens found on the construction site of its New York headquarters.

“We want to make this very clear,” a Goldman representative said Thursday. “All of the kittens have been adopted and we paid the bills. We are very happy they have found homes.”

Underscoring the bank's commitment to all things adorable, the company called back minutes later after making the statement to elaborate: “I would also like to add that we would never abandon kittens. Thank you.”

The rapid spread of the story, through a newspaper report and the Internet, points to a more serious image problem at Goldman: No matter what it does, critics and conspiracy theorists are quick to seize on any story that casts the bank as a symbol of Wall Street excess and greed.

The kitten saga started in August, when Rich Brotman found them near Goldman's nearly finished $2-billion (U.S.) head office.

Mr. Brotman, who runs a rescue service called City Critters, approached the bank about paying for any associated medical costs, and took the kittens home to get them used to humans.

Mr. Brotman convinced Goldman to canvass its employees to see if any would open their homes to the kittens, which were nicknamed BlackBerries because of their dark fur.

And that's where things started to get a little hairy. An editorial in a weekly Manhattan newspaper suggested Goldman had not delivered the promised veterinary cheque as of the end of October, months after the kittens were rescued. Worse, the paper alleged the bank hadn't bothered to help to find loving homes for the hapless strays.

The blogosphere ignited with indignity – how could a bank that posted a $3.18-billion quarterly profit refuse to help? Maybe its critics were right, and it really was a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” as a Rolling Stone profile characterized it in a recent issue

Then again, this Gawker post does suggest that Goldman Sachs delaying paying by two months.

[CAT] "News of John Baird's cat's death goes international"

As much as I dislike John Baird, a Canadian federal parliamentarian and Conservative government minister who--like George Smitherman in the Liberal government of Ontario--has traditionally served as an attack dog for the government, with comedy sketches suggesting that he is incapable in speaking in any way other than a shout, I am sorry about his cat, confusion with a notable political figure aside.

Canada's Transport Minister John Baird on Tuesday among colleagues spread the simple message, "Thatcher is dead." The message reached members of the Canadian Parliament who attended a gala event in honor of Army families. Also, the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was present.

As the Canadian news agency CanWestNews reported was to the consternation of whether the big news - especially feels the Canadian Conservative government party of the "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher, who governed Britain from 1979 for eleven years combined, very.

Prime Minister Harper told immediately, the message can be verified by the death of the politician in Britain. But in 10 Downing Street one was surprised - Lady Thatcher, 84, was alive and kicking.

As it turned out a little later, Baird had said Transport Minister Thatcher, a very different - namely, his cat, which he had given in honor of the politician whose name.

This story sounds too good to be true. It is, however, assured as a "CanWestNews" spokesman SPIEGEL ONLINE: "Our chief political reporter was at the gala reception there and has seen the story live."

[LINK] "LCROSS Impact Data Indicates Water on Moon"

Thanks to one of my Facebook Andrews for this news.

The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.

Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.

NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon’s south pole.

The impact created by the LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket created a two-part plume of material from the bottom of the crater. The first part was a high angle plume of vapor and fine dust and the second a lower angle ejecta curtain of heavier material. This material has not seen sunlight in billions of years.

"We're unlocking the mysteries of our nearest neighbor and by extension the solar system. It turns out the moon harbors many secrets, and LCROSS has added a new layer to our understanding," said Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Scientists have long speculated about the source of vast quantities of hydrogen that have been observed at the lunar poles. The LCROSS findings are shedding new light on the question of water, which could be more widespread and in greater quantity than previously suspected.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the secrecy of the Canadian Conservatives

Any number of observers of the Canadian political scene--opponents of the Conservative minority government, true--have accused said government of being addicted to secrecy. I'll quote at length from BCer in Toronto. Links are at the original page.

Gov't program wants job applicants' views on Tory budget: An elite federal program to recruit the cream of new graduates suddenly wants to know the applicants' views on the government's vaunted Economic Action Plan before they get a job interview.

Cities stuck with bill for Tory 'propaganda': The federal government is being accused of wasting millions of taxpayers' dollars by forcing cash-strapped Ontario and municipalities to help pay for billboards advertising the Conservatives' economic program at thousands of infrastructure projects. The Liberals and NDP slammed the Conservatives for requiring provincial and city governments receiving infrastructure cash to buy an additional sign at each building project specifying that the federal government paid part of the bill under its Economic Action Plan.

Raitt accused of expense abuse: Federal cabinet minister Lisa Raitt signed off on her own expenses on at least one occasion – more than $3,000 spent on a trip to London, England – when she was president and CEO of the Toronto Port Authority.

Torch relay has a lot of stops in Tory ridings: If MPs strutting at hometown torch relay celebrations was a Winter Olympic sport, the federal Conservatives would be turning in a solid gold performance. When federal riding maps are superimposed over torch relay community events, the flame's pit stop standings are as follows: Conservatives: 126 New Democrats: 29 Liberals: 21 Bloc Quebecois: 18.

Duffy blasts NDP MP as 'faker': Conservative Senator Mike Duffy called MP Peter Stoffer a "faker" Thursday after the Nova Scotia New Democrat released a report questioning the expenses of new Tory senators.

Stimulus money favours key Tories: The biggest winners of the Conservatives' stimulus extravaganza include one of the prime minister's closest friends, a riding the Tories desperately hope to win in a byelection next week, and a longtime party stalwart. Eastern Ontario MP Scott Reid, the Nova Scotia riding of Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley and British Columbia MP Jim Abbott are three of the clearest winners in the distribution of stimulus spending, a broad analysis by The Canadian Press shows.

And that's all just from this past week, and never mind the H1N1 story. Each one in isolation merits a head-shake, but in aggregate it's quite a picture.

What news item sticks out for me?

according to Canadian government officials, a biography of U.S. President Barack Obama provided to Prime Minister Stephen Harper shortly after Mr. Obama's inauguration last January qualifies as a state secret.

Under the Access to Information Act, Canwest News Service requested all briefing materials provided to the prime minister ahead of Mr. Obama's visit to Canada in February.

Mr. Obama's whirlwind stop in Ottawa on Feb. 19 was his first visit to a foreign country after being inaugurated. After a series of icebreaking meetings, the prime minister and the president pledged to co-operate on everything from the financial crisis to clean energy and Afghanistan. But the trip will perhaps best be remembered for the rock-star treatment accorded to Mr. Obama, who charmed the public by declaring his love for Canada and picking up a Beavertail dessert on an impromptu stop in the national capital's Byward Market.

The 77 pages of heavily censored documents released to Canwest include memos to Mr. Harper from his foreign-policy adviser, a letter from Canada's former ambassador to the United States, Michael Wilson, as well as talking points to prepare Mr. Harper for the meeting. It also includes biographies of the president and officials who accompanied the president on the trip to Canada, including National Security Advisor James Jones, National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers, Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

In blacking out the biographies of the president and his entourage, officials cited a section of the act that allows the government to refuse records whose disclosure could be "injurious to the conduct of international affairs, the defence of Canada or any states allied or associated with Canada."

[. . .]

Retired colonel Michel Drapeau, an expert in access-to-information law at the University of Ottawa, said it's not surprising that much of the briefing material on such a high-level meeting was being withheld. Canadian courts have tended to support the government's view that releasing such materials could hurt relations with other countries, he said.

But he said it was "silly" for Canadian officials to withhold the biography of such a prominent public figure.

"He's not the former director of the CIA, or anything. I mean, this guy's as public as it comes," Mr. Drapeau said, adding that it's highly unlikely that Canada would be privy to personal or professional information about the president that had not already been disclosed.

Is this sort of thing common outside of Canada, I ask my non-Canadian readers?

[LINK] Some Friday links

I like these links. I also like posting without HTML errors--sorry!

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew remarks--with pictures--on how there isn't very much old Toronto at all.
  
• Anthropology.net reacts to a neuroscientist, one David Eagleman, who seems to argue that he human capacity for synaesthesia--briefly, the ability for people's sensory impressions to cross-connect in an unusual way--has interesting implications for human consciousness.


• Bad Astronomy reacts to the news that astronomers have found a correlation between the likelihood that a star hosts planets and that of low lithium abundance. Centauri Dreams pays attention to the same findings.


• A BCer in Toronto's Jeff Jedras considers the ongoing Romanian presidential election campaign from his position on the ground.


• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber argues that the European leaders who started the First World War are mass murderers on the scale of a Hitler or a Stalin.


• Daniel Drezner is skeptical of the idea that China will escape the nearly iron-clad law that countries of a certain income will democratize, based on China's past precedent.


• English Eclectic's Paul Halsall pronounces himself decidedly in favour of the European Union and the Lisbon Treaty.


• Everyday Sociology makes the argument that the exceptionally tight structure of military life helps create people predisposed to random violence.


• Far Outliers describes anti-Greek violence by Ottoman authorities in Thessaloniki in 1821, and quotes Niall Ferguson's suggestion that 1979, not 1989, saw the biggest break from the past with the rise of China and radical Islam.


• Global Sociology examines the arguments of Afghan woman parliamentarian Malalai Joya and her despair at the continued fundamentalism of Afghanistan's leaders and reports on findings that although women tend to live longer than men, they have a lower quality of life.


• The Grumpy Sociologist points out that the selection of Laos as host of the Southeast Asian Games makes the poor country into a field for economic competition between powerful neighbouring states for influence.


• Language Hat takes note of the ubiquity of Hungarians.


• Language Log's Mark Liberman really doesn't like the idea that differences in landscape necessarily translate into huge differences in language and meaning.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Sek rightly despairs for Camille Paglia's good sense.


• Erin's Lost & Found, heavy on art, features an excellent picture of me.
  
• Marginal Revolution hosts a discussion on whether or not the sheer size of the economic gap between many developing countries and their developed counterparts is promoting an unproductive despair on the part of the former.


• Noel Maurer reports that the fact that uranium production is tightly-linked to particular states means that there isn't any integrated, elastic, uranium market.


• Slap Upside the Head reacts to news from the United States that same-sex couples behave quite similarly to opposite-sex ones in terms of parenting and whatnot.


• Torontoist reviews Torontonian David Sax's work on the deli and its decline as related to Jewish assimilation.


• Towleroad announces that an opposite-sex couple in the United Kingdom want a gay civil partnership in order to protest the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage. (Peter Tatchell has pronounced himself in favour of the extension of these basic rights to opposite-sex couples.


• The Yorkshire Ranter reports on Nigeria's defeat of the various Niger Delta militias demanding control of local oil reserves.

[LINK] "Technology not causing social isolation: Pew study"

This is worth noting, not least because the thesis that the study disproved runs completely against my own experiences.

Contrary to popular belief, technology is not leading to social isolation and Americans who use the Internet and mobile phones have larger and more diverse social networks, according to a new study.

"All the evidence points in one direction," said Keith Hampton, lead author of the report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project released Wednesday. "People's social worlds are enhanced by new communication technologies.

"It is a mistake to believe that Internet use and mobile phones plunge people into a spiral of isolation," said Hampton, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The authors said key findings of the study -- "Social Isolation and New Technology" -- "challenge previous research and commonplace fears about the harmful social impact of new technology."

"There is a tendency by critics to blame technology first when social change occurs," Hampton said.

"This is the first research that actually explores the connection between technology use and social isolation and we find the opposite.

"It turns out that those who use the Internet and mobile phones have notable social advantages," Hampton said. "People use the technology to stay in touch and share information in ways that keep them socially active and connected to their communities."

The study found that six percent of Americans can be described as socially isolated -- lacking anyone to discuss important matters with or who they consider to be "especially significant" in their life.

That figure has hardly changed since 1985, it said.

The study examined people's discussion networks -- those with whom they discuss important matters -- and core networks -- their closest and most significant confidants.

It found that on average, the size of people's discussion networks is 12 percent larger among mobile phone users, nine percent larger for those who share photos online, and nine percent bigger for those who use instant messaging.

The diversity of people's core networks tends to be 25 percent larger for mobile phone users, 15 percent larger for basic Internet users, and even larger for frequent Internet users, those who use instant messaging, and those who share digital photos online.

The Pew report mentioned is available here. Hampton et al. abstract their findings as follows.

. Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend. Specifically, they argue that the type of social ties supported by these technologies are relatively weak and geographically dispersed, not the strong, often locally-based ties that tend to be a part of peoples’ core discussion network. They depicted the rise of internet and mobile phones as one of the major trends that pulls people away from traditional social settings, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and public spaces that have been associated with large and diverse core networks.

The survey results reported here were undertaken to explore issues that have not been probed directly in that study and other related research on social isolation: the role of the internet and mobile phone in people’s core social networks.

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

[PHOTO] Two sunsets, two minutes

It's amazing how much the sunsets, as seen from the west of the Art Gallery of Ontario on Dundas Street West between Spadina Avenue and University Avenue, differed in the space of minutes.

Art Gallery of Ontario Sunset (1)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Art Gallery of Ontario Sunset (2)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei