[PHOTO] Murder at New Generation Sushi

New Generation Sushi (491 Bloor Street West) is a popular sushi restaurant in the middle of the Annex despite its allegedly sub-par food: It's sushi, it's cheap, who really cares?

New Generation Sushi from a distance
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

New Generation Sushi: "Closed for renovations"
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

It's not closed for "renovations." Rather, it was closed because of a murder in the kitchen of one worker by another. Torontoist has a feature about the murdered man, Ming Xang, who was a student at the Ontario College for Art & Design and is now getting a posthumous exhibition.

[LINK] "The German mandarins"

Understanding Society had a great post examining a book on the vissicitudes of the Second Reich-Weimar German intellectual community, Fritz Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933. Originally published in Germany in 1967, it's apparently been influential.

The concept of mandarin is Ringer's shorthand for "influential educated elite." Humanistically educated in a system that emphasized literature, classical languages, and philosophy, the mandarins played the role of the educated and powerful elites of late nineteenth-century Germany, as officials, professors, and other highly educated professionals. These were men of letters who played key roles in German social and political life. Ringer concentrates on one important segment of this elite group: Germany's professors and university leaders, primarily in the humanities and social sciences.

The blogger's analysis of the different influences on their consequences is worth reading. A highlight:

The first kind of intellectual influence is unconscious and invisible. The second is closer to being conscious to the thinker. And the third is analytical and intentional on the part of the thinker. These frameworks bear some analogy to the three perspectives mentioned above -- "logical", "traditional", and "ideological" explanations. But the correspondence is not exact. We might say that the three perspectives correspond to the three different ideas about how thought corresponds to the world: that thought reflects social reality; thought advocates for social position; and thought interrogates social reality. Ringer echoes this in his coda on Weber by suggesting that Weber was able to transcend the limitations of perspective and interest to some degree, permitting him to exercise some independent critical intelligence:

Max Weber and a few other leading social scientists in the modernist camp hold a special place in the intellectual history of the mandarin community. They apparently shared some of the emotions with which the majority of their colleagues viewed the social transformations of their time. But their intellectual response to these changes far surpassed the orthodox norm in subtlety, critical control, and precision. Though never without a certain pessimism, they put their ambivalence at the service of analysis. They became at least partly conscious of their own situation. (180)

What is particularly tragic in Ringer's account is how poorly this mandarin culture prepared universities and academics for the onslaught of National Socialism and antisemitism in the 1930s. The nostalgia and pessimism that were the dominant themes of the mandarin social psychology left intellectuals unequipped for the struggle against fascism within the university and within German society. Their ideas and emotions left them ready for "conservative revolution" during the Weimar period, and provided no positive basis for mobilizing society against fascism when the time came.

The whole post is worth reading, and not only as a reminder of the need to be actively, constructively, socially engaged on the part of intellectuals specifically and people generally.

[LINK] "Reality hunger"

I like this Castrovalva post about the contradictions of realism in fiction and writing.

[I]t can often be the case that the more a writer adheres to autobiography, the more fantastical the narration becomes. Witness Huysmans and DeQuincey as obvious exmaples. One might also note that the division Shields draws between etoliated artifice and the crudity of raw experience is surely a false one; as John Bayley's The Uses of Division : Unity and Disharmony in Literature was at pains to point out, the most interesting work of many realist writers is often their more fragmented and inchoate. For me, writers like Lawrence, Eliot and Hardy are great precisely because of how untidy their novels often are. With all of that said though, in the end I probably sympathise more with Shields than with Smith. From Isherwood and Pessoa onwards to Coetzee and Sebald, writing that defies the division of reality and invention has become a hallmark of the age. Equally, it's difficult not to notice that if our age has any genre it has obsessively explored, it would have to be biography, even those of people who are still living and have done apparently little to merit the attention. Put simply, we live in an age where experience is a heavily circumsribed or heavily mediated concept.

[LINK] "Kiwi Rocket Scares Sheep, Reaches Space"

Interesting.

A small, private company launched New Zealand’s first rocket into space to cheers from about 50 people gathered on a small island off the country’s coast.

As the noise of the blastoff sent sheep running, the 18-foot rocket raced into the sky, reaching beyond the Kármán line, 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the Earth’s surface, which is traditionally considered the dividing altitude between the upper atmosphere and real space.

The Atea-1, named after the Maori word for space, was built by Rocket Lab. It’s the first privately built rocket launched from the Southern Hemisphere to reach space.

“It’s not trivial sending something into space,” Mark Rocket, Rocket Lab director and former internet entrepreneur, told local media. “This is a huge technological leap for New Zealand.”

After the sub-orbital vehicle entered space, it turned back toward Earth and splashed down. The Rocket Lab team is currently trying to locate the rocket, which was expected to fall into the Pacific Ocean about 30 miles northeast of Great Mercury Island, a privately owned resort and the rocket’s takeoff point.

If you happen to be in the area and see the payload, don’t go scooping it up, Rocket Lab warned through its Twitter feed.

“IMPORTANT: Marine traffic in the Coromandel, do not recover payload, it contains delicate scientific instruments & is potentially hazardous,” the Lab wrote. “If found please mark the payload location, and relay the GPS coordinates to Rocket Lab ASAP.”

[LINK] "The Pursuit of Attention: Social Networks, Individualization NOT Isolation"

From Global Sociology, in the meantime, comes an extended linkish post considering the impact of social networks on human interactions. They don't, the author argues, isolate people. Their impact is rather more subtle than that. The quotes are extensive and useful, like this one.

Consider this, for example. We enjoy accumulating followers, seeing ourselves referred to, commented to, and otherwise being made visible. Doesn’t matter whether this involves acknowledgment, recognition, or validation; the point is that the medium does create a kind of social visibility. Call it, for simplicity’s sake, “being paid attention to.”

Well, attention doesn’t correlate with actually engaging in conversation. Many of us sometimes ignore a request for communication, for whatever reason. It’s part of daily life; in real life it’s called “civil inattention,” and is handled by acknowledging others in ways that also indicate to them “I see you, recognize you, but I’m not available to interact.” Simply put, politeness.

Now, consider the social media space. Attention paid to others may not be visible to them. But if it’s given, such as by taking any action recorded and captured by the medium and surfaced by design, then this action can have two social outcomes, not one. This is the power of the medium, and the net effect of the doubled audience mentioned above.

Some potential consequences?

For all of our talk about “the world watching”, what good did social media actually do for the people of Iran? Did the footage out of the country actually change the outcome of the elections? No. Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power. It’s astonishing, really. Despite how successful ten million actual voters marching through Washington, London and other major cities in 2003 were in stopping the invasion of Iraq, a bit of entirely virtual cyber-posturing by foreigners didn’t lead to real change in Iran.

And so it was at Fort Hood. For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.

What’s most alarming about Moore’s behaviour is that she probably thought she was doing the right thing. Certainly, looking at her MySpace page and her Twitter account (before the army finally forced her to lock it down) we see the portrait of a patriot. Someone who clearly cares a great deal about others, and who – despite the rhetorical question “remind me why I joined the army again” on her profile – is proud to serve her country. In tweeting from the scene, and calling out the media for not reporting the rumours from inside the base, I’m sure she genuinely believed she was helping get the real truth out, and making an actual difference.

And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something, or post a video on YouTube or check-in using someone’s address on Foursquare. It’s just what we do now, no matter whether we’re heading out for dinner or witnessing a massacre on an Army base. Like Lord of the Flies, or the Stanford Prison Experiment, as long as we’re all losing our perspective at the same time – which, as a generation growing up with social media we are – then we don’t realise that our humanity is leaking away until its too late.

I find it a bit difficult to disagree with the master author's conclusion.

Individualized gazes do not create global social movements for peace or democracy. That still takes old-fashioned organizing. these videos do not translation into social actions but greater social attention on social media platforms for those fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time. They might be interviewed on television and see their Twitter following scores swell along with the number of comments for their videos on YouTube.

And you?

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Jaws and Tumblr and stereotypes

Something about the way I sank into the chair and yawning last night around 8 o'clock caused my to pop my my right temporomandibular joint, since it has caused me a lot of hassle. First I had to call Telehealth to be sure and get told that I should check it one, then I had to go to a walk-in clinic downtown to be told that I should see my dentist, then I walk down the street to my dentist and make an appointment for a week's time, then I have to go home with the strong suggestion that I should rest the jaw for the next bit, this rest including no "jaw jaw jaw." This unpleasantness, along with the strong desire to keep my dull pain from becoming actual shooting pain never mind wake-up-screaming-in-the-night pain, means that a pleasant night based on oral communication isn't going to be. Tabernac.

What will I do instead? Electronic communication will suffice nicely for the next bit, which works out since I wanted to write a blog post that began with Tumblr. A microblogging site like Twitter that includes an ability to readily share photos and video, this social networking service got some coverage recently in the free daily TTC-ubiquitous Metro, "Ups and Downs of a Tumblette's Life". "Tumblette."

Canadian Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother (a.k.a jaimeleigh) is supposedly a Tumblette: young, sexy and an over-sharer. The Tumblette — a vogue-ish tag for a female type who blogs on the website Tumblr — “lifecasts” with an edge.

[. . . ]

On her “for the story goes” Tumblr, the Toronto-based Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother bares all daily — from a series of self-point-and-shoot photos the 20-something blond snapped for a Semi-Naked-Picture-Day, to a controversial posting that included a spreadsheet mapping her bed-hopping history.

“People have a weird love for these sexual things,” says Fairbrother, who in person, is surprisingly demure. “We all talk about it... yet if you’re honest and shameless about it, you’re judged.”

At first glance, Fairbrother’s Tumblr is a female version of Tucker Max, whose drunken bro-ish hijinks recently made it to the big screen in I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

It’s made Fairbrother a love-her-or-hate-her Tumblette: She’s garnered a cult of 800 to 900 active followers and, last week, was ranking higher than other micro-celebrities and fellow oversharers, like Internet star Julia Allison.

Fairbrother’s quick to recognize her Tumblr began over a year ago as a lonely, soliloquy-ing stream.

Her postings quickly garnered followers, especially through Tumblr’s unique re-blogging feature — the re-posting of content allows users to trace how one post is amplified or subverted by other users — which created a dialogue that would bounce between her, her followers and even non-followers.

(Jamie-Leigh's Tumblr blog is here. I like.)

Many of the Tumblr elements described above--the ability to share and reshare links, the ability to construct communities of readers, and so on--have been active functions of any number of blogging platforms and social networking systems for years. boasts about the Telegraph that "the smart thing to be doing online these days is tumblelogging, which is to weblogs what text messages are to email - short, to the point, and direct."

What interested me most about the article apart from its content was the way it positioned a certain demographic as core, 20-something women who are quite active and often very open online. This sort of association with an online social networking service with a stereotype isn't unfamiliar, and may not even be inaccurate, since social networks are famously lumpy. We're familiar with how MySpace is especially common among musicians and certain American socioeconomic classes, how Orkut surprisingly came to dominate the Brazilian and take off in absolute numbers in India, how English Canada went Facebook-mad long before French Canada, the networks which ensure LinkedIn is populated very largely by professionals and professional-wannabes, and, closer to home, the way that Livejournal is famously big among Russophones. My own blog presence is based on Livejournal since that's the platform where my friends and acquaintances were, and I'd be surprised if that wasn't the sort of thing that influenced all my readers at some point. One may as well be amazed that Flickr's users use that service to store and reproduce images.

Some stereotypes are accurate, even useful. Others, not so much. The use of the diminuitive "ette" to describe hard-core users of Tumblr struck me as interesting, inasmuch as "ette" is one of those terms that is either sexist or reclaimed from sexism. The latter is the one that applies here, but real stigma is elsewhere. I think particularly about how some talk about Livejournal as an embarrassing wasteland populated by whiny teenagers. While I was flattered when one blogger years ago cited A Bit More Detail as one of the few good things on Livejournal, I was not impressed even more by the insult paid to the hundreds of Livejournal users who are as interesting bloggers as anyone. Are Blogspot and Typepad really that much better? This prejudice has even been internalized: the maintainers of the very interesting russiamagazine community preface most of their posts by saying that the "Russian blogosphere conveniently, if bafflingly, revolves around LJ."

I don't like this prejudice. Negative stereotypes are always bad, especially the sweeping ones, never mind how these particular ones discourage some from taking full ("Why use Livejournal if people won't take me seriously?") and lead others to ignorantly reject huge, perfectly enjoyable, swathes of our great global online community. It's inevitable that the prejudice that infects humanity generally would manifest itself in this specific form, I suppose, and the sheer size of the online community makes picking-and-choosing inevitable regardless of the motives involved, too, but I still feel let down. What happened to the dreams of unfettered global community? More, was wanting to believe in them really inevitable?

[DM] "On Indonesia and migration"

I've a post up at Demography Matters that takes a look at migration in Indonesia. As migration within Indonesia takes on importance, the numbers of Indonesian emigrants both permanent and temporary are growing. No, the Indonesians aren't invading Australia. Yes, the Indonesians are moving on a large scale to Malaysia and to a Middle East peculiarly lacking basic protections for these migrants.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Are Super Earths more habitable?"

The Dragon's Tales Will Baird comes up with the best links. And he a father of two!

Astronomers have discovered hundreds of Jupiter-like planets in our galaxy. However, a handful of the planets found orbiting distant stars are more Earth-sized. This gives hope to astrobiologists, who think we are more likely to find life on rocky planets with liquid water.

The rocky planets found so far are actually more massive than our own. Dimitar Sasselov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, coined the term "Super-Earths" to reflect their mass rather than any superior qualities.

But Sasselov says that these planets – which range from about 2 to 10 Earth masses – could be superior to the Earth when it comes to sustaining life.

[. . .]

The fear today is that too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lead to global warming. Yet too little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would make Earth a much colder place, and the photosynthetic plants and algae that rely on CO2 would perish. The demise of these oxygen-producing organisms would leave us all gasping for breath.

According to Sasselov, Earth's mass helps keeps tectonics in action. The more massive a planet, the hotter its interior. Tectonic plates slide on a layer of molten rock beneath the crust called the mantle. Convective currents within the mantle push the plates around. For smaller planets like Mars, the interior is not hot enough to drive tectonics.

Super Earths, with a larger and hotter interior, would have a thinner planetary crust placed under more stress. This probably would result in faster tectonics, as well as more earthquakes, volcanism, and other geologic upheavals. In fact, Sasselov says the plate tectonics on Super Earths may be so rapid that mountains and ocean trenches wouldn't have much time to develop before the surface was again recycled.

This is a new theme. I wonder how long it will take to percolate into the popular consciousness, including in literature? In the 2300AD/2320 roleplaying universe that I'm so fond of, created in the late 1980s, nearly all of the colony worlds had masses and gravities either similar to that of Earth or below that of Earth, in some cases substantially below. The only two exceptions were Dukou, a frozen high-gravity prison planet in the Epsilon Eridani system, and King, a world with gravity three times that of Earth and with an environment so hostile that only huge mineral wealth brought by mining, and even then the life expectancy was only 50 years. Will the ratios of super-Earths to Earths and sub-Earths be reversed in the future?