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I took a long exposure to try to capture something of the sights facing the Dufferin commuter heading towards the downtown. I like the composition, but the problem is the blurring. Does anyone reading this have any recommendations as to how I could escape the blurring and take sharper photos of dark areas?
Jan. 19th, 2011
Interesting, this.
A Maritime family connection lies behind an impromptu $1 million gift to Riverdale’s pioneering gay-rights church.
“It came out of the blue,” says Metropolitan Community Church Pastor Brent Hawkes, of the donation from Wallace McCain, founder of McCain Foods, and his wife Margaret McCain, former lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick.
“I knew his father,” Wallace McCain said simply from the couple’s Toronto home, partly explaining their motivation. “His father had a grocery store five miles from Florenceville, (N.B).”
The announcement coincides with the 10-year anniversary of a controversial wedding ceremony Hawkes conducted for two same-sex couples. The act ranks as a milestone in Canadian civil rights and helped lead to legal recognition of same-sex unions.
The gift, Hawkes said, is to go toward paying off the church mortgage and pursuing a support program for gay and lesbian refugees to Canada.
“There are 68 countries in the world where I could be arrested for being gay,” he said. “In 10 of those I could be executed.”
In 1950, the pastor’s father opened a general store with a grocery in Bath, N.B., leading to the beginnings of the McCain-Hawkes connection.
“In the early days, my father also used to run almost a mini-store in a truck,” Hawkes recalled. “He used to drive around on different routes on different days of the week, and many of the farmers would go inside and buy their groceries.”
We can agree this is profoundly cool, right?
The galaxy isn't expected to be entirely made of dark matter, with some normal-matter stars detectable by infrared telescopy likely present. And if it doesn't exist, Chakrabarti's finding still imply something spectacularly unexpected.
An entire galaxy may be lurking, unseen, just outside our own, scientists announced Thursday.
The invisibility of "Galaxy X"—as the purported body has been dubbed—may be due less to its apparent status as a dwarf galaxy than to its murky location and its overwhelming amount of dark matter, astronomer Sukanya Chakrabarti speculates.
Detectable only by the effects of its gravitational pull, dark matter is an invisible material that scientists think makes up more than 80 percent of the mass in the universe.
Chakrabarti, of the University of California, Berkeley, devised a technique similar to that used 160 years ago to predict the existence of Neptune, which was given away by the wobbles its gravity induced in Uranus's orbit.
Based on gravitational perturbations of gases on the fringes of our Milky Way galaxy, Chakrabarti came to her conclusion that there's a heretofore unknown dwarf galaxy about 260,000 light-years away.
With an estimated mass equal to only one percent the mass of the Milky Way, Galaxy X is still the third largest of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies, Chakrabarti predicts. The two Magellanic are each about ten times larger.
The galaxy isn't expected to be entirely made of dark matter, with some normal-matter stars detectable by infrared telescopy likely present. And if it doesn't exist, Chakrabarti's finding still imply something spectacularly unexpected.
[LINK] "People Turning Against Taliban"
Jan. 19th, 2011 07:03 pmYet another news report (this one from Inter Press Service's Ashfaq Yusufzai) suggesting that the inhabitants of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region are turning strongly against the Taliban and its local proxies.
Go, read.
"It is not surprising that the Taliban’s popularity graph is dwindling. They no longer enjoy the quantum of public support they had at the time of the attack on Afghanistan by U.S.-led forces," said Jamilur Rehman, a resident of South Waziristan and a student at the University of Peshawar.
Rehman hopes that the Taliban will soon vanish because they are rapidly losing local support. Quite apart from the horror of the atrocities themselves, killing women and children has also weakened the Taliban, he says.
Led by religious sentiments, thousands of people donated generously - and thousands of youths from Pakistan travelled to Afghanistan - to fight alongside the Taliban against U.S. forces in Sep. 2001. Millions of rupees were collected by religious parties in the name of supporting the Taliban.
[. . .]
[In the October 2001 elections] the people were also on the side of the Taliban, and the MMA received 11 per cent of the total vote in 2002 - with 3,349,436 ballots cast in favour. In contrast, during the election in 2008 the religious parties alliance won only six seats in the National Assembly with a total of 772,798 votes.
"Killing of respected religious scholars such as Dr. Muhammad Farooq Khan, Maulana Hasan Jan and Mufti Farooq Naeemi further eroded the Taliban’s public outlook," Majeed Shah, a teacher in the political science department of the Gomal University Dera Ismail Khan told IPS. "The people who held them in high esteem are now cursing them because of their follies."
[. . .]
"Our children cannot go out of our homes due to curfew and the continuous battles. Taliban don’t allow children to play and go to schools. How can we support them," said Jamal Akbar, once a strong supporter of the Taliban. Akbar, a shopkeeper in South Waziristan, said people were becoming poorer due to the Taliban’s activities.
"Attacking mosques and schools has deeply hurt the people’s sentiments and the Taliban are attacking both," said Wajid Ali, 25, a teacher at a religious school in Khyber Agency - one of the seven tribal agencies in FATA.
Go, read.
I owe Language Log's Mark Liberman thanks for linking to Lameen Souag's post "Language use in Tunisian politics", examining the language forms used by prominent Tunisian politicians.
The use of Tunisian Arabic versus Standard Arabic is rooted substantially in a desire to gain as wide an audience as possible. It's also profoundly rooted in the close relationship of Standard Arabic with the language of the Qu'ran. It might not be inaccurate to say that encouraging the use of colloquial Arabic dialects (as opposed to Standard Arabic) may be roughly as controversial as encouraging the use of colloquial neo-Latin languages like French and Italian (as opposed to Latin) centuries ago. An extreme form of this, seeing in the potential for the displacement of Standard Arabic an attack on Arab identity and Islam generally, can be found in Yahya Asmar's unsubtle Islamic Network article "Corruption of Arabic Language a Central Part of Cultural Attack on Muslim World".
Asmar needn't worry. Back in February 2005, I blogged about a proposed effort to dislocate shared Arabic identity by trying to encourage the rise of local Arab dialects (Moroccan, say, or Iraqi) as fully-fledged separate languages. The general consensus was that language differences weren't so large, that Standard Arabic--or popular dialects, like the Egyptian and Lebanese Arabics promoted by popular culture--was readily accessible, and that the tendency was for a stable disglossia, the two major forms of Arabic co-existing stably, each in their own domains. With Qu'ranic language forming a good part of the modern Arabic language and accordingly encouraging acquisition of a standard language not wildly different from what they already speak, standard Arabic is hardly likely to disappear. If anything, conceivably, if Arab society coalesces into some sort of polity, stable diglossia could be disrupted to the standard's advantage.
That certainly seems to be the case in China. Looking back at my earlier post, I noticed that I was too optimistic about the durability of regional Chinese languages like Cantonese and Shanghainese, which enjoyed a vaguely similar relationship to Mandarin, but which seem to be well on their way to being replaced by the Chinese national language. The key difference in that case may be the political unity of China versus the pronounced disunity of the Arab world, and the mass migrations of China versus the stabler populations of the Middle East: a stable diglossia such as exists in Tunisia may have been impossible to form in China proper. Certainly the continued vitality of Chinese regional languages in autonomous Taiwan suggests that, if political situations in Greater China were different, different outcomes could well have resulted.
For non-Arabic speakers, the key point to remember is that in any one country Arabic has at least two basic levels - formal Fusha and dialectal Darja - which are different enough grammatically and lexically to be considered separate languages, but which can be combined in appropriate circumstances.
The Prime Minister is Mohamed Ghannouchi. He first came to prominence on Saturday when he briefly declared himself acting President. This speech was entirely in Fusha - no efforts to add a personal touch here, simply officialese. The only dialectal features I notice are the pronunciation of jīm as ž, and of some short low vowels as ə. The delivery, however, is notably non-fluent - he's reading it slowly from a paper, pausing sometimes every three or four words, and he makes a mistake in case marking ('ad`ū kāffati 'abnā'i tūnəs "I call upon all the sons of Tunisia" - should have been kāffata.) Today, as Prime Minister he announced the new cabinet; his speech is a bit less halting (although still halting enough that you get several elision failures, like li al-ħayāti l`āmmah for lilħayāti l`āmmah), but as before it is entirely in Fusha and is being read out from a paper
[. . .]
Moncef Marzouki, a secular leftist opposition figure calling for the old ruling party to get out, similarly sticks to Fusha throughout a recent interview with Aljazeera, avoiding dialect forms with remarkable persistence. His language use nonetheless contrasts strikingly with Mr. Ghannouchi's: Mr. Marzouki speaks quickly and fluently off the cuff, without consulting any visible notes, and without any conspicuous errors in delivery. Yet Mr. Marzouki is only 4 years younger than Mr. Ghannouchi, and, having studied medicine, undoubtedly did his university in French; has he simply been more motivated to learn to speak to a wide audience? The choice of consistent Fusha seems to reflect Aljazeera's pan-Arab audience[.]
The regime's favourite bogeyman for many years, the Islamist leader Rachid El Ghannouchi, [. . .i]n his speech of 2 days ago, [uses] Fusha consistently and fluently, with an intonation reminiscent of a sermon, and shows only sporadic dialectal phonetic features[.] Yet he shifts into Darja briefly (at about 4:50): after warning security forces that those who kill innocents will be damned to Hell, in the maximally formal language of a quotation from the Qur'an [.], he suddenly caps it with a brief colloquial appeal to their common sense: əṭṭāġiya muš məš isədd a`līk "the tyrant isn't gonna save you". [. . .]
As for the protesters? Well, listen for yourself to one of the latest. Some slogans are definitely dialectal[.] Others are purely Fusha (though minus inconvenient case endings, as is common in less formal Fusha[.] Not hearing anything in French though, which is interesting given its prominent position in the Tunisian sociolinguistic environment: I suspect French would (rightly) be viewed as inappropriate for an appeal to the people of the nation, no matter how many people may speak it as a second language, whereas Fusha or Darja are equally suitable for demonstrations.
The use of Tunisian Arabic versus Standard Arabic is rooted substantially in a desire to gain as wide an audience as possible. It's also profoundly rooted in the close relationship of Standard Arabic with the language of the Qu'ran. It might not be inaccurate to say that encouraging the use of colloquial Arabic dialects (as opposed to Standard Arabic) may be roughly as controversial as encouraging the use of colloquial neo-Latin languages like French and Italian (as opposed to Latin) centuries ago. An extreme form of this, seeing in the potential for the displacement of Standard Arabic an attack on Arab identity and Islam generally, can be found in Yahya Asmar's unsubtle Islamic Network article "Corruption of Arabic Language a Central Part of Cultural Attack on Muslim World".
From the beginning of the Qur’an’s revelation, the Jews and mushrikeen of old Arabia, although often awestruck by its rhetorical and spiritual intensity, attempted to destroy the integrity of Islamic Arabic. This hatred of Arabic, because it is the language of the Qur’an, continued through the ages, with the enemies of Islam in all times and places attempting to corrupt Arabic and separate Muslims from the language of the Qur’an, and thereby from the Qur’an. Colonial powers, encouraged by Christian missionaries, succeeded in persuading or forcing Muslims in Africa and Asia to abandon the Arabic alphabet and adopt Latin scripts instead. One of the first official acts of the Kemalist secularisers in Turkey was the fabrication of a Roman alphabet for Turkish, while outlawing Arabic, even to the point of commissioning the call to prayer in Turkish. [. . .]
Throughout the twentieth century, Western-oriented schools and universities in the Arab and Muslim world insisted on using English and other colonial languages as their languages of instruction, and slowly the definition of an “educated” person became one who was educated in a colonial language. At the same time, catering to nationalist and modernist sentiments in the Arab world, Western-style universities also insisted on “updating” Arabic, with local Christians colonizing the language with Western words and secularising definitions and concepts present in the language from before. In recent years American-style universities have proliferated in the Arab world, especially in the oil-rich Gulf sheikdoms. Run by Western expatriates who recruit faculty-members from the ranks of missionaries, often with the blessings of the local elite, these universities are slowly whittling away at literary Arabic, replacing it with literary English. Many expatriates are repulsed by any form of Arabic, but the shrewder ones encourage the local colloquial forms, which are not written and often not intelligible to other Arabic-speakers, but which give Arab students a false sense of security that they are not forgetting their native tongue. In reality, language is inseparable from modes of thought and feeling, and giving up one’s language for another means changing one’s thinking. [. . .]
Allah has promised to protect the Qur’an, but it may be up to Muslims to protect the Arabic language, especially in its literary form. Qur’anic and literary Arabic are under assault by the enemies of Islam, who cannot bear the fact that the language of revelation from Allah Most High is still alive and relatively well among Muslims and Arabs, more than fourteen centuries after the Qur’an came down. Their hatred of Islam and of the Qur’an is the main reason for their assault on Arabic, and they have powerful local proxies to help in the task of corrupting or reformulating Arabic. Their current focus is on native speakers of Arabic, and by way of ‘education’ and satellite television the enemies of Allah are slowly making progress in their satanic quest. It is not too late to thwart them, but major efforts are necessary. Certainly Muslims and Arabs who still revere the Qur’an must take notice of these plots, and develop alternative forms of education and communication, in order to counter this diabolical onslaught.
Asmar needn't worry. Back in February 2005, I blogged about a proposed effort to dislocate shared Arabic identity by trying to encourage the rise of local Arab dialects (Moroccan, say, or Iraqi) as fully-fledged separate languages. The general consensus was that language differences weren't so large, that Standard Arabic--or popular dialects, like the Egyptian and Lebanese Arabics promoted by popular culture--was readily accessible, and that the tendency was for a stable disglossia, the two major forms of Arabic co-existing stably, each in their own domains. With Qu'ranic language forming a good part of the modern Arabic language and accordingly encouraging acquisition of a standard language not wildly different from what they already speak, standard Arabic is hardly likely to disappear. If anything, conceivably, if Arab society coalesces into some sort of polity, stable diglossia could be disrupted to the standard's advantage.
That certainly seems to be the case in China. Looking back at my earlier post, I noticed that I was too optimistic about the durability of regional Chinese languages like Cantonese and Shanghainese, which enjoyed a vaguely similar relationship to Mandarin, but which seem to be well on their way to being replaced by the Chinese national language. The key difference in that case may be the political unity of China versus the pronounced disunity of the Arab world, and the mass migrations of China versus the stabler populations of the Middle East: a stable diglossia such as exists in Tunisia may have been impossible to form in China proper. Certainly the continued vitality of Chinese regional languages in autonomous Taiwan suggests that, if political situations in Greater China were different, different outcomes could well have resulted.
Via the National Post comes, via Quan Li at the China Daily, news of the contributions of cats to the economy of the northeast Chinese port city of Dalian.
A man has trained 60 cats to guard a grain depot from rats, the Dalian-based Peninsula Morning Post reported on Monday.
Yin Chunzhu, an employee at a storage and transportation company in Dalian, Northeast China’s Liaoning province has been dubbed “Cat commander” for his army of feline guards.
The barn, stocked with organic crops has been harassed by rampant rats for many years, according to staffers. Due to the possible contamination from rat poison, Yin has been training the cats since mid-October to protect against rodents.
The cats have been trained with different skills such as detecting, lurking and patrolling for rats.
“It is obvious that our grain damage has lessened in the recent months”, said a staff member at the company. And the expense of raising the cats is only half the cost of losing the grain, she added.