[PHOTO] On a wintry day off Avenue Road north of Bloor (1)

On a wintry day off Avenue Road north of Bloor (1)
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

The day was cold and the snow was powder mixed with salt as the wind blew. Oh, winter!

[LINK] "Nicolas Sarkozy slip puts French Alsace 'in Germany'"

Oh, Sarko. Facebook's Stephen may be rather interested in this item.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy made a gaffe while addressing a group of farmers in a French border region, saying he was "in Germany".

Mr Sarkozy dropped the clanger while delivering an address in Alsace - the region won back by France from Germany in World War I.

He quickly corrected his mistake, but was booed by some in the crowd.

Nationality in Alsace is sensitive as the region has been part of both France and Germany over the centuries.

Mr Sarkozy had been delivering an address to farmers in the town of Truchtersheim, 24 km (15 miles) from the German border.

He was explaining how he intended to protect their income, and said: "I can accept distortions of competition from China or India, but not from Germany. I'm not saying that simply because I'm in Germany."

He then added quickly: "I am in Alsace."

Mr Sarkozy held up his hand and attempted to joke it off. The crowd first laughed and then some booed.

Video is available here.

Thanks to Antonia for the heads-up!

[LINK] "Multiple Asteroid Strikes May Have Killed Mars’s Magnetic Field"

Bother. Wired Science's Lisa Grossman lets us know about the debate.

Once upon a time, Mars had a magnetic field, just like Earth. Four billion years ago, it vanished, taking with it the planet’s chances of evolving life as we know it. Now scientists have proposed a new explanation for its disappearance.

A model of asteroids striking the red planet suggests that, while no single impact would have short-circuited the dynamo that powered its magnetism, a quick succession of 20 asteroid strikes could have done the job.

“Each one crippled a little bit,” said geophysicist Jafar Arkani-Hamed of the University of Toronto, author of the new study. “We believe those were enough to cripple, cripple, cripple, cripple until it killed all of the dynamo forever.”

Rocky planets like Earth, Mars, Mercury and even the moon get their magnetic fields from the movement of molten iron inside their cores, a process called convection. Packets of molten iron rise, cool and sink within the core, and generate an electric current. The planet’s spinning turns that current into a magnetic field in a system known as a dynamo.

Magnetic fields can shield a planet from the constant rain of high-energy particles carried in the solar wind by deflecting charged particles away from the surface. Some studies have suggested that Earth’s magnetic field could have protected early life forms from the sun’s most harmful radiation, allowing more complex life to develop. But traces of magnetism in the Martian surface reveal that the red planet lost its magnetic field some four billion years ago, leaving its atmosphere to be dessicated by the harsh solar wind.

Previous studies suggested that a massive impact could have shut down Mars’s dynamo by warming the mantle layer, disrupting the heat flow from the core to the mantle and shutting down convection. The fact that the crust of Mars’s younger impact craters is not magnetized supports this idea. Earlier computer models by geophysicist James Roberts of Johns Hopkins University showed that the largest known impacts on Mars could turn the mantle to a warm blanket, bringing the dynamo to a standstill.

But Arkani-Hamed’s new study in the Journal of Geophysical Research suggests that just one impact wouldn’t suffice. The dynamo would recover in less than one hundred million years. “The magnetic field should come back again,” he said.

[. . .]

[S]everal impacts in a row could do the job. The planet’s crater record shows that Mars suffered 20 impacts in quick succession between 4.2 and 3.9 billion years ago. In work to be presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas this March, Arkani-Hamed teamed up with Roberts to show that just the five largest of these impacts could have shut down the magnetic field. The impacts came so rapidly that the dynamo had no time to recover before the next crippling blow arrived.

And here I was hoping that the Vastitas Borealis--briefly, the great northern plains which some think held Mars' oceans--wasn't a crater. Not that it would necessarily make it less likely an ocean, but I'd hope for plate tectonics.

The implication of this, if true, is that other Mars-like worlds which evaded a spree of impacts could remain relatively habitable for longer.

[LINK] "Protests in Grozny in 1950s Show What a Russian ‘Bunt’ Looks Like"

Window on Eurasia has an interesting account of the 1958 Grozny riots, which erupted when the Grozny Oblast--established after the deportation of the Chechens and the Ingush to central Asia--was set to be transformed back into the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic with the return of these Vainakh peoples to their homeland.

On January 6, 1957, Moscow issued a decree “on the restoration of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR within the RSFSR,” a measure that anticipated the gradual return from Central Asian exile of the peoples sent there but not the “more than 200,000” who flooded back over the course of 1957 alone.

The problems this created were not limited to numbers alone, Matveyev says. There was “the mass acquisition of arms,” blood feud murders, rapes, other violent crimes and “attacks on the residents of the republic who represented other nationalities.” And the Chechen leaders, he continues, sought to promote both the practice of Sufism and the establishment of Shariat law.

By the end of the year, “anti-Russian leaflets were being distributed in Grozny,” and Chechen young people attacked both teachers and even “officers of the Soviet Army.” According to one Russian there at the time, “the situation is so bad” that “the people are in a panic. Many have left,” she said; “and the rest are meeting” to decide what steps they should take.

According to official statistics, during 1957, some 113,000 ethnic Russians, Osetins, Avars, Ukrainians “and citizens of other nationalities” left the newly re-established Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic. But those who did not leave participated on August 26-27 in an even which is “a classical example” of a “Russky bunt.”

Matveyev provides enormous detail on what occurred, but even the broad outline of events is suggestive of what can happen. On August 23, a Chechen got into a fight with an ethnic Russian and killed him. Russians around the city demanded that the Chechen be severely punished, and on August 25-26, they called for the public execution of the Chechen.
On the 26th, more than 3,000 people marched on the center of Grozny and staged a demonstration in front of CPSU headquarters. “But,” Matveyev notes, “neither in the oblast committee nor in the city committee of the party did anyone consider it necessary to enter into a discussion with the city residents or give it any explanations.

Instead, the party officials simply remained behind “a militia cordon” and assumed the crowd would disperse. But the crowd didn’t go away. Instead, a group of its younger members “broke into the offices of the obkom and attempted by force to bring into the square” senior government and party officials.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Questioning the ritual"

John Lorinc's Spacing Toronto post actually didn't create much controversy in the comments. Most of the commenters seemed to agree with his argument that the massive funeral of Toronto police sergeant Ryan Russell, killed by a man who'd hijacked a snowplow of all things, was over the top and perhaps a bit of unexpected positive public relations for a police force that has been criticized greatly over the cursed G20 weekend. 13 thousand people were present at the funeral, held in a Toronto convention centre, the downtown was dominated by the parade for most of the day, and major media outlets gave it heavy coverage.

I do not understand why the police as an organization (and certainly not just in Toronto) insist on transforming a deeply human tragedy into a show of force and a media circus.

There’s a certain irony here. I feel the Sgt. Russell we came to know as an individual in the past few days has been subsumed by a brand of militaristic ritual that serves to reinforce the otherness of the police as a social institution.

And maybe that’s appropriate: when I sit down at my computer in the morning to begin working, I am reasonably certain I will be in tact when I get up in the afternoon. Cops, on the other hand, do risk their lives on our collective behalf, and so when one of those lives is lost to violence, we should honour them in a different way, or so the logic goes.

Yet the traditions of police funerals, for me, evoke images that have nothing to do with mourning and the genuine connections between people that such tragedies engender. These events, rather, are filled with profoundly complicated visual symbols — of invasion, of force, and of a conspicuously defensive sort of esprit de corps. Indeed, in the wake of last summer’s G20 riots, how should those Torontonians who were appalled by the actions of the police react to the sight of thousands of uniformed officers again clustered in the downtown core?