[PHOTO] Flowers in fall at twilight

Flowers in fall at night
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

As the chill surrounds us Torontonians, I thought it a good thing to remind us all that life will return.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Andrew Barton, at Acts of Minor Treason, has a picture of a beautiful Sumatran tiger in the Phoenix zoo. Kitty!


• Over at blogTO, meanwhile, the latest TTC issue involves a TTC employees' Facebook group featuring employees who seem to have issues with not being able to chat or social-network at work. Like, on their vehicles.


• Jeff Jedras, BCer in Toronto, thinks that the federal Liberals shouldn't panic, that they're making headway against the Conservatives with their humanization of Ignatieff. Yeah, I might add, but their need to humanize him ...


• At Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster considers the scenarios explaining how different planets in the same system can have wildly differently inclined orbits around their star. Migration, not formation in situ, seems key.


• Daniel Drezner doesn't think much of the idea of China as dominant superpower given the fragmentation and diffusion of power far beyond the presidency.


• After visiting Montréal, Extraordinary Observation's Rob Pitingolo reflects on what he felt about that city's urbanism.


• GeoCurrents Events points out that some of the highest suicide rates in the world can be found in the Russian autonomous republics of Mari-El and Chuvashia, where cultural factors seem to create a predisposition. In the comments, other Russian autonomous regions are cited as having higher suicide rates.


• The Global Sociology Blog thinks it's a good thing that many sociologists are producing depressing analyses of the world situation, since there's many things which need to be wrong and not brushed under the covers.


• Language Hat considers the different names given to the Tajiks of Central Asia by their neighbours, and the names' etymologies.


• Language Log, meanwhile, takes a look at Russian loanwords in border dialects of Chinese.


• Strange Maps features maps, drawn by Americans, of Second World War invasions of the United States that wouldn't have happened on account of the Axis powers' defensive warplanning.

[LINK] "Confessions of a Sexaholic"

Dan Savage's take on Berlusconi's problems--at Foreign Policy, of all magazines!--is grand.

Backing up for a moment: Henry Kissinger famously observed that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. I'm shocked that a man in your position -- you built your own media company, you have the world's seventh-largest GDP at your disposal -- has to pay for it. Bill Clinton and François Mitterrand managed to attract "extracurricular women" without having to pay-for-play. Either you're living in a place where there are no women aroused by power (Vatican City?), or you're not nearly as powerful as you think you are (seventh largest? You sure?).

[. . .]

Ah, but I haven't answered your question: Why can't you get away with it anymore? Because, CIAO, in some ways luck is like a first wife (it dries up), and in some ways luck is like a first husband (it runs out).

Your luck, like your wife, stuck around for a long time, CIAO, and things might have stayed as they were, if you hadn't come to see your good fortune as the natural state of things. Once a man does that, CIAO, he can begin to take his luck for granted and to presume upon it. And we all know what happens to men who get overconfident: They get sloppy, they get caught, they get indicted, and sometimes they wind up getting sent places where there are no ladies.

You've managed to wriggle your way out of trouble more than once in your long career, presumably, and your professional Teflon may yet save your ever-loosening hide. Just remember, CIAO, the general public, unlike your entourage, is not composed of so many brainless, easily impressed girls. They don't expect you to be a saint or to have a personal life less complicated than their own, but they do expect you to keep it legal and keep it discreet. If you can't manage your affairs without breaking laws and making news, the public is unlikely to entrust you with the management of theirs.

[LINK] Six Tunisia links

• Over at Demography Matters, I link to an interesting article whose author suggests that the age distribution of the Tunisian population suggests that democracy has a chance of taking off, but also a commenter who says that the author's definition of age groups is too broad.


• Open Democracy's Leila Ouardani thinks that democracy has a good chance of taking off in Tunisia, thanks to the alliance of progressives and moderate Islamists but also because of the strong human ties between Tunisia and democratic Europe.


• The close links between Francophone Tunisia and Québec has faciliated the flight of many of the family members of former President Ben Ali to Montréal. The Canadian government's unhappy, and the Tunisian government is demanding the extradition of one of the exiles.


• In fact, it turns out that the provisional Tunisian government is demanding the extradition of not only six Ben Ali family members but of Ben Ali himself. One almost hopes for his sake that the Saudis will refuse.


• Official Iran's worried about American interference in Tunisia.


• Finally, over at IWPR Ali Reza Asraghi doesn't think that the Tunisian model of revolution is applicable to Iran, mainly because power--economic, political--is diffused beyond a single family and the Green Movement couldn't get as broad a coalition as the Tunisians.

Go, read.

[URBAN NOTE] "A different perspective on TTC bus route changes"

A new paradigm for the TTC--ensuring all people in Toronto live no more than five minutes from a stop, the way most people do already--is attractive, and could compensate for some service cuts. blogTO's Derek Flack opened up an interesting discussion.

Go, read, maybe even participate.

[DM] "What the cats of Houtong say about the population of Taiwan"

I've a post up at Demography Matters that uses the phenomenon of the tourist-attracting cats of Houtong to illustrate any number of demographic phenomena, from the influx of immigrant wives to the island state to the integration of Taiwan's population with that of greater China to dismal demographics as illustrated by the limited number of cats.

Go, read.

[LINK] Two primate links

Both of these are from the ever-interesting io9. Thanks for pointing me to it, Glenn!

First comes the news that chimpanzees have the ability to generate and transmit cultural elements, to wit, the ability to undo snare traps.

The snare traps are used in the Bossou region of Guinea primarily to capture cane rats. The locals don't eat chimpanzees because the chimpanzees are thought to be the reincarnation of their ancestors, but the snares will trap and kill anything that wanders inside. Still, the Bossou chimpanzees suffer far fewer snare deaths than their counterparts elsewhere, and it's all because they've learned how to avoid this deadly fate.

Researchers from the Japan Monkey Center observed five different male chimpanzees deactivate snares on six separate occasions. Once, they saw a chimp shake a snare until it broke. Another time, a group of adult chimps and a juvenile male came across a trap. The youngest chimp then managed to make the ropes holding the snare together become untied, rendering the trap harmless. All these chimps seemed quite expert and none met with any injuries - indeed, any mistake made would have almost certainly killed or maimed the chimp.

The researchers believe these behaviors have actually been passed down from generation to generation, which is supported by the fact that the juvenile chimp handled the deactivation when it's highly unlikely he was the most experienced of the party. Only the chimps in the Bossou region have displayed this ability. It's possible that this all comes from an individual chimp a few generations back who escaped a snare and passed down these behaviors to all that followed.

What's really amazing is that it isn't one specific action the chimps use to destroy the snares - multiple methods are used, suggesting the chimps really do perceive the snare as a general threat that can be dealt with using different strategies, and not just a stimulus that provokes a particular unthinking response.

Second, we learn that orangutans are genetically quite diverse despite having evolved little.

The family Hominidae, commonly known as the Great Apes, has four main members: humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Humans and chimpanzees are the most closely related species, and then both are more related to gorillas than orangutans, who are all alone on their corner of the family tree. Orangutans are now the latest members of the great ape family to have their genomes sequenced, and they've revealed some surprising details about our evolutionary story.

The most shocking has to be that the orangutan genome hasn't changed in 15 million years. To put that in some perspective, our species didn't even really exist until 200,000 years ago, and even the Homo genus doesn't stretch much further back than 2.4 million years. Chimpanzees don't become distinct from our evolutionary ancestors until about six million years ago, and gorillas don't emerge until about 7 million years ago. Orangutans are, by the standards of the rest of their family, an incredibly ancient species.

The key difference is that the orangutan genome evolved very slowly, without any of the rapid-fire bursts of acceleration that we can find preserved in the genomes of humans or chimps.

[. . .]

Part of the puzzle seems to be a kind of DNA element known as "Alu". Alus are repetitive stretches of DNA that comprise about 10% of our genome and can account for unexpected mutations that help drive evolution. Humans have about 5,000 of these Alus, chimps have 2,000, but orangutans [have 250].

Still, after 15 million years of genomic slumber, orangutans woke up about 400,000 years ago, diverging into the Sumatra and Borneo species. Intriguingly, modern orangutans - particularly the Sumatran orangutans - have incredibly diverse DNA, which seems counter-intuitive considering their evolutionary history. Locke explains:

Go, read.