At least according to Google, it turns out that 1072 Dupont Street just east of Dufferin is either a complex with multiple businesses at once or one hosting multiple businesses in succession.
And no, I've no idea what these slumping piles of dirt are for.
(The concrete blocks visible at far right form the edge of the incomplete concrete block wall I photoblogged here.)
A new WikiLeaks cable suggests the U.S. government views Stephen Harper's talk about Canadian Arctic sovereignty as little more than empty chest-thumping designed to win votes.
In a diplomatic cable posted this week by the online whistleblower, the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa says the Tories have made successful political use of promises to beef up Canada's presence in the Arctic.
But it says the Harper government has done only scant implementation on pledges like increasing surveillance over the Northwest Passage.
"Conservatives make concern for 'The North' part of their political brand …and it works," says the note, titled Canada's Conservative Government and its Arctic Focus.
[. . .]
The January 2010 cable, issued under the signature of U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson, even pokes fun at Harper's statements on the North.
"The persistent high public profile which this government has accorded 'Northern Issues' and the Arctic is, however, unprecedented and reflects the PM's views that 'the North has never been more important to our country' — although one could perhaps paraphrase to state 'the North has never been more important to our Party.' "
The cable says many of these promises — such as the purchase of armed icebreakers and Arctic Ocean sensors —have since been forgotten.
It notes that Harper hammered away at the issue in his first post-election news conference following his election in January 2006, before he had even been sworn in. Harper chided the U.S. government over its longstanding view that the Northwest Passage was international water.
[. . .]
It says Harper did not even mention the Arctic during January 2010 meetings with U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson, which lasted several hours.
"That the PM's public stance on the Arctic may not reflect his private, perhaps more pragmatic, priorities, however, was evident in the fact that during several hours together with Ambassador Jacobson on January 7 and 8, which featured wide-ranging conversations, the PM did not once mention the Arctic."
When the solar system was very young and still very hot, could medium-sized asteroids have been habitable abodes for life? It's not a crazy question, because there's abundant mineralogical evidence for what we consider the building blocks of life in asteroids, specifically carbonaceous asteroids. They contain lots of different organic molecules including amino acids; there's evidence for the presence of liquid water within asteroids in the past, and many carbonaceous asteroids still retain quite a lot of water bound within their minerals; and the residual heat from their formation and from the decay of radioactive isotopes give you the "food," water, and energy that are necessary for life. But despite searches there's been no convincing evidence that life ever arose on an asteroid. Given what we think are the right ingredients, why didn't life arise?
Big asteroids are a different story. Big, ice-rich bodies like Ceres, or the body whose destruction gave rise to the Themis family of asteroids, would have differentiated, separating into layers of liquid water above a rocky interior, solving the pore space problem. Their long-lasting internal heat would likely have kept those oceans liquid for millions or tens of millions of years; Ceres may even have retained an internal ocean right down to the present day. So the moral of the story is: despite the existence of habitable zones within medium-sized asteroids for many millions of years, it just doesn't seem like life had a chance to get started there. But we ought to check for ancient life on Ceres and Themis!
Only slightly larger than Earth's moon, Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The discovery solves a long-standing debate over how much of the moon's insides must be molten to feed the ongoing eruptions.
"At any time, Io has 400 [and] maybe more active volcanoes," said study leader Krishan Khurana, a planetary physicist at the University of California, Los Angles.
"They are very powerful—they can shoot plumes out into space to a height of about 300 miles [500 kilometers]." Finding an extensive magma ocean means that "now we know why there are so many, and where the lava comes from."
[. . .]
Khurana and colleagues made the find after reexamining readings from the Galileo spacecraft, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 and made occasional flybys of the planet's moons, including Io.
The data showed how Io deflects Jupiter's enormous magnetic field via a process called electromagnetic induction—"very similar to the principle used by the metal detectors at the airport," Khurana said.
Magma has high electrical conductivity, he explained, a trait that laboratory studies have demonstrated with molten rocks similar to those expected to lie beneath Io's surface.
As Jupiter's electromagnetic field penetrates Io, it interacts with the magma ocean, and a current forms on the outer edge of the molten rock layer. This current in turn generates its own electromagnetic waves, which deflect Jupiter's field lines, an effect the Galileo probe was able to detect.
The data show that Io's magma exists in an underground layer that lies about [30 to 50 kilometers] beneath the surface, between the crust and the mantle.
The magma layer is at least [50 kilometers] thick, and it might be as thick as [320 kilometers].
If "sadness" could take tangible form, it would manifest as brown brick tiles, off-track betting, and too many Jesus figurines to count. Friends, this is the Galleria Mall. Its existence is paraded right at Dufferin and Dupont, where a sign for the P.M. Toronto Sports Bar, housed in the Galleria Mall, hints at just what the dreary building has in store.
"Watch the ga e here," the sign announces, inviting all those passing by. This must be the Galleria I thought, catching glimpse of the sign. So I descended the bus and made my way toward the mall.
They say animals are always the first to know, and indeed, I should've taken my cues from the 'gulls. Swarms of birds circled the parking lot, cawing menacingly as they gathered in swirls. Should I turn back now? No, I couldn't--I had heard there would be strobe lights.
And indeed there were, pulsing inexplicably from an electronics store, illuminating an abandoned Royal LePage kiosk. Yes, this was the Galleria; brown, dim, and melancholy, with an arched ceiling made of something you definitely didn't want to inhale. Gathering my wits, I moved on.
That's when I found Jesus, in a multiplicity of different forms. There he was as a figurine; as a painting; with Mary and alone. Is that a decorative plate? A window charm? Candelabra? I should venture inside Galleria Electronics to find out more...
No, I would move on. I soon came across P.M. Toronto Sports Bar, littered with failed stubs and a gaggle of beer-drinking men. Eyes glued to a collection of screens, the men seemed not to notice as I contaminated their boys' club. Indeed, I had explored the world of off-tracking betting before, and the Galleria's version certainly adhered to all the unspoken rules of the game: hats mandatory, men only, and keep your eyes, literally, on the prize.
City council’s compliance audit committee unanimously voted Friday to order a full audit of Rob Ford’s campaign expenses, marking the first time a sitting City of Toronto mayor has had to undergo this kind of scrutiny.
The decision came in response to allegations that provincial elections laws were breached, made earlier this month by Toronto residents Max Reed and Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler in a 17-page filing. None of the allegations have been proven. In their requests for a compliance audit, they alleged that Mr. Ford may have exceeded his statutory spending limits and relied on unorthodox financing arrangements – the Ford family’s holding company paid over $77,000 in early campaign expenses.
Three requests for an audit were filed in response to a Globe and Mail investigation into the mayor’s campaign filings. One was withdrawn and the committee deemed the other to be moot.
Mr. Chaleff-Freudenthaler, who ran unsuccessfully in last year’s election as a school trustee, said there could be “very serious consequences” if the audit concludes the mayor ignored the rules. “I think the entire gamut of consequences should be considered,” he told reporters after the morning-long session.
Adrienne Batra, Mr. Ford’s spokeswoman, said the mayor has said previously that his campaign acted in accordance with the rules and welcomes the scrutiny.
Other members of council preferred to duck questions about their response to the news. “I have no other reaction than ‘wow,’” said Josh Matlow (St. Paul’s).
Mr. Ford’s lawyers now have 15 days to apply for a judicial review of the committee’s decision. “It is an option that has been exercised in a number of these cases,” Thomas Barlow said. Ms. Batra said the mayor hadn’t yet been briefed on the committee’s decision and couldn’t say whether he’d fight the audit in the courts.
"In the 1960s, an idea penetrated deep into the public imagination that nature is a self-regulating ecosystem, there is a natural order," Curtis says. "The trouble is, it's not true – as many ecologists have shown, nature is never stable, it's always changing. But the idea took root and spread wider – people started to believe there is an underlying order to the entire world, to how society is structured. Everything became part of a system, like a computer; no more hierarchies, freedom for all, no class, no nation states." What the series shows is how this idea spread into the heart of the modern world, from internet utopianism and dreams of democracy without leaders to visions of a new kind of stable global capitalism run by computers. But we have paid a price for this: without realising it we, and our leaders, have given up the old progressive dreams of changing the world and instead become like managers – seeing ourselves as components in a system, and believing our duty is to help that system balance itself. Indeed, Curtis says, "The underlying aim of the series is to make people aware that this has happened – and to try to recapture the optimistic potential of politics to change the world."
The counterculture of the 1960s, the Californian hippies, took up the idea of the network society because they were disillusioned with politics and believed this alternative way of ordering the world was based on some natural order. So they formed communes that were non-hierarchical and self-regulating, disdaining politics and rejecting alliances. (Many of these hippy dropouts later took these ideas mainstream: they became the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who decided that computers could liberate everyone and save the world.)
Another, rather different kind of fan of the network society was Alan Greenspan, for many years the world's most important central banker. "Greenspan believed that networks of computers, like networks of nature, could stabilise themselves," Curtis says. "And technology could turn everyone into heroic individuals, completely free to follow their own ideas." In his individualism, Greenspan was inspired by Ayn Rand, the Russian-born novelist who abhorred altruism, praised the "virtues of selfishness" and still has a massive following in the US 29 years after her death.
[. . .]
That stability was, of course, an illusion; it was followed by the greatest economic crash since 1929. But, as Curtis says, the price of the bailouts was paid by ordinary people, via the state, rather than by the wealthy financiers who lost all the money in the first place. That's because, despite the illusion of ordered non-hierarchy, some people have vastly more power than others, and in many cases have had it for centuries.
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