[PHOTO] Approaching Taddle Creek

Wychwood Park is characterized substantially by Taddle Creek, one of the many streams buried by the growth of downtown Toronto (as described by Alfred Holden).

Taddle Creek had its parallels, among them Garrison Creek in the far west end, and lesser-known Russell Hill Creek nearer in. All were inspired by gravity, the source of which was the Iroquois shoreline, the ancient bluff of Lake Ontario that rises just north of the Canadian Pacific railroad tracks that cross central Toronto. It is a significant slope, a moraine that meanders east until it is interrupted by the Don Valley and eventually becomes the Scarborough Bluffs. “Sparkling with hope and promise, they spring from the hills of Davenport, only to be captured and forced into the dark netherworld of Toronto’s underground,” memory columnist George Gamester wrote in the Toronto Star a few years ago, commenting on the three creeks’ common fate. Taddle’s source, then and now, is said to be the pond in Wychwood Park, partway up the incline, but it is known to have had many tributaries.

It's been frequently observed, for instance by Laura Hatcher at Spacing, that this pond, one of the few visible vestiges of Taddle Creek, lends Wychwood Park much of its charm.

Like so much of Wychwood Park, this pond was shaped by [landscape painter and planner Marmaduke] Matthews' eye for the picturesque. He dammed part of Taddle Creek to create the pond, with the idea that it would enhance Wychwood Park's already scenic qualities. In the winter, the pond was used as a skating rink, and provided Wychwood residents with ice for their ice houses. Today, the pond is home to snapping turtles, mallard ducks, and goldfish (rumored to be the descendants of the goldfish put there by Matthews's grandson), though signs saying "Danger, Quick Sand" warn against getting in for a closer look.

[BRIEF NOTE] Why we run our own panopticonic society

Fellow Queen's alumnus Clifford just posted an essay, "Social Media and the Panopticon", talking about the implications of our panopticonic society. After the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver, he notes, you had the Vancouverite masses take part in a concerted effort to identify as many rioters as they could. And it was all spontaneous. We live in a world where the panopticon is run by its nominal subjects, who are in a strange way empowered by it.

In a strange way, then, living in a panoptic world is both more and less free than living under a tyrant. More free, because everyone is on the same level. Less free, because at least under a tyrant you are free when you are outside of his gaze. Under panopticism, you are never outside of the gaze of authority because we have all been trained to watch each other.

As I mentioned, in our society, this heightened scrutiny is often entirely voluntary. People choose to put themselves in the fishbowl. We laugh at the douchebags that posted pictures of themselves setting cars on fire, but it's only a dumb manifestation of a universal desire. We all seem to crave that scrutiny. That's why we post pictures on the Internet, along with our opinions and what we had for dinner.

The panopticon of social media both weakens and empowers the mob. Weakens it because people lose anonymity. But empowers it becuase it becomes much easier to identify and marshall disapproval against people who act outside of social norms.

[. . .]

People think a dictatorship will arise through a revolution or through the subversion of our government by sinister politicians. But we could not have a dictatorship without the a majority of society deciding to organize ourselves in that way. And that we might be more willing to do so then you might think.

We are moving, voluntarily, into a world like the one described by Foucault: where everyone observes and judges one another. We won't necessarily be less free, but we will certainly be much more watched. It will be a powerful shift away from an individualized, private world to one where everyone lives under the gaze of their colleagues and neighbors.

A world of billions of people dominated by the norms of small villages? Or, perhaps more accurately, a world of an near-infinite number of communities based on interests and geography and culture and history and the like that are as efficiently and ruthlessly self-governing as any mob?

I wrote earlier about China's "human flesh search engine", the aggregate population of Internet users who see a wrong then go on to identify said and make sure the culprits are thoroughly crushed. China, in this as in other things, may be leading the world.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the latest landmark of our glorious future in space (2)

My previous post dealt with the success of space probes. This post deals with the astonishing power and accuracy of ground- and space-based telescopes. Where once fans of science fiction imagined that fleets of probes and manned vehicles would be needed to discover planets from afar, the current generation of telescopes does this quite well. Centauri Dreams' post on the discovery of two very dim nearby brown dwarfs.

The two brown dwarf discoveries — WISE J0254+0223 and WISE J1741+2553 — are at estimated distances of 15 and 18 light years respectively. Their strong infrared signature and their extremely faint appearance at visible wavelengths attracted the team’s attention, and both show the high proper motion across the sky that flags nearby stellar objects. The team was able to use the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona to determine spectral type and distance more accurately. Interestingly, both objects fit into the category of T-type brown dwarfs, at the boundary of the still not well defined class of Y-type brown dwarfs.

The first brown dwarf was only found in 1995; now, the universe is turning out to be dense with them. There may even be brown dwarf objects closer to our planetary system than nearby Alpha Centauri.

The (un)known Solar neighbors. The stars are shown with symbols of different sizes and colours, roughly corresponding to their real sizes and spectral types. Most stars in the Solar neighborhood are red dwarf stars of spectral type M (in the middle of the figure) with surface temperatures of slightly more than 2000 Kelvin. Proxima, our nearest known neighbor, also belongs to this class. The number of brown dwarf discoveries (almost all with spectral types L and T, and surface temperatures below 2000 K) is already higher than the number of white dwarfs (shown as small white dots at the top). The two nearest brown dwarfs, epsilon Indi Ba and Bb, the discovery of which was reported by the AIP in 2003 and 2004, and the newly found objects are marked. (Credit: AIP).

And more will be coming