[PHOTO] Dupont Street Sunflowers

The wild growths of sunflowers in the front yard of a particular Dupont Street house just west of the local Good Bike Project installation is an annual occurrence. I like having sunflowers I can count on..

[URBAN NOTE] Two blog links on responsible cycling in Toronto

Of late in Toronto the issue of biking--bike lanes, bike etiquette, bikes as iconic of a particular view of city life--has been rather heated, so heated that rational discourse isn't especially possible. I've hopes that such is possible, mind, since it's something that we all need to do, whether cyclist or not.

To this end I thought I'd share two blog posts, each dealing with the matter of cyclist responsibilities. Both create convincing arguments that cyclists who care about their safety and other's safety--and by extension, with the reputation of their chosen method of commuting and recreation--should be subject to stricter enforcement of existing traffic laws and stricter regulation.

First is Andrew Barton's simply-titled post "Brain, Meet Helmet".

[U]nder Ontario law, all cyclists under the age of eighteen are required to wear a helmet - but for the last fifteen years, helmets have been mandatory by law for all cyclists in British Columbia. Doesn't stop 'em, though. It's not unusual to see someone zipping down the Dunsmuir bikeway with just some hair between their skull and the sky.

The letter columns in recent issues of the Georgia Straight have seen something of a back-and-forth regarding helmet use, and the Globe and Mail makes reference to Vancouver drivers "whinging on talk radio about bicyclists... who ride without helmets" in the context of the city's gradual transportation culture shift. Helmetless riding is something I noticed frequently in Toronto, though at least there people aren't breaking the law when they do it.

No, they're only running the risk of breaking their own heads. I ride with a helmet not because it's the law - to be honest, I had no idea helmets were mandatory in BC until this writing - but because I am not a moron. Incidentally, yes, I am totally intentionally implying that if you ride a bike without a helmet, you are a moron.

For me, it's simple arithmetic. Bicycles are potentially unstable frames that frequently share road space with speeding hunks of metal, the drivers of whom have been demonstrated time and again to just not register the presence of bicycles on the road, and if you hit something or get hit there's a good chance of your braincase absorbing the punishment. Personally, I think of my brain as important - realistically, since my brain is what I am; everything else are just mechanisms to allow the brain to interact with the world. I kind of want my brain to keep working for as long as it can. So when I'm on my bike I wear a helmet, so that if I take a spill or get rammed or whatever, there is something before that crunchy bone to absorb the punishment of impact.

I don't understand why more people don't see this sort of attitude in the same light as anti-seatbelt attitudes. It's the same damn thing, just expressed differently - people are making a choice to proceed with limited or no regard to their personal safety. I've seen letters in the Georgia Straight arguing that mandatory helmet laws discourage people from bicycling, but honestly, if a person could be discouraged from biking by having to wear a helmet, that smacks of utter laziness to me - and lazy people, I think, would not be able to stick with the program.

The second is a post from the Toronto Star's Cycling hub, an interview with a woman twice hit by cyclists who argues that cyclists should be subject to stiffer fines in the case of collisions. They and their bikes aren't as massive as motor vehicles and their drivers, but they still have plenty of kinetic energy.

For Emily Niedoba, June 5 is pretty much a blank slate — she has no memory of being mowed down around noon by a 240-lb. cyclist who ran a red light at Yonge St. and Rosehill Ave.

“I don’t remember anything about getting hit — my last memory was being back at the gym having a shower,’’ she says.

The 31-year-old had been on her way home from a fitness gym when she was hit by a cyclist who was charged with failure to yield under the Highway Traffic Act. It carries a set fine of $150, plus $30 surcharge, upon conviction or guilty plea.

Not only is the fine for a cyclist running a red light “completely inadequate,’’ she says there is a need for regulating bikers.

What she would like to see are changes requiring all cyclists over the age of 16 to be licensed and carry insurance.

“They are travelling with velocity — they have the potential to cause a lot of damage,’’ says Niedoba who is considering a civil suit against the cyclist.

[BRIEF NOTE] Will Brazilian farmers move to Mozambique?

One thing I've observed here for the past few years, as far back as 2003, is the accelerating (and non-exclusive) integration of the different Lusophone countries of the world--Brazil, Portugal, Angola and Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde and Sao Tomé e Principe, East Timor in the Pacific--in any number of domains. After a sufficient amount of time following the end wars of independence in Portuguese Africa and the successful transitions to democracy in Portugal itself and Brazil, the bonds of language and history could return, ultimately under the benign hegemony of a Brazil that has emerged as a great power. This has manifested in any number of ways, from coordinated language reforms to surveillance of and support for troubled democracies to East Timorese purchase of Portuguese government debt.

One new way in which this is being manifested is in the intensification of migratory flows. After a time in the 1990s when Portugal became a country of net immigration, economic malaise in Portugal has definitely accelerated flight of Portuguese around the world, to points in western Europe and the rest of the Lusophone world in substantial numbers as far away as Angola. A new flow may yet form, of Brazilian farmers migrating to Mozambique.

Mozambique invites Brazilian soy, corn and cotton growers to plant on its savanna and introduce their farming know-how to sub-Saharan Africa, the head of Mato Grosso state’s cotton producers association Ampa said on Monday.

Brazil has been successfully growing crops on its centre-west plains since a breakthrough in tropical soybeans in the 1980s unlocked the productive potential of the expansive region by breeding soy to grow closer to equatorial regions.

While Mozambique possesses similar climatic and soil characteristics, Amapa president Carlos Ernesto Augustin told Reuters that some areas in the country on the southeast coast of Africa even had more fertile soils than Brazil.

“The price of the land there is too good to ignore,” said Mr. Augustin, who added that the risks inherent in buying Brazilian land as a producer were enormous because of high costs and stiff environmental regulations.

Producers who are granted concessions to plant would be required only to pay a tax of 21 reais per hectare ($5.30/acre U.S.), and would receive an exemption from import tariffs on farm equipment.

Prime productive land in Brazil’s developed south can run to 35,000 reais a hectare, compared with 5,000 reais in the extreme frontier regions of the centre-west and northeast savannas, where infrastructure is poor. Brazil’s import tariffs on farm equipment can also be steep.

[. . .]

“Mozambique is probably going to look a lot like Mato Grosso [Brazil’s leading soy state] 40 years ago,” Mr. Augustin said. “We are well-acquainted with the challenges of this type of frontier farming. Transport will be a concern.”

An offer is one thing, and it is true that there is interest on both sides in substantially strengthening ties between rising Brazil and terribly poor Mozambique. Will the offer be taken up by any significant number of Brazilian farmers and agricultural businesses? Will the interest be sustained? Watch this space for more.

[BRIEF NOTE] On information's new bricolage

Over at his blog The Numerati, Stephen Baker's post "Does social media discourage ideas?" tries to answer the frequently-asked question of whether the tendency of the Internet and its social networking systems--especially 140-character Twitter--fragments discussions so much as to make information trivia and render coherence and the construction of new ideas, impossible. Baker's answer, that this worst-case scenario for fragmentation only works if you let it, is my answer.

Neal Gabler argues in the Times that social media tends to focus our minds on facts and updates--and keeps us, as individuals and a society--from generating big ideas.

I have to confess, I was reading this article of his and wondering if Gabler had read my books, and then wondering how he might find out about them. If he followed certain people on Twitter, they might direct him to them, and perhaps he'd encounter an idea. But he puts down Twitter: "Instead of theories, hypotheses and grand arguments, we get instant 140-character tweets about eating a sandwich or watching a TV show."

The problem is that social media, like most of human conversation, is full of trivia. If you tune blindly into Twitter or "friend" absolutely everyone on Facebook, you'll spend lots of time on those networks and pick up only anthropology. It's like eaves-dropping in Times Square.

The challenge is to listen to the right people, and then to follow their links. Some of them lead to ideas. In fact, I would argue that anyone interested in ideas should at least be dipping your four or five toes into social media.

That said, as I wrote my novel over the spring and summer months, I stayed away from Twitter and Facebook for days at a time, and I didn't blog that much. I enjoyed the break. But I think that if you're in the information business, or the ideas racket, you can't afford to tune out millions of smart people. Finding them is due diligence for the Information Age.

Myself, I've found that social networking systems--blogs, Facebook, Twitter--do a great job in assembling information, in promoting the process of creative bricolage because of the frequent hyper-allusiveness of the Internet and its users and the frequent juxtaposition of people and ideas that otherwise would not have connected.

And you? What do you think of this question, Baker's answer, and my elaboration upon Baker?

[DM] "Some notes on new immigration trends in Canada"

I've a post up at Demography Matters taking a look at new trends in immigration. While a proposal to increase annual levels of immigration in Canada fourfold to a million isn't going to happen for political reasons and probably shouldn't happen for economic reasons, the relatively peripheral provinces of Manitoba and Prince Edward Island (!) have surprisingly encountered a good deal of success recently. What does this mean? Go, read.