[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton makes a very good argument against municipal amalgamation in Vancouver. Certainly Toronto's post amalgamation history is unpleasant enough.


• CultureLab features a review of British science fiction artist Chris Foss' work. Great stuff, this.


• Geocurrents notes the very significant problems posed to Zambian development by the "Congo Pediclce", a corridor of land under Congolese sovereignty that bisects Zambia's core.


• Language Log's Geoffrey Pullum is quite unimpressed by the York University student who claimed a professor made an anti-Semitic comment when he did no such thing.


• The Numerati is right to note that the first cyborgs will be people using technology to recover from illness or injury, the second wave consisting of people envious of those so upgraded.


• Slap Upside the Head celebrates the adoption by Australia of passports which accomodate genders other than the male and the female.


• Torontoist comments on the intruiging-looking Toronto Review of Books, which will review--it seems--everything.


• The Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell observes talk about the people talking about the change necessary for the Labour Party to succeed, noting for starters that the British left really shouldn't take advice from the American left judging by the latter faction's terminal lack of success.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the former Borders and and future bookstores

Notwithstanding my love of books, I feel glad for any number of reasons not to have participated in the final looting of Borders book stores in my country's southern neighbour last weekend and in the days before. As described in the widely-syndicated article "Last Borders shoppers wistful, looking for deals", the scene was just sad.

Started in 1971, Borders grew to become a giant in the industry, operating Borders and Waldenbooks bookstores. But the company failed to adapt quickly to the changing industry and lost sales to the Internet, discounters and other competition. It filed for bankruptcy protection in February and has since shuttered stores and laid off thousands of employees. Borders began liquidating its remaining 399 stores in July when a $215 million "white knight" bid by a private-equity firm dissolved under objections from creditors and lenders who argued the chain would be worth more if it were liquidated immediately.

A few vestiges of Borders will remain. Books-A-Million is taking over 14 stores. And bidders including Barnes & Noble and Malaysian company Berjaya Books (which operated some Borders in Malaysia) will take over $15.8 million in Borders' intellectual property. That includes trademarks; the Borders, Waldenbooks and Brentano's trade names; Internet domain names; and the Borders.com e-commerce website. That's little solace to some shoppers who were taking advantage of the deals at the remaining Borders stores this weekend. Many wondered where they would shop once the chain disappears — even though many of them already are migrating to online booksellers and discount chains.

Steve Mannix on Friday carried out 10 books and two magazines for $11.79 total at the Waldenbooks store in Cincinnati's Western Hills neighborhood. Most of the books were graphic novels about vampires, super-heroes and Japanese characters. He said he had been interested in the artwork and stories in graphic novels, but didn't want to pay $20 for one book.

"It's sad," he said, loading the books into the trunk of his car. "I used to come to this store all the time."

Still, Mannix said he reads online and buys most of his books at a Half Price Books discount bookstore, which he says saves him a lot of money. "They really priced themselves out of business," he said of the Waldenbooks store.

[. . .]

At the Borders in CambridgeSide Galleria mall in Cambridge, Mass., Mary Jane Diodati, a lawyer on disability, also pondered the end of an era.

"I really like the camaraderie and the peace of just being in a book store — it is different from a library, in my opinion," she said.

The thing is, it's also inevitable. The pure bookstore--the bookstore that sells only or mostly books, and makes books its main reason for being--is gone. Future successful bookstores are going to have to be community centres as much as anything else--for geographic and interest communities both--and to sell non-book items. Margins must be wde, tis all.

[BRIEF NOTE] Is intelligence inevitable?

This io9 report has a lot of interesting implications on the evolution of intelligence.

The first thing to note is that intelligence among the cephalopods--a class, or subpopulation, of the mollusk phylum--is itself very surprising. Most of the other animal species known to possess a high level of intelligence belong to the chordate phylum, birds and various mammals (primates, cetaceans, elephants, and so on). Cephalopods diverged evolutionarily from chordates at such an early point that their earliest common ancestors are hypothetical reconstructions dating back hundreds of millions of years. Despite this ancient separation, cephalopods seem to have developed a level of intelligence comparable to that of many better-known species known for their intelligence. Shared close ancestry with species known to be intelligent, in other words, isn't required for intelligence.

Now, it looks like, among mollusks at least, even the complex nervous systems that are prerequisites for intelligence don't date back any length of time. They just keep appearing.

Kevin Kocot and his team examined the genetic sequences of the eight main branches of the mollusk phylum. They hoped to determine which branches are most closely related to which others, and in doing so provide a clearer history of the specifics of mollusk evolution. Until now, it was assumed that the two mollusk groups with the most highly organized central nervous systems, the cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, squid) and the gastropods (snails and slugs), are the most closely related.

Now it appears that that's actually almost the exact opposite of the truth. According to Kocot's analysis, the gastropods are most closely related to bivalves (clams, mussels, oysters, and scallops), which have far more rudimentary nervous systems and not much of a brain. Even more shockingly, cephalopods - the most intelligent of all the mollusk groups - comes from one of the earliest branches, meaning their evolutionary development predates that of snails, clams, and the rest.

There's no way that cephalopods and gastropods could have evolved together apart from all the other mollusks, which means that their similarly advanced nervous systems must have developed independently. That goes against a lot of longstanding assumptions about the evolution of sophisticated structures, as Kocot's colleague, University of Florida researcher Leonid Moroz, explains:

"Traditionally, most neuroscientists and biologists think complex structures usually evolve only once. We found that the evolution of the complex brain does not happen in a linear progression. Parallel evolution can achieve similar levels of complexity in different groups. I calculated it happened at least four times."

A lot of evolutionary theory has been guided by something akin to Occam's Razor - it's simpler to assume that something as complex as the brain only evolved once in a given group, and that all brainy members of that group come from a single common ancestor. Mollusks appear to be pointing us towards a very different story of evolution, one governed by parallel developments and the repeated emergence of brains in wildly divergent groups. Evolution doesn't have any set goals, but it does appear that it has certain ideas and structures it just keeps coming back to.

I don't want to channel Teilhard de Chardin unnecessarily, but might it be the case that, so long as the environment permits, life inevitably involves in the direction of greater intelligence? If complex nervous systems just keep evolving again and again among very different species in very different environments (and even among not very different peces in fairly similar environments), I have to wonder. Be in wonder, too.

[BRIEF NOTE] On six possible Earth-like planets

This Centauri Dreams post linked to a very interesting paper, "Near-Infrared Spectroscopy of Low-Mass Kepler Planet-Candidate Host Stars: Effective Temperatures, Metallicities, Masses and Radii" by Muirhead et al, that made a very interesting conclusion about some of the planets observed by the Kepler satellite. The authors suggest that the radii of some of the measured dimmer stars in the Kepler sample is smaller than theory predicts. What does this mean?

The effective temperatures, radii and masses of the KOIs imply different planet-candidate equilibrium temperature estimates, such that 6 planet-candidates are terrestrial-sized and have equilibrium temperatures which may permit liquid water to reside on the planet surface, assuming Earth-like albedos and re-radiation fractions. Scaling the Earth’s equilibrium temperature of 255 K by the orbital semi-major axis, stellar Teff and stellar radius of the KOIs in this letter, we find that KOIs 463.01, 1422.02, 947.01, 812.03, 448.02 and 1361.01 all have equilibrium temperatures between 217 K and 261 K: the limits of the habitable zone as described in Kasting et al. (1993).

In other words, six of the planets found by Kepler may well be Earth-like within very specific constraints. Of course, as Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster notes, this is both very sexy and very preliminary. "This one has struck a nerve and it’s easy to see why, as we are suddenly looking at six Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of their stars. [. . .] The authors point out, for example, that this work assumes 'the same albedo, re-radiation fraction and greenhouse effect' as are found in our own system, an assumption that may well be challenged for a terrestrial planet orbiting a red dwarf star." These worlds could very easily be greenhouse worlds akin to Venus, for instance.

But still. Wow. Miracles, meet wonders.