[PHOTO] Dufferin northbound

The 29 Dufferin approaches Bloor northbound in the rain.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s Glad Day Bookshop up for sale"

Oh no! The Glad Day Bookshop, Toronto's only gay bookstore--one of the only GLBT-themed bookstores still extant in North America--is up for sale. Niamh Scallan at the Toronto Star reports.

Toronto’s Glad Day Bookshop Inc., believed to be the oldest gay and lesbian book store in the world and the first of its kind in Canada, is up for sale.

On Monday afternoon, store owner John Scythes, who was working at the second-floor shop on Yonge St. north of Wellesley St., said he planned to reach out to friends and regular clients before considering a public sale of the iconic independent bookstore.

Scythes, who bought the store from founder Jearld Moldenhauer in 1991, began to look for potential buyers about a month ago, staff member Prodan Nedev said.

With shelves still crammed with books and walls cluttered with posters, there were few signs of distress at the shop, save for a white sheet of paper taped to the front countertop, asking anyone interested in buying the store to contact Scythes.

The store first opened in 1970 in a small apartment in the Annex and quickly became a gathering place for Toronto’s queer community. A political and cultural hub, Glad Day was a fixture in the fight for gay and lesbian rights in Canada, spending decades embroiled in costly legal battles against censorship.

Scythes refused to comment further on the private listing. But in 2010, he told Inside Toronto he was forced to dip into his own pockets to keep the shop — hard hit by a drop in sales — afloat.

I've written in the past about Glad Day, which has faced challenges in the past even as it has continued to enjoy acclaim. It's lasted longer than This Ain't the Rosedale Library, a like indie bookstore that was once located in the neighbourhood. I'm saddened to learn it isn't doing better.

(And before you ask, I was planning to visit and make a purchase Friday.)

[LINK] "We should scour the moon for ancient traces of aliens, say scientists"

The idea, reported by The Guardian, makes sense: it's low-cost and has plenty of non-SETI spinoffs, too.

Hundreds of thousands of pictures of the moon will be examined for telltale signs that aliens once visited our cosmic neighbourhood if plans put forward by scientists go ahead.

[. . .]

Prof Paul Davies and Robert Wagner at Arizona State University argue that images of the moon and other information collected by scientists for their research should be scoured for signs of alien intervention. The proposal aims to complement other hunts for alien life, such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti), which draws on data from radiotelescopes to scour the heavens for messages beamed into space by alien civilisations.

"Although there is only a tiny probability that alien technology would have left traces on the moon in the form of an artefact or surface modification of lunar features, this location has the virtue of being close, and of preserving traces for an immense duration," the scientists write in a paper published online in the journal Acta Astronautica.

"If it costs little to scan data for signs of intelligent manipulation, little is lost in doing so, even though the probability of detecting alien technology at work may be exceedingly low," they add.

The scientists focus their attention on Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has mapped a quarter of the moon's surface in high resolution since mid-2009. Among these images, scientists have already spotted the Apollo landing sites and all of the Nasa and Soviet unmanned probes, some of which were revealed only by their odd-looking shadows.

Nasa has made more than 340,000 LRO images public, but that figure is expected to reach one million by the time the orbiting probe has mapped the whole lunar surface. "From these numbers, it is obvious that a manual search by a small team is hopeless," the scientists write.

One way to scan all of the images involves writing software to search for strange-looking features, such as the sharp lines of solar panels, or the dust-covered contours of quarries or domed buildings. These might be visible millions of years after they were built, because the moon's surface is geologically inactive and changes so slowly.

[. . .]

An alternative approach would be to send tens of thousands of amateur enthusiasts images over the internet for examination, though this could lead to disagreements over what constituted an unusual, and potentially alien, feature.

Davies and Wagner's proposal is also available online.

[LINK] "The freelance panoptiswarm"

Quiet Babylon's Tim Maly thinks that drones are the future "Here’s a glimpse of the future: Ubiquitous cheap sensors. Perpetual freelance surveillance. Relentless sunlight, directed by shoals of shadowy interest groups."

Almost every faction, state, or individual for which use of a drone can be imagined somehow legitimate, Maly suggests, will be able to get one in the near future. Are we ready?

It’s an interesting solution to the panoptiswarm problem (when everyone is a journalist, everyone is a disposable sensor node) that nicely mirrors the rise of drones in warfare. Drone war is the perfect antidote to an enemy willing to send suicide bombers at your forces. By splitting the identity that used to link soldier and combatant, you eliminate the tactical advantage of the other side having the terrible resolve to blow themselves up. Their bodies are on the line, but yours are not.

Similarly, with drone journalism, journalist’s bodies need no longer be on the line. They may be barred from safe access to the site of the beatings, but they can still put eyes on it. This neatly negates the tactical advantage that police held over journalists in a battle of wills. No longer can the police say “leave the area or you will be tear gassed and beaten like the rest of them,” leaving journalists with the stark choice between ignorance and physical peril. Now they can say “we will leave, but our drones will be watching”.

At first glance, this seems to restore the journalist/police/activist triumvirate. A new class of privileged observers, perhaps operating from the Las Vegas desert, can log in and cver the story as neutral observers while police and protestors go about the business of beating and being beaten. Journalism will be literally above the fray.

Too late for that. Everyone can afford a drone now. It is cheaper to buy a drone than a smartphone. And if you can’t afford a drone, maybe a camera grenade is more to your taste. Or perhaps you will hack together your own Streetview trike enabling constant passive recording, 360º.

[PHOTO] Snowfall at Bloor and Dufferin, looking west

The first snow of the season!