[PHOTO] Southwest corner of Yonge and Eglinton, late afternoon

Looking at the southwest corner of Yonge and Eglinton, late afternoon.

[URBAN NOTE] On the silliness of Stalin in early 21st century Toronto

Much can be said about a politician in a democratic society that has not known any totalitarianism, right or left, who compares politicians who are manifestly not totalitarians to Stalin. (Is there a corollary to Godwin's law?) CBC's brief report lays it all out.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford compared his political opponents at city hall to despot Joseph Stalin on Tuesday, the same day that one of those councillors had praised the mayor for a new attitude.

Speaking on Toronto radio station AM 640, Ford was asked a question about Coun. Josh Matlow — a first-term politician usually described as centrist, who has said he will oppose the mayor's planned abolishment of the land transfer tax.

After calling Matlow a "left-wing NDPer," Ford compared him to left-leaning councillors Adam Vaughan, Gord Perks, Janet Davis and Paula Fletcher.

"These people are all two steps left of Joe Stalin," he said. "So I'm not discouraged by that and I don't expect it. They don't care about the taxpayers. But I know one person that does, and that's me."

Earlier in the day, Matlow had told CBC's radio program Metro Morning about a new spirit of co-operation and communication coming from Ford.

"His staff, his office, have been reaching out to myself, to other city councillors, trying to get a sense of where we're at, what we'll support, what we won't," he said.

Joseph Stalin was the general secretary of the Soviet Union's Communist Party from 1922 to 1953, during what is now considered a reign of terror. Under his rule, millions of people were sent to slave labour camps, his program of forced agricultural reform cost millions of lives and his program to purge the Communist Party of "enemies of the people" led to the execution of thousands.

Matlow was asked for a comment about the mayor's comparison, but declined.

[CAT] "Will the Maine Coon become an American Icon?"

One of my first reactions to James McGirk's 3 Quarks Daily essay on the apparent national popularity of the Maine Coon in the United States was nationalist envy. "Why can't Canada develop a national cat breed?"

“The most masculine of cats,” tout defenders of the breed, and they are indeed rugged, solid creatures who look as if they ought to be de-mousing a lighthouse on the stormy coast of Maine rather than sprawling on the settee. That is, after all, what they were probably bred for. Picture a cat, a large one, with tufted ears and a lumbering gait and a cheerful disposition; a coat with an undercoat of insulation, and oversized paws fit for trampling snow or scurrying up a tree trunk. Drooping whiskers, a propensity to sprout extra toes on his feet, an unusually expressive tail, and a dour, owlish expression that is almost a pout complete the Maine Coon, a creature on the cusp of entering America’s national pantheon of icons.

The Maine Coon is fast approaching the status of charismatic megafauna like orcas and eagles and howling white wolves. No other breed of cat has starred in so many viral videos, has inspired so many airbrushed t-shirts or so many wretched – and even a few not-so-wretched – tchotchkes as the Maine Coon. A search for “Maine Coon” returns 56.4 million search results, while its longhaired cousin the Persian returns only 8.1 million and the Abyssinian returns a mere 3.4 million. The Coon’s combination of rugged looks and an undeniably goofy disposition seem thoroughly plugged into that folksy vein of Americana that generated Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox Babe. There is also an almost mystical air to the cat’s provenance.

No one really knows when the first Maine Coon came lumbering out of Maine’s timberlands to sprawl in front of wood stoves, though there are some pretty compelling creation myths floating around on the internet. For the cat to truly become part of America’s enduring iconography of log cabins and cowboys and ironclads and the Stars and Stripes, however, one of these peculiar stories will have to stick. Which one will it be?

One myth claims that Maine Coons are a hybrid of descendants of Marie Antoinette's half-dozen Turkish Angoras, successful escapees of the metropole and later mating with the mongrels of Maine. Another claims that a sea captain/cat hoarder named Coon managed to use his ship to engage in the captive breeding of Angoras and Persians. A third claims that Maine Coons are descended in part from Norwegian forest cats brought by the Vikings to Vinland in the 11th century. Americans, McGirk suggest, like the idea of being democrats but also descendants of noted pedigrees from the old country but also pragmatically useful and passionate savages. But, he claims, one more element is needed for the Maine Coon to emerge victorious.

There seems to be something missing from this mélange of stories, however, with one more component these three slivers of story might all snap together and form a credible, lasting creation myth for this all-American cat. Nearly every settler and migrant to the United States of America has come looking for opportunity or fleeing horrific persecution (or often both), so perhaps what the Maine Coon needs to truly nestle into the American collective unconsciousness is a persecution story (a purrsecution story, perhaps). But looking at the cuddly specimen curled up beneath my desk lamp beside me, such a thing is too horrible to contemplate. Maybe since everyone else has a nasty story lurking in his or her past, the Maine Coon will find his way into America’s heart without one.

What would a Canadian cat breed mythology be like, I wonder?

[LINK] "Lonely planet"

This item from the Economist's Babbage blog struck me as worth sharing. This particular disproof of Fermi's paradox--answering the question "Where are the aliens hiding?" with "There doesn't seem to be space for aliens to hide, ergo, there are no aliens"--seems detailed enough.

The question, first posed explicitly in 1950 by Enrico Fermi, an Italian-American physicist, has elicited a plethora of responses. Perhaps civilisations just do not feel like chatting, or fear that humans could not handle it, or invariably destroy themselves before reaching the technological threshold at which interstellar communications become feasible? Alongside such inherently untestable proposals, however, are some more tractable ones. One is that although civilisations exist, they are few and slow to expand—and so have yet to reach Earth. Another is that galaxy is teeming with intelligent lifeforms, but they are unevenly distributed; Earth just happens to find itself in a bare patch.

The latest attempt to calculate whether such scenarios ring true comes from Thomas Hair and Andrew Hedman, of Florida Gulf Coast University. In a paper presented recently to the meeting of the Amercian Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, they reckon the odds are rather long. To arrive at their conclusion Dr Hair and Mr Hedman assumed that outer space is dotted with solar systems, about five light years apart. They then asked how quickly a single civilisation armed with the requisite technology would spread its tentacles, depending on the degree of colonising zeal, expressed as the probability that intelligent beings decide to hop from one planet to the next in 1,000 years (500 years for the trip, at a modest one-tenth of the speed of light, and another 500 years to prepare for the next hop).

All these numbers are necessarily moot. If the vast majority of planets is not suitable, for instance, the average distance for a successful expedition might be much more than five light years. And advanced beings might not need five Earth centuries to get up to speed before they redeploy. However, Dr Hair and Mr Hedman can tweak their probabilities to reflect a range of possible conditions. Using what they believe to be conservative assumptions (as low as one chance in four of embarking on a colonising mission in 1,000 years), they calculated that any galactic empire would have spread outwards from its home planet at about 0.25% of the speed of light. The result is that after 50m years it would extend over 130,000 light years, with zealous colonisers moving in a relatively uniform cloud and more reticent ones protruding from a central blob. Since the Milky Way is estimated to be 100,000-120,000 light years across, outposts would be sprinkled throughout the galaxy, even if the home planet were, like Earth, located on the periphery.

Crucially, even in slow-expansion scenario, the protrusions eventually coalesce. After 250,000 years, which the model has so far had the time to simulate, the biggest gaps are no larger than 30 light years across. Dr Hair thinks they should grow no bigger as his virtual colonisation progresses. That is easily small enough for man's first sufficiently powerful radio transmissions (in the early 20th century) to have been detected and for a reply to have reached Earth (which has been actively listening out for such messages since the 1960s). And though 50m years may sound a lot, if intelligent life did evolve more than once, it could easily have done so billions of years before this happened on Earth. All this suggests, Dr Hair and Mr Hedman fear, that humans really do have the Milky Way to themselves. Either that or the neighbours are a particularly timid bunch.

Can others unpack the assumptions of the model? For me, assuming that--if Earth's solar system was located in a swath of populated space--extraterrestrial civilizations would be a) detectable and/or b) interested in communicating with us could be particularly problematic. What say you?