[PHOTO] "A simple backyard in the Annex"

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[LINK] Two links about the unfolding of the Greece debt crisis

This morning, Crasstalk poster Baldwin Periphetes outlined the latest stage of the Greek debt crisis.

206 billion Euros worth of debt, in the form of Greek government bonds are due for repayment at midnight Friday, Athens time. Greece does not have 206 billion Euros lying around. The newest in a long line of repayment plans will be voted upon by the bondholders (read: hundreds or thousands of banks and investment funds around the world). At 10pm Athens time, 3pm EST in America, voting closes. And then the manure hits the ventilation device.

The plan put to the bondholders is extremely complicated in the detail. The short version is that it involves swapping the existing bonds for new low-interest bonds maturing in 2042 plus 12 and 24 month bonds drawn on the European Financial Stability Facility (the bailout fund laid on by the rest of the Eurozone, predominantly Germany). Felix Salmon explains in more detail (for the finance tragics only) here. Pundits seem to think this will wipe off anywhere from 40-60% of the value of the debt, depending on how the market values the replacement long-term bonds and whether it thinks Greece can even pay back the debt with around 100 billion Euros wiped off overnight.

[. . .]

If over 66% of bondholders vote for this plan, the Greeks have announced their intention to use the so-called “Collective Action Clauses”. This amounts to a retrospective law passed by Greece which allows them to impose the deal on holders of Greek bonds as long as the 66% approval threshold is reached.

It was part of the deal struck by the big bondholders and is meant as a weapon to cow the rest of the bondholders: if you vote no, it says, there is still no chance the Greeks will pay you in full, plus stuff will get even worse because in the eyes of the markets, Greece will have defaulted (the rating agencies and most other relevant bodies have confirmed that the Greeks exercising this option will be treated as a default- there’s not really any other way to describe it). There’s some messiness here, because the Greeks issued some of the bonds under English or Swiss law instead of Greek law, but for 86% of the bonds the Greeks can implement this plan by force.

Greece has also hinted that bondholders who vote no might find themselves left with their old bonds, on which Greece will default completely, instead of receiving the new bailout bonds like everyone else.

Why legislate away part of the debt instead of all of it? Because for one, they are trying to maintain some level of creditworthiness for the future, and for another, even after dealing with these debts they need money from the Germans and other European countries, money which will not be given if Greece refuses to repay the bonds at all.

Effectively, this option amounts to default with a plan, an orderly default under which European governments and major financial institutions will still do business with Greece, although no-one else will offer so much as a copper coin to Greece again for 20 years or more. This seems to be the most likely outcome.

And Reuters seems to indicate, in the article "Greece closes in on bond swap, hurdles key threshold", that this is what's happening.

Greece moved closer to wrapping up its bond swap with private investors on Thursday, indicating that it had already cleared a vital threshold needed to pass a deal which will hand bondholders steep cuts in the value of their investments.

With less than three hours to go before the 2000 GMT deadline on the biggest sovereign debt restructuring in history, a senior official said the government had acceptances covering more than 75 percent of bonds eligible to take part in the offer.

Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos told cabinet the deal was on track and no surprises were expected, a minister told reporters after the meeting chaired by Prime Minister Lucas Papademos.

"I look forward to maximum participation by the private sector, which will contribute significantly to the effort to adjust and restore our economy," Papademos said, according to a statement from his office.

Greece had said that it would abandon the deal if it did not receive at least 75 percent participation in the offer and it required two-thirds take-up to deploy a legal device to force the bulk of any recalcitrant creditors to accept the terms.

Major banks and pension funds have agreed to accept cuts of around 74 percent in the value of their holdings in exchange for new bonds as part of a deal that will cut more than 100 billion euros from Greece's massive public debt.

What will happen next? Guesses, anyone? Certainly we'll find out soon enough ...

[LINK] "More voters-list issues found in Toronto riding"

From robocalling to straightforward electoral fraud? The news from the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence worries me, and angers me. WTF, people?

CBC News has found still more problems with the voters list in the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence during the last election. The defeated Liberal candidate, former MP Joe Volpe, has now demanded an Elections Canada investigation and the winner, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, says that's fine with him.

"If Elections Canada asks for the material," said Oliver, "of course we're entirely open to do that and we welcome any investigation. I don't know if it's needed or not."

But Liberals in the riding say it's definitely needed because, they say, Conservative tactics crossed the line.

Eglinton-Lawrence resident Marsha Sands said she personally received a rude and misleading phone call from a female caller who claimed to be calling from Liberal headquarters.

Trouble was, Sands took the call as she sat in Liberal headquarters as a volunteer for the Volpe campaign. After she tried to find out who was really calling — from a U.S. number — the caller said she was with a research company and hung up.

[. . .]

Now, though, the problem is not just misleading calls. Elections Canada has already dismissed the Liberals' complaint about that.

What's new is that an influx of unregistered voters somehow got on the voters list in Eglinton-Lawrence without providing the address information that Elections Canada requires. At least 2,700 such applications were approved and signed by an elections official so that the applicant could vote. But an examination by CBC News shows most of them have address problems. Some give addresses of a bank or a UPS store, where nobody lives. Others have no address at all. And most have no previous address — which is required to ensure that voters aren't on the list at both old and new residences.

[. . .]

Another odd feature of the voters list in Eglinton-Lawrence is that 12 members of one family all got on the list using four different current addresses, but without giving any previous addresses at all. An Elections Canada official said that, without that information, the applications would not have been approved or signed by an elections official.

However, all of the hundreds of forms examined by CBC News show, beneath a notation saying, "office use only," the signature of an "authorized official."

[LINK] "Kepler Statistical Analysis Suggests Earthlike Planets Extremely Rare"

Space Daily's John Rehling shares news of a recent analysis of data from the Kepler space telescope, charting extrasolar planets by the thousands, which suggests that Earth-like worlds are--contrary to earlier analyses--relatively rare. The Kepler program, which basically detected planets via their eclipses of their stars, was biased towards the detections of close-orbiting worlds and of large worlds (larger than the Earth). It turns out that doesn't mean that Earth-like worlds, of the right size and in the right orbit, are common.

This release shows two favorable trends. As a statement from the Kepler team puts it, "With each new catalog release a clear progression toward smaller planets at longer orbital periods is emerging. This suggests that Earth-size planets in the habitable zone are forthcoming if, indeed, such planets are abundant."

However, the fine details of this latest release favor more pessmistic projections. Although the release shows, in comparison to the previous release, one favorable trend regarding planet size and another favorable trend regarding planet distance from the star, these trends are, unfortunately, unfolding in an either-or respect: We see more Earth sized planets which are very close to their stars, and therefore likely very hot; and, separately, we see more giant planets which are located farther out from their stars.

This table shows the estimated frequency of planets per star in each bin [category]. The planet sizes are presented in terms of Earth radius, Re, while the orbital periods are in days (d). The bins are populated with frequency estimates based on the de-bias factor, times the observed candidate count, where that count was 4 or greater. In addition, more tentative numbers appear in parentheses in certain bins, based on a smaller n or the n that would have resulted from a single discovery. In each row, the maximum value appears in bold.

This shows that for each terrestrial planet size catgeory, we have observed the frequency max out at a very short period between 4 and 16 days, then exhibit decreasing frequency for longer periods.

[. . .]

For the bin corresponding precisely to the Earth, the projected frequency is 0.7%, a far cry from Traub's projection of 34%, owing in part to differences in the size of the bin: If we consider the 3x3 collection of bins that surround Earth's bin, the current projection rises to 7.8%. By including also the smaller Mars-sized planets, to 9.0%.

This does disprove some earlier optimistic estimates, although these estimates were made without any data at all.

In a memorable scene of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Sagan considers the Drake Equation and estimates that perhaps 1/4 of all stars have planets and that each such system might have two planets suitable for the development of life. That estimate was recorded before any planet outside our solar system had been discovered.

With the current Kepler release, we find that the number of earthlike planets per star is likely to be considerably lower than the 0.5 implied by Sagan's estimate. Of course, the picture is considerably complicated: We may find habitable worlds, whether earth-like or Europa-like, orbiting giant planets. We may find earth-like worlds harbored as Trojans of giant planets in the habitable zone.

The frequency as a function of orbital period may have a second peak or flatten and fail to drop with still longer periods. Comfortable temperatures may also be found at planets close in to dim red dwarf stars, although that may likely result in the world being tidally locked, and therefore subject to one daylight hemisphere and one in eternal night. And if nothing else, the pessmistic characteristic of these results suggest that to find earth-like worlds elsewhere, we should prepare to look hard - and quite possibily very hard for decades if not centuries.

[MUSIC] David Guetta feat. Nicki Minaj, "Turn Me On"

"Turn Me On", the international hit by French DJ David Guetta featuring the sung vocals of Nicki Minaj, peaked at #3 in Canada and is currently #10 on the charts. It's a song that I like: I don't care for it that much, but when it comes on the radio I don't turn to another station.

The song's of interest to me mainly for its video, which is basically built around steampunk tropes of automatons being made into flesh. You know that a sub-genre of science fiction has become mainstream when ...