[PHOTO] Sunday afternoon in the park

Looking south down George Hislop Park towards Isabella Street on a beautiful clear Sunday day, all seemed right with the world.

[CAT] Shakespeare, not looking terribly thrilled

[CAT] "Is this your cat?"

This poster is a pleasant change from most of the other cat posters I've seen taped on posts: not cat lost, rather cat found.



IS THIS YOUR CAT

FOUND

DUFFERIN/DUPONT AREA

CALL: 416 220-9793

[LINK] "From China, With Rock"

At Torontoist, Kelli Korducki has an interesting interview with a Toronto writer, Jonathan Campbell, whose new book Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll takes a look at the history and import of rock music in modern China.

Torontoist: Your book mentions a “golden period” of Chinese rock music. Would you say there was one, and that it’s now over?

Jonathan Campbell: When Chinese people talk about that time—and they use the word “platinum,” like a platinum era—they generally mean this 1992 to 1996 period, where a Taiwanese record label called Rock Records came into China and they saw the potential to sell rock and roll. They produced albums from the biggest names in Chinese rock and roll for the general public—bands like Tang Dynasty, which was a metal band that had a very Chinese flavour, and this other band called Black Panther that was sort of Bon Jovi—esque. Though they really liked Wham! as well.

For me, and for a lot of people that I talk to in the book, a golden period would be when there was a lot of cool stuff happening, when there were a lot of bands playing and places to play and more and more people watching. But, definitely over the course of the last 10 years, there’s been an explosion. When you talk about Chinese rock beginning in 1986, compressing our 60 years (of rock and roll) into barely 30—

Wait, sorry to interrupt, but Chinese rock began in 1986?

There’s a birthday. May 9, 1986, is the day that Cui Jian sings a song on national television called “Nothing to My Name,” and that’s the moment where Yaogun—the word I use to talk about Chinese rock and roll—is born.

Obviously, [Cui Jian] played before then. He practiced enough to be on TV, and there were a few gigs in the years previous. But there was nothing real, beyond a few gigs [for a mostly foreign population], until 1986, when he sings this song and sort of changes the way popular music sounds.

So, there was this compression of our 60 years [of rock and roll], but in the last 10 years—because that’s when the Internet took off—it’s been just exponential.

[. . .]

There’s a quote that I use in the book from Brian Eno, the producer [and musician]. He was talking about the Czech resistance movement in the late ’60s, and he said, “The difference between the Communists and us is that they believe in the power of art, and we don’t anymore.” When you say “rock and roll can change the world,” people laugh. And I get it—it does sound cheesy to me. But at the same time, I know what it did for people like the woman in Subs, and particularly for people older than her who grew up through that post-Mao period where suddenly everything they knew about their country was completely not happening in real life. Rock and roll was a way for people to navigate [their world] and it gave them hope, and it asked questions. Suddenly the music isn’t just something you listen to anymore.

Cui Jian's "Nothing to My Name" is a great song. It's a song that famously works on multiple levels, both as an address by a man in love to his beloved and a response to the uncertainties of post-Mao China. Good music.

[LINK] "ALMA Reveals Workings of Nearby Planetary System"

Not two days after my post describing speculation that the gas giant believed to have been imaged orbiting the nearby star of Fomalhaut didn't exist, via io9 I learned that the European Southern Observatory in Chile has found different, smaller planets using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.

The ALMA images show that both the inner and outer edges of the thin, dusty disc have very sharp edges. That fact, combined with computer simulations, led the scientists to conclude that the dust particles in the disc are kept within the disc by the gravitational effect of two planets — one closer to the star than the disc and one more distant.

Their calculations also indicated the probable size of the planets — larger than Mars but no larger than a few times the size of the Earth. This is much smaller than astronomers had previously thought. In 2008, a NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image had revealed the inner planet, then thought to be larger than Saturn, the second largest planet in our Solar System. However, later observations with infrared telescopes failed to detect the planet.

That failure led some astronomers to doubt the existence of the planet in the Hubble image. Also, the Hubble visible-light image detected very small dust grains that are pushed outward by the star's radiation, thus blurring the structure of the dusty disc. The ALMA observations, at wavelengths longer than those of visible light, traced larger dust grains — about 1 millimetre in diameter — that are not moved by the star's radiation. They clearly reveal the disc's sharp edges and ringlike structure, which indicate the gravitational effect of two planets.

"Combining ALMA observations of the ring's shape with computer models, we can place very tight limits on the mass and orbit of any planet near the ring," said Aaron Boley (a Sagan Fellow at the University of Florida, USA) who was leader of the study. "The masses of these planets must be small; otherwise the planets would destroy the ring," he added. The small sizes of the planets explain why the earlier infrared observations failed to detect them, the scientists said.

The ALMA research shows that the ring's width is about 16 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth, and is only one-seventh as thick as it is wide. "The ring is even more narrow and thinner than previously thought," said Matthew Payne, also of the University of Florida.

The ring is about 140 times the Sun-Earth distance from the star. In our own Solar System, Pluto is about 40 times more distant from the Sun than the Earth. "Because of the small size of the planets near this ring and their large distance from their host star, they are among the coldest planets yet found orbiting a normal star," added Aaron Boley.

[BRIEF NOTE] Did Viking discover life on Mars?

The latest news item announcing that the experiments used by the Vikings Mars landers of the 1970s to determine if there might be Mars actually did detect life, just life that we did know how to identify back in the 1970s before we learned of the extremophiles of Earth, something that absinthe_dot_ca linked to, just as james_nicoll did. The former linked to the paper, "Complexity Analysis of the Viking Labeled Release Experiments".

The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the three which were components of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars. Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response. In this experiment 14C radiolabeled nutrient was added to the Mars soil samples. Active soils exhibited rapid, substantial gas release. The gas was probably CO2 and, possibly, other radiocarbon-containing gases. We have applied complexity analysis to the Viking LR data. Measures of mathematical complexity permit deep analysis of data structure along continua including signal vs. noise, entropy vs.negentropy, periodicity vs. aperiodicity, order vs. disorder etc. We have employed seven complexity variables, all derived from LR data, to show that Viking LR active responses can be distinguished from controls via cluster analysis and other multivariate techniques. Furthermore, Martian LR active response data cluster with known biological time series while the control data cluster with purely physical measures. We conclude that the complexity pattern seen in active experiments strongly suggests biology while the different pattern in the control responses is more likely to be non-biological. Control responses that exhibit relatively low initial order rapidly devolve into near-random noise, while the active experiments exhibit higher initial order which decays only slowly. This suggests a robust biological response. These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.

At best, this is provocative stuff, and makes the case for a followup mission to Mars. Comments in Jason Major's Universe Today item make the point that retroactive analyses of the data are great at picking up patterns, just patterns that are imposed by the researchers combing through the data again as much as patterns that actually exist. One of the authors of the paper, Gilbert Levin, designed some of the Viking probes' life-detection experimental kit and has since argued at length that NASA scientists almost went of their way to interpret the evidence as proof of an absence of life.

[LINK] "Why Nobody Wants an Election But We Could Get One Anyway"

Torontoist's Patrick Metzger points out that the Ontario NDP's brinksmanship over the minority Liberal government's budget, demanding tax hikes and new spending, could well bring the Conservatives into power provincially. Liberal assent would undermine the whole austerity project; Liberal dissent could bring an early election.

[W]ho would gain most from an election—or more importantly, who thinks they would gain most? The Grits would be hard-pressed to find anything they’ve done that’s going to pick them up seats, having already got farmers, northern residents, public servants, and Ford nation in a state of high dudgeon. Penny-pinching (er, nickel-pinching?) is never popular, and an election based on this budget would be neutral for the Liberals at best.

The NDP don’t want an election either—they are even less financially prepared than the Grits—but feel they could run a strong campaign on their budget ideas. A recent poll by the Broadbent Institute indicated that a majority of Canadians are comfortable with taxing the rich to prevent cuts in social programs, and tax credits for job creation are likely to find favour in a province where employment has barely recovered since the depths of the Great Recession.

The Conservatives have already defaulted to forcing an election if the Liberals and NDP don’t reach an agreement. If they won the contest, Tim Hudak would redeem himself from the defeat he pulled from the jaws of victory last fall, and if they lose, the Tories probably get to look for a leader who has a better shot at running the province. Either way, somebody’s problem gets solved.

I do not want Tim as premier, I do not.