[PHOTO] Graffiti on Jersey

The graffitied side of this commercial building on Jersey Avenue just above Harbord Street caught my eye.

[LINK] "Meet the Former Right-Wing Blogger Who Realized Conservatives Are Crazy"

The extended interview of Alternet's Joshua Holland with Charles Johnson, the blogger behind Little Green Footballs, makes for remarkable reading. The mechanics of the transition of Little Green Footballs from crazy right-wing blog to something altogether different is important, I think.

JH: You were always kind of an anachronistic right-wing blogger. You’re a highly accomplished jazz guitarist; you always seemed to care about the environment. What were your politics like on September 10 or during the Clinton years?

CJ: My politics in one sense didn't change because even when I started to be more associated with right-wing blogs and that whole milieu I was still what you call a social liberal. I never went in for the religious right stuff. In fact the rising importance and power of those kind of people in the Republican Party is one of the reasons why I finally had to just go elsewhere.

[. . .]

JH: [. . .A]long the way, and correct me if I’m wrong because I was an outsider looking in, it seems the tipping point came in 2007 when you had this epic flame war with Pamela Geller, who remains one of the country’s biggest bigots to this day. Geller was behind this ridiculous Ground Zero mosque controversy and was an apparent inspiration for Anders Breivik, who murdered 70-plus Norwegians last year. Tell me about that incident. And what is Vlaams Belang?

CJ: So you’ve been googling around a bit. Actually the split between me and the far-right blogging scene had begun before that, but that was one of the big schism points. It wasn’t just Pamela Geller, but Robert Spencer and those who called themselves the “anti-Jihad bloggers.” They had gone to Belgium to have a meeting with a bunch of European like-minded bloggers and other personalities. When I discovered that one of the people there was Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang party, which actually is a successor to a party called Vlaams Blok, which was banned by the Belgian government for their neo-Nazi roots and extreme-right hate speech. What they did is basically reform the image of the party, but didn’t change much else.

When I discovered that this was one of the people they were making alliances with, I said I can’t. This is not for me. I started to criticize people like Pamela Geller. Geller in response started to lash out at me with incredible viciousness, which is kind of her standard mode of operation, and it went from there. Basically the more I looked into and really started to investigate the connections that were forming between these people and the American anti-Jihad blogging scene, the more I realized there’s something really wrong here. We’re talking about people who are fascists, who not only have neo-Nazi connections but also have connections to real, oldtime Nazis, the real Nazis from the Third Reich.

At that point I had a real gut check. It was a moment where things kind of changed -- I began to look at things differently.

[URBAN NOTE] "Rob Ford celebrates World Press Freedom Day, does not take reporters’ questions"

When the right-wing National Post comes up with such a bitingly ironic headline for Natalie Alcoba's article on Mayor Rob Ford, it's a safe bet that it's slipping. (And when, as here, the comments seem to be equally divided between supporters and opponents of the mayor, something's up.)

Mayor Rob Ford joined members of Canada’s ethnic press at City Hall on Monday to emphasize “the need to respect press freedom.”

The occasion marked the United Nation’s World Press Freedom Day, which was May 3.

“The day serves as a reminder that violations of press freedom occur in countries around the world where journalists, editors, publishers are harassed, detained, attacked and killed,” said Mayor Ford, who has himself been embroiled in a public dispute with the Toronto Star after a confrontation with a reporter outside his home last week.

The Mayor has threatened not to take part in press conferences if a Star reporter is present. Mr. Ford accuses Star reporter Daniel Dale of spying on his house.

Mr. Dale denies the allegation, saying he was in the area last Wednesday to inspect a piece of parkland that the Mayor wants to purchase next to his house.

The Mayor did not take questions after he read the proclamation on Monday.

[URBAN NOTE] The final word on Rob Ford's homophobia

In the comments to yesterday's post regarding a guest on the brothers Ford's radio show who launched into all sorts of homophobic speech without getting a reprimand, suitablyemoname alerted me to what's probably the definitive word on whether or not Rob Ford is a homophobe. In his words?

All he has to do--literally--is read a two-minute proclamation, get his photo taken shaking a few hands, and he can move on with his life. He won't even do that. He doesn't even have to touch a gay person: this is PFLAG, so if he only wants to be photographed with heterosexual grandmothers, that's entirely possible to arrange. But this is evidently still a bridge too far.

He's a homophobe.

The Globe and Mail's article is below.

Mayor Rob Ford is passing up another opportunity to support the gay and lesbian community, this time opting to skip a flag-raising outside his office that will be attended by Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke.

The Toronto chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays has confirmed that Mr. Ford turned down its invitation to a flag-raising to mark the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia in Nathan Phillips Square on May 17.

The event was considered among the likeliest to draw the reluctant mayor – it’s low-key, conveniently located and not part of the formal Pride Week celebrations.

Irene Miller, the president of Toronto PFLAG, began sending the mayor’s office invitations in February.

In a letter she called warm and gracious, the mayor’s office replied in late April that Mr. Ford couldn’t fit the event into his schedule.

“We will continue to keep that door open in the hopes that … the mayor will one day come with us,” Ms. Miller said.

Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, whose ward includes the Gay Village, described the May 17 event as “gentle” and “welcoming.” Among the confirmed guests is Mr. Burke, whose late son was gay.

“It would have been wonderful to see the mayor there,” she said. “In many ways, it might have taken the question away about whether or not he supports the LGBT community.”

The mayor will sign the proclamation – as he does for every official day or week the city proclaims through its protocol office – but Councillor Gord Perks will read it in his stead.

[LINK] Two notes on remote sensing of exoplanet environments

We live in an age of miracles and wonders, when our species' astronomers really can detect relatively fine details of extrasolar planets from the comfort of its home planetary system. Two Universe Today stories today highlighted the scope of our accomplishements, the first being Nancy Atkinson's post reporting the detection of light by the Spitzer telescope from the superterrestrial planet 55 Cancri e.

The first planet around 55 Cancri was reported in 1997 and 55 Cancri e – the innermost planet in the system — was discovered via radial velocity measurements in 2004. This planet has been studied as much as possible, and astronomers were able to determine its mass and radius.

But now, Spitzer has measured how much infrared light comes from the planet itself. The results reveal the planet is likely dark, and its sun-facing side is more than 2,000 Kelvin (1,726 degrees Celsius, 3,140 degrees Fahrenheit), hot enough to melt metal.

In 2005, Spitzer became the first telescope to detect light from a planet beyond our solar system, when it saw the infrared light of a “hot Jupiter,” a gaseous planet much larger than 55 Cancri e. Since then, other telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and Kepler space telescopes, have performed similar feats with gas giants using the same method.

In this method, a telescope gazes at a star as a planet circles behind it. When the planet disappears from view, the light from the star system dips ever so slightly, but enough that astronomers can determine how much light came from the planet itself. This information reveals the temperature of a planet, and, in some cases, its atmospheric components. Most other current planet-hunting methods obtain indirect measurements of a planet by observing its effects on the star.

The new information about 55 Cancri e, along with knowing it is about 8.57 Earth masses, the radius is 1.63 times that of Earth, and the density is 10.9 ± 3.1 g cm-3 (the average density of Earth is 5.515 g cm-3), places the planet firmly into the categories of a rocky super-Earth. But it could be surrounded by a layer of water in a “supercritical” state where it is both liquid and gas, and topped by a blanket of steam.

“It could be very similar to Neptune, if you pulled Neptune in toward our sun and watched its atmosphere boil away,” said Michaël Gillon of Université de Liège in Belgium, principal investigator of the research, which appears in the Astrophysical Journal. The lead author is Brice-Olivier Demory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

[. . .]

“When we conceived of Spitzer more than 40 years ago, exoplanets hadn’t even been discovered,” said Michael Werner, Spitzer project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Because Spitzer was built very well, it’s been able to adapt to this new field and make historic advances such as this.”

During Spitzer’s ongoing extended mission, steps were taken to enhance its unique ability to see exoplanets, including 55 Cancri e. Those steps, which included changing the cycling of a heater and using an instrument in a new way, led to improvements in how precisely the telescope points at targets.

Next, Jon Voisey described how one proposed method for detecting the existence of water oceans on distant worlds really isn't all that. (One method, mind, for now.)

One of the most promising methods was proposed in 2008 and considered the reflective properties of water oceans. In particular when the angle between a light source (a parent star) and an observer is small, the light is not reflected well and ends up being scattered into the ocean. However, if the angle is large, the light is reflected. This effect can be easily seen during sunset over the ocean when the angle is nearly 180° and the ocean waves are tipped with bright reflections and is known as specular reflection.

Translating this to exoplanets, this would imply that planets with oceans should reflect more light during their crescent phases than their gibbous phase. Thus, they proposed, we might detect oceans on extrasolar planets by the “glint” on their oceans. Even better, light reflecting off a smoother surface like water tends to be more polarized than it might be otherwise.

The first criticisms of this hypothesis came in 2010 when other astronomers pointed out that similar effects may be produced on planets with a thick cloud layer could mimic this glinting effect. Thus, the method would likely be invalid unless astronomers were able to accurately model the atmosphere to take its contribution into consideration.

The new paper brings additional challenges by further considering the way material would likely be distributed. Specifically, it is quite likely that planets in the habitable zones without oceans may have polar ice caps (like Mars) which are more reflective all around. Since the polar regions make up a larger percentage of the illuminated body in the crescent phase than during the gibbous, this would naturally lead to a relative diminishing in overall reflectivity and could give false positives for a glint.

This would be especially true for planets that are more oblique (are “tilted”). In this case, the poles receive more sunlight which makes the reflections from any ice caps even more pronounced and mask the effect further. The authors of the new study conclude that this as well as the other difficulties “severely limits the utility of specular reflection for detecting oceans on exoplanets.”

[LINK] "Floppy Disks are Dead, Long Live Floppy Disks"

Bruce Sterling linked to this interesting post at Library of Congress digital preservation blog The Signal by Bill LeFurgy about the dubious prospects facing floppy disks. This storage medium, it turns out, is quite fragile.

Damn. Are the disks at home all pointless? (The same goes, only more so, for my Commodore 64 disks: older and using defunct formats.)

Floppy disks are both a bane and a blessing to digital preservationists. The blessing part centers on their potential for providing digital details from the past, especially from the period before widespread use of the internet to disseminate information. Depending on who used them for what they might contain significant literary manuscripts, rare data sets, revealing presentations or perhaps important family information. In any event, it’s quite possible that whatever is on a floppy is unique.

Bane comes into the picture for just about everything else. Disks may not, for example, have labels or any other clear way to identify their origin or their content. A box of unidentified disks is about as human understandable as a box of rocks. Determining what is on the disks requires very specific computer hardware that likely went obsolete years ago. You’ll need a specialty disk drive with a specialty controller that may or may not work with a modern computer. For that purpose you may need to acquire something like a Catweasel (the computer device, as distinct from the children’s TV show or the pro-wrestler). Or you might have to buy some vintage computer hardware and hope it still works.

The crux of the matter comes down to how good a job a disk has done in retaining the bits entrusted to it. Often the results are unhappy. As one writer notes, “if you still have boxes of floppies sitting in your attic or basement or grandparents’ place or wherever else, I’m telling you the days of it being a semi-dependable storehouse are over.” That’s because the disks are fragile constructions that were never designed for permanence. The Florida Division of Library and Information Services describes how the binder glue that is used to hold magnetic particles on a disk can be easily damaged from high levels of heat and humidity. “It can become soft and sticky, or it can become quite brittle… brittle binder flakes off the plastic base, taking the magnetic particles (and thus the information recorded on the particles) with it.” In other words, disks can and do fail with alarming regularity.

[BRIEF NOTE] On IKEA's East German forced labour and globalization

The Deutsche Welle article's simple title of "East Germany relied on forced labour" has the signal flaw of seeming to communicate conventional wisdom when, in fact, it's communicating something come new to public attention: East Germany made use of forced labour to produce goods which could earn hard currency. It's interesting to note that East Germany, arguably the most developed economy of Soviet-bloc Europe, eagerly entered into the sorts of trade relationships with Western countries--low-end manufactures and agricultural exports--which would be typical of more peripheral countries. Also, that East Germany took part in globalization to such an extent, images of autarky aside.

The allegations against furniture maker Ikea that East German laborers for years toiled for the Swedish group started the ball rolling. On May 2, the Swedish television network SVT broadcast a report that gave former prisoners in East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic, a chance to speak. They said that up until the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, Ikea furniture was made in East German jails, including by political prisoners. It was forced labor in East Germany for a Western company. This was not an isolated case, but a common practice from which many West German companies also benefited. All prisoners in East Germany were obliged to work.

"Prisoners were made to do the hardest and dirtiest work, the work that nobody else wanted to do, under the worst conditions," said Steffen Alisch of Forschungsverbund SED-Staat, a research institute at the Free University of Berlin that investigates East Germany. He says threatening letters about forced labor were sent to Ikea as early as 1984.

[. . .]

What is known is that forced labor was a fixture of the business plan of the GDR. In the mid-1980s, it was estimated that there were around 20,000 in prison. The prisoners represented "only" one percent of industrial production, but the government "didn't want to do without it," said Hildigund Neubert, who is in charge of Stasi files in the state of Thuringia, in an interview with DW. "When amnesties were granted on the GDR's national day, there were complaints from the ministries. They were afraid that without these workers, the economic plan could not be fulfilled."

For their work, the prisoners were given only a pittance. But Neubert says the responsibilities of individual Western firms are difficult to determine. He thinks it would therefore be a welcome move if the companies that profited from the dirty business of the slave laborers compensated by making donations to foundations in restitution.

It was common knowledge that Western goods were produced in the GDR. But the people in both German states knew only part of the story. Western companies benefited from the low wages in the GDR, while the West German government had a political interest in trade relations in pursuit of its policy of "change through rapprochement."

East Germany saw exports to the West as an opportunity to obtain the hard currency it increasingly needed. It had cooperation agreements with Sweden and Japan. "With [West] Germany, that would have been impossible," said Maria Haendcke-Hoppe-Arndt, an economist and former employee of the Stasi documentation authorities. East Germany wanted to avoid any official connection with West Germany.

[. . .]

"But there were still arrangements as to who should provide what and how," said journalist Anne Worst, who made "Eastern Products for the West," a comprehensive television documentary for German public broadcaster MDR. "An important meeting place was the Leipzig Trade Fair. There were plenty of salespeople."

Worst's research shows that 6,000 West German companies did business with the GDR. Among them were companies such as catalog merchants Quelle and Neckermann, shoe maker Salamander and cosmetics firm Beiersdorf, but also less-well-known firms such as battery maker Varta and spirits maker Underberg. As long as the Soviet Union supplied the fraternal socialist country with cheap oil, East Germany's exports of petroleum products were abundant, as were the exports of chemicals, machinery and textiles.

[. . .]

While textiles were the best-known export item from the GDR, they were by no means the most common, Worst said: "The GDR delivered an incredible number of foods to the West, whole sides of pork, fruit and vegetables, which were also partly in short supply in the GDR. When it came to fresh food, all of West Berlin was dependent on supplies from the GDR."