[PHOTO] Kids in the Fountain

A clutch of children was enthusiastically playing in the spray of the central fountain of Washington Square Park when I was passing through. The weather was such--hot, humid--that I empathized with them for their freedom to do so.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• 80 Beats reports on how the Chukchansi tribe of California has used more than a million dollars' revenue from their on-reserve casinos to try to fund the revival of their language.


• The Burgh Diaspora comments on how Brazil and Mexico, even though they are similar in being upwardly mobile middle-income Latin American democracies, respectively enjoy and suffer from very different portrayals in the international media (Brazil as successfully social-democratic country of the future, Mexico as seat of horrific drug gang warfare).


• Eastern Approaches has two posts describing the contestation of the Second World War in post-Communist Europe, one from Hungary commenting on the rehabilitation of that country's dictator Admiral Horthy, the other in Lithuania with the provisional government that took over immediately after the Soviets were driven out by the Nazis in 1941.


• Geocurrents portrays Tunisia's Djerba island, an ethnolinguistically and religiously diverse and economically cosmopolitan island that despite terrorism still hosts annual visits by members of the departed Jewish community.


• GNXP's Razib Khan wonders, in light of a recent study suggesting human musical preferences are non-arbitrary, if classical music with its hierarchical associations is fading, if our (possibly emerging) "world of nearly free music and amateur dispersed production may return to the roots of our species, from the vaulted arches of aristocrats back down the earthier tastes of the commons".


• Language Log's Julie Sedivy comments on the role of greetings in commercial establishments in Montréal as markers of identity and language change.


• Torontoist's guest contributor Krista Simpson notes that Toronto artists are staging guerrilla takeovers of the city's remaining telephone booths as impromptu art galleries.

[URBAN NOTE] On the closing of the World's Biggest Bookstore

I learned from Torontoist's Steve Kupferman that the World's Biggest Bookstore--a huge bookstore in downtown Toronto at 20 Edward Street, just north and west of Yonge and Dundas--is set to close. Bert Archer at Yonge Street seems to have been the first to carry the news.

The current lease on the building, held by Indigo Books and Music, runs out at the end of 2013 and is not being renewed. The owners, the family of the late Jack Cole, co-founder, with his brother, Carl, of Coles Books, still own the 64,000-square-foot building they converted from a bowling alley in 1980.

According to Stuart Smith, a VP at CBRE Commercial Real Estate Services, who is handling the account, the owners would like to rent it to a single tenant. “It’s the rarity of an envelope of this size in an area this far downtown that makes it so unusual,” he says.

Wikipedia's potted summary of the store's history may not quite communicate the centrality of the World's Biggest Bookstore in Toronto. Suffice it to say that it's been Toronto's largest retail space for books in three decades, with sixty-four thousand square feet devoted to bookselling.

The store was started in 1980 by Jack Cole and Carl Cole, former owners of Coles Bookstore.

At the time of its opening in 1980, in a converted bowling alley, it went unchallenged in its claim as the biggest bookstore in the world. Although it retains the name today, the Guinness Book of World Records currently lists a Barnes and Noble outlet in New York City as the world's largest bookstore based on floor space, although Powell's Books of Portland, Oregon is usually considered the largest based on shelf-space. Nevertheless, World's Biggest Bookstore still claims the title on the basis that it depends on how "biggest" is defined: while Barnes and Noble has more floor space, World's Biggest Bookstore carries more titles.

The World's Biggest Bookstore was the first of the book "superstores", and was purchased from Coles by Chapters Inc, which itself was formed from the merger of the Coles bookstore chain and SmithBooks. Although it retains its unique name, its stock, distribution and advertising are closely integrated with the Chapters and Indigo chains.

It is noted for its bright lights and over 20 kilometres of bookshelves.

Over at Torontoist, commenter CRS suggests that this news item doesn't quite get the whole story, that this is instead a sort of a negotiating tactic adopted by the owners in response to the request from the World's Biggest Bookstore's owners for lower rent, in the context of the general decline of bookselling.

Hold your horses, kids! From what I've heard, Mrs. Coles, widow of Jack Coles and who owns the property and is in her nineties, has stipulated that as long as she is alive the property must be a bookstore out of respect for her husband's accomplishments. The property is not up for sale, but rather the building is for rent. It is much more likely that Indigo will renew the lease on a year by year basis, as it would be simplest for everyone involved. It would be difficult to find a company financially confident enough to pay for the overhaul and rebranding required to transfigure a space like that without the knowledge that they own it. WBB will be around for a little while longer - no fear.

It's not spun that way in the Toronto Star, though. It looks like the huge real estate potential of the site, located literal steps away from Yonge Street in the middle of downtown Toronto, is key.

“The existence of a large retail space like this, just steps from Yonge and Dundas is the hen’s tooth of all hen’s teeth — incredibly rare,” said broker Stuart Smith, vice-president of the urban retail group for commercial real estate company CB Richard Ellis.

“I’ve had the biggest of the big (retailers) looking at it from all over the world.”

The big draw is location, location, location. The store sits in the epicentre of a condo boom that’s added tens of thousands of shoppers to the downtown.

While it may not have a door on Yonge St., the property is within steps of some pretty major downtown developments.

They include a major expansion of the nearby Ryerson University campus and, just around the corner, construction of Canderel’s 78-storey condo and retail complex, the tallest residential condo in Canada. Those projects, and others, are expected to kick-start a major remake of Yonge St.

The two-storey building also offers bargains of another kind: Leasing costs that are almost unheard of downtown at roughly $25 per square foot, plus $8 per square foot in operating costs and taxes. (Yet for a property that size, the rent is $1.5 million a year.)

For property right on Yonge St., costs are a combined $150 to $200 per square foot, said Smith.

“It’s a suburban site (in size) with suburban taxes in a completely urban environment,” said Smith. “It’s the biggest thing to come up for rent downtown since Maple Leaf Gardens,” now a bustling Loblaws.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On the latest on lakes and life on Titan

It's been known for a while that for all of its differences from Earth, Saturn's planet-sized moon Titan is Earth-like in that it has surface lakes and seas which just as on Earth constitute key elements of a planet-wide hydrographic cycle. Titan's lakes and seas are rather different from Earth's, of course, since Titan is a cryogenic environment (average global temperatures around minus 180 degrees Celsius) with a dense nitrogen-methane atmosphere, and Titan's lakes are liquid hydrocarbons (ethane and methane). Somewhat paradoxically, Titan is also a desert environment, warm enough that most bodies of liquid on Titan's surface are located in Titan's polar areas. (The first lake discovered was Ontario Lacus, a south-polar sea I've mentioned here in the past not only because of its being a namesake of Toronto's own lake.)

The discovery of surface bodies of liquid in Titan's equatorial region by the space probe Cassini makes things even more interesting.

[I]mages show dark regions that appear to be pools of hydrocarbons around the moon's equator.

"We detect evidence for the presence of a tropical lake with an area of 2,400 square kilometers [927 square miles]—as large as the Great Salt Lake in Utah—with a depth of at least a meter [three feet]," said study leader Caitlin Griffith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"Our work also suggests the existence of a handful of smaller and shallower ponds, similar to marshes on Earth, with knee- to ankle-level depths."

Based on the polar lakes and other evidence, scientists think methane—the main component of natural gas—might play a similar role as water on Earth, cycling between the atmosphere and the surface.

But until now, Titan's lower latitudes were thought to be dry, filled mostly with rippling sand dunes.

Scientists had previously seen only hints of moistness in Titan's tropical areas. For instance, in 2004 the European Huygens lander set down near the moon's equator and captured views of what appeared to be rain runoff.

In addition, later Cassini images turned up evidence of storms in this supposedly parched region.

Still, Griffith and colleagues think the newfound lakes can't be explained by rainfall, since a number of circulation models say that significant bodies of liquid shouldn't be stable at the moon's tropics based on precipitation alone.

"Any liquid deposited in the tropical surface evaporates quickly and eventually is transported by Titan's circulation to the poles, where the large polar lakes appear," Griffith said.

"Lakes at the poles are easy to explain, but lakes in the tropics are not."

One possibility, Griffith said, is that "our detection of tropical lakes suggests that a subterranean source of methane may flood the surface and dampen the ground, in essence creating oases on Titan."

The use of the term "oasis" may have been intentional. A recent post at Supernova Condensate explores the possibility that Titan's environment might be hospitable enough for life.

The idea has been considered for some time now of whether Titan might be able to support some kind of life. In fact, the idea was given quite some consideration by one Carl Sagan back in the 1970s. Since then though, ideas have developed that perhaps any prospective Titanian organisms might be methanogenic. The mechanism put forward by McKay and Smith in 2005 is that, in the absence of liquid water, an organism might metabolise molecular hydrogen and acetylene to give methane:

C2H2 + 3H2 --> 2CH4

Life could potentially use a reaction like this to acquire energy comparable with the way methanogenic bacteria work here on Earth. The result would be drastically depleted H2 and acetylene (or ethane, or other larger hydrocarbons) at the surface, and an abundance of CH4. Interestingly enough, in 2010 some detailed calculations implied that there may well be a lack of hydrogen at the surface of Titan, and despite how easily it forms in Titan’s upper atmosphere, the Huygens probe could barely measure the ethane at ground level because it was so scarce. The latest discovery of methane lakes in regions of Titan where rain isn’t normally seen to fall would appear to add some further weight to this .

We, of course, shouldn’t get too excited just yet. There are still quite a number of missing pieces to this puzzle. Indeed, other reviews of the data have suggested that such methane-based life may be quite unlikely. All the same Titan’s methane has to be replenished somehow. Exactly as with the methane on Mars, Titan’s methane is destroyed by sunlight hitting the moon’s upper atmosphere. If not replenished, in a few tens of millions of years it would be all gone.

The ground on Titan is seemingly a lot like wet sand, damp with liquid methane. Huygens managed to detect plenty of methane after it landed, despite the instrument it was using being embedded several centimetres into the ground. Indeed, it’s quite likely that Titan is a “muddy” little planet with plenty of wet ground and humid air near its surface. This is coupled with the fact that Titan’s lakes are expected to be ephemeral in nature, appearing and disappearing over time.

All in all, while there’s no way we can definitively state that there is any kind of life on Titan, the evidence so far is compelling, it has to be said. In closing, a final thing to consider is the temperature. Yes, Titan is cold. Very cold. And both chemical and biochemical reactions would occur very slowly there. But remarkably, at least one species of Earth microbe, named colwellia, has been found to be capable of both surviving and metabolising at temperatures which would make Titan seem… well… genuinely tropical. Perhaps the door shouldn’t be fully closed on the idea of methanogenic titanian life just yet….

(A related post at Supernova Condensate was skeptical of the idea that Titan's unusual atmospheric content is a unique artifact of our time. The mediocrity principle widely adopted by astronomers militates against the assumption that we're lucky enough to see something that rare in bodies with histories so much longer than humanity's recorded history.)