[PHOTO] Graffiti on 10th Avenue and West 25th Street

Very visible from the High Line as we were passing the intersection of 10th Avenue and West 25th Street was a graffiti artist spraypainting in vivid colour a version of the famous image of a sailor kissing a woman on Times Square on V-E Day. (Barely visible on street level, by Auto Design N Y C, is a San Francisco-style streetcar.)

I certainly can't fault the art. It's certainly an improvement over the bland black-painted building that Google Maps reveals.

[LINK] "Asteroid between Mars, Jupiter named for US gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny"

The Washington Post carries the news about the newly-named asteroid and its connection to the gay rights movement.

A Canadian amateur astronomer has named an asteroid he discovered after U.S. gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny, who died last year in Washington.

Kameny, who earned a doctorate in astronomy at Harvard University, was an astronomer with the U.S. Army Map Service in the 1950s but was fired from his job for being gay. He contested the firing all the way to the Supreme Court and later organized the first gay rights protests outside the White House, the Pentagon and in Philadelphia in the 1960s.

When astronomer Gary Billings read Kameny’s obituary, he consulted with others in the astronomy world. They decided to submit a citation to the Paris-based International Astronomical Union and the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., seeking to designate Minor Planet 40463 as Frankkameny.

It’s located in the asteroid belt, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The Kameny asteroid is visible through a telescope and was first discovered in 1999 using long-exposure photography.

“Frank would show up as a little dot that moves between two points,” Richard “Doc” Kinne, an astronomical technologist at the American Association of Variable Star Observers in Cambridge, Mass., said in an interview. He helped write the citation that would lead to the naming.

[. . .]

A published citation officially naming the asteroid on July 3 notes Kameny’s history as a gay rights pioneer.

“Frank E. Kameny (1925-2011) trained as a variable star astronomer in the 1950s, but joined the Civil Rights struggle. His contributions included removing homosexuality from being termed a mental disorder in 1973 and shepherding passage of the District of Columbia marriage equality law in 2009,” the citation reads in the Minor Planet Circular.

See Wikipedia for more.

[LINK] "Stephen Harper draws criticism for Calgary is Canada’s ‘greatest’ city"

Jake Edmiston's coverage of Prime Minister Harper's statement, while presiding over the Calgary Stampede, that Calgary--Alberta's economic capital--is Canada's greatest city doesn't touch upon the element of regional rivalries in modern Canada. Something worrying could come of this--Alberta alienation? anti-Alberta sentiment?--given the strength of the Conservative Party federally in Alberta.

In an unscripted moment of Stampede enthusiasm, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has declared Calgary ”the greatest city” in Canada.

“I think that if the [Stampede] founders could be here today and see the great city – see what has built up around this event – they would be amazed,” said Mr. Harper, who was born in Toronto, moved to Calgary in his 20s, and now resides in Ottawa.

“Some people will look at this and say, ‘Come on, really? Calgary?”
“They would be amazed to see that their Stampede has been part of giving birth to the greatest city in the greatest country in the world.”

The declaration has earned him critics – Vancouver’s mayor said the prime minister was clearly mixed up – but it also separated him from his political competitors.

Both interim Liberal leader Bob Rae and NDP leader Thomas Mulcair opted only to endorse all Canadian cities.

“I want to work hard for all Canadian cities,” said Mr. Mulcair, an Ottawa-born Montrealer who grumped: ” ‘I’m better than you’ is not the best way to get results.”

Mr. Rae allowed “Toronto is my hometown” before saying via email, “now that I am a National Leader all of Canada is my home.”

The prime minister’s unplanned remarks at the Calgary Stampede’s opening ceremonies Friday were captured on video and posted on the Huffington Post’s website Tuesday. But the Prime Minister’s Office was notshyabout confirming the truth of the remarks.

“Absolutely the prime minister meant it,” press secretary Carl Vallée wrote in an email Tuesday.

A political science professor at the University of British Columbia couldn’t recall any other Canadian prime minister making such a public claim, but said Mr. Harper’s remarks were reminiscent of Jean Chrétien’s outspoken affinity for his native Shawinigan, Que.

“This is barbecue season and politicians are on break and they’re going to be saying things to please the home crowd,” says Prof. Max Cameron. “But from Harper it’s believable.

“Some people will look at this and say, ‘Come on, really? Calgary?’ But I think it’s kind of cute. When a politician speaks with genuine passion of their hometown, people like

[URBAN NOTE] "OneCity: Councillors set to tussle over TTC chair Karen Stintz’s transit plan"

The latest on the OneCity transit plan, according to the Toronto Star, isn't encouraging.

Whether the OneCity transit plan is in its death throes or is simply percolating through the city’s complicated planning and political machinery depends on who you ask.

By the end of the Wednesday-Thursday council meeting, Toronto could have begun a new roadmap to an ambitious transit future, says TTC chair Karen Stintz.

Others, however, believe the boldest transit plan Toronto has seen in years has already vapourized less than three weeks after it was unveiled by Stintz and TTC vice-chair Glenn DeBaeremaeker.

On Tuesday some city councillors didn’t even know what exactly they would be asked to vote for this week.

There’s a feeling among some that Stintz let the air out of her plan by removing the controversial proposal to hike property taxes to pay for a third of the $30 billion expansion scheme after meeting with the mayor’s staff.

“The OneCity transit plan as originally presented is so watered down, if it were a drink I wouldn’t know what flavour it was,” said councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, an ally of anti-tax Mayor Rob Ford.

It seems unlikely that even the name OneCity will appear on any council motions this week.

None of that matters, says Stintz, as long as the planning process gets a kick-start and the funding proposal comes back to council in the fall, along with other possible funding options being studied by city staff.

[LINK] "False Steps", by pauldrye

pauldrye is working on a new book, about the alternate histories of the space programs of the world.

I've begun a second book project and associated blog (the first one, Passing Strangeness, is finished and due to be e-published as soon as I can wrest an ISBN from Ottawa).

http://falsesteps.wordpress.com

The new topic is things that almost happened in the Space Race (generously expanded to include Germany in WWII, the post-war years up to Sputnik, and the years after Apollo 11). Not the really weird stuff like Project Orion and whatnot, but stuff that was seriously on the drawing board/testing and might have gone into space if money and politics had broken differently. If you think you might be interested in, say, how the Russians were planning on doing their Moon landing, or American super-Apollo stuff that got cancelled in favour of the Space Shuttle, or the couple of abortive attempts the Chinese made at a space program prior to the one they've got now, please come and check it out.

Paul's first post describes the Sänger-Bredt Silbervogel, a spaceplane designed by Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt in the 1930s and 1940s.

The Silbervogel would have been a two-part ship. The spacecraft itself was to have been a 10-ton, streamlined plane with two stubby wings and two tailfins, both raked upwards at about ten degrees. Four fuel tanks took up most of the fuselage and contained liquid oxygen and kerosene which would burn in a single rocket engine over the course of 168 seconds. On the ground the plane would be mated with a rocket sled which would give it an initial boost from behind along a rail track for a mere ten seconds but with nearly five times the thrust as the spaceplane’s engine.

Once the Silbervogel completed both burns it would be moving at a minimum of Mach 13 (15,926 km/h) and as much as Mach 20 depending on its mission and payload, and reach a maximum altitude of anywhere from 31 to 121.5 kilometers, the latter value being well into space. Just to put this in perspective, the air speed record in 1944 was 1130 kilometers per hour (Mach 0.92), while the altitude record in an aircraft was 17.3 kilometers. Sänger and Bredt did not think small.

The Silbervogel would then begin a roller-coaster-like ride up and down into the Earth’s atmosphere, using its wings and angle of attack to skip off the denser air at about 20 kilometers up and regain altitude for another distance-eating hop. An example diagram in the 1944 paper discussed below shows no less than eight such skips before settling into a steady flight at 20 kilometers and a return to base after a complete trip around the world.

Alas (actually, perhaps "fortunately") German technology wasn't up to the task.

Go, read.