[PHOTO] New York Public Library Main Branch, Bryant Park

New York Public Library Main Branch, adjoining Bryant Park, is a wonderful place.

The Lego lion greeting visitors, one of two inside the doors, mirrors the two stone lion sculptures outside.



The entry is impressive.



The McGraw Rotunda caught my eye.



The reading rooms are beautiful.



( Four more photos. )

[LINK] "New York Public Library's plan to take books off shelves worries scholars"

Continuing a theme from my photo post this morning, Brian Braiker's article in The Guardian from April raises a worrisome future for the NYPL's Main Branch. Can anyone go into more detail as to whether this plan--a terrible plan--is still planned to occur?

There is a quote by John Milton engraved over the entrance to the main reading room at the New York Public Library's stunning Beaux-Arts building on Fifth Avenue: "A good Booke is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life."

But now, 101 years after the library was first dedicated, up to 3m of those precious books are to be removed from the central library and shipped to two off-site storage facilities, prompting a chorus of complaints from authors and scholars who say that the institution is threatening its own claim to be "one of the world's pre-eminent public resources for the study of human thought".

Researchers will still be able to access the books, but only after a wait of up to 24 hours. The qualities which inspired the names of the two marble lions that guard the entrance, Patience and Fortitude, have been in little evidence.

The removal of the books – some to a site underground in adjacent Bryant Park, the rest to a facility in suburban New Jersey that the NYPL shares with Princeton and Columbia universities – is part of a gargantuan $300m reorganisation aimed at lugging the central library into the 21st century.

[. . .]

"We are aiming to create the greatest library facility in the world," Anthony Marx, the library's CEO and president, told the Guardian. "And we are as committed as the scholarly community to ensure that it continues to be a great research facility."

But some of scholars have bristled that moving a significant chunk of its five million research volumes off-site to make room for these changes will hamper their research. They met with Marx on Thursday to discuss those concerns.

"When they move a part of the collection offsite, that slows things down," Caleb Crain, a fiction and nonfiction writer who has blogged on the topic, told the Guardian.

"It will force me to plan ahead and request books. If you discover something near your deadline that you want to look at, it might as well not be there if it's going to take a week to get here."

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• 80 Beats notes the introduction of commercial crawfish fishing on mountainous Lake Tahoe, instituted with the intent of controlling an invasive species.


• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait celebrates the first image taken by NASA's NuSTAR X-ray telescope, of famous black hole Cygnus X-1.


• Edward Hugh at A Fistful of Euros is very gloomy about Portugal's future.


• The Global Sociology Blog celebrates Fernando Henrique Cardoso, sociologist and Brazilian president.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen makes a confusing post, noting that some of the best-performing capitalist economies in the 1950s were Caribbean and/or colonial but going on from there to make unsupportable generalizations about Communist economies (rapid catch-up growth in the Communist bloc at the time, too).


• Slap Upside the Head notes that the "gay panic defense" of the Australian state of Queensland is being challenged by a petition campaign.


• Two posts from Supernova Condensate, one regarding an ancient fossil mushroom, the other discussing the SF trope of habitable moons.


• Towleroad notes that the European Union now requires aspirant member states to respect gay rights.

[BRIEF NOTE] A note on habitable moons

Supernova Condensate's post on habitable exomoons inspired me to make a brief followup.

Wikipedia's summation of the case for natural satellites being capable of supporting life is sound. Certainly I've blogged here enough times about the prospect of moons like Europa (around Jupiter) or Enceladus and Titan (around Saturn) possibly supporting life.

Having Earth-like worlds, however, is more problematic. There is a fairly constant 1:10000 ratio between the mass of gas giants and the mass of their satellite systems, that is, the satellite systems of gas giants amount to one ten-thousandth of the mass of the gas giants. Were this relationship to hold true, to have an Earth-mass moon of a gas giant the gas giant would actually have to be a much larger brown dwarf, a body that--unlike a gas giant, but like a star--actually experienced nuclear fusion. Smaller moons could orbit smaller gas giants, bodies the mass of the Moon (an eightieth the mass of Earth) or Mars (a tenth the mass of Earth), but these bodies are so small that it's unlikely they could remain habitable for very long.

The only way to get Earth-sized moons of a gas giant would be to have the gas giant capture an Earth-sized moons into orbit. This actually isn't implausible, since current theory on planetary formation has nascent planets spiral inwards over time. The capture scenario for Earth-sized moons does suggest, however, that Earth-like habitable exomoons will be rare.

[URBAN NOTE] Toronto man faces charge of arson in Yonge and Gould fire

The intersection of Yonge and Gould, just north of Yonge and Dundas, is highly visible, not least since Gould Street is a major artery of the campus of Ryerson University (subject of a [PHOTO] post this April past) and is hosting some showy new architecture as that university expands.

Back in January 2011, Yonge and Gould was also the scene of a spectacular fire as a heritage building already damaged in a partial collapse burned to the ground. Arson was suspected from the beginning, and today, police announced an arrest.

Toronto police have charged a man in connection with two separate downtown fires, including one that prompted the demolition of a Yonge Street heritage building last year.

Insp. Gary Meissner told reporters on Monday afternoon that a male resident was arrested last Friday on an unrelated matter.

That arrest started a process in which officers investigated the suspect's connection to two fires — the blaze that gutted a three-storey building on the southeast corner of Yonge and Gould streets on Jan. 3, 2011, and a fire in a Toronto Community Housing building on Sackville Street last week.

The six-alarm blaze at 335 Yonge Street started at around 4 a.m. ET on Jan. 3, 2011. It took at least four hours to bring the fire under control, and firefighters were still hosing the building down at noon that day.

The building had to be demolished after the fire, leaving several tenants without a home, including the popular Salad King restaurant that has since relocated to the other side of Yonge Street.

I'll be curious if this did, as suspected, have anything to do with real estate speculation.

[LINK] "The Case (Study) of Arsenic Life: How the Internet Can Make Science Better"

80 Beats and Bad Astronomy are just two of the many blogs and other news sources that reported on the disproof of the claim of a team led by biochemist Felisa Wolfe-Simon that she had discovered an arsenic-using bacterium in California's Mono Lake. I followed the news at the time, inasmuch as NASA hyped the purported discovery as one indicating that extraterrestrial life could be chemically different from our life, but even at the time the general reaction was one of skepticism, aided by a combination of NASA hype, the scientists' lack of preparation for said, and bad science.

The reaction to the whole affair that I found most interesting was Rebecca Rosen's piece in The Atlantic, "The Case (Study) of Arsenic Life: How the Internet Can Make Science Better". Rosen argued that the quick response of scientists to the paper, mediated by social media like blogs and Twitter, represents an improvement over more traditional, hide-bound methods.

Here's how it all came to an end: On Sunday, while scientist Rosie Redfield spoke at the Joint Congress of Evolutionary Biology, two papers, one by her and her colleagues and another by a separate group, were published on the website of the journal Science. Together, the papers represent a summary refutation of the claims, first made in December of 2010, that the bacteria (GFAJ-1) could use arsenic to build its DNA, not phosphorous as is the case with all other life on Earth. As it turns out, GFAJ-1 is just like the rest of us -- phosphate-dependent -- and doesn't represent some strain of alien or separately evolved life here on Earth, as the existence of arsenic-based life implies. Though the papers were not set to be published until later this month, Science released them early -- during Redfield's talk -- in a move that surprised even Redfield herself, and garnered a cheer from the live audience in Ottawa.

This is all as it should be, right? As Redfield told the Washington Post's Marc Kaufman, "A very flawed paper was published and received an inordinate amount of publicity. ... Now refutations of the work by two independent research groups are appearing in the same high-profile journal, and the refutations are being well publicized. This is how science is supposed to work."

But there's something lacking in this. All is not well just because it has ended well. Perhaps that's true for the scientific core of the story, the narrow question of whether GFAJ-1 depends on phosphate. But the bigger story -- how the original, shoddy paper was hyped by NASA and Science beyond responsible levels; how the authors of that paper handled the criticism; right up until how Science kept the new papers and their authors under lock and key until last night, even while Redfield's paper was already available on arXiv.org; and, notably, how the open fora of science blogs and Twitter provided a platform for public analysis and scrutiny -- this story demonstrates the large problems with the process of how science is packaged and delivered, and how the tools of the web could be deployed to make that process better, smarter, and more efficient.

[. . .]

At every single step of the way in this long tale, there is a tension between the archaic, rule-bound process preferred by NASA and Science and the free-for-all, rapid-consumption ethos of science online. And at each step, the science and surrounding reporting coming from the latter looks smarter, cooler-headed, and more solid than that emanating from the older organs.

Begin with the press release which ramped up expectations beyond where the science could go, look at Alexis's tweet, which tried to bring them back down (and which teetered on the edge of acceptable embargo behavior). The whole process makes little sense: As EmbargoWatch's Ivan Oransky wrote at the time, "If the goal is to communicate the science accurately, and there's a lot of allegedly inaccurate coverage floating around out there about a study that is already peer-reviewed and proofed, and available in PDF form to reporters, can someone please explain why the best thing to do is to wait until Thursday to release the actual study?"

Then go from the press conference to the initial fall-out. Points go to Redfield and other scientists who debunked the study on their blogs and Twitter streams. Wolfe-Simon and her team, for their part, refused to wade in (that is, any more than they already had by, you know, publishing the paper). "Any discourse will have to be peer-reviewed in the same manner as our paper was, and go through a vetting process so that all discussion is properly moderated," Wolfe-Simon wrote to Zimmer. "The items you are presenting do not represent the proper way to engage in a scientific discourse and we will not respond in this manner." [Emphasis added]

[. . . T]he reason to have "proper" methods of engagement is because they ostensibly will produce better science and better science journalism. But in this one case study, we can see how the opposite is true: The "proper" paths of engagement produced uninformed hype, poor science, and kept the sources -- both human and paper -- away from a conversation that was simmering with genuine enthusiasm and curiosity. The best science -- and the best science writing -- could come when we allow those natural levels of interest to have a field day with the research and researchers that are out there. The curious may never be satisfied, but at least they will have some science to sink their teeth into, rather than the vapors emitting from some press releases, press conferences, and papers whose authors shy away from the conversation.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On the clash of civilizations in Toronto, or, Atangana at Yonge and Dundas

Terry Davidson's article "Muslim street cleric wants to protect Canadian women from sex assault by forcing them to cover up" was the front-page article of today's edition of the tabloid Toronto Sun.

Canadian laws should be changed to require women to "cover themselves" to prevent sexual assaults, says an Islamic street preacher in Toronto.

Al-Haashim Kamena Atangana, a 33-year-old Islamic convert, called for legal change in response to recent sex attacks at York University.

Atangana is connected with a group called Muslim Support Network and is one of a number of street-corner clerics commonly seen at the Yonge and Dundas Sts.

In an e-mail to the Toronto Sun, Atangana said "the reason ... these sex attacks are continuously happening is because (of) Canadian laws, which give too much freedom to women" when it comes to how they dress.

"You should take your example from the way Muslim women dress," he wrote. "Why does (sic) Muslim women who wear long dress and covers her head aren't targeted for sex attacks?"

The clash between western culture and values and the beliefs of some Muslim adherents has been a source of controversy and conflict across North America.

Atangana, who plans to distribute his views on paper in the coming weeks, went on to state that "the reason ... a woman gets raped is because of the way she (dresses)," and suggests that "Toronto (become) the first city in North America to introduce laws that would make it illegal for women to dress provocatively."

If Toronto did this, Atangana said in an interview, other Canadian cities would follow suit.

"If (women) want to prevent being sexually assaulted, they should cover themselves," said Atangana, adding that while he doesn't expect Western women to dress as Muslim women do, they should have a "dress code" and take note of the burka the head scarf and face veil some Muslim females wear.

Atangana says he began planning to distribute his views after a recent spate of sex assaults at York University's Keele campus, and praised Const. Michael Sanguinetti, a Toronto police officer who ended up in hot water after telling students at a York University safety forum in January 2011 that women should avoid dressing like "sluts" if they didn't want to be victimized.

Many things can be said of this. Critical Muslim Tarek Fateh interviewed later in the article is correct to identify this view with an Islamic version of misogyny, while Alia Hogben of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women is also correct to identify this sort of misogyny as something present in all cultures. As Josh Dehaas writing at MacLean's points out, Atangana's statements blaming female victims of sexual assault for their clothing is a more extreme echo of the statements of a Toronto police officer that started the SlutWalk movement worldwide. The American Muslim's Sheila Musaji points out that Atangana, a street preacher of no particular position, has no authority to speak for Muslims. Going to Onislam.net, the reaction from Muslim and non-Muslim commenters is one of hostility and anger, pointing out that blaming victims of sexual assault is immoral and that judging by Egypt, at least, the hijab and niqab do nothing to prevent very high rates of sexual assault. The general consensus, in short, is that Atangana may be a public Muslim, but that he's not a very good one.

This doesn't matter very much, at least not to the Sun's target audience. Toronto, like other cosmopolitan cities, isn't a city where different populations are mixed up promiscuously, but is rather a city of more-or-less autonomous enclaves. Despite the past fifty years of non-discriminatory immigration policy, the idea that most Canadians wouldn't have Muslim friends isn't even worthy of a bet. This isn't because of racism, as such, as it has to do with the fact that Canadians don't live in the cities where Muslims of whatever stripe are most common, never mind the specific neighbourhoods. I'd be willing to bet that would even be true for many Torontonians--Wikipedia's article on Islam in Canada identifies a quarter-million Muslims living in the Greater Toronto Area in 2001 out of a total regional population of 4.7 million or so, and the numbers haven't changed much since then. Especially since the category "Muslim" is so broad as to encompass any number of nationalities and even more ethnicities, so diffuse as to include people who practice different variants to different degrees or (in fact), not at all, it would be easy for most people to run into contact with someone of one sort of Muslim affiliation or another and not even recognize them.

Herein lies the genius of the Toronto Sun. Relatively few people might know Muslims, but everyone is familiar with Yonge-Dundas Square. Yonge and Dundas is one of the several intersections that lie at the core of Toronto's imagined identity. I myself have sixteen tagged entries in LiveJournal myself, and probably more besides. More, most everyone who goes to Yonge and Dundas, especially on the weekend, is familiar with the preachers--Christians on one stretch, Muslims on another. I'm tempted to think that I'd recognize Atangana if I passed him on his corner.

The front-page article of the Toronto Sun, complete with photo, just made Atangana one of the most famous and recognizable Muslims in Toronto. Atangana's theology has become one of the most recognizable variants of Islam practiced in Toronto for people who read the article. What does it matter if Atangana is not representative of Toronto Muslims? How many Torontonians--and how many Toronto Sun readers--are going to notice?

We can always have a clash of civilizations if we want to. Some of us do.