[PHOTO] Neon Condos under construction, Duplex and Orchard View

The planned Neon Condos development on the northeast corner of Duplex Avenue and Orchard View Boulevard, just northwest of Yonge and Eglinton, will be an imposing construction in a neighbourhood that’s still substantially composed of one- and two-story residential buildings. The description of the planned construction in a city staff rezoning proposal released in 26 July 2010 is succinct.

The application proposes to amend the Zoning By-law to permit the construction of a 17 storey apartment building with a height of 50.4 metres containing 229 dwelling units at the subject properties. The proposal consists of a 14-storey tower on top of a 3-storey (10.3m) base massed along the west, north and south façades of the site, a stepback at 6 storeys (18.8m) is found along Duplex Avenue. The base building is massed and articulated to read as grade related townhouse units with direct access for ground floor units from the Duplex Avenue sidewalk. The tower is located on the southeast end of the property with a 3 metre stepback at the 3rd storey along Orchard View Boulevard.

As this thread at Skyscraper City, this thread at Urban Toronto, and 2010 article in the Town Crier all indicate, the size of the building makes it a controversial construction for many neighbourhood residents. Still, it gained approval.

Construction is still in the very early stages. As of yesterday afternoon, all there was on the site was the gigantic crane swinging above the houses underneath the bright blue sky.

[DM] “On the potential consequences of open borders and wages”

I’ve a post up at Demography Matters pointing readers to this Chris Bertram post at Crooked Timber talking about the certain benefits of open borders for global migrants but the questionable consequences for workers living in migrant-receiving countries. It’s an interesting subject, and the post with its discussion thread is worth sharing with others.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Andrew Barton remarks on the fact that not only are the dominant newspapers of British Columbia part of a commercial monopoly, they're all going up behind paywalls, too.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster notes that galaxies like our Milky Way, which has two relatively large satellite galaxies (the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds), are actually quite rare in the universe.


• In his ongoing False Steps blog, pauldrye describes a proposed American spacecraft designed in 1946 that could have sent an astronaut into space a decade ahead of time.


• Geocurrents describes the peculiar situation of the booming Somalian city of Galkayo, divided between two state-like entities.


• GNXP's Razib Khan is very critical of the recently-voiced argument that Indo-European languages evolved in Anatolia, not the Pontic steppes.


• Marginal Revolution takes note of Mexico's heavy investment in the United States, one data point illustrating that Mexico is actually something of a global economic power.


• New APPS Blog's Mohan Matthen revisits the question of Gandhi criticism.


• Savage Minds links to an anthropologist's posting describing how, given the terrible economic prospects for students in the field, the only future for anthropology truly is outside of academia. More later.


• Torontoist takes note of the commemoration of the one-year anniversary of Jack Layton's death at Toronto City Hall.


• Towleroad's Andrew Belonsky points out that the ongoing trend in the United States towards acceptance of same-sex marriage is likely to influence eventual Supreme Court decisions.


• At The Way the Future Blogs, Frederik Pohl is right to note that one major element behind the decline of Mexican emigration to the United States is the sharp fall in the Mexican fertility rate. This is not the only factor at play, however, as he implies.

[LINK] Three Centauri Dreams links on sighting extraterrestrial artifacts

Three recent posts at Centauri Dreams have been concerned with detecting signs of extraterrestrial civilizations, not through intentional signalling on their part but rather via byproducts of their industrial processes.

• "To Detect a Starship" and "SETI: Starship Radiation Signatures" examine ways in which starships using different propulsion mechanisms--antimatter photon rocket, light sail, magnetic sail--might be detected.


• More unsuual possibilities are indicated in the post "Exotic Detections: Wormholes and Worldships", excerpted below.

The analysis assumes that the mouth of a wormhole would accrete mass, which would give the other mouth a net negative mass that would behave in gravitationally unusual ways. Thus the GNACHO (gravitationally negative anomalous compact halo object), which playfully echoes the acronym for massive compact halo objects (MACHOs). Observationally, we can look for a gravitational lensing signature that will enhance background stars by bending light in a fundamentally different way than what a MACHO would do. And because we have MACHO search data available, the authors propose checking them for a GNACHO signature.

In conventional gravitational lensing, when a massive object moves between you and a much more distant object, a greatly magnified and distorted image of the distant object can be seen. Gravitational lensing like this has proven a useful tool for astrophysicists and has also been a means of exoplanet detection. But when a wormhole moves in front of another star, it should de-focus the light and dim it. And as the wormhole continues to move in relation to the background star, it should create a sudden spike of light. The signature, then, is two spikes with a steep lowering of light between them.

The authors think we might find the first solid evidence for the existence of a wormhole in our data by looking for such an event, saying “…the negative gravitational lensing presented here, if observed, would provide distinctive and unambiguous evidence for the existence of a foreground object of negative mass.” And it goes without saying that today’s astronomy, which collects information at a rate far faster than it can be analyzed, might have such evidence tucked away in computer data waiting to be discovered by the right search algorithms.

[LINK] On the destroyed planet of BD+48 740 (HIP 12684)

The star BD+48 740, also known--as Wolfram Alpha indicates--as HIP 12684, is an orange giant star roughly thirty thousand light years from Earth. Nearing the end of its normal lifetime, the star has at least one planet, a gas giant in an eccentric orbit. A recent analysis by a Polish-led team suggests, however, that until quite recently BD+48 740 had two giant exoplanets. As Nancy Atkinson's Universe Today post "A First: Star Caught in the Act of Devouring a Planet" explains, the chemical composition of the star suggests that one close-orbiting gas giant was swallowed up.

The evidence the astronomers found was a massive planet in a surprising highly elliptical orbit around the star – indicating a missing planet — plus the star’s wacky chemical composition.

“Our detailed spectroscopic analysis reveals that this red-giant star, BD+48 740, contains an abnormally high amount of lithium, a rare element created primarily during the Big Bang 14 billion years ago,” said team member Monika Adamow from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. “Lithium is easily destroyed in stars, which is why its abnormally high abundance in this older star is so unusual.

“Theorists have identified only a few, very specific circumstances, other than the Big Bang, under which lithium can be created in stars,” Wolszczan added. “In the case of BD+48 740, it is probable that the lithium production was triggered by a mass the size of a planet that spiraled into the star and heated it up while the star was digesting it.”

The other piece of evidence discovered by the astronomers is the highly elliptical orbit of the star’s newly discovered massive planet, which is at least 1.6 times as massive as Jupiter.

“We discovered that this planet revolves around the star in an orbit that is only slightly wider than that of Mars at its narrowest point, but is much more extended at its farthest point,” said Andrzej Niedzielski, also from Nicolaus Copernicus University. “Such orbits are uncommon in planetary systems around evolved stars and, in fact, the BD+48 740 planet’s orbit is the most elliptical one detected so far.”

Because gravitational interactions between planets are responsible for such peculiar orbits, the astronomers suspect that the dive of the missing planet toward the star could have given the surviving massive planet a burst of energy, throwing it into an eccentric orbit like a boomerang.

“Catching a planet in the act of being devoured by a star is an almost improbable feat to accomplish because of the comparative swiftness of the process, but the occurrence of such a collision can be deduced from the way it affects the stellar chemistry,” said Eva Villaver of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain Villaver. “The highly elongated orbit of the massive planet we discovered around this lithium-polluted red-giant star is exactly the kind of evidence that would point to the star’s recent destruction of its now-missing planet.”

The subject is described in greater detail in the arXiv-hosted paper "BD+48 740 - Li overabundant giant star with a planet. A case of recent engulfment?". A recent Centauri Dreams post also goes into more detail.

[URBAN NOTE] “Mapping Little Ginny: Do parents want to raise their kids in downtown Toronto?”

In a recent links roundup at Torontoist, Hamutal Dotan linked to a column by Metro Canada columnist Matt Elliott, one that took a look at Torontonian demographics. Inspired by the comments last month of Toronto’s deputy mayor Doug Holyday that children shouldn’t live in downtown Toronto, Elliott decided to take a look at the latest findings from Statistics Canada on the proportion of children living in different areas of the city.

Based on 2011 census figures for federal ridings in Toronto, the map above breaks down the percentage of the area population that was 14 or under in 2011. A darker shade of green means more kids.

Immediate conclusion: very few children live downtown. In Trinity-Spadina, the percentage of the population under 14 is less than half that of the rest of the city. In fact, most parts of the old City of Toronto fall below the amalgamated city average. For the most part, kids are clustered in Etobicoke and Scarborough—the suburbs—just as Holyday predicted.

Maybe the deputy mayor was right. People don’t want to raise their kids in the heart of this city.

My riding is Davenport, the downwards-facing triangle in the west-centre. There, the under-14 proportion amounts to 13%. But, as a second map showing change in the under-14 population in Toronto’s different ridings shows, many area of the downtown core saw increases in the number of under-14s while many outer areas saw sharp falls.

As a whole, the City of Toronto got older between 2006 and 2011. The median age in this city is now 40.4, up from 39.2 in 2006. City-wide, the under-15 population declined by 2%. But certain areas of the city bucked the trend. Leading the way was the downtown core in Trinity-Spadina, which saw its youth population increase by 6%. Parkdale-High Park, which most would consider at least downtownish, was up 4%.

At the same time, supposed kid-friendly suburban areas are showing steep declines. Scarborough is down sharply, especially as you move north. The same is true in Etobicoke, with a decline showing even in Etobicoke Centre, Holyday’s stomping grounds and presumably the kind of place he thinks people want to raise their kids.

The data isn’t consistent enough to draw sweeping conclusions—families are still flocking to Willowdale, for example, and hell if I can figure out what’s going on in Davenport—but there’s enough here to challenge some ingrained assumptions. It’s clear that many young families do want to settle downtown and raise their children, even with unsubstantiated fears that their kids might end up playing in traffic.

It’s probably worth adding that the demographic patterns shown in Elliott’s maps, of a relatively old downtown and a relatively young periphery, mirrors the ongoing divisions between core and peripheries in the City of Toronto.