[PHOTO] Flying buttresses of Five

I've taken more than a few pictures of the construction site of Five Condos, a projected 45-story condominium tower located at Yonge and St. Joseph, just one block above Wellesley. The site is conveniently located and the scale is immense. I've one pair of photos posted of the site in September 2011 (1, 2) and another posted in September of this year (1, 2), as well as this background post.

From this particular angle, and this particular light, when I saw the brick facade cannibalized from the previous building propped up by steel girders, I recalled the flying buttresses of cathedrals.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Worst of Reel Toronto"

For five years, Torontoist's image-heavy Real Toronto feature has shown that blog's readers movie after movie filmed in Toronto--"There's the Eaton Centre! Here's Queen Street West!"--most often pretending to be something else. Yesterday, David Fleischer posted his list of the worst films filmed in Toronto. The Love Guru, Glitter, Short Circuit 2, Eugene Levy's filmed body of work ...

[LINK] "Meet 55 Cancri e, the Planet Made of Diamonds"

The etymology of the name of exoplanet 55 Cancri e is simple: it was the fourth planet discovered to be orbiting the incidentally Sun-like star 55 Cancri A, forty light-years away. 55 Cancri e turns out to be important, as Universe Today's Jason Major notes, as the prototype of a diamond planet.

(Pulsar PSR J1719-1438, as I noted last August, also has a diamond planet, but that world is likely to have started off as a star baked by the supernova explosion that created the pulsar.)

55 Cancri e — an exoplanet discovered in 2004 — is more than twice Earth’s diameter and over eight times more massive, making it a so-called “super Earth.” Earlier this year it made headlines by being the first Earth-sized exoplanet whose light was directly observed via the infrared capabilities of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Using information about 55 Cancri e’s size, mass and orbital velocity, as well as the composition of its parent star 55 Cancri (located 40 light years away in the constellation Cancer) a research team led by scientists from Yale University created computer models to determine what the planet is most likely made of.

They determined that 55 Cancri e is composed primarily of carbon (as graphite and diamond), iron, silicon carbide, and possibly some silicates. The researchers estimate that at least a third of the planet’s mass — the equivalent of about three Earth masses — could be diamond.

“This is our first glimpse of a rocky world with a fundamentally different chemistry from Earth. The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite.”

So what would one expect to find on a world made of diamond?

“On this planet there would basically be a thin layer below the surface which will have both graphite and diamond,” Madhusudhan told Universe Today in an email. “But, below that there will be a thick layer (a third of the radius) with mostly diamond. For a large part the diamond will be like the diamond on Earth, except really, really pure.

“But at greater depths the diamond could also be in liquid form,” Madhusudhan added.

[LINK] "Spy Delisle's guilty plea preserves Navy secrets"

I'd blogged briefly about the case of Jeffrey Delisle, a Canadian naval intelligence officer charged with selling information to the Russians. Even at the time, the case seemed relatively low-profile given the import of what was probably Canada's biggest spy scandal in the last decade. CBC carried the news that the case was settled surprisingly quickly with a guilty plea.

Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Delisle's surprise guilty plea yesterday means that not only will highly classified intelligence be kept out of the courts, but it now may never be known why the leaks were undetected.

Delisle, a naval officer stationed in Halifax, pleaded guilty in Nova Scotia Provincial Court to communicating safeguarded information and breach of trust.

"Can you imagine how many sighs of relief are being breathed in the corridors of Ottawa?" said intelligence expert Wesley Wark of the Munk Centre for International Studies. "This would have been a complicated long-running case with lots of diplomatic embarrassment."

The techniques Delisle used were antiquated in terms of today's cyberworld sophistication. "A floppy disk, for God's sake", says Wark, and a USB key were the means of transporting information out of HMCS Trinity, an intelligence facility at the naval dockyard on Halifax's waterfront.

"Co-workers in sensitive areas are meant to keep an eye on each other. If they spot something they consider a bit fishy, then they are supposed to be part of the security web. It sounds like it was a security breakdown at potentially many, many different levels," according to Wark.

Information presented at Delisle's bail hearing detailed how Delisle would browse for material on the secure computer at Trinity, save it in the notepad feature, then transfer it to a floppy disk drive. He would take the floppy out of the secure computer, transfer it to an unsecure system and make a USB copy. After taking the USB home, he would access an email account given to him by the Russians and write in drafts. None of the material was ever transmitted, but the Russians could access the account and read the drafts.

[. . .]

Wark also points out that the other members of the "Five Eyes", the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, might have reason to be upset by Delisle's spying. "What Delisle might have been able to tell the Russians that's very, very damaging is how the communications systems themselves worked and the codes and processes they used to protect secrets. If the Russians have that, it's a huge advantage for them, it's a key into communications systems of not just Canada but all of our allies."

It's not known what information Delisle shovelled to the Russians, and even he may not remember since he wrote over each previous email draft as he sent a new one, but court information suggests the Russians were most interested in Russian mafia activity within Canada and its "Five Eyes" allies.

Wark has an article in the Ottawa Citizen going into more detail about his concerns that the secrecy surrounding the case isn't going to allow for a proper public consideration of the issues involved, whether domestic or international.

[LINK] "Helping a Child to Come Out"

Of the various testimonials I've seen this National Coming Out Day, one of the most interesting is New York Times journalist John Schwartz' essay describing how supportive parents are dealing with children who are not only coming out of the closet at younger and younger ages, but whose behaviour at an even earlier age is indicative of difference. Schwartz, remarkably, comes out of the closet himself in talking about his own experience with his own son.

Some people approach this particular square on the calendar with pride and courage, others with trepidation. Then there’s a third group, which gazes at the day with an uncomfortable blend of longing and impatience. These are parents who know, deep down inside, that a son or daughter is almost certainly gay, but hasn’t worked up the nerve to open up about it. And many of them want to scream, “Would you just come out, already?”

Parents aren’t blind, and the clues are often there. Some research suggests that sexual orientation can show itself even at 3 years old. In our family, by the time our youngest son came out at 13, my wife and I had long progressed from inkling to conviction. A toddler who wore a feather boa around the house and pleaded for pink light-up sneakers with rhinestones is probably telling you something, even if he doesn’t yet know what it is.

We’re not the only ones, said Ellen Kahn, the director of the Family Project for the Human Rights Campaign, a leading advocacy group for gay men and lesbians. Recalling that her own tomboy ways served as a signal, she said, “I was one of those kids, and my parents were those parents.”

Ms. Kahn added, “I’ve heard many parents who have said, ‘I knew my son was gay, I heard my daughter was a lesbian, and I just was waiting’ ” for what she called the “Mom, Dad: I have something to tell you” conversation.

In her home, and in too many others, she said, “Nobody wanted to talk about it.” (She initially told her mother that she thought she was bisexual, because she thought “it wasn’t going to crush her as much.”)

[. . .]

In our family, we knew that Joseph was probably gay, and we saw in problems he was having at school that he was under psychological pressure. We believed that keeping his sexual orientation under wraps (he’s since told us that he knew he was gay from the age of 8) was aggravating the situation. But we were reluctant to force him out of his closet.

We asked our gay friends what they would have wanted at Joe’s age. They confirmed: don’t push, unless Joe seemed to be in real distress. It’s his secret to reveal, they said.

But they also suggested that we make it clear that however our son turned out, we’d accept and love him — and to work references to gay life into our daily conversation instead of treating it as a touchy subject best left alone.

We did, and Joseph came out to me one evening when I had taken him out for sushi at a local restaurant; he was telling me about ways that he unsettled the other boys by dropping comments like, “Do you think Josh has any idea how attractive he is?” I asked if maybe he wasn’t trying to tell them something — and asked if he might also be trying to tell me something. “I might be,” he said. And so we knew.

Author of the memoir Oddly Normal about his own family's experience, Schwartz' Queerty interview for more insight into his family's experience. Remarkable story.

[LINK] "Changing science fiction, changing the world"

Via io9 I came across Scholars and Rogues' Samuel Smith's essay on William Gibson.

Smith makes a simple argument:

I have been known to say that William Gibson is arguably the most important author of the past 30 years. That’s a mouthful of an assertion, especially since we’re talking about a genre writer, I know. But even if I’m wrong, I’m not off by much. The man who more or less invented Cyberpunk, then abandoned it as quickly as he defined it, did more than simply alter the direction of science fiction, he literally helped shape the computing and Internet landscape as we know it today. That’s pretty big doings for a guy who had never so much as played with a computer before he wrote his first novel.

I'm inclined to agree with Smith's twofold argument, that Gibson's writing, by imagining cyberspace, helped create cyberspace and the modern infosphere, and that Gibson's particular approach to science fiction was pioneering.

It’s sometimes worth remembering that those who architected the earliest of Europe’s great cathedrals had never been in anything quite so grand as what they dreamed of. DaVinci designed all kinds of machinery for which the world in which he lived offered no precedent whatsoever. And while MTV has evolved into something of a disappointment, in its early days it was relentlessly innovative. How did they do it? Well, the story goes that they went out of their way to hire people with no experience because they didn’t want the channel to be defined by people who knew “how it was done.” Innovation, in their view, was boosted when people didn’t realize what wasn’t possible.

We now know that a generation of computer engineers and designers, the people who literally built the Internet, envisioned the Web, dreamed the future of personal computing and gaming, many of these people had read Gibson and his imagination, unencumbered by the text-based limitations of the Commodore 64, served as an important resource as they set about crafting the electronic world in which we now live.

And:

In 1950, the state of science was such that it was relatively simple to distinguish between what was possible and what was impossible – that is, between the present and the future. But Gibson understood that the future was gaining, as it were. As the curve describing technological advance grew more and more vertical, the lag time between today and tomorrow was shrinking.

Gibson addressed this dynamic in a couple of ways. First off, he abandoned technical plausibility. You can read the Cyberspace Trilogy backward and forward as many times as you like and you’ll not find any of the standard trappings of Hard SF. This was most decidedly not your father’s Asimov. He described how cyberspace looked and his writing certainly put you in the cockpit as Case approached that mountain of black ice, but he didn’t much care if you understood the nuts and bolts of how it all worked. It was Internet sci-fi without any coding whatsoever.

Instead, Gibson devoted his attentions to cultural plausibility. You might not know how a cyberdeck worked, but you had a pretty clear sense of how the politics and the economy were set up. Black and gray markets and DIY economies emerging from the poverty of the streets? Check. Rampant urban sprawl? Check. Uber-powerful corporations that answered to no government? Check. Ultra-rich who weren’t quite human anymore? Check. Gibson made no secret about how he constructed his all-too-likely future world: he took what he saw around him and exaggerated a bit in the direction things seemed to be moving. In doing so, he blazed a path that every decent SF/SpecFic author today is following.

[MUSIC] Psy, "Gangnam Style"

Psy's "Gangnam Style" had 432,478,043 views and a balance of 3,869,742 likes versus 183,396 dislikes when I began writing this pot.

Max Fisher's claim in August at The Atlantic that the song is quietly subversive of South Korean bourgeois mores may be overstated. What can't be overstated is the extent to which this song's unprecedented popularity--I hear "Gangnam Style" regularly on Top 40 radio in Toronto, the first Asian pop song I've heard--reflects the global success of so-called "Korean wave", the complex of Korean pop culture exports that first broke into Asia some years ago (1, 2) and is now reaching the rest of the world. This Asia Times article breathlessly recounting the rising profile of Korean culture in the United Kingdom, and this New Yorker article talking about the highly sophisticated global marketing strategy of Korean pop music, give some idea as to the scope. For that matter, there's tourism--the Gangnam district that's the subject of the song has even become subject of a USA Today profile.)

South Korea's a global economic power, and South Korean popular culture is fast catching up. The cultural technology of catchy pop songs is, clearly, a technology South Korea has mastered.