[VIDEO] Breakdancing on the J Train

Riding on the J Train north to Essex Station on the 13th of June, 2012, I captured this half-minute section of a breakdancer doing his thing. Would that this was in higher resolution.

(It goes with this picture, also sadly low-resolution. I only had my cell available, what can I say?)

[BRIEF NOTE] On the resignation of Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty and the Ontario Liberals' future

The resignation of Ontario's Liberal Party premier Dalton McGuinty yesterday evening took me completely by surprise. Yes, there had been ongoing scandals, but surely someone else, like the embattled Energy Minister Chris Bentley, would have fallen? But no.

Hamutal Dotan's analysis at Torontoist deftly analyses the reasons for this surprise shift.

[S]peculation mounted that McGuinty might be stepping down provincially in order to launch a bid for the federal Liberal party leadership. Tonight McGuinty said that he didn’t “have any plans” for what he’d be doing next, but he refused to rule out that leadership bid outright. He cited his daughter’s recent wedding as a reminder of what “was really important,” as one key factor in his decision to step down. The other deciding factor, McGuinty went on, was the party’s annual general meeting last month, at which he received strong support (86 per cent of delegates backed him) and which convinced him of the party’s stability. “My responsibility is to look to the future and ensure renewal,” he said tonight. He also said that AGM convinced him “our party had the strength, the rigour, and the vigour” to withstand the pressures of a leadership race.

Observers, however, are quick to point out that McGuinty and his party are under serious fire for Energy Minister Chris Bentley’s decision to scrap two gas plants, at great expense. Bentley has said he won’t resign; some today speculated that McGuinty may have decided to take the fall. He didn’t, however, apologize for that situation when asked to directly tonight by a reporter.

The minority Liberal government is also in the midst of tense labour negotiations, which have seen McGuinty alienated from the teachers whose support he sought and received for years. The Liberals are calling for a pay freeze and other concessions—a call that the teachers are challenging in court. Negotiations are also tense with many other bargaining units, all of whom are facing similar demands as the Liberals attempt to eliminate the deficit, which Finance Minister Dwight Duncan pegged at $14.4 billion today. McGuinty said that his party will continue to “negotiate directly with our labour partners,” and also try to strike up “civil” conversation with other parties, while the legislature is prorogued. He expressed hope that those conversations might go better than they have to date if they happen outside of the pressures of a legislative session.

Both the Toronto Star and the CBC also place McGuinty's resignation in the context of his minority government's significant problems.

All this brings to mind an analysis of public opinion at the end of September by Éric Grenier, posted at his blog ThreeHundredEight.com. There, he suggested that support for the Liberals had fallen so low that not only was a Progressive Conservative majority plausible, but that the NDP would take the mantle of official opposition and--just like the federal Progressive Conservatives in 1993--the Ontario Liberals would be crushed down to a single-digit number of seats. Could McGuinty have hoped that, without the baggage of his leadership, his party could avoid this future? (But then, it's not as if McGuinty has any obvious successors. For better and for worse, the Ontario Liberal Party has become very closely identified with the man.)

[URBAN NOTE] "City councillor Ana Bailao charged with impaired driving"

I wonder how this news item will influence city politics, inasmuch as Ana Bailão has been one of the centre-leaning councillors who've been critical of Ford. I'm curious as to how it's influence my neighbourhood, since it's located in Bailão's Ward 18.

Toronto city councillor Ana Bailao was arrested and charged with impaired driving overnight.

“I can confirm that on October 16, I was charged with impaired driving,” Bailao said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon.

“This situation is regrettable. I have been advised by my legal counsel that because this matter is before the courts that I have no further comment.”

Toronto police say Bailao was arrested in the early hours of Tuesday morning in the Bathurst Street and Harbord Street area.

Bailao attended the Mayor’s Ball for the Arts on Monday evening, hours before she was arrested.

Coun. Frances Nunziata told CBC News that she sat at the same table as Bialao and spoke to her “throughout dinner and she seemed fine.”

[. . .]

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford said Tuesday that Bailao is innocent until proven guilty, and also that "everybody makes mistakes."

[BRIEF NOTE] Alpha Centauri Bb found

I was alerted to this by james_nicoll's sharing on Facebook of an astronomer's tweet announcing the discovery of "Alpha Centauri Bb", that is, a planet orbiting the slightly dimmer but still Sun-like orange dwarf star of Alpha Centauri B. Such a planet would be the nearest planet discovered--indeed, since Alpha Centauri's three stars are the closest stars to our own planetary system, it's likely to retain that title for some time.

Nicoll also linked to a Croatian-language news article, ably translated by Google, that goes into more detail. Apparently Bb, while Earth-like in mass, orbits B just six million kilometres away, much closer than Mercury.

European astronomers have discovered that around the nearest star Alpha Centauri orbits the planet whose mass is nearly equal to the Earth

It is also the lightest planet ever discovered. Investigations were carried out with the help of the instrument HARPS mounted on the 3.6 m telescope of the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

[. . .]

'Our observations HARPS instrument that lasted for more than four years have revealed a small, but real signal coming from the planets turned around Alpha Centauri B every 3.2 days, "said lead researcher Xavier Dumusque from the Geneva Observatory and the Centro de Astrofisica da Universidade do Porto in Portugal. "This is an extraordinary discovery, in which we use our technique to the limit. '

The existence of a small planet was determined from the wobble of the star images influenced by its gravity. The effect is truly portable - runs the star forward or backward at a speed of 1.8 kilometers per hour, which is about the speed of crawling children. The planet is around Alpha Centauri B at a distance of about six million [kilometres], much closer than Mercury is to the Sun. From another star Alpha Centauri A is a hundred times further, however, and it is in his heaven, probably a very shiny object

[LINK] "An Earth mass planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B"

The search for planets at Alpha Centauri has just begun with the confirmed existence of Alpha Centauri Bb, an Earth-mass planet orbiting orange dwarf B at a distance of 0.04 AU. The discovery paper is here.

One of the major challenges in the search for exoplanets is the detection of an Earth twin, i.e. an Earth-mass planet orbiting in the star’s habitable zone. Towards this goal, Alpha Centauri B is one of the most interesting targets. At a distance of 1.3 parsecs, it is a member of the closest stellar system to the Sun, composed of itself, Alpha Centauri A and Proxima Centauri. It also exhibits low stellar activity, similar to the solar activity level, usually associated with a small perturbing contribution of stellar intrinsic activity to measured radial velocities. Alpha Centauri B is cooler than the Sun (effective temperature3,4, 5, 6 of Teff = 5214 ± 33 K, spectral type K1V), and have a smaller mass that our parent star7 (M􀄑 = 0.934 ± 0.006 Msun). These two conditions ease the detection of a potentially habitable planet with radial velocities, the first one implying a habitable zone closer to the star, and the second one, a stronger radial-velocity variation for a similar mass planet. In addition, theoretical studies show that the formation of an Earth twin is possible around Alpha Centauri B8, 9. Finally, the brightness of the star (visual magnitude V=1.33) would allow for an efficient characterization of the atmosphere of potential orbiting planets.

An Earth twin induces a typical radial-velocity variation of a few tenths of a meter-per-second on a star like Alpha Centauri B. Such detections, technically possible with the most stable highresolution spectrographs, are however challenging due to the presence of stellar intrinsic signals inducing a radial-velocity “jitter” at the level of a few meters-per-second, even for quiet stars.

We report here the discovery of a planetary companion around Alpha Centauri B, unveiled by a radial-velocity signal with a semi-amplitude K of 0.51 meters-per-second, a period P of 3.236 days, and a semi-major axis a of 0.04 AU. This planet, with a minimum mass similar to Earth, is the lightest orbiting a solar-type star and the closest to the solar system found to date. Being much closer to its parent star than the Earth is to the Sun, it is not yet an Earth twin. However, the small amplitude of the signal shows that the radialvelocity technique is capable of reaching the precision needed to detect habitable super-Earth planets around stars similar to our Sun, or even habitable Earths around cooler stars (i.e. Mdwarfs).

In addition, statistical studies of exoplanets suggest that small-mass planets are preferentially formed in multi-planetary systems10, 11, 12. There is therefore a high probability that other planets orbit Alpha Centauri B, maybe in its habitable zone.

[LINK] "World's biggest geoengineering experiment 'violates' UN rules"

Martin Lukacs' Guardian article raises all sorts of interesting and globally relevant questions. What do you do with rogue efforts like this?

A controversial American businessman dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean as part of a geoengineering scheme off the west coast of Canada in July, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

Lawyers, environmentalists and civil society groups are calling it a "blatant violation" of two international moratoria and the news is likely to spark outrage at a United Nations environmental summit taking place in India this week.

Satellite images appear to confirm the claim by Californian Russ George that the iron has spawned an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometres. The intention is for the plankton to absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean bed – a geoengineering technique known as ocean fertilisation that he hopes will net lucrative carbon credits.

[. . . ]

Scientists are debating whether iron fertilisation can lock carbon into the deep ocean over the long term, and have raised concerns that it can irreparably harm ocean ecosystems, produce toxic tides and lifeless waters, and worsen ocean acidification and global warming.

"It is difficult if not impossible to detect and describe important effects that we know might occur months or years later," said John Cullen , an oceanographer at Dalhousie University. "Some possible effects, such as deep-water oxygen depletion and alteration of distant food webs, should rule out ocean manipulation. History is full of examples of ecological manipulations that backfired."

George says his team of unidentified scientists has been monitoring the results of the biggest ever geoengineering experiment with equipment loaned from US agencies like Nasa and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. He told the Guardian that it is the "most substantial ocean restoration project in history," and has collected a "greater density and depth of scientific data than ever before".

[. . .]

The dump took place from a fishing boat in an eddy 200 nautical miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, one of the world's most celebrated, diverse ecosystems, where George convinced the local council of an indigenous village to establish the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation to channel more than $1m of its own funds into the project.

[. . .]

"If rogue geoengineer Russ George really has misled this indigenous community, and dumped iron into their waters, we hope to see swift legal response to his behavior and strong action taken to the heights of the Canadian and US governments," said Silvia Ribeiro of the international technology watchdog ETC Group, which first discovered the existence of the scheme. "It is now more urgent than ever that governments unequivocally ban such open-air geoengineering experiments. They are a dangerous distraction providing governments and industry with an excuse to avoid reducing fossil fuel emissions."