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Oct. 22nd, 2012
This stretch of gracious, low-slung houses along the north side of Davenport Road just east of the terminus of Ossington Avenue is one I find aesthetically pleasing. The early 20th century suburban houses along this stretch aged well.
CBC is one of many news agencies reporting an arrest in the string of sexual assaults that occurred around Christie Pits park this summer and, inadvertantly, sparked a sustained, much-needed public discussion about sexual assault. (The response by Krista Ford who implicitly (and inaccurately) the victims for dressing like sluts comes to mind, as does the firestorm started by the Toronto Sun over a misogynist Islamic street preacher that ended up highlighting on the paper's own misogyny.)
A 15-year-old boy has been charged in connection with a string of sexual assaults in Toronto's Bloor and Christie area, where female pedestrians were attacked from behind as they walked at night.
Toronto police say the teen — who cannot be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act — was arrested at around 11 p.m. ET Saturday in the area of Bloor Street West and Roxton Road, at the scene of another alleged sexual assault.
He faces 14 counts of sexual assault and two counts of criminal harassment.
[. . .]
The attacks prompted hundreds of people to take part in September rally to symbolically take back the area around Christie Pits Park.
"After the initial shock of some of the assaults, what's happened is it's actually really galvanized the community," local Coun. Mike Layton said on CBC's Metro Morning on Monday.
"Immediately following the first round of announcements of them, it brought people out onto the street and people taking back the street, and [had them] saying, 'You know what? We're not going to have this in our community.'"
It remains in the realm of science fiction for now but the discovery of a new planet just four light years away will reignite a race to find a twin of planet Earth that may host extraterrestrial life.
The step change comes as the most powerful telescopes ever built are about to enter into service and as ideas about where life could exist are being turned on their head. At the same time, scientific discussion about the possible existence of alien life is becoming more mainstream.
[. . .]
Researchers from the Geneva Observatory said the newest planet to be found was too close to its own sun to support life. But previous studies have suggested that when one planet is discovered orbiting a sun there are usually others in the same system.
Rival astronomers are now likely to start scouring Alpha Centauri for more planets, possibly in the habitable zone around its stars.
The technological eyes and ears that scientists have at their disposal are about to take a leap forward too, broadening and deepening their search.
Barring a surprise discovery of microbes on Mars, we will see alien life long before we are ever able to touch it.
“I think it is realistic to expect to be able to infer within a few decades whether a planet like Earth has oxygen/ozone in its atmosphere, and if it is covered with vegetation,” Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, told Reuters.
The next decade will see two record-breaking telescopes come on line; the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a huge radio telescope sited in South Africa and Australia, and Europe’s Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) that will sit on a mountain top in Chile’s Atacama desert and be the largest optical telescope ever built.
Their main task will be to probe the origins and nature of galaxies, but they will also look for signs of life on planets that can now only be seen in the roughest detail.
“I think the capabilities of new telescopes means that the detection of an ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) is more likely in the next few decades, than it was in the last,” said Mike Garrett, general director of Astron, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.
"I have often imagined the day when scientists directly image an Earth-like extra-solar planet," Icarus Deputy Project Leader Robert Freeland told Discovery News. "We would be able to determine the planet's atmosphere and surface temperature from its spectrum, and we would thus know whether it might be able to sustain life as we know it. I suspect that once such a discovery hits the news, people worldwide are going to demand that we send a probe to determine whether the planet has life (of any type) and/or could be suitable for human habitation. If the latter proves true, then a manned mission would eventually follow."
Freeland added that in the case of this most recent discovery, we're not looking at a viable exploration target. This world's orbit is ten-times closer to its star as Mercury is to the sun -- it would be a hellish, (likely) rocky, molten world. Alpha Centauri Bb orbits well inside the nearest edge of the star's 'habitable zone' -- the region where liquid water can exist on the surface -- so this exoplanet is the very antithesis of 'habitable.'
[. . .]
By Freeland's reckoning, when we do discover a bona fide Earth-like world encircling one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri system (i.e. a world of the approximate mass of Earth orbiting inside the habitable zone), the world's space agencies (particularly NASA) would need to be prepared, lest be caught "flat-footed" when a wave of public pressure to mount a mission to that planet demands why a plan isn't in place.
"Icarus Interstellar and its partner organizations -- the British Interplanetary Society and the Tau Zero Foundation -- have been working on interstellar mission designs for years, and we're eager to help NASA/ESA jump-start a serious, fully-funded interstellar program.
[. . .]
Although there's reason for some guarded excitement about the discovery of Alpha Centauri Bb, Crawford cautions that detecting small exoplanets at larger orbital distances from the star cannot be done using the "radial velocity" detection technique. Earth-mass worlds orbiting further away will have less of a gravitational impact on the host star, thereby causing it to wobble less.
"Even these very sensitive radial velocity measurements are incapable of detecting Earth-mass planets in the alpha Cen B habitable zone -- with the lowest mass detectable at (habitable zone) orbital distances being 4 Earth-mass super-Earths," he said. "Therefore, despite the very real cause for excitement about this detection, it may still be a long wait before we know whether or not this star also has Earth-mass planets in its habitable zone."
The title of Sean Coughlan's BBC article "Breakthrough in world's oldest undeciphered writing" is a bit misleading. The script of the Proto-Elamites hasn't been deciphered; the numbering system and basic accounting terms identified in the article have been known for decades. What has happened is that new techniques for the machine-reading of proto-Elamite have been developed, these techniques making it possible to put the corpus of proto-Elamite online where--it is hoped--crowdsourcing will lead to the script's rapid decipherment.
"I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough," says Jacob Dahl, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and director of the Ancient World Research Cluster.
Dr Dahl's secret weapon is being able to see this writing more clearly than ever before.
In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away and flashing out light.
This device, part sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. This is Indiana Jones with software.
[. . .]
Dr Dahl, from the Oriental Studies Faculty, shipped his image-making device on the Eurostar to the Louvre Museum in Paris, which holds the most important collection of this writing.
The clay tablets were put inside this machine, the Reflectance Transformation Imaging System, which uses a combination of 76 separate photographic lights and computer processing to capture every groove and notch on the surface of the clay tablets.
It allows a virtual image to be turned around, as though being held up to the light at every possible angle.
These images will be publicly available online, with the aim of using a kind of academic crowdsourcing.
He says it's misleading to think that codebreaking is about some lonely genius suddenly understanding the meaning of a word. What works more often is patient teamwork and the sharing of theories. Putting the images online should accelerate this process.
But this is painstaking work. So far Dr Dahl has deciphered 1,200 separate signs, but he says that after more than 10 years study much remains unknown, even such basic words as "cow" or "cattle".
3 Quarks Daily's Gautam Pemmaraju has a wonderful essay exploring the influence of trains on popular music, starting--of course--with Kraftwerk and their Trans-Europe Express.
The influential electronic music artists Kraftwerk, saw their 1977 concept album Trans-Europe Express as a symbol of a unified Europe, a “sonic poem” enabling a moving away from the troubled legacy of the war, and particularly, of Nazi Germany. The spectre of the Reich and their militaristic high speed road construction was often linked to the band’s fourth studio album Autobahn, although the band saw it, in part, as a “European rejoinder to American ‘keep on trucking’” songs. The French journalist and friend to the band, Paul Alessandrini, had apparently suggested the idea of the train as a thematic base (See the wikipedia entry): “With the kind of music you do, which is kind of like an electronic blues, railway stations and trains are very important in your universe, you should do a song about the Trans-Europe Express”. Described as embodying “a new sense of European identity”, the album was destined to become a seminal work of the band, not just in fusing a qausi-utopian political idea with their sonic aura, at once popular, idiosyncratic and profoundly influential, but also in ‘reclaiming the train’, which chugs across “borders that had been fought over”. In response to Kraftwerk’s espousal of European integration, band member Karl Batos says here,We were much more interested in it at that time than being Germans because we had been confronted by this German identity so much in the States, with everyone greeting us with the 'heil Hitler' salutes. They were just making fun and jokes and not being very serious but we'd had enough of this idea.
The chugging beat, “ripe with unlikely hooks, and hypnotic, minimalist arrangements” is in ways an ideological amplification of the idea of Autobahn, referencing the transport networks of Germany, and seeking in its “propulsive proto electro groove…a high speed velocity transit away from the horrors of Nazism and World War II”. There was, however, as Pascal Bussy writes in Kraftwerk: Man, Machine, Music (1993), a formidable nationalism underlying their somewhat nebulous politics. Kraftwerk believed, as Hütter is quoted saying to the American journalist Lester Bangs in 1975, that they were unlike other contemporary German bands which tended to be Anglo-American; they wanted instead to be known as German since the “the German mentality, which is more advanced, will always be part of our behaviour”.
Drawing quite a bit of inspiration from pioneering avant-garde artists such as Karl Heinz Stockhausen, the Italian composer Russolo & the Fluxus Group (which included La Monte Young, Jon Hassel & Tony Conrad), it was actually the Frenchman Pierre Schaeffer that they were directly indebted to, in some manner, with regard to their electronic transport music. As Karl Batos reveals in the aforementioned interview, they were ‘following his path’, since it was the Schaeffer’s Musique Concrète piece using only train sounds that they were referencing.
Musique Concrète was a Schaeffer’s way of ‘turning his back on music’. It was a method of empirically gathering environmental sounds and creating sonic envelopes using these sources. In doing so it was in “an opposition with the way musical work usually goes”, Schaeffer believed, and the process of collecting sounds, ‘concrete sounds’, whatever their origin be, was “to abstract the musical values they were potentially containing”. It was a way of ‘freeing’ composition from its formalist shackles and reformulating the process of composition, ‘a new mental framework’, which saw the shaping of music as a more ‘plastic’ process. In a 1986 interview (read here), the broadcast engineer who worked for the radio station ORTF, says that having successfully driven out the German invasion in the years after the war, music was still ‘under an occupying power’ – Austrian, 12 tone music of the Vienna School. It was this that he wished to reject and seek instead, “…salvation, liberation if possible”. He along with Pierre Henry, in contrast to purely electronic music, developed pioneering modes and techniques of electroacoustic improvisation, wherein naturally occurring and other environmental sounds, ‘any and all sounds’, were recorded and then manipulated to create musical compositions.