[PHOTO] Walking under 25 The Esplanade

The columns of the Beaux-Arts 25 The Esplanade frame things nicely.

[URBAN NOTE] "Historicist: The “Manifest Destiny” of North Toronto"

Torontoist's David Wencer contributed a Historicist post that took a look at the annexation, exactly one hundred years ago, of the municipality of North Toronto into the growing City of Toronto. Now located squarely in the centre of the modern city, stretching along Yonge Street, North Toronto was a rapidly-growing community that lacked the financial wherewithal to provide the infrastructure necessary for its population. The solution for North Toronto, as for many other municipalities in the immediate area of Toronto a century ago, was annexation.

In December 1912, North Toronto was very much a community in transition. The most recent census listed the town’s population at 6,655—up from 5,217 the year before. That November had been a record month for new buildings, and many more permits were on the way as the area’s farmland gradually gave way to new subdivisions.

And at the stroke of midnight on December 15, all 2,610 acres of North Toronto became part of the City of Toronto.

In 1889, the previously unincorporated villages of Davisville and Eglinton formally merged to become the Village of North Toronto. In early 1890, the boundaries were extended, and North Toronto was upgraded to town status. The town grew in spurts over the next 20 years, evolving into a bedroom suburb of Toronto where commuters and their families enjoyed affordable and relatively quiet property within close proximity to the amenities of the growing City of Toronto.

Like many of Toronto’s surrounding municipalities at this time, North Toronto struggled to find the capital necessary for the urban projects which the growing residential population increasingly demanded: street paving, electricity, plumbing, sewage, public schools, and libraries. Accounts of North Toronto’s history often reference the tax laws of the time, under which York County properties classified as farmland were taxed at a lower rate than properties which had been subdivided into lots. Speculation in North Toronto boomed, as investors bought North Toronto land, hoping to cash in once the big wave of development finally came. Prior to annexation, however, many were taking advantage of the favourable farmland tax rate and refrained from actually building on their North Toronto assets, leaving the town with limited funds to spend on amenities.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• BlogTO's Ed Conroy rights about the golden age of video stores in Toronto. (Apparently Toronto was the first city to have a video store, the Video Station on Eglinton Avenue, in 1977.)


• Eastern Approaches describes how the European Union is building up a viable relationship with Moldova. Is the possibility of Moldova being tracked for EU membership that far off?


• Far Outliers' Joel quotes from J.H. Elliott's Imperial Spain, noting how a devastating plague at the end of the 17th century not only created severe labour shortages but depressed the Spanish mood. The great dream of empire was falling apart.


• Geocurrents discusses the climate of Australia.


• GNXP's Razib Khan is among the many people who noted the genetic research tracing the ancestry of the Romani to northwestern India's lower castes and their arrival in Europe to a point a thousand years before present.


• Normblog's Norman Geras links to a review of a recent book on the devastating Great Leap Forward and its famine in early Communist China, making the point that although Mao may have driven the policies that created the catastrophe everyone around him collaborated in trying to minimize the disaster.


• Steve Munro describes a public meeting of GTA transit authority Metrolinx. He's unsatisfied with the extent to which policy changes were discussed, as opposed to past achievements.


• Supernova Condensate discusses, with pictures, the unusual wind patterns of Saturn.


• Torontoist noted the 1992 visit of Salman Rushdie to a PEN gathering in Toronto.


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble discusses the disaffection of many Tatar Christians in Tatarstan in being classed as ethnically Tatar, and the ways in which this complicates state-center relationships.

[META] Blogroll addition: Wonkman

I've added a new blog to the blogroll, Wonkman. The first post up is Men’s Rights Activists: A Letter to Marilena, criticizing the men's rights movement on the grounds that the paradigms it uses--strongly opposed to women's rights full stop, seeing all conflicts through the lens of male oppression, et cetera--aren't helpful to the authentically worthy causes taken up by that movement.

Bluntly stated, it is absolutely undeniable that many self-identifying Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) simply hate women. Some MRAs have no problem with women whatsoever. Some MRAs merely resent women. (“She belongs in the kitchen” and other trash like that.) But large numbers openly, vocally and explicitly hate women. It shows in the language they use, the culture they consume and promote, in their stated attitudes about women, in their own self-image, and most of all in their politics.

And it’s not just that these men are kind of gross. It’s that the MRA movement provides a means by which they can organize and seek legitimacy. Instead of a bunch of isolated cranks writing nasty anonymous letters to women with blogs and newspaper columns, it’s an echo chamber within which the cranks can organize, spread their vitriol more efficiently, and actively work to dismantle anything which offends their delicate, delicate sensibilities.

Now, let’s not dismiss them unfairly. As I said upthread, MRAs do have some core points worth considering. Could it be the case that the good outweighs the bad? That making progress on these important issues counts for more than the fact that some of these guys are assholes?

Well, maybe. But here’s the key thing: we don’t need MRAs. In fact, more often than not, they do more harm than good.

[LINK] "Farming in the Sky in Singapore"

Kalinga Seneviratne's Inter Press Service about high-rise agriculture in Singapore highlights ideas about urban agriculture I've not heard of in a while. While costs need to come down to make the system competitive with traditional agriculture--or, less happily, costs associated with traditional agriculture need to come up--might this be a widespread phenomenon in the near future?

With a robust economy that boasts a gross domestic product of 239.7 billion dollars, Singapore has plenty of money. “But money (is) worthless without food,” according to Sky Green Director Jack Ng.

“That’s why I wanted to use my engineering skills to help Singapore farmers to produce more food,” Ng told IPS.

An engineer by training, Ng created the vertical farming system, which he nicknamed ‘A Go-Grow’. It consists of a series of aluminium towers, some of them up to nine metres high, each containing 38 tiers equipped with troughs for the vegetables.

In keeping with Sky Green’s focus on environmental sustainability, the water used to power the rotating towers is recycled within the system and eventually used to water the vegetables. Each tower consumes only 60 watts of power daily – about the same amount as a single light bulb.

Ng knew that if the system was too expensive or complicated, urban farmers would not be able to survive. And given that he designed the project with retirees and other housebound farmers in mind, he tried to create a situation in which “the plant comes to you, rather than you going to the plant.”

The multi-layered vegetable tower rotates very slowly, taking some eight hours to complete a full circle. As the plant travels to the top it absorbs ample sunlight and when it comes back down it is watered from a tray that is fed by the hydraulic system that drives the rotation of the tower.

This closed cycle system is easy to maintain and doesn’t release any exhaust.

Ng says that such towers, if set up on roofs of the many multi-storey residential blocs that house most of Singapore’s population, could provide livelihoods for retirees and housewives, who would only need to spend a few hours up on the roof to attend to the system.

Sky Green towers currently produce three vegetables popular with locals – nai bai, xiao bai cai and Chinese cabbage, which can be harvested every 28 days.

They already supply NTUC FairPrice, Singapore’s largest grocery retailer that has a network of over 230 outlets and supermarkets. The urban-grown vegetables cost roughly 20 cents more per kilogramme than the imported varieties.'

[LINK] ""Beyond Drake's Equation" --New Insights into the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations"

The Facebook presence of hard-SF collaborative universe Orion's Arm linked to a post at The Daily Galaxy taking a look at the Drake equation, developed by astronomer Francis Drake to estimate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations. The post builds upon a George Dvorsky criticism of the equation is arbitrary. It doesn't, Dvorsky notes, take account of our declining radio traffic as low-powered satellites and fiber optics take over, there's still no definitive knowledge of the frequency of life in the galaxy (notwithstanding various estimates), it doesn't take the changing nature of the galaxy into account, and it doesn't take the possible changes affecting technological civilizations into account. He calls it at best "a way of searching for a very narrow class of civilizations under very specific and constrained conditions."

The Daily Galaxy pointed me to an interesting attempt to update the Drake Equation, however.

In 2010, the Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone published in the journal Acta Astronautica the Statistical Drake Equation (SDE). It is mathematically more complex and robust than the Classical Drake Equation (CDE).

The SDE is based on the Central Limit Theorem, which states that given the enough number of independent random variables with finite mean and variance, those variables will be normally distributed as represented by a Gaussian or bell curve in a plot. In this way, each of the seven factors of the Drake Equation become independent positive random variables. In his paper, Maccone tested his SDE using values usually accepted by the SETI community, and the results may be good news for the “alien hunters”.

Although the numerical results were not his objective, Maccone estimated with his SDE that our galaxy may harbor 4,590 extraterrestrial civilizations. Assuming the same values for each term the Classical Drake Equation estimates only 3,500. So the SDE adds more than 1,000 civilizations to the previous estimate.

[. . .]

Another SDE advantage is to incorporate the standard variation concept, which shows how much variation exists from the average value. In this case the standard variation concept is pretty high: 11,195. In other words, besides human society, zero to 15,785 advanced technological societies could exist in the Milky Way.

If those galactic societies were equally spaced, they could be at an average distance of 28,845 light-years apart. That’s too far to have a dialogue with them, even through electromagnetic radiation traveling in the speed of light. So, even with such a potentially high number of advanced civilizations, interstellar communication would still be a major technological challenge.

Still, according to SDE, reports Astrobio.net, the average distance we should expect to find any alien intelligent life form may be 2,670 light-years from Earth. There is a 75% chance we could find ET between 1,361 and 3,979 light-years away.