[PHOTO] Late summer evening, lower Bathurst Street

Looking down Bathurst Street towards Lake Shore Boulevard late on a summer evening, from a point beneath the Gardiner Expressway, the brick and concrete almost look golden.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling considers the grim future of e-book readers. Why a dedicated reader when a generalist tablet would do just as well?


• Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams summarizes a paper by one Duncan Horgan examining the efficiencies of different propulsion methods for interstellar probes.


• Far Outliers' Joel compares early modern English and Spanish expansion, arguing that each imperial power began by colonizing an adjacent area (Ireland in the case of England, al-Andalus and the Canaries in the case of Spain).


• The Global Sociology Blog argues that the political concept of "traditional family" should die a quick death in the face of the diversity of real families.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen suggests that German hostility to American-style immigration policies favouring low-skilled workers explains why robotic mowers are more successful on the German market--capital substitutes for labour.


• At The Power and the Money, Doug Muir makes predictions about the future of Syria. He expects Assad's defeat after a long drawn-out battle, and bad things happening thereafter.


• Registan's Nathan Hamm is unimpressed by the quality of the PR consultants hired by the fame-seeking daughter of Uzbekistan's dictator, Gulmara Karimova.


• Torontoist describes how, in 1993, a lawyer on the 24th story of a Bay Street tower ran into a window panel and fell out, to his death. True story.


• Understanding Society examines what assumptions underlying talking about the "social sciences" as the "human sciences". (Emphasizing the importance of history and the interpretive nature of human sciences as contrasted to the empiricism of natural sciences is key.)


• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Kontorovich contrasts and compares Israel settlement policies on the West Bank with Turkish settlement policies in North Cyprus, making a case that Turkish settlement is a more substantial effort.

[LINK] The photogenic ruins of Villa Epecuen

Recently a Facebook friend shared a link to a remarkable photo essay at Vice by Federico Peretti, "The Underwater Tourist Town". The Argentine resort town of Villa Epecuén has a remarkable history, as described in The Atlantic's "The Ruins of Villa Epecuen", featuring the photography of Juan Mabromata.

Back in the 1920s, a tourist village was established along the shore of Lago Epecuen, a salt lake some 600 kilometers southwest of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The resort town, named Villa Epucuen, soon had a railroad station, and it thrived for several decades, peaking in the 1970s with a population of more than 5,000. Around the same time, a long-term weather event was delivering far more rain than usual to the surrounding hills for years, and Lago Epecuen began to swell. In 1985, the salty waters broke through an earthen dam, and Villa Epecuen was doomed. A slow-growing flood consumed the town until it reached a depth of 10 meters (33 feet) in 1993. The wet weather later reversed, and the waters began to recede in 2009. AFP photographer Juan Mabromata recently visited the ruins of Villa Epecuen, met its sole inhabitant, and returned with these images.

The above photo comes from The Atlantic's photo essay. Both photo essays are worth perusing--the unearthly beauty of the salt-bleached post-apocalyptic landscape has to be seen.

[URBAN NOTE] "Rob Ford's lawyer fights 'draconian' removal order"

The CBC report about the ongoing appeal by Rob Ford's lawyers of the judicial order requiring his removal from office says it all. Going by what is being said and what has been said, Ford will have an uphill battle--the required penalty may be stiff, but it is the required one, and there's no plausible room for leniency.

Alan Lenczner argued before a three-judge panel of an Ontario divisional court Monday that the mayor misinterpreted the law when he voted in favour of a council motion that would have absolved him from an earlier council directive to repay $3,150 in donations made by lobbyists to his football charity.

Lenczner said the mayor had 10 times in the past declared conflict of interest in council matters, and recused himself from voting.

In November, Ontario Superior Court Justice Charles T. Hackland found Ford violated the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, and ordered the mayor to vacate his seat on council.

The act does say that violation of conflict of interest rules would result in automatic expulsion from office, save for an error in judgment or if the money involved was too small to be classified a pecuniary amount.

Lenczner cited both provisions in his arguments to the three-judge panel hearing the appeal.

He also argued that city council did not have the power to order Ford to pay back the donations, and that the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act only applies when the city or a council member gains money, which he says did not apply in Ford's case.

Moreover, the penalty for violating the act — removal from office — is "draconian" and punishes not only Ford, but the electorate that sent him to office by a margin of 100,000 votes, Lenczner said in a packed courtroom in downtown Toronto.

[URBAN NOTE] "Cycling Through the Seventies"

Over the weekend, Torontoist published Jamie Bradburn's overview of the progress of biking--as an activity, as a movement--in Toronto over the 1970s.

In a 1971 interview with Star columnist Alexander Ross, Metro Parks Commissioner Tommy Thompson observed that local geography made cycling downtown impossible. “If I asked somebody to ride from Front Street to Queen’s Park,” Thompson noted, “do you know what would happen? The average person would be dead—and not from the traffic. The average person would be so tired from the upgrade that he’d end up walking.” Ross disagreed with Thompson`s contention, noting that he rode daily from Bloor to King and “was not even puffing.” We also suspect aldermen like William Kilbourn and John Sewell, who cycled to work at City Hall, might have taken issue.

Thompson’s department was probably happier if people walked anyway—apart from a couple of short trails such as one along Mimico Creek opened in 1965, cyclists were prohibited from riding off-road in all parks across Metro.

One of the first battlegrounds for Toronto’s cycling future was the Belt Line in North Toronto. When Canadian National Railways (CN) put the old railway line on the market in 1970, two opposing visions of its future emerged. Metro parks officials and York Mayor Phil White saw a great opportunity to develop the land into recreational land that could include a bike path. Toronto Mayor William Dennison and his executive committee favoured buying portions of the Belt Line to expand roads and existing parks. Dennison told the Star that he opposed a continuous path along the Belt Line because “people have demonstrated they just won’t use it.”

Dennison also echoed the fears of homeowners along the Belt Line in Forest Hill, who worried about safety issues and vandals salivating over easier access to wreck their homes. Resident William McKay, who belonged to a ratepayers association opposed to any public use of the right-of-way, feared a Belt Line park would attract lusty young lovers. “How can I teach my children morals,” he told the Star, “when there are couples seducing each other a few feet from my house?” Also underlining anti-park sentiment was the possibility, endorsed by Dennison, of selling portions of the Belt Line Toronto didn’t need to residents to expand their backyards. As a Star editorial declared, “there are always people who cannot see past the ends of their noses.”

After two years of talks, Toronto City Council approved a land swap with CN in October 1972. In exchange for the title to Union Station (which CN and Canadian Pacific intended to demolish as part of the never fully realized Metro Centre project) and a parking lot at Lake Shore Boulevard and Yonge Street, the City received the Belt Line and the future site of Roy Thomson Hall. Among the boosters of turning the rail bed into a bike path was alderman David Crombie, whose election as mayor soon after may have raised the hopes of North Toronto cyclists. Though it took a few years, both green space and a path were built and eventually named after park proponent Kay Gardiner.

Apparently one critical turning point came in 1974, when an extended TTC strike made bikes an option for the masses.

Abundantly illustrated with period photographs and maps, Bradburn's extended essay is a wonderful historical document.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Kepler-32 planetary system

This graphic is taken from the paper "Characterizing the Cool KOIs IV: Kepler-32 as a prototype for the formation of compact planetary systems throughout the Galaxy", by Johnson, Swift, et al. Drawing on data from NASA's Kepler exoplanet-hunting satellite, the team identified the signals of five planets orbiting Kepler-32, a M1V red dwarf with a bit more than half the Sun's mass but only 5% of its luminosity a bit more than three thousand light years away.

Some days ago, I noted at my blog, via an article by Phys.org's Marcus Woo, the recent claim by a team of astronomers at Caltech that red dwarf stars, the least massive and dimmest yet by far most common sort of star, are likely to have relatively extensive planetary systems.

Discussion at Centauri Dreams about the Kepler-32 system emphasizes the extent to which this very compact system--five planets orbit this star within 0.13 AU, a mere third of the distance of Mercury from the Sun!--centers on speculation as to the frequency of Earth-mass planets orbiting within the habitable zone of red dwarfs. Preliminary data suggests that Earth-mass planets orbit these dim stars far too closely to be habitable. Even the most distant planet in this system, a commenter suggests, might receive three times as much radiation as the Earth does from its star.

[LINK] Two links on exoplanets and exomoons

First comes Wired Science's Adam Mann and his article "Nearly Half of Sun-Like Stars May Have Earth-Like Planets.

New estimates suggest that roughly 50 percent of sun-like stars could have planets the size of Earth orbiting in a place where liquid water might exist on their surface.

The results also indicate that almost all sun-like stars have a planetary system of some sort.

“If you could randomly travel to a star, it will have planets,” said astronomer Francois Fressin from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, during a press conference today here at the American Astronomical Society 2013 meeting.

The finding uses data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which is currently scanning 150,000 stars in the constellation Cygnus for evidence of planets. Astronomers analyzed this data using a program called Transiting ExoEarth Robust Reduction Algorithm (TERRA) to try and estimate the percentage of planets that Kepler is missing.

Kepler looks for the very tiny dimming of a star’s light that can be detected when an exoplanet passes in front of it, causing a mini eclipse. The telescope is good at detecting the dimming from a larger Jupiter-sized planet, but a tiny Earth-like planet will cause such a slight change that Kepler might miss it. TERRA found that Kepler had missed about 37 Earth-like planets in its data analysis, which means it’s missing about 25 percent of these worlds.

The findings suggested that smaller extrasolar planets form more frequently than larger ones, a result consistent with previous research. But TERRA found that the trend doesn’t hold true past a certain point. Planets twice the diameter of Earth are about as common as those that are Earth-sized or smaller, a result that astronomers hadn’t previously seen.

The results are heartening for anyone who likes imagining a universe full of life. Previous analysis suggested billions of Earth-like planets could exist in our galaxy, and recently another team announced the discovery of 15 potentially habitable exoplanets.

The astronomers do note that many of the worlds found aren't necessarily habitable, that exoplanets two or three times the size of Earth are likely to be ice giants like Neptune, and that one-sixth of stars have Earth-sized planets orbiting much too closely to their host star. Still.

Universe Today's Nancy Atkinson, meanwhile, writes in "Exciting Potential for Habitable ExoMoons" about the potential of exomoons, the moons of extrasolar planets. Most of the exoplanets first detected by astronomers were massive planets, gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn. Even though many of these planets did orbit in the habitable zones of their stars, they themselves could not support Earth-type life. But what of planet-sized moons of gas giants? In the Upsilon Andromedae system that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, for instance, Upsilon Andromedae b does orbit within Upsilon Andromedae A's habitable zone and might be of a size to support relatively massive moons.

The hunt progresses.

Imagine moons like Europa or Enceladus that are orbiting distant gas giant exoplanets located in the habitable zone of their star. What would be the potential for life on those moons? Hopefully one day we’ll find out. That could be the scenario at an exoplanet that has been found by the Planet Hunter citizen science project. This is the second confirmed planet found by Planet Hunters, and PH2 b is a Jupiter-size planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star.

“There’s an obsession with finding Earth-like planets but what we are discovering, with planets such as PH2 b, is far stranger,” said Chris Lintott of Oxford University and Zooniverse. “Jupiter has several large water-rich moons – imagine dragging that system into the comfortably warm region where the Earth is. If such a planet had Earth size moons, we”d see not Europa and Callisto but worlds with rivers,lakes and all sorts of habitats – a surprising scenario that might just be common.”

Astronomers with Planet Hunters estimate the surface temperature PH2 b is 46 degrees Celsius. That’s a “just right” temperature for there to be liquid water, but it is extremely unlikely that life exists on PH2 b because it is a gas planet, and might be similar to Jupiter, so there is no solid surface or liquid environment for life to thrive. But if this planet is anything like the gas giant planets in our solar sytem, there could be a plethora of moons orbiting them.

“We can speculate that PH2 b might have a rocky moon that would be suitable for life, said lead author of the paper that has been published in arXiv, Dr Ji Wang, from Yale University. I can’t wait for the day when astronomers report detecting signs of life on other worlds instead of just locating potentially habitable environments. That could happen any day now.”

[. . .]

The team said that with 19 similar planets already discovered in habitable zones, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water, the new finds suggest that there may be a “traffic jam” of all kinds of strange worlds in regions that could potentially support life.

Although most of these planets are large, like Neptune or Jupiter, these discoveries increase the sample size of long-period planet candidates by more than 30% and almost double the number of known gas giant planet candidates in the habitable zone, Wang said. “In the future, we may find moons around these planet candidates (just like Pandora around Polyphemus in the movie Avatar) that allows life to survive and evolve under a habitable temperature.”

[DM] "On how non-traditional families and higher fertility in developed countries go together"

I've a post up at Demography Matters pointing out that the best way to ensure replacement-level fertility is to allow for a diversity of families. Trying to enforce the "traditional family" will just push people out of parenthood.

Go, read.