[PHOTO] Where Sam the Record Man was

The northeast corner of Yonge and Gould, just north of Yonge and Dundas, once hosted the flagship store of Sam the Record Man, a leading Canadian music store chain that collapsed in 2005, the flagship store continuing on but finally closing on the 30th of June, 2007. The site was bought by Ryerson University, which levelled then building and then in April 2011 announced plans to build an avant-garde student centre.

I have pictures here of the old building after the store closed and of the demolished site. Now, the construction crews are digging the foundations for the student centre.

[DM] "Hugh and Vistesen on 'Japan's Looming Singularity'"

Over at Demography Matters, I note that co-bloggers Edward Hugh and Claus Vistesen have co-authored an essay, "Japan's Looming Singularity", on the particular consequences of Japan's rapiding aging population--most notably, its shrinking work force--on the economy. Available at A Fistful of Euros as well as at Japan Economy Watch, Hugh and Vistesen make the point that Japan's particular demographic profile, characterized by sustained very low fertility, longevity, and negligible immigreation, has made Japan the first developed country to reach a particular economic state we know nothing about. How can steadily growing public debt be made to work with a shrinking work force without immiseration and worse?

The assumption that things can more or less go on and on is widespread both in and outside Japan. Despite the frequent references to “Japan’s lost decade”, the country has now lost not one, but two – what was it Oscar Wilde said, losing one child could be an accident, but losing two surely has to constitute negligence – and as things are shaping up we seem to be all set to have a third one in front of us, markets and weather permitting, always assuming the Japanese government remains able to finance its debt.

[. . .] Japan is not only an ageing society: It’s THE ageing society. Following decades of an ultra low birth rate and negligible immigration, it faces a steady decline in its working-age population and a rising dependency ratio for decades to come. There is no changing this now. Even some “miracle” reversal of the fertility problem would take decades to work through, so whatever happens next, things will get worse before they get better.

Japan’s population – in median age terms – is the oldest on the planet. Median age is around 45, and it will continue to rise. There is no real prospect of it coming back down again, since the process it is experiencing appears to be totally irreversible. Forecasts see the median age in Japan rising to more than 50 within the next two decades, and really here we are breaking totally unknown territory – no society in the whole of human history has ever been this old.

[. . . If Japan is going to see a decline in working population over the next several decades (and possibly much longer, since so long as fertility remains below replacement rate each generation will be smaller than the previous one) and if this lies at the heart of the deficient domestic demand deflation problem, then it means the issue is a deep structural one which won’t be resolved by any kind of “kick start”, however large. The only consequence of having permanent fiscal injections will be not to give stimulus, but rather an accumulation of debt that will be increasingly harder for those smaller and poorer workforces to pay down in the future – especially if the process is associated with ongoing deflation.

To use an analogy – it isn’t simply a question of a planet which has slipped off or strayed from its orbit (or “good equilibrium”), and just needs a nudge to get it back on, what we have is a planet which has veered off onto a whole new trajectory, one which leads to who knows where. This situation was never contemplated by the founders of neoclassical theory, and yet, having started in Japan, the phenomenon is now extending itself steadily across all developed economies in one measure or another.

[. . . T]hose who urge a solution to Europe’s imbalances via an increase in German fiscal deficits to stimulate consumption miss the point: arguably what people in these societies need to do is save more, not less, and certainly when it comes to the public sector.

Go, read.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Crooked Timber's Maria Farrell writes about Ireland's Magdalen Laundries, institutions she sees as product of Irish misogyny and Roman Catholicism.


• Daniel Drezner took note of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and argues that the main people arguing about a currency war are (among others) developing countries and a Bundesbank that doesn't want to lose power to the European Central Bank.


• Eastern Approaches points out that cohabitation in Georgia between President Saakashvili and the governing opposition is not going well.


• Far Outliers' Joel points out that the dialect of African-Americans in the Japanese translation of Gone With The Wind is that of the marginalized Tohoku region in northern Honshu, visited two years by disaster.


• Geocurrents maps the results of a referendum on conscription in Austria, noting that the largely rural state of Burgenland--once part of Hungary, and still a frontier region--voted strongly in favour.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Dave Brockington notes that the American states with the longest voting lines tend to have Republican governments and relatively large African-American and Latino populations.


• Progressived Download's John Farrell points out that private labs offering adult stem cell treatments very often inflict terrible, novel illnesses on their clients.
  
• Registan's Mitchell Polman points out that Central Asia is hardly likely to prosper if foreign influence is seen as a zero-sum game. All kinds of powers need to take part.


• Window on Eurasia quotes from a Russian Eurasianist thinker, Rustem Vakhitov, who argues that separatist tendencies in Russia overall are strongest in Russian regions. Why single out the ethnic republics and risk triggering something?


• Zero Geography's Mark Graham maps Twitter usage in different African cities.

[LINK] On the discovery of life in Antarctica's Lake Whillans

Early indications that Antarctica's subglacial Lake Whillans might harbour microbial life (1, 2) have been confirmed. Via Will Baird is the report from Nature.

Having just completed the tortuous 48-hour journey from the South Pole to the US west coast, John Priscu is suffering from more than his fair share of jet lag. But his tiredness can't mask the excitement in his voice. After weeks of intense field work in Antarctica, he and his team have become the first to find life in a lake trapped under the frozen continent's ice sheet.

“Lake Whillans definitely harbours life,” he says. “It appears that there lies a large wetland ecosystem under Antarctica’s ice sheet, with an active microbiology.”

The lake in question is a 60-square-kilometre body of water that sits on the edge of the Ross Ice shelf in West Antarctica. To reach it, Priscu, a glaciologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, and his team had to drill down 800 metres of ice.

They arrived at their goal on 28 January, when their environmentally clean hot-water drill broke through to the lake's surface. What they found was a body of water just 2 metres or so deep — much shallower than the 10–25 metres seismic surveys had suggested, although Priscu notes that the lake may well have deeper spots.

The team put a camera down the borehole to make sure that the borehole was wide enough for sampling instruments to be deployed and returned safely. It was, and over the next few days, the scientists collected some 30 litres of liquid lake water and eight sediment cores from the lake’s bottom, each 60 centimetres long.

What precious stuff they had retrieved soon became clear under the on-site microscope. Both water and sediment contained an array of microbes that did not need sunlight to survive. The scientists counted about 1,000 bacteria per millilitre of lake water — roughly one-tenth the abundance of microbes in the oceans. In Petri dishes, the bacteria show a “really good growth rate”, says Priscu.

io9's Robert Gonzalez notes the implications of this discovery for life elsewhere in the solar system, in the subsurface water oceans known to exist on worlds like Europa and Enceladus.

Lake Whillans — like the hundreds of other subglacial lakes and waterways entombed beneath Antarctica's assorted ice shelves — is thought to harbor conditions similar to those of Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus. Hundreds of meters below the surface of Earth's southernmost continent, pressures soar to vitality-crushing levels. Nutrient availability is minimal. Sunlight is nonexistent. Antarctica's bygone repositories of liquid water have been isolated from the rest of the world for so long, under conditions so extreme, that evidence of life in any of the continent's subsurface reservoirs would bode well for our chances of discovering life on other worlds — to say nothing of the enormous boon such a discovery would be to biological research here on Earth.

As at least some commenters at io9 note, Antarctica's subglacial lakes are not at all like the subsurface oceans of Europa or Enceladus in that, until geologically quite recently, Antarctica was a temperate continent on a warm Earth. Europa and Enceladus have always been outer-system ice moons. Did life ever get started in those extraterrestrial oceans (or, perhaps, get transplanted there)?

[LINK] "A tale of two worlds: habitable, or colonizable?"

In a post at his blog, Canadian science fiction writer Karl Schroeder makes the distinction between "habitable" worlds and "colonizable" worlds. To illutrate, he uses two recently discovered exoplanets: Alpha Centauri Bb, a planet somewhat more massive than the Earth orbiting Alpha Centauri B in a scorching three-day orbit; and, Gliese 667Cc, a super-Earth that orbits stable red dwarf Gliese 667Cc squarely in its habitable zone. Gliese 667Cc could support liquid water on its surface, and thus conceivably an Earth-like environment. Alpha Centauri's world, though, might be a better prospect, for all that the half of its surface permanently exposed to its sun is a magma sea. Why?

Because 581g is a super-earth, the gravity on its surface is going to be greater than Earth's. Estimates vary, but the upper end of the range puts it at 1.7g. If you weigh 150 lbs on Earth, you'd weigh 255 lbs on 581g. This is with your current musculature; convert all your body fat to muscle and you might just be able to get around without having to use leg braces or a wheelchair. However, your cardiovascular system is going to be under a permanent strain on this world--and there's no way to engineer your habitat to comfortably compensate.

On the other hand, Centauri Bb is about the same size as Earth. Its surface gravity is likely to be around the same. Since it's tidally locked, half of its surface is indeed a lava hell--but the other hemisphere will be cooler, and potentially much cooler. I wouldn't bet there's any breathable atmosphere or open water there, but as a place to build sealed domes to live in, it's not off the table.

Also consider that it's easier to get stuff onto and off of the surface of Bb than the surface of a high-gravity super-earth. Add to that the very thick atmosphere that 581g is likely to have, and human subsistence on 581g--even if it's a paradise for local life--is looking more and more awkward.

Colonizable worlds, Schroeder goes on to suggest, have accessible surfaces, elements needed for life and industry in sufficient quantity, and a "manageable flow of energy at the surface" (Venus' surface fails as its uniformly superhot). Mars comes off badly, actually, on account of its low nitrogen content.

[LINK] "RCMP calls for more info about abuse claims in B.C.'s aborginal communities"

CTV's report on Human Rights Watch's Those Who Take Us Away hits the key points.

Human Rights Watch released on Wednesday its investigation into the "Highway of Tears" – the name used to describe an infamous 800-kilometre stretch of highway in central British Columbia on which a series of unsolved murders and disappearances of women have occurred.

The investigation, called Those Who Take Us Away, found that while the RCMP have not been able to effectively deal with the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, there have also been a number of disturbing allegations of rape and sexual assault at the hands of its officers.

[. . .]

Researchers with Human Rights Watch spent five weeks in 10 northern B.C. towns last summer during which they conducted 87 interviews with 42 indigenous women and eight indigenous girls between the ages of 15 and 60 years old.

They documented numerous accounts of women and girls in indigenous communities finding themselves in a constant state of fear. Researchers also noted the all of the victims in the report were frightened about possible retaliation within their communities or by police and insisted on having their identities protected.

“(This report) was about the level of fear that I and my colleague witnessed in the north at levels that we found comparable in conflict situations in post-war Iraq,” lead researcher Meghan Rhoad told reporters in Ottawa during a news conference on Wednesday. “It’s about the lack of meaningful accountability for police neglect or police mistreatment which creates an environment of impunity for violence against ingenious woman and girls.”

According to Human Rights Watch, one woman reported that in July 2012 police officers took her outside of town, raped her and threatened to kill her if she told anyone.

The report also documents instances of girls as young as 12 being pepper-sprayed and tasered, a 12-year-old girl attacked by a police dog, a 17-year-old punched repeatedly by an officer who had been called to help her, women strip-searched by male officers, and others injured due to excessive force used during arrest.

"In five of the 10 towns Human Rights Watch visited in the north, we heard allegations of rape or sexual assault by police officers," the report states.