[PHOTO] On the morning's meteor event in Chelyabinsk

What Wikipedia calls the 2013 Russian meteor shower occurred at 9:20 in the morning, local time, in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk and points west.



The BBC reports.

A meteor crashing in Russia's Ural mountains has injured at least 500 people, as the shockwave blew out windows and rocked buildings.

Most of those hurt suffered minor cuts and bruises but some received head injuries, Russian officials report.

A fireball was seen streaking through the clear morning sky above the city of Yekaterinburg, followed by loud bangs.

President Vladimir Putin said he thanked God no big fragments had fallen in populated areas.

A large meteor fragment landed in a lake near Chebarkul, a town in the neighbouring Chelyabinsk region.

Much of the impact was felt in the city of Chelyabinsk, some 200km (125 miles) south of Yekaterinburg.

"It was quite extraordinary," Chelyabinsk resident Polina Zolotarevskaya told BBC News. "We saw a very bright light and then there was a kind of a track, white and yellow in the sky."

"The explosion was so strong that some windows in our building and in the buildings that are across the road and in the city in general, the windows broke."

Livejournaler zyalt, Ilya Varlamov, has dozens of photos and videos of the event and its aftermath up at his blog. Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shares some of these.

This dashboard video captures the fall of one of the meteors.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCawTYPtehk&w=560&h=315]

This video shows the after-effect of the sonic boom that broke windows throughout the city, in this case in a commercial district.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7mLUIDGqmw&w=560&h=315]

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Continuing on the Chelyabinsk meteor front, Bad Astronomy, Joe. My. God., and Towleroad all have more video and photos.


• 80 Beats confirms that cosmic rays--high-energy particle travelling the universe at the speed of light--are produced by supernovas.


• The Burgh Diaspora makes the point that higher density doesn't necessarily translate to greater economic productivity.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster speculates about the consequences of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, pointing to the cargo cults of Melanesia.


• A Fistful of Euros' Brent Whelan thinks that the left is poised to take over Italy in the coming elections.


• Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig maps ethnicity and political parties in Israel.


• In a pair of posts at Lawyers, Guns and Money, the long-term consequences of the timber economy in northwestern North America are explored, among which is the presence of pot farmers opposed to legalizing marijuana.


• Torontoist reports on a pedestrians' lobbyist group recently formed in Toronto.


• Window on Eurasia advances the argument of some that Russia is preparing to cut off the North Caucasus, severing the ties of these largely non-Russian districts and making them into satellites on the model of Abkhazia.

[LINK] "Frenemies Forever"

Writing in The New Republic, Keith Richburg examined the origins of the Chinese alliance of North Korea in the nostalgia of the Korean war the two countries shared. Of note is the fact that this historic solidarity is irrelevant to younger generations of Chinese, as it may be for North Korea itself.

Officially, the Chinese foreign ministry expressed “firm opposition” to the nuclear test 100 kilometers from China’s border and made a show of calling in North Korea’s ambassador to register its displeasure. The state-run media also piled on, with the nationalistic Global Times newspaper—owned by the Communist Party’s main mouthpiece People’s Daily—calling the test “unwise and regrettable,” even while blaming Pyongyang’s “insecurity” on hostility from the United States.

But it was via social media, particularly weibo, or Chinese Twitter, that average Chinese citizens have been blasting their government for continuing to embrace a dangerous, mercurial and hermetic regime that seems to have little concern with international norms. “Surely the root cause is that for decades the DPRK has been ruled by a succession of evil unbalanced dictators,” one Internet user wrote, posting comments immediately after the Global Times editorial. What was amazing is not the sentiment—but that the Communist-owned paper allowed the comment to remain on its site.

Other online comments were even harsher. “Kim Jong-un slapped China on the face by having a nuclear test at our front door, during the Chinese New Year” said one weibo user named Liu Weiwei. “China has spent so much money every year to raise this ungrateful wolf.” Hu Xijin, the chief editor of Global Times, wrote on his personal weibo account; “I hope the government will firmly oppose this action, instead of just paying lip service. The friendship between China and North Korea is important, but China should not be kidnapped by the North Korean regime.”

But why is the Chinese public at pains to suggest that the “friendship” with North Korea is important at all? This is indeed where something gets lost in translation. Where Westerners simply see North Korea as an impoverished and unpredictable country, Chinese see it as a neighbor with which it became bonded through the trauma of war. The defining moment of the relationship came in October, 1950, when Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong sent more than a hundred thousand People’s Liberation Army troops swarming across the Yalu River, where they overran advancing United Nations and American troops. They engaged in some of the bloodiest battles of the Korean War, which is still referred to in that part of China as “the war to resist U.S. aggression and aid North Korea.” The bonds forged in that war persist to this day—though they are attenuating with age.

[LINK] "China's New Bachelor Class"

The Atlantic's Jessica Levine notes that a consequence of sex-selection in China is that rural and poor Chinese men find themselves at a loss for partners. Rural and poor women can marry up and out, owing to the relative scarcity of their gender on the marriage market, but not men.

Cool as glass, a young couple strolls into the Tiffany & Co. attached to Beijing's four-star Peninsula Hotel, elegantly lit with custom crystal chandeliers. She grips his elbow; he's aloof. Epitomizing urban affluence in today's China, this male likely drives a slick car, owns an even slicker high-rise and is more than willing to shell out for a Western-style tuxedo, wedding cake, live music, and, of course, a platinum Tiffany ring.

In other words: he's rich.

By contrast, millions of his fellow rural countrymen will likely never know such splendor or even the joy of matrimony. These young males are known as "bare branches," trees without leaves, involuntary bachelors demographically destined to a life without a wife or child. An estimated 40 to 50 million bare branches are scattered around the nation, and according to Quanbao Jiang and Jesús Sánchez-Barricarte, authors of the article "Bride Price in China: The Obstacle to 'Bare Branches' Seeking Marriage," they tend to be concentrated in rural or poverty-stricken areas.

It's a reversal of hundreds of years of gender discrimination in China. A longstanding preference for boys -- presumed better able to assist in backbreaking farm work -- has played out in sex selection through abortion and infanticide. After the country instituted its One-Child Policy in 1978, it gave most families only one chance at that coveted baby boy.

This only exacerbated the imbalance. Now, an estimated 12 to 15 percent of Chinese men -- a population nearly the size of Texas -- will be unable to find a mate within the next seven years.

This harsh reality has begun to change the country's patriarchal system, yielding the power of choosing a spouse to females. And many are electing for comfort. On the mega-popular dating show "If You Are the One," contestant Ma Nuo perfectly encapsulated China's mood when she famously declared that she would "rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the backseat of a bicycle." Indeed, 70 percent of single women in a 2011 survey said financial considerations ranked above all else when selecting a husband.

The cost of rural females marrying up is leaving the men from their villages waiting and wanting. Hard-pressed to compete with higher-earning males and unable to spring for the car and perhaps the house that some young women see as a matrimonial prerequisite, forlorn bachelors subsequently fall victim to what Jiang and Sánchez-Barricarte deemed the "poor->bare branch->poorer" cycle.

As Deborah Jian Lee and Sushma Subramanian noted in their recent Pulitzer Center report, this cycle is perpetuated by an age stigma. That is, regardless of socioeconomic status, wifeless men over 30 years old are derisively referred to as "leftovers;" the stuff of to-go boxes. Interviews by the Institute of Social and Family Medicine at Zhejiang University found that these societal pressures have led them to feel aimless, angry and alone. Bleaker still, whole villages exist without one unmarried woman. Fueled by sexual frustration, marginalized by neighbors, these islanded bachelors are increasingly likely to drink, fight, gamble, and frequent prostitutes.

[URBAN NOTE] "Mammoliti denies taking dirty loans"

NOW Toronto's Ben Spurr reports that Giorgio Mammoliti has rejected claims that the loans he received from developers were improper. Which, technically, they aren't--interest was charged on them and they were repaid in full. Technically. (Even the mayor has said that he wouldn't do this.)

Embattled councillor Giorgio Mammoliti has responded to media reports that he received $275,000 in loans from developers he helped out at City Hall.

On Thursday, CBC reported that the York West councillor took out two loans from real estate investors whose plans for lucrative billboards he helped push through Etobicoke York Community Council.

[. . .]

In a written statement released Friday, Mammoliti said there was nothing improper with the loans and asserted they were not connected to his support of the billboard approvals.

“I have supported hundreds of first and third party signs throughout my career both in my community and throughout the City of Toronto and will continue to do so,” the statement said.

Mammoliti also asked journalists to stop following the story, arguing that it wasn’t relevant to his duties as an elected official.

“While I accept challenges about my decision making as a Councillor, to blatantly issue a story that has no relevance to my job and involves my family and personal relationships I find to be in very poor taste. I respectfully request to leave my personal dealings and my family out of the media.”

[LINK] Two links on zombies in our world

First, political scientist and blogger Daniel Drezner--a man who has built his reputation in part on the question of the zombie--takes issue with what he calls an "appalling lack of zombie preparedness in the Great White North" evidenced by Foreign Minister John Baird's speech.

Now, to be honest, I'm a bit disturbed by this exchange. First of all, there were so many better puns that Baird could have uttered.

Second of all, both the NDP representative and the Foreign Minister were poorly briefed. Sure, Martin knew about the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Quebec government's counter-zombie efforts, but why no mention of British Columbia's aggressive campaign against the living dead?! That seems like rank prejudice against Canada's Western provinces.

Third, how in the name of all that is reanimated could the Canadians have this debate without discussing Canada's distinguished contributions to the zombie genre? No mention of Pontypool? No mention of Fido?! Come on!!!

Fourth, the claim that zombies could effortlessly cross borders echoes a leading Canadian perspective on this issue ... but where's the expert testimony? Why no international relations perspective? It's not like Theories of International Politics and Zombies isn't available in Canada.

This is serious business. Winter has come. The White Walkers could be emigrating down from the North at any moment. Until Canada gets its house in order, secures its strategic maple syrup reserve from waffle-eating ghouls, and starts consulting experts on this issue, I for one, am taking my family south.

Perhaps more seriously, Canadian science fiction writer and biologist Peter Watts comes up with a plausible basis for the zombie, at least in the universe of The Walking Dead: the zombie condition is the mechanism used by a parasite to reproduce itself, by radically modifying human behaviour. It's not as if there aren't plenty of parasites which already do exactly that.

Let’s start with evolution. Why do walkers attack the living in the first place? How does the consumption of living flesh promote the fitness of dead flesh? Doesn’t the fact that the flesh is dead mean that it’s pretty much out of the whole Darwinian race by definition?

>Obviously it’s not the agenda of the flesh — living or dead — that’s at issue here. The flesh is simply a delivery platform for something still subject to natural selection— and in terms of real-world biology, it’s almost too easy. Readers of my rifters books (or of Carl Zimmer‘s more plausible nonfiction ones) may remember fireside tales of Sacculina, the parasitic barnacle that rewires the behavior of infected crabs so that they stop worrying about their own welfare and instead spend their time aerating the larvae growing inside them, even helping them disperse once they hatch. Or you may be reminded instead of Ophiocordyceps, the mind-controlling fungus that leaves its host’s motor nerves intact while it devours everything else — and which finally, when its victim is little more than an exoskeletal husk stuffed with fungus, takes the reins and forces that poor hollowed-out insect to assume a perch oriented at the optimum angle for spore dispersal just before it dies.

My own personal favorite is Dicrocoelium, a fluke that uses ants as a stepping-stone into the ruminant it targets as its definitive host. Each night Dicro forces its ant to climb to the top of the nearest convenient blade of grass and lock itself in place with its mandibles, leaving it vulnerable to the grazing habits of any nearby cow or sheep. It’s also smart enough to release its ride when the sun comes up, to let it resume its usual anthill duties (remaining locked to that blade of grass during daylight would toast the host beneath the noonday sun, which would benefit neither rider nor ridden). Recent studies have shown that the reins tugged by Dicro are neurological: it actually hacks into the central nervous system to work its magic.

And I’m not even going to bother to link to our old friend Toxoplasma gondii.

The take-home message is that any number of real-world parasites conscript unwilling flesh in the service of their own dissemination. It doesn’t matter whether the agents who walk the dead are viral, bacterial, or helminth: natural selection will promote any behavior that spreads the infection. Jumpstart the most basic locomotory responses; reboot the ancient reptile drives; shock the carcass into motion. What does it matter that those ancient predatory reflexes no longer serve to nourish the corpus, that meat instinctively bitten chewed and swallowed won’t ever be digested in the service of mammalian metabolism? The biting and chewing itself is enough to spread the infection. The swallowing is mere collateral: an irrelevant side-effect of some macro evolved for one function, then repurposed to another.

[LINK] Two links on the legality and ethics of drone warfare

The first is Ilya Somin's careful consideration about an important question re: Obama's memo authorizing drone warfare, posted at the Volokh Conspiracy. "Who decides whether a potential target qualifies as a senior operational terrorist leader, and how much evidence does he need to have? "

[I]dentifying Al Qaeda leaders is a far more difficult task than identifying enemy officers in a conventional war. Precisely because terrorists don’t wear uniforms and often don’t have a clear command structure, it’s easy to make mistakes. And where US citizens are involved, there is the danger that the government will target someone merely because that person is a political enemy of the current administration. Even if officials are acting entirely in good faith, there’s still a serious risk that innocent people will be targeted in error. The Obama memo doesn’t even consider the question of how we decide whether a potential target really is a terrorist leader or not. But that is in fact the key issue.

The problem is not an easy one. On the one hand, war cannot wait on elaborate judicial processes. And we cannot give a potential target an opportunity to contest his designation in court without tipping him off. On the other hand, it is dangerous to give the president and his subordinates unconstrained power to designate American citizens as “terrorist leaders” and then target them at will.

One possible solution is requiring officials to get advance authorization for targeting a US citizen from a specialized court, similar to the FISA Court, which authorizes intelligence surveillance warrants for spying on suspected foreign agents in the United States. The specialized court could act faster than ordinary courts do, and without warning the potential target, yet still serve as a check on unilateral executive power. In the present conflict, there are actually very few high-ranking terrorist leaders who are US citizens. Given that reality, we might even be able to have more extensive judicial process than exists under FISA. Alternatively, one can envision some kind of more extensive due process within the executive branch itself. But any internal executive process has the flaw that it could always be overriden by the president, and possibly other high-ranking executive branch officials.

Whether the decision is made with or without judicial oversight, there is an important question of burden of proof. How much evidence is enough to justify classifying you as a senior Al Qaeda leader? The administration memo doesn’t address that question either.

The second post was made by Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money. There are rules, he argues; we just never would admit to them.

Basically, the United States will use drones in any of the areas where we would use any kind of military force to advance our interests outside of war. E.g., countries (or subareas of countries) that satisfy two conditions:

They are outside the reach of a legitimate, democratic and effective government;
The open use of American force would not embarrass a government we like or damage other American interests.

E.g., the U.S. will use drones to kill people in the world’s ungoverned spaces, just like it will use the Marines or the Army or any other element of national military force. But we will not use them to kill people in Canada and we will not use them in Colombia, albeit for different reasons.

These unwritten rules, I think, are why liberals massively support the use of drones to kill Al-Qaeda members in Yemen. I was surprised to discover that self-selected viewers of the Ed Show are okay with this policy. The support is there despite the risk to foreign civilians and even when the alleged terrorists are American.

The legality is strange (in essence, even American citizens in ungoverned spaces have no rights) but not, I do not think, new.